That's pretty funny, and is literally what I did with a CLI tool I made once. It was supposed to loop through something that was over 10,000 entries long. It finished in under a second.
I decided to add a small fraction of a second every X iterations and output some garbled data to the terminal. I got paid a nice little sum because of that. Sometimes, knowing how to make something look complicated is as important as doing something complicated.
I think the tool they used came from their capital reserves. IIRC they had about a billion dollars worth of BTC, and they have money from other sources as well. So they got liquidity to buy up all the sellers of UST on exchanges and stopped it from going to zero. If you have enough capital to soak up the supply, then you're good.
Hot Take that no doubt will meet a lot of doubt:
I would make a prediction that Window's next OS, is going to be semi-Linux based.
Imagine Windows doing to their OS the way they did with their browser, forking opensource code and rebranding it as their own. I could see them deciding to take some flavor of Linux (or maybe even something esoteric like Google's Fuchsia), and just slapping on their bloat & spyware.
I don't think this would damage Microsoft's marketshare as much as some people think. Sure, they no longer have "their own codebase", but I don't see the benefit in that. Hell, they could go lower & build off the actual Linux kernel and then build there own distro off of that. That way they can still enforce certain structures at a low level.
I would deeply enjoy this, although I would not use it (sticking with Linux). But imagine Microsoft embracing & advocating for AppImages/Flatpaks/Snap packages, Vulken, WINE/Steam Proton, etc. Imagine building for only 2 platforms to get your app running on (nearly) all devices. Imagine having Linux on the desktop get the same treatment it got with Linux on mobile.
Again, I understand this sounds like I'm predicting pigs will fly, or it'll rain cats & dogs, or the government will be efficient, but I'm serious, I can see this happening. Maybe not soon, but the next decade could be very interesting to see how this fabled "new" Microsoft moves & behaves.
That's neither a hot take nor a new one. People have been predicting it since the 1900s. If anything, more people believe it than doubt it.
But sadly, after making these predictions, and being proven wrong, year after year, no one sits down and asks why it didn't happen.
But I did. So let me try to explain.
The short version is: "The Linux kernel licensing model is hostile to the Windows hardware ecosystem".
What does that mean? Well, the Linux kernel licensing model is GPLv2. But it's more than that. It's actually "GPLv2 plus the interpretation of the kernel developers". And the kernel developers have tried to enforce their interpretation using technical means. Specifically, if you want to compile closed-source drivers into the MAINLINE Linux kernel, they make it difficult for you. Only one company fights this difficulty. That company is Nvidia. How hard does Nividia have it? Nvidia has to ship their kernel driver as two parts. A GPL-compatible stub (which is compiled into the kernel), and a closed-source blob (which connects to this stub).
"That's not so bad" you say. Well there's more. The GPL stub only works for one kernel version. You know, 5.17, 5.18, etc. When the user updates their kernel (which they MUST do in order to get security fixes!), the GPL stub may stop working. Why is that? Because while Linus Torvalds mandates a stable _userland_ API, the internals of the kernel, including drivers and other kernel modules, changes ALL THE TIME. Seriously, stuff is changed and refactored all the time. So, Nvidia must release a new driver each time the kernel updates. That's more work. That means more employees for every hardware vendor. That means every hardware vendor would need to push those costs on to consumers or accept lower profits. That means every hardware vendor would scream bloody murder at Microsoft to not do this.
Not so bad now? But there's more. How do you install the new driver version? When you update the kernel, hopefully your distro is smart enough to grab the new version of the nvidia driver and install it for you also. If that somehow gets out of step, you get a kernel panic. That's an ugly error for Sam Sixpack or Deb McBusinesshuman to deal with. They're certainly going to call their IT department, who is going to call Microsoft and complain. But that's not so bad...
But there's more. Antivirus. Once Linux is underlying the most popular OS in the world, it'll need antivirus. But, antivirus companies will need to release a new kernel module each time there's a new Linux kernel update. Or, they can rely on eBPF. Maybe. eBPF is still untested for that purpose.
"So why can't hardware vendors just release their drivers as GPLv2 and upstream them into the kernel?" Well, that's a possible solution. But companies are generally averse to giving their code away for free, and it's not the default, so the legal departments will have to check it over, and MBA types will have to grok the idea of open-source. Many will push back on Microsoft and ask them to not do this.
"So why can't Microsoft just fork Linux and remove all of the restrictions, give it a stable closed-source driver API and/or make it capable of running Windows 11 drivers natively, and just give the bird to upstream/Torvalds?" Yeah that's very possible. But at that point, is it really using "Linux" or a kernel based on Linux? Why wouldn't they just use BSD instead and avoid 90% of this trouble?
I'm not familiar with how Google does it with Android & Chromebooks, do you have a similar level of understanding there? Your explanation was very good, thank you for that information. I'm now wondering if Google is just small enough (with their OS operations) that they don't face these issues, or if they do something different.
I highly doubt Google would embrace something that kills there business without having a plan.
