Yeah, what a loss. Now it will only be able to suggest glue on burgers. /s

Gotta admire this level of foresight, for sure. :)

Good luck getting your water to the right temp in a microwave without toeing the flashboil line, though.

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

Interesting deep dive and very much worth a read. I’d say it probably underestimates the weight of finance-related pressures coming from the CFO’s office, though.

Too real. They’ll steal your heart alright, but god damn.

Looks like an encoding problem, not a font problem. Make sure your terminal is configured to use the UTF-8 encoding.

It will, however, be far better than not doing anything.

Big missing piece there: cloud.

In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon’s hands.

Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that’s why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.

It’s business to business, however, so the generak public doesn’t hear about it a lot. It’s also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.

In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.

Thank you. Excellent observation It is, in fact, the very fact that makes the comment you are responding to funny.

It’s journalist for, someone blabbed but doesn’t want to be named. Don’t sweat it.

The actor in the picture on that site looks like Richard Harris, not Michael Gambon. -_-

“Today you. Tomorrow me.”

“Read the fucking room Mal” deserves to become a thing.

My friend, I don’t need to go read the video game history about Daggerfall: I wrote some of it. :)

And I stand by my statement. That game was the height of storytelling that came out of Bethesda in a bunch of small but important ways, although Morrowind is not far behind, in a somewhat different fashion. And there is a definite shift in the series from the moment Ted Peterson left the team. Patently, not a shift I am personally very fond of, but to each her own.

Well, I’d argue that Daggerfall was their best game, story-wise, but Daggerfall is even older. And that’s the point, isn’t it? More time passed between Skyrim and Starfield than between Daggerfall and Oblivion. A lot can change in so many years, and I do believe that hoping for something new was not entirely unreasonable.

Then again, the keyword there is entirely, isn’t it. I personally didn’t expect very much from Starfield, and, also personally, I can’t say I fully understand the amount of hype surrounding it.

They’ve always been boring

Strongly disagreed. Pre-Oblivion their games were great. Hoping for a return to engrossing stories taking place in a rich, expansive universe was not entirely unreasonable.

True. It’s still a good aspiration. Maybe we can get there.

Well, damn. What sad news. :(

We’ve got a perfectly good planet right there under our feet and we’re failing rather spectacularly at keeping it functional, so as things currently stand the idea we could go to a dead planet and somehow turn it livable is, at the very best, dubious.

If you are interested in the topic, Kelly and Zach Weinersmith of SMBC fame have a book coming on this very subject: https://www.acityonmars.com/.