rincebrain

In a number of cases, yes.

I'm not remarking that the premise is entirely without merit, just that there's some emergent cases where it actively made things worse.

Once upon a time, someone at Microsoft wished on a monkey's paw for a way to replace thousands of undocumented INI files throughout the filesystem.

It curled, and we got the registry.

The problem with that is, in places where delivery is ubiquitous, people use the reusable bags the same as they used the single-use bags, and there's no way to return them, so now people are disposing of much more resource-intensive bags the same way they did the single-use ones.

I don't think they want to kill it entirely in the next 5 years, at least, but I do think they just want to stop supporting the non-enterprise users because that lets them significantly constrain what hardware and features they have to maintain, and all their big software offerings are very content being sold as cloud-based recurring revenue sources.

I would assume after 11 LTSC finally EOLs might be the earliest they'd be considering anything more drastic, but I wouldn't speculate whether it'd look like a good idea by then.

It may sound wild, and certainly possible time will prove me wrong, I'm not an oracle, but the ongoing failures in basic functions in Windows seems like they're removing significant investment in it as a reliable platform for general use going forward, and their recent introduction of things like the Xbox handheld running Windows makes me suspect their goal is to constrain where it's still used, and trim how much it costs to maintain that way.

I would assume because it's hideously expensive to maintain a full OS and support and compatibility guarantees with all the random horseshit consumer platforms throw at them, and they did the math and concluded they liked the profit margins for purely online and non-consumer targeted things, where they can more effectively constrain what is and isn't supported, better.

In particular, my guess is that they looked at their estimates for how much they could make off recurring revenue sources in desktop OSes, and their estimates for how the desktop market is changing with more younger users not using them or viewing them as legacy platforms, and decided they should pivot to primarily being a services provider, in much the same way they're aggressively trying to slap the Xbox branding on other things and getting out of the console market as fast as they can run.

Could be wrong, I don't work there, but usually my experience with companies that large making apparent missteps is that their goal isn't the one you think it is, and attempting to extract as much data as they can from desktop users really sounds like what you do when you're trying to squeeze the sponge before you throw it out.

I do still strongly suspect Microsoft's endgame is to get people off Windows in the consumer space, and that most of what's going on right now with 11 is froth as they add features they think will make them money in the near term even as it drives people off or be useful in the non-consumer space, not because they sincerely think this is something people will find a net gain in the consumer space.

So yes, I agree it's likely not primarily ignorance driving this.

The largest problem with dealing with humans is handling both good and bad faith cases.

In particular, if you can't rely on the escalation path being willing to rule a lawsuit is "bloody stupid" if you offer, say, a discount on "all fruits" and someone tries to argue milk is a fruit, then you wind up with endless escalations of rules lawyering and perverse effects.

11, I think, is what happened when they wanted to push breaking changes that customers who pay for LTSC wanted to avoid for the entire lifetime of 10.

My assumption is that 10 was as you describe, and then 11 was motivated by wanting to make disruptive changes to squeeze the last juice from the consumer segment, and the "agentic OS" pivot is just the most recent gorilla in the room to squeeze the ever-drier sponge.

In particular, I would assume Microsoft sees writing on the wall with how so many people in younger demographics are using phones as primary devices and see full sized laptops and desktops as effectively legacy platforms they use at jobs, and is frantically trying to get out of that market before the bottom falls out.

The nuance there, I think, is that over half the players are reportedly new to the Diablo games, which suggests that their primary intended market was likely not existing Diablo players.

The core kernel of it always seemed, to me, to be an extension of the Diablo 3 RMT auction house idea - they wanted a recurring revenue source from a franchise where traditionally they were not charging one, and in this case, they squared that circle by appealing to users who were not existing players, and so did not have those norms in mind.

I think what people misunderstand is that this is probably an active goal of theirs.

Similar to how Microsoft has decided there's no money to be made in console hardware and is trying to spin their Xbox brand into a software service brand they can slap on other things, I think they've decided that making a consumer OS has no money in it, and all the minmaxing of squeezing at the moment is them trying to extract the last drips of money while trying to drive people elsewhere.

I could be wrong, I'm not a journalist with sources at the company or something, but looking at it from the outside, this seems like the moves you'd make to drive people off your platform over time so you can kill it while having plausible deniability that you're not trying to do that, you definitely genuinely believe everyone wants you to opt them into everything every time you push an update.

In particular, I don't think having the kinds of enormous tire fires on update releases over this long without radical reinvestment in avoiding that happening in the future is what you do if you're trying to build something you're still dealing with another 10-20 years from now.