Off the top of my head I can think of 3 scenarios:
1. Google is investing in tech that allows them to index canvas-rendered items (putting them far ahead of all other search engines if they are the only ones with this tech)
2. Google will put out an "index.txt" guideline ushering in a new way to create SEO content for the internet (there are problems here but, like with anything, they can be addressed in time)
3. Google might ditch indexing altogether and look into alternative ranking methods (curation groups? popular in your social sphere? heavier reliance on ads?)
And then Charlie walks out and goes "Ooooh, uh oh, uh yeah, guys you know what... I think I know what they mean. Last week when everyone was talking about the virus, I had just watch this really cool cyber hacking movie on TV last night, so I kinda zoned out and didn't know what our next scheme was, so when I went home I paid someone on the darkweb for a virus just like in that movie-"
Dennis: "How the hell do you have money to pay people on the darkweb Charlie?"
Charlie: "KittenCoin"
Dennis: "Oh god dammit, KittenCoin? You did that huh? Alright, checks out. Anyways, so then what happened?"
Charlie: "Well then I didn't really know what we were doing still, so I just emailed the file the russian kid sent me to your email, but I totally messed up the address cause my fingers were all sticky with peanut butter at this point and-"
Dennis: "WHY WERE YOUR- You know what, not only do I not wanna know, but I'm also gonna take a stab at how this story ends. Charlie, are you telling me you made a scam cryptocurrency and then used the profits to pay some sketchy russian hacker for a ransomware virus which you then emailed to a random address with a subject line something along the lines of "FOR FRIEND, IMPORTANT FILE, FOR PLAN, GIVES MONEY", which obviously enticed the random receiver to open said email promptly starting a massive email worm that managed to spread its way into the government's oil pipelines?"
Charlie: "That's... Uh, yeah, yup, yup, that's pretty much spot on dude, I'm pretty sure."
I always felt like the hardest position to uphold is "Anti-Kink-Shaming", A) it's embarrassing, B) there's some... questionable kinks out there, C) the amount of adhoms you'll get in response is absurd
NSFW is the catch all phrase paving the way for censorship
Say what you will about the crypto & blockchain scene, but I can't fucking wait for us to move over to it more & start adopting more tamper-resistant decentralization standards... One can hope
Because there are some technical solutions to some societal problems. Are there technical solutions to the ones we are discussing? Possibly, possibly not, you don't know until you look.
the societal problems are solvable only through technology. At least that is the main premise of Das Kapital - the progress in the tools and means of production is what drives societal progress.
I dare you to name a societal problem which was solved independently of the technological advancement state of the time, i.e. a problem that could have been solved the same way with a significantly regressed state of technology when at the time of its actual solution.
i don't understand what societal problem you do you mean here - the prohibition or the alcohol. If you mean that the societal problem was the prohibition then we do know that it was solved by the bootlegging at a massive scale which relied on using cars and machine guns with modern communication of the time - telephone - playing a significant role too. If you mean that the problem was alcohol - i don't see where and when it was solved at all.
Bad laws become "bad" and get repealed when they become untenable to maintain. Cars, boats, planes, guns, drones, global financial system, crypto, social media, scientific development of our understanding of addiction - it all leads to the untenability of the current drug regime and the resulting progressive decriminalization we see.
Clearly that's incorrect though. We're only seeing legalization of socially acceptable drugs. Tech has nothing to do with it.
Nobody is fighting for meth, cocaine and heroine to become legal in the US. We also have plenty of prostitution going on thanks to technology but that won't be legal anytime soon either. It will happen when people decide they're OK with it, not because technology makes it easy.
History and the trends suggest that we are moving to more centralized and controled systems. Prior to social media, a mere 10-15 years ago, there were far more blogs and self hosted sites in proportion.
But there's no reason to believe this is unidirectional and self reinforcing. There are plenty of trends that went on long enough that whole generations were born with them as the status quo, only for them to be reversed or changed. Feudalism went on for hundreds of years.
There are financial large incentives to centralize though. That needs to change, look at the infra that is hosted on the cloud and what depends on that.
lol this is true, I guess they meant they didn't replay it as much as they'd like to, or those replays weren't as fun, but to me it seems that playing a single player game multiple times over, doing different things each time, seems like pretty darn good replay value.
I’ve put hundreds of hours individually into most of the Fallout games. There are so many side quests and crazy things that can happen, character options, things to explore, ways to accomplish goals that I can keep going back.
I played Final Fantasy VII Remake twice, because they made the game so you can’t get everything by going though just once and I also wanted to get the PS trophies. So I replayed it, though I found it tedious and annoying at times. I don’t remember how many hours I spent but certainly under one hundred.
I’ve replayed all these games, but I wouldn’t say the latter has replay value.
I decided to add a small fraction of a second every X iterations and output some garbled data to the terminal. I got paid a nice little sum because of that. Sometimes, knowing how to make something look complicated is as important as doing something complicated.