Bitcoin. A technology trying to circumvent our highly regulated financial system? Which is mostly used to sell drugs online and evade sanctions? Where we knew at the start that it would need more energy than whole countries if it was successful? And then there are those 51% attacks? Yeah, that’s stupid. I really would have expected governments to crack down harsh on everything bitcoin and cryptocoin and would have expected that owning or using them would be as illegal as owning child porn.

There is another battle: There is a fight to open up app installation on phones. The EU recently forced Apple to allow other app stores on iOS and Apple is fighting this as hard as you would expect. Apple & Google are taking 30% of each sale in their stores and are making bank. One of the arguments they are pushing is “safety”. Only apps on their vetted app stores are safe, every other store is unsafe and so on. If they allow a child porn app in their store, all of their arguments in this debate are invalid. And that is also an important fact for that debate.

Does it? It was possible a while ago, but in the last years, we saw train tickets going to apps. There is no ticket machine at my local stop. There are areas where you can only park your car with an app. I need 2FA to get into my accounts. Restaurants have QR code menus. So going to protests or just living your life without a phone is getting harder

No, it doesn’t. But that is totally something that should run locally on your own devices.

I kind of makes sense to produce computers that are able to run local AI. People here hate AI, but there are a lot of tasks that make a lot of sense even on a laptop. It’s great to produce tags and descriptions for your images. Google Photo has this - search for “horse” and you will get back all pictures of horses you have taken. And it totally makes sense to run stuff like this locally on your own computer without sending every picture you’ve taken to Trumpland.

But I really do not trust Microsoft to build something like that. That would totally go against everything they have been doing for the last decade and would also devalue their billions they’ve put into OpenAI

A lollipop with electronic waste. Truly a feat of engineering!

I remember getting my first MP3s at a LAN party and it was revolutionary. You could just copy over music to your computer from other computers and they had quite the selection? Awesome! I totally filled my (tiny) hard disk to the brim and then listened the shit out of them with Winamp. I learned a while later that you could also rip CDs and that was also revolutionary. Then Napster, the first Discmens with MP3 support and so on - MP3s are awesome!

All of them - there might be a reason to want to get rich as fuck so that you can live comfortable and buy everything you want. I totally can understand that a superyacht in the Mediterranean can be awesome or that your private jet is more comfy than flying in a normal plane. But there is a limit: Just imagine being Elon Musk, being so rich that you could use a small part of your money to eradicate some illnesses or lift millions of people out of poverty and then spending your time shitposting on Twitter

You have a license for some crappy Win11 home version. You can’t use it for the Enterprise versions, even if Microsoft is providing you with the ISO.

Just imagine how many tutorials, documentations, videos and so on Microsoft has made obsolete by just moving the start menu from the lower left side to the middle. And yes, you totally can’t expect users to find the new position on their own, some people are interesting

Which is, by the way, totally ok. If you buy an expensive computer and it is getting shipped with a garbage version of an OS that is something to complain about. It’s also totally reasonable to complain that there is a garbage version at all. People shouldn’t need to reinstall their brand new computers with pirated enterprise versions to escape the abuses of