The problem with that is that there's a number of examples about how your entitlement increases markedly when you feel you have paid for something.

So if you don't have enough hours in the day, more money doesn't solve that problem unless it can displace other things in your schedule, and can make the number of people attempting to impose, and their attitudes, worse.

The most recent experience was a ThinkPad T14 G2, which had, in addition to my negative experiences that were not defects, enough hardware defects that they eventually sent me a new Intel model because I had RMA'd it so many times for failures.

It's in their style to do when they think there's a benefit to them from it, short or long term.

I'm not claiming they're not beneficial or acting in bad faith, but their past contributions are "making enormous improvements in the ecosystem when they think this is the best option for them" - things like radv+aco you could see as "we looked at AMD's solution for this and decided it was lower risk to build a better one ourselves" - and I can't really argue with their logic, even if AMD hadn't given up and gone for it, they have a history of switching solutions every so often and then god help you if you built around the old one.

Zink makes sense because it closes a unique gap (supporting older games if OpenGL support sunsets) in their platform, not just for its own sake.

AArch64 emulation on x86 is useful, but doesn't fill such a gap for them, IMO. Nothing is uniquely targeting AArch64 in the library of things they want to support on Steam platforms except non-game software targeting only macOS/AArch64.

I would predict, since they seem to be adding some level of Steam game support for handling Android games [1] [2], that you might see them financing such a thing in the next couple years if there's enough things exclusively targeting Android or AArch64 that they want to de-risk people complaining they can no longer play them in 5-10 years.

[1] - https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/11/steamworks-sdk-adds-su...

[2] - https://www.theverge.com/news/818672/valve-android-apps-stea...

Sure, I doubt it's anything other than someone eagerly grabbing a list of long tail things and blacklisting them.

Sure, it wasn't a surprise how the incentives for that would work out.

But it's an excellent example of how something you could see some naive people in good faith claiming is a good thing can be pathologized.

The problem is not strictly the pennies themselves, but all of the prices that rely on being able to quantize things to a cent, and a number of different laws about not playing games with prices.

Most recently, a stick in the SNAP benefits laws is that you can't charge SNAP recipients different amounts from other people - which was presumably intended to ensure you can't play games like charging SNAP recipients more for things, but in practice, means that if you, hypothetically, wanted to charge SNAP and credit card holders exact amounts (which you would likely want to do to avoid weird effects where SNAP recipients, who tend to be very price sensitive, find their bills going up), and charge cash users rounded up or down, you would be in violation.

Those are the kinds of warts you would hope to see a plan for before these things were announced, rather than having to figure out one in the middle.

Eventually, almost any organization distorts from its nominal goal to self-perpetuation.

As the numbers get larger, it becomes easier and easier to suggest that the organization's continued existence is still a net positive as you waste more and more on the organization bloating.

It's also surprisingly hard to avoid - consider how the ACA required that 85% of premiums go to care, and how that meant that the incentives became for the prices to become enormous.

If you have rearranged your budget so that 60% of it is provided by one source consistently, then you're not putting the 60% toward new programs, you're using it to finance the existing things everyone already expects of you.

And if you're using that to, say, avoid raising taxes to cover things like inflation or new projects, over time, the level of pain you're going to experience when you either have to make all those adjustments at once or, worse, if the income source is removed, gets worse and worse.

edit: in this case, specifically, it seems like the concern is that even the limited amounts of income from tech companies and knock-on effects from their employees is an enormous lifeline to Ireland's economy, and they're afraid of the rebound effects if it goes away.

Given that the "fix" involves making the string reported "Possibly Apple, Possibly M1", I am going to say it's a blacklist.

They could, but why?

If an ARM device both suits the goals and has lower risk, there's little upside other than forcing the project to exist.

And since there's very few pieces of AArch64-exclusive software that Valve is trying to support, that's not a goal that benefits the project.

(If I were guessing without doing much research, Switch emulators might be the largest investment of effort in open source on x86 systems running AArch64 things performantly, but that's certainly not a market segment Valve is targeting, so...)

I don't think even this is true any more.

Windows used to have a solid technical foundation and was working on improving longstanding historical warts (font processing in the kernel, what could go wrong?), regardless of how off the rails the end user experience was getting.

Now, Windows seems to be rotting from every direction. The user experience is going straight for minmaxing data harvesting and antipatterns, and the technical underbelly is showing horrible problems getting into releases. [1][2], to pick a couple recent examples.

[1] - https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows/windows-11-...

[2] - https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/october-...

Yes, in theory.

