I’m happy to see a big company put in money into RISC-V. I think this could work out. Unlike Intel competing on the bleeding edge, GF may be going for cheaper lower compute requirement use cases which I can see working out and keeping their foundries busy. There was an article a year ago about GlobalFoundry’s customers shifting to sub-10nm faster than anticipated which they abandoned their pursuits 7 years ago. Maybe they can compete for any of the car chips, appliances, TV and TV boxes, defense applications, everything that Rockchip and Amlogic chips show up in

I thought it already did. I’ve been seeing videos of fancy Xiaomi appliances for years. Nicest rice cookers I’ve ever seen

They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming

So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade

One observer has been spectating and commentating on Mozilla since before it was a foundation – one of its original co-developers, Jamie Zawinksi

…

Zawinski has repeatedly said:

Now hear me out, but What If…? browser development was in the hands of some kind of nonprofit organization?

In my humble but correct opinion, Mozilla should be doing two things and two things only:

1. Building THE reference implementation web browser, and

2. Being a jugular-snapping attack dog on standards committees.

3. There is no 3.

This makes sense to me. I initially thought everything that Proton does, that should have been Mozilla. They should have been a collection of services to compete with like O365 and Google One. So I didn’t see a problem with Mozilla selling a VPN, even though if I remember right it being just a Mullvad rebrand.

Right now to me it looks like Proton is the closest mostly missing a web browser and a more cloud office offering.

Mozilla functioning more as the reference browser for others to finish packaging and supporting sounds good to me because Mozilla doesn’t seem to be great at attracting general users or even picking what businesses to try and break into.

Linux kernel devs do Linux kernel development and distros small and large do the integration with everything else needed for an operating system, branding, support, etc. Sounds like Mozilla should have been the core devs for a number of reference software projects. Firefox browser engine. Maybe an equivalent to Electron based on Servo. Shouldn’t have dropped Rust and been the steward for the reference Rust compiler. Could have been the steward for FirefoxOS/KaiOS/etc. Support PostmarketOS maybe.

Linux foundation stewards or contributes to all sorts of software projects not just the kernel but they’re all pretty much things that are relevant for users of Linux operating systems. Mozilla could have found some software centric focus that in some way came together thematically. I would guess privacy focused browser and software services

Out of residency 200-300k is the starting pay too. Mid to late career doctors, especially the specialist, make major major money. What sucks can be long hours and major responsibility over human lives while being sleep deprived but the long hours can be matched by tradespersons while paying 2-10x less and being more susceptible to market downturns

Last game was mediocre but over 20 years they’ve been very consistent. I wonder how stable Playground Games have been with Fable reboot. I wonder if they’ve managed being a 2 game pipeline studio or it’s all hands on deck for Fable. If it’s all hands on deck for Fable and no Forza Horizon game on the horizon as a studio silver lining regardless of Fable performance, the pressure there after the last couple of years of MS Xbox slashing must be heavy

Forza Motorsport being cut when it has been a pillar for 20 years is insane.State of Decay 3 so far dodging bad news year after year while being publicly absent

I’ve watched a video of hers before. My takeaway was that Microsoft is a heavily bloated company that suffocates internal development but with the OG Xbox and early 360, they were like a side bet that didn’t have a great deal of oversight from MS Windows/Office/Server mega money eyes.

They didn’t have a great deal of internal dev studios but they were really good at identifying third party exclusives to pursue and early on managed them and the few studios they did fully acquire well. It worked well for the first Xbox and first half 360. It differentiated the Xbox/360 from Nintendo and Playstation

Then I guess success led to changes in leadership aimed at growth and using Xbox as a platform to push more MS services and they lost the focus and ability to identify and secure great third party exclusives. That coupled with not having internal game dev teams in numbers and experience like Nintendo and Sony meant if they didn’t hit with their living room smart device dominance ambition, they’d just have a worse PlayStation. That’s what they ended up with with the XOne - a worse PS4. Then it happened again with the XSX because of lack of execution with their internal studios. An XSX just became a PS5-lite library-wise

Pitchford is the only person in the industry that seems to love the smell of their own farts as much as Tim Sweeney

Mobile and I imagine Google Docs really did a number on Windows necessity. In my experience, large companies and government rely on Windows and O365, smaller organizations use Google Docs. Even universities I’ve seen start with classrooms a decade ago using Google Docs and hangouts to eventually using Google Suite or whatever its called these days for student/faculty email

At least word documents saved as PDF and shared is way more common today than a decade ago. A decade ago I mainly remember seeing nothing but Excel and SPSS in classes, now I see professors showing how to do stuff in Google Sheets. For a long time computer science and math professors have been geeky and idealistic so you’d regularly see Libre/OpenOffice used in lectures

Another is Blender. In like 2008 ~2.49 Blender, professionals would scoff. A decade later Blender 2.8 releases and by today I hear way less vitriol and more opensess as another tool in the toolbox or recognition as great for at least learning or professional use for smaller teams. Flow was a successful movie made with it

Davinci Resolve is getting better and a lot more mainstream today than a decade ago. And stuff like Kdenlive is more powerful than the vast majority of people need. People were doing great stuff a decade+ ago with iMovie and basic Windows Movie Maker

Video games are a lot easier now because of Valve with Linux

Mobile, adults used to have laptop that pretty much excited to login to their credit cards and pay them, use TurboxTax, print out MapQuest directions, etc. Phones have made a laptop redundant I think for most people now. Work provides one if needed. TV for movies and phone for everything else

To me there’s nothing Microsoft can do to stem the decline of Windows. Mobile first is standard now. Microsoft has no presence in smart TVs because they failed with Windows Mobile and Xbox hardware is on life support and they never made the stripped down Xbox Windows available for TV makers anyways. The loss towards mobile will continue.

