Asahi is still getting a lot of work and development done, but since they’re reverse engineering everything without proper documentation from Apple, they basically get kicked back to square one on any component that Apple makes big changes too with each new generation of chip. They’re more focused on polishing off support on older chips and keeping what they have up to date rather than jumping on every new chip release and leaving stuff unfinished on the older ones

So right now M1 and M2 Macs are fully supported. M3s are mostly working but very much a WIP, and M4 hasn’t really gone anywhere yet.

I’d say that if you find the advantages of the M chips really compelling, but want to stay on Linux, an M2 running Asahi is still very competitive, and the work to support the M3s is chugging along.

If you want the newest hardware possible, then yah you’re probably better off with an AMD or Intel based computer. There are also some other ARM based desktops out there, and Linux on arm is a thing, I have no idea what’s going on over there though.

They’re all moving to tokens based billing to stop the bleeding. The markets aren’t as willing to let them burn infinite cash on operating expenses anymore. A lot of the private investors see the writing on the walls, that these AI companies are not worth anywhere near the valuations, and propping them up to ensure further datacenter build out to keep Nvidia shares high is costing more than it’s worth.

A lot of the model providers are lining up for ipos to cash out their initial investors and dump the responsibility of the mess on the public markets. They have to jack their prices to pretty up their books if they want to cash out with an IPO though. The unlimited access for a flat monthly cost shtick was obviously never a viable business model. They’ve all been spending massively more on inference than they’ve been taking in subscriptions, and even with the changes to token based billing, they still will be.

Anthropic is claiming that they will have their first “profitable” month soon, but that’s actually just a magic trick of book keeping. They’re deferring some cost of compute for a few months, and accepting a bunch of pre payments from customersr. Basically pretending to have high revenue and lower cost by shifting when the payments are made. And then on top of that they’re jacking up prices and thus decreasing their demand with the shift to tokens.

Everyone is running around rearranging deck chairs on the datacenter titanic hoping they can keep their feet dry a little longer.

… shut!

the leadership at a lot of companies have a very poor read on public sentiment, kind of strange given how much data they collect and how much they like to talk about how good they are at using that data.

And a lot of high level leadership at collages run in the same circles are executives at big companies. These speech events are sort of a benefit for both sides, the leadership at the collage gets to advertise what a good job they’re doing that they were able to get someone so influential to speak, and the speaker gets a sudo-academic platform to state their ideas and an ego boost from the huge in person captive audience.

A lot of them just kind of write off the discontent they see as “a vocal minority”, so when mass confronted with actual public sentiment, i do think it kind of blind sides them.

“ NOOO YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND BRO! OUR BUSINESS MODEL DOESN’T WORK IF WE CAN’T DO MASS SURVELIANCE BRO!”

I mean, Microsoft’s biggest mistake was shoving it in front of everyone’s faces. The real reason that all the other “agentic BS” is received well is because the people who use them have an actual use case, or, are very enthusiastic about the technology and enjoy messing with it. Thus the discussion is mostly from that small group of people who will have something positive to say.

The truth is, that all the models and harnesses suck for most use cases that most people have. When you shove it in front of a general audience and make them interact with it, then the discussion will be about how bad it is.

Gondwana, Laurasia, Pangaea.

Arch is fairly easy in my experience to install. I did install in manually once and that took a while but wasn’t difficult.

Since then I’ve just connected to WiFi then just run the arch install script which is prepackaged in the ISO now.

Actually using it has had minimal issues except for the time I didn’t use the machine it was on for a few months and couldn’t get it to update because the signing keys for stuff was out of date. That and an issue with running out of memory when trying to compile a browser from the AUR (I just installed it through flatpack instead).

They do have their own App Store, it’s just only got like… 14 apps in it. Mostly just the stuff they’ve made them selves that they’re super confident in the security of, as well as a couple of other app stores like Accrescent

To start allowing submissions of any third party app to it would ether require them to do a ton of vetting to ensure it meets their standards, or for them to drop the standards for security and privacy for it. If you want more than that handful of defaults, Accrescent and the google play mirror are there ready to be installed

so, Linux does work, a lot of stuff works. There is nothing fundamentally different about phones other than them basically all running on ARM instead of x86, which is more common for PCs. More development of stuff for X86 Linux than ARM Linux, although less of a difference than there use to be.

Really the issue is proprietary stuff built on top of android and IOS. Stuff that a lot of useful apps rely on for security and functionality. For instance banking apps are super locked down for obvious reasons, but the standards that have been adopted by the industry for mobile banking are all entangled with proprietary close source stuff.

“No! We swear we can make money! Seee! Phone? Phone make money! We make phone! Please give us more money to throw in to the money shredder.”

Exactly, this is the problem. This is anticompetitive behavior.

It’s not anti competitive if it is litterlay also what all the competitors are doing, and have been doing since the very dawn of digital markets for software. It also dubious if they could legally even set up such interoperability even if they wanted to, as it could potentially violate parts of the DMCA.

They’re not doing anything to destroy their competitors, they’re not a monopolist, and the repeated failures of court cases against them all over the world shows that. There are a few on going cases against them, but, there are far far more cases that have already finished that failed to show any monopoly seeking behavior.

Public companies do not actually have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder value. That is a myth based on a misreading of the Dodge V Ford decisions. That specific reading of the precedent of that decisions has never actually been used in a court case to charge a CEO.

The difference was that people pretended like Google ever had an option to “not be evil”. At the end of the day, they were a publicly traded company, and thus, line must go up, or else the collective hive mind of the public market would vote the leadership out and replace them.

Steam is private, thus, the current leaderships can ignore the demands of the public market hive mind. Private companies can be evil, but it depends on who owns them. They’re not guaranteed.

A monopoly is when all competitors have been destroyed, not when competitors aren’t particularly competitive. At least, under the letter of US law.

If they start being stupid, they’re suddenly on par with the competitors already being stupid. Suddenly they have viable competitors.

They do have competitors, they competitors just aren’t very popular. There is the colloquial definition of monopoly, and a different legal bar for being declared a monopolist under US law.

To be declared a monopolist requires that a company already has destroyed or is actively seeking to destroy competitors through anti competitive behavior. Even if people mix terms, the general idea is that they’re not doing anything unreasonable and anti-competitive to gain their position in the market. They have competitors, they’re just not popular, and steam has not done anything to make them unpopular.

The real danger is that if steam decided to suddenly start being externally anti consumer, like many of it’s competitors already are, it would be difficult for people to migrate away due to a lack of interoperability between services. Users can’t transfer licenses to play games between services, nor can they easily interact with social features on other platforms. But that’s not really steam’s fault, that’s how all the competitors (for the most part) work as well.

I mean, public companies have to chase the quarter, private companies don’t have to. Private is a curse and a blessing. It can be better because the ownership might be reasonable, or it could be worse because the owners are insane.

Public is predictable, for good and for ill. Private is a a wild card.

The only safe bet is worker owned.

I always say, people starting out should just go to mint. It’s the lowest friction option, and will work fine for just about every use case. Like, there is a whole world of cool stuff to try out, but that’s for after someone has an easy, stable and reliable experience. After they realized that Linux can work for just about anything, that’s the time to start messing about and trying out the more specific distros.

Damn, glad i don’t own a car and will never buy one.