Go fash, lose cash. 👍🏻

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.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. Wasn’t it shown that e.g. Russia is targeting our side just as heavily?

I don’t know why you are getting downvoted. This is a very valid and interesting point. Durable improvements are systemic, not individual, and the drive to look for heroes leads to nasty places.

Everypony.

An oft overlooked option that leaves no one indifferent.

Correct, AFAIU.

It’s a trade-off that works for many. Not much you and I can do about it, even if it’s frustrating.

Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn’t help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren’t there.

If you’re intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you’re fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.

But you can’t reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.

JACK is very cool and if you’re willing to tinker there’s some really awesome stuff that can be done with LADISH session management and e.g. native Linux VSTs.

It’s still a non-option for musicians who just want to do music, not tinkering.

Considering it’s a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I’m gonna go with yes.

Yeah, definitely the vibe has changed. It’s kind of sad.

Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.

I mean, you have people in your life who actually like you. I don’t know if the same can be said of Trump.

How do you bake it? The crust looks incredible.

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

I mean, red turnip may be rotten, but you wouldn’t want blue turnip to get in.

Maybe read the fucking room, Mal.

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.

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