But there's not a huge market (and therefore, FOSS dev time spent on it) for emulating AArch64 on x86 the way there is x86 on AArch64, so if your options are to build your own AArch64 emulation for x86 (or drop a fortune into an existing FOSS option), or building something based on AArch64 and using the existing x86 emulation implementations, one of these has much more predictable costs and outcomes today.

My experiences with trying AMD CPU laptops is that they're not good.

Every time I've tried it in the last 10 years, it's felt like I was teleported into the late 90s PC era - weird bugs in specific drivers that you can find lots of reports of for this specific model and no resolution, heat management that feels like someone in a basement strung things together in 5 minutes and never tested it again, strange failures in "plug and play" support for USB devices that work on every other machine flawlessly with the same cable and device, and don't get me started on Bluetooth. (My favorite ever might be the time that attempting to pair a specific pair of headphones to the laptop shut off every USB port, reproducibly, apparently because the BT adapter was connected over the USB M.2 pins to the root hub, and was crashing in firmware, so both Windows and Linux did the same style of dance of "try to reset it, once that fails, go up a level and turn off the complex to make sure other things keep working"...except up one level was the root.) (Though, to be fair to AMD, that was an Intel BT/wifi chip in an AMD laptop...)

I really want to like and recommend AMD mobile hardware, but every time I've tried it has been a shitshow without fail.

Mozilla's fundamental problem to square is they have no way to fund themselves.

So they keep trying to find ways to try to extract even a tiny drip of income from their userbase, who recognize and resent it when they feel Mozilla is already in arrears in their relationship, and it just spirals because every less invasive option Mozilla tries and has to walk back means the next option was one they considered and decided was worse the last time.

I don't really have a great idea how to do this better, but it's not _just_ that Mozilla execs have poor ideas, it's that they're desperately trying to find a funding source and all the options are going to burn the already-negative goodwill remaining.

It's kind of the startup story - you give people the first hit for free (which Mozilla did for many years, effectively), then once enough people are using it, you slowly attempt to boil the frog to cover the massive debt you sank giving something away below the actual cost of providing it.

In a nicer world, I could imagine a nation-state providing funding to Mozilla to underwrite not having a browser monoculture. But I don't see anyone having the appetite for doing that now.

I believe the specific purpose of that is to appeal to the parts of companies that engage in professional ass covering for the hot potato.

That is, if a well-established company offers you a service explicitly promising no human bones in the soup, when all the other services don't promise that, you can make a reasonable argument that, in the event you were required by circumstances to pick one of the services to use, you have done the best you can in that circumstance, even if human bones ended up in the soup, as long as the company doesn't have a known history of not honoring its commitments.

And in that case, it becomes easier to make an argument to your management chain that you didn't deliberately put in human bones to save on cost, you picked the one that explicitly promised no human bones.

Because almost everything is risk mitigation or reduction, not elimination.

In particular, in the US, the legal apparatus has been gamified to the point that the expectation becomes people will sue if their expected value out of it is positive even if the case is insane on its merits, because it's much more likely someone with enough risk and cost will settle as the cheaper option.

And in that world, there is nothing that completely eliminates the risk of being sued in bad faith - but the more things you put in your mitigation basket, the narrower the error bars are on the risk even if the 99.999th percentile is still the same.

I was running Debian unstable on my 64-bit SPARC up until I moved a few months ago and haven't set the system back up again while unpacking.

It's been somewhat useful for finding weird edge cases in software where for whatever reason, it doesn't reproduce easily on AArch64 or x86, but does there. (Or vice-versa, sometimes.)

I don't know that I'd say that's sufficient reason to motivate dozens of people to maintain support, but it's not purely academic entertainment or nostalgia, for that.

The problem is a lack of firsthand experience.

If your experience with polio is nonexistent, it's easy to dismiss "1 in 1000 people suffer from paralysis" as a small fraction of cases without considering the horrific reality of that paralyzing thousands of people in a city of millions, to say nothing of the other effects.

This is also, I think, related to why doctors are often dismissive of patient concerns - our expectations have shifted, because so few things that occur frequently require active intervention to reduce mortality any more, comparatively.

If you'd like to see an interesting parallel, go look at how Microsoft announced supporting DirectX 12 on Windows 7 for a blessed apps list - basically because Blizzard whined hard enough and was a big enough gorilla to demand it.

I think the problem can be described as assuming good faith in the argument - that is, that you're talking with someone who you are presuming is attempting to communicate, not just "win" the conversation.

The difference becomes clear very quickly - if there's a genuine misunderstanding, someone will clarify and move on; if someone is trying to rules lawyer the conversation, it won't.