Then there’s national security concerns for countries around the world to be reliant on American software and hardware. Diversification of operating system has picked up heavily. It started like 20 years ago but it didn’t seem to really pick up until the Huawei sanctions and driving Huawei to their own OS and Chinese government to invest even more into domestic Linux distro a. Then the recent American trade wars renewing interest in European countries in Linux and LibreOffice. My understanding has been that Linux had had strong adoption in India for some time now

Desktop Linux in the US, I say just keep focusing on prosumer/professional users. Software developers and other IT professionals are already Linux heavy. Some commercial software is available like Maya and Davinci Resolve. Krita and Blender are great. Kdenlive is good. Seems like GIMP and Inkscape development may be picking up momentum. Darktable is great. Valve keep focusing on SteamOS and community distros keep supporting more handhelds making every year easier and easier for gaming. Steam Deck 2 is hopefully a way more available in retail than the first deck. First product work out the kinks and prove viability. Second product and possibly AMD, Nvidia, Qualcomm, etc are way more interested in low power gaming than before as well as first class Linux support

Outside of the US, I feel like Trump both term one and now term two has really given Linux and open source software a global boost in appeal.

I think the big hit to the series was voice acting. When it’s read, it’s fine. When it’s voiced, Final Fantasy’s need to be esoteric filled with game specific lore jargon makes it sound like a bunch of nonsense. A lot of people complain about JRPG writing as anime-y, I don’t think Final Fantasy games writing would make it to production for an anime that had to stand on its own merit, no FF association. Feel like FF writing quality is somewhere around Fist of the North Star but not as endearing wheras modern shounen anime is post-Yu Yu Hakusho where its not just mature themes but where it reads like the author really believes in what they’re writing rather than thematic checklist writing by a collection of writers and producers

The Sakuguchi games I think balanced the edgy grim dark “Final Fantasy” apocalypse stories with some lighter moments that give the world and characters more well rounded characters. I think that’s the magic. It’s apocalyptic but there’s a sense of hope and magic and perseverance in the writing and art

Not weird. It’s the main reason to play. For me it wasn’t even really about the main plot line, ended up not caring for the Wild Hunt or the White Frost at all but every tidbit about the conjunction of spheres, Heart of Stone, and the various non-Wild Hunt factions and quests were pretty captivating to me. The small quest lines were usually interesting. The Crones were a lot more interesting than the Wild Hunt

Cyberpunk is edgy mature. Even more so than the Witcher series. I’m not saying that disapprovingly. I like both but I don’t think they’re a far cry from the previous 15 years of mature video game stories. They’re still stories that need direct physical violence to work. They have a grand scale.

Some standouts I remember, of course all violent, from the past would be KOTOR 2, GTAIV, Eternal Sonata, Xenogears, StarCraft 1/Brood War, Persona series has been consistently interesting, Yakuza games and that reminded me of Shenmue, Dragon Age Origins, Dragon Age 2 is cool with the timespan of story in a single city, Bioshock games, the first 2 Fallout games, Planetscape Torment. There’s a lot. What makes Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk standout to me is primarily graphics and scale. A bunch of interesting questlines in single games. They’re all a bunch of violent games though.

Eternal Sonata I think was the most memorably unique of the games I listed and maybe across all the games I could remember that had high production values for the time. I wish that got a PC release/remaster

The reaction of diehards wasn’t close to golden. You had the lore-aficionados that found the game as whitewashed, the shippers thought every relationship was shallow and role players thinking it jumped the shark even more than previous games with anachronism. The game was stable. Not buggy. That is its elevator pitch for why it’s good

Where they may lag behind is powervr graphics and the accompanying drivers though that will mostly be a problem for those interested in running windows software through the developing software and whatever comes of the Debian VM progressing

Canceling NordVPN was a pain. It took numerous emails across numerous days for them to cancel and remove my credit card info. Lesson learned, I only pay with PayPal where I can revoke permission for recurring payments or pay with crypto. Went expressvpn to the cheaper nordvpn then to proton unlimited

Ya it’d be better if it didn’t require a phone number but it’s a solid start as it’s build up a user base over the past decade. Matrix is good but I know far less people that use it and it’ll be a long time of growing with nerdy/geeky communities before it starts getting more mainstream users

Yup. It is

I would guess he’s thinking money. Design, production line, and legal are all going to be extremely expensive. Bezos is a name and face but if you replace his name with JP Morgan Chase, BNY Mellon , Blackrock, etc is there really that big of a difference. The large financial institutions have done far more for far longer to people all around the world

It’s a slow grind for adoption. I’ve had Signal installed on my phone since like 2016. Went from one person I knew to now about ~30. It’s mostly people from work at tech companies but progressively I’ve noticed other industries employees adopting it for unofficial chat that my contacts list has been growing over the years. Probably won’t take off in a few years. Maybe another decade

I have one. I think it’s too big. It’s fine if I’m playing with my elbows rested on something but anytime my elbows aren’t backed by something, it’s not ideal. And then whenever I travel, with a case it is bulky. I got a Switch 2 and that feels great to carry around regardless of less ergonomic hand grips