I have enjoyed VR, but the “metaverse” angle was something largely no one asked for.

I’ll admit even at its best it is still niche, but I have enjoyed it, particularly for simulation genre.

Well the problems to be solved aren’t necessarily the technical ones. Another way of “solving” the problems is to stop trying to use it in contexts where it’s limitations are more trouble than they are worth.

Here it is being tasked with and falling to accurately summarize news, which is ridiculous because those news articles come with summaries already, headlines.

So a fix may not mean fixing the summary, but just skipping the attempt as superfluous.

There are uses for the state of LLMs as they are, but hard to appreciate when it’s being crammed down our throats relentlessly at things we never needed them for and watch them screw things up.

The thing is, for the Windows ecosystem, ARM doesn’t have a good “hook”.

When tablets scared the crap out of Intel and Microsoft back in the Windows 7 days, we saw two things happen.

You had Intel try to get some android market share, and fail miserably. Because the Android architecture was built around ARM and anything else was doomed to be crappier for those applications.

You had Microsoft push for Windows on ARM, and it failed miserably. Because the windows architecture was built around x86 and everything else is crappier for those applications.

Both x86 and windows live specifically because together they target a market that is desperate to maintain application compatibility for as much software without big discontinuities in compatibility over time. A transition to ARM scares that target market enough to make it a non starter unless Microsoft was going to force it, and they aren’t going to.

Software has plenty of reason not to bother with windows on arm support because virtually no one has those devices. That would mean extra work without apparent demand.

ARM is perfectly capable, but the windows market is too janky to be swayed by technical capabilities.

This sounds pretty plausible. The windows user is the least likely to understand the implications of arm for their applications in the ecosystem that is the least likely to accommodate any change. Microsoft likes to hedge their bets but generally does not have a reason to prefer arm over x86, their revenue opportunity is the same either way. Application vendors not particularly motivated yet because there’s low market share and no reason to expect windows on x86 to go anywhere.

Just like last time around, windows and x86 are inextricably tied together. Windows is built on decades of backwards compatibility in a closed source world and ARM is anathema to x86 windows application compatibility.

Apple forced processor architecture changes because they wanted them, but Microsoft doesn’t have the motive.

This has next to nothing to do with the technical qualities of the processor, but it’s just such a crappy ecosystem to try to break into on its own terms.

Yeah, but it is hard to separate that, and it’s easy to get a bit resentful particularly when a projects quality declines in large part because they got lazy by duct taping in container registries instead of more carefully managing their project.

But you forget for outlets like the Post where people are suddenly left wing if they do anything they don’t like.

I lost a bunch of weight and very carefully watch the scales every day to make sure I don’t get carried away again, sometimes having to eat very lightly for a few days when it creeps up.

Did wonders for my blood sugar, cholesterol, and liver. Unfortunately it means I’m just a touch hungry most days.

Also moderate exercise, a bit of aerobic exercise most days, but not too much. Park far away to make myself walk more in daily activity.

I want that to be true, but judging from their financials, their big problem send to be just massive costs. They have more revenue than AMD despite their technical challenges, but they spend way way more to get it.

Part of it is not having a lot of fab customers yet having their own fabs, part of it is a whole bunch of Intel projects you’ve never heard of that will never amount to anything, but still cost lots of money. Part of it is essentially bribing vendors to favor Intel products even as amd makes more sense in a lot of those products.

Better engineering would certainly help, but they are just bleeding money all over the place largely owing to bad business bets.

I heard a story about how in world war 2 British and American generals got into an argument about the importance of a certain matter.

The British thought the matter needed to be tabled and the Americans were shocked and thought it must not be tabled.

Took some time for them to realize “tabling” an issue meant the exact opposite in America and UK

Since hearing that story the exact expression came up for me online once and on a work call once with British and American speakers.

No foreign language, but still.

I will confess that I think making windows UI appropriate for tablet or phone has to be more than a skinning exercise. E.g. software interacting with a mouse pointer unable to deal with more vague and multiple touches. UI elements needing different spacing for the form factor. A different scheme for switching full screen tasks and recognizing that traditional windowing isn’t going to be very helpful in a smaller than 9" format.

Unfortunately windows basically favored touch at the expense of traditional desktop, when their home turf was very much not touch enabled.

3840x2440, 2560x1440, and 1920x1200. Wayland and all of them are probably just 60hz screens.

I’d flip that around to say people shouldn’t seek to be a fan of a “franchise”. To be a fan of a franchise in general is to put a big sign on your back saying “I’m a sucker for whatever company owns the rights and I will spend money if you vaguely make it themed along the lines of the franchise”.

Star Wars has been constantly retconning itself, from the beginning.

The first film was not really produced as “Episode IV”, it was “Star Wars”, a standalone film. It was a movie about a farmer orphan who goes on a swashbuckling space adventure with laser swords and space wizards. The good guys are unambiguously good, the bad guys are just bad guys. Everything is pretty much just as it seems, no secretly alive people, no secretly related people. Lucas may have had nebulous plans/hopes for follow ons, but they weren’t baked and the overall concept is standalone.

Then ESB came along and retconned the Skywalker family, and produced cliffhangers knowing there’d be a third film. However, I’m pretty certain that “there is another Skywalker” didn’t specifically have Leia in mind at the time, mainly because of how it’s handled in the follow up.

Then ROTJ came along, and that little tease about ‘there is another Skywalker?’ just a kind of casual “oh yeah, that’s Leia, and she’s your sister, and we are going to do absolutely nothing serious with that, just consider the matter closed even though they were clearly setting up for… something with that”.

A lot of things in the franchise have this feel. Like “Rei’s provenance is mysterious and significant” swinging in the next film to “the parents are nobody, parents don’t matter” and then swinging again in the last of that set of three to “just kidding, her provenance is very significant”.

Yeah, I strongly suspect there was a camp within Microsoft that was 100% pushing for ‘rolling release’ model for the OS versus another traditionalist camp that said there would be new major upgrades. Further, I bet rather than reconciling those perspectives, they just let both camps continue on under their own assumption, until eventually the traditionalists won out and got ‘Windows 11’, finalizing which way the company was going to actually go.

The browser editions don’t quite fully work for everything.

A coworker manages to make some excel workbooks that just don’t work in the web version, and makes everyone deal with it.

I’ve had to contend with powerpoint decks with ‘features’ that don’t work in the web. For example, one group told me the only way to get a file was to click the embedded link in the pptx file, which only works with desktop version.

If you have to deal with Teams meetings with screen sharing, well, you can’t control the other person’s screen (for no good reason) and you can’t offer remote control of your own (ok, I understand that one).

I’ll say that 95% of my dealings with Office files can be dealt with between browser based O365 and libreoffice for some of those features, but once in a while I simply have to open desktop Office.

This is the perspective of someone who really dislikes Windows and is willing to deal with this sort of uncertainty to minimize Windows usage. Most people would just not want to futz with the options and go straight to the desktop client, which is the only thing that supports all the Office features.

But alas, Windows 8 was the ‘oh crap, tablets and phones might eat our lunch’ release and the focus was throwing the desktop/laptop experience under the bus to try to cater to sensibilities of markets they were never going to capture. Also, to have their own ‘app store’ to try to wrestle a google/apple like revenue model for applications running on the platform.

Windows ME was actually some Windows 2000 bits glued onto Windows 98. That’s why it was so terrible, it was kind of an afterthought when initial plans for ‘2k for everyone’ got abandoned as they realized the home app ecosystem needed more compatibility workarounds than they were prepared to offer. So instead of completing the 2k based product line, they just '2k’ed up Win98 to satisfy their then-current release cadence and make sure home market had a ‘current’ OS to go with the 2k professional line.

Note that my three monitor setup with an nvidia GPU actually works better in Linux.

Mainly because when I plug the laptop in, I have to turn the third monitor off and on again to make it ‘wake up’, but in Linux, all three reliably start displaying.

I was wondering about that. I just got forced to run native Windows 11 by work, and one monitor in my multihead setup just never wakes up automatically, but my Linux install on same hardware has no issue.

Yeah, as much as Windows feels… subpar for my day to day vanilla, it really turns crappy with my corporate’s mandated load. System is constantly chewing on some bloat from one of the various ‘security’, monitoring, or fix management solutions that they have on this.

Unfortunately, if a company pitches their extra crap as ‘enhancing security’, the execs just have to say yes, because to be an exec who ever said ‘no’ to more security is to put your job at peril. Even if three of that vendor’s competitors already got their equivalent solutions into the load already…