It's not even just children in safe situations like bedtime. I regularly see adults crossing the street typing on their phones while having headphones on.
So much modern tech is just about capture and extraction, not actually empowering the end user. It's as if guitar companies found a way to make more money in claiming royalties on musicians' work instead of building good guitars.
I would amend that to basically all modern tech. It's all fucking rent seeking now. Everyone wants to be the next Google and Facebook (or to be acquired by them) and just sit on their asses and cash checks while occasionally rebooting a server.
Every tech company is headed by MBA graduates who couldn't read code if their lives depended on it and all they know how to do is order engineers to make the UX worse so they can make imaginary lines go up. I am so, so terrified of what happens to Steam when Gabe Newell retires/dies.
It's a political challenge, not a technical one. There are constituencies that reap concentrated benefits from the current system (e.g., tax-filing services) while imposing disperse costs on everyone else. Also, there are those who believe that the IRS is out to get them, so filing your own taxes is more trustworthy than going with a government-issued pre-filled default. And that going through the motions makes the pain of paying taxes more salient, so you're more likely to complain about it.
If you look at it as a practical or technical challenge, you're addressing the wrong question.
It's about integrity, not confidentiality. Without HTTPS, anyone between you and the server can mess with the content you're receiving. It could be injecting ads, or make the website upside-down [1], or replace downloads with malicious links.
It's a slot machine. Everything social media and e-commerce is a slot machine. Each scroll is a pull of the arm, hoping that the algorithmic gods will smile kindly on you and give you some sweet content or deal.
Steam is great, in no small part because Valve isn't beholden to quarterly earnings numbers. But I'm worried what will happen when Gabe Newell retires. Valve has been a pretty good (though at times imperfect) steward for PC gaming and it'll be sad if a change in leadership decides to extract value from 20+ years of goodwill.
I think the biggest problem with Steam is that when you buy a game on Steam, it's tied to your Steam account forever. In theory, Gabe could croak and they get bought by a VC firm that decides that a Steam account costs $45/month. At that point, you either give up all the games you purchased on Steam, or pay the $45/month.
I don't know why anyone would prefer their games tied to a service in that way. Especially when we've seen other digital stores go belly up, resulting in inaccessible collections.
Steam was the OG online store, it grandfathered itself in before a time people started to think that having their gaming library behind such a service might offer some downsides.
Nowadays I mostly buy PC games on GoG for that reason, but I have plenty on Steam. I do worry about it a little.
One of the things that drives me a little crazy about Steam is that there was actually an earlier digital game store (run by Stardock IIRC) that made the launcher and other tie-ins optional. That one didn't take off, though. Steam required a tie-in to the launcher, and it took off.
I would've much rather had the launcher and all that be optional, but I'm guessing that requiring Steam for games like Half-life 2 probably was the smarter move (from a profit perspective) than having it be optional, so that's the way the market went.
>ship a new feature and make sure people use it by making it as annoyingly in-your-face as possible, so you can show "impact".
Modern consumer tech in a nutshell. It's less about serving the paying end-user and more about self promotion. There's so much neediness and entitlement in the design.
You're quite right about the relative calm in Linux. It knows it's an operating system, and an OS is supposed to stay out of the way and simply support the user's needs, not be a billboard for junk.
They're cheaper right now because they're operating at a loss. At some point, the bill will come due.
Netflix used to be $8/month for as many streams and password-shares as you wanted for a catalog that met your media consumption needs. It was a great deal back then. But then the bill came due.
Online LLM companies are positioning themselves to do the same bait-and-switch techbro BS we've seen over the last 15+ years.
Yes they'll be cheaper to run, but will they be cheaper buy as a service?
Because sooner or later these companies will be expected to produce eye-watering ROI to justify the risk of these moonshot investments and they won't be doing that by selling at cost.
From a simple correlational extrapolation compute has only gotten more cheaper over time. Massively so actually.
From a more reasoned causal extrapolation hardware companies historically compete to bring the price of compute down. For AI this is extremely aggressive I might add. HotChips 2024 and 2025 had so much AI coverage. Nvidia is in an arms race with so many companies.
All over the last few years we have literally only ever seen AI get cheaper for the same level or better. No one is releasing worse and more expensive AI right now.
Literally just a few days ago Deepseek halved the price of V3.2.
AI expenses have grown but that's because human's are extremely cognitively greedy. We value our time far more than compute efficiency.
You don't seriously believe that last few years have been sustainable? The market is in a bubble, companies are falling over themselves offering clinically insane deals and taking enormous losses to build market share (people are allowed to spend ten(s) of thousands of dollars in credits on their $200/mo subscriptions with no realistic expectation of customer loyalty).
What happens when investors start demanding their moonshot returns?
They didn't invest trillions to provide you with a service at break-even prices for the next 20 years. They'll want to 100x their investment, how do you think they're going to do that?
I think "standing out" in a market of lemons is playing the wrong game. The winning move is to sidestep the market altogether and find a niche where there's a barrier to entry that's both high enough to deter most other competitors but low enough that you can clear it.
It doesn't scale, but that's the point. Direct competition is a loser's game.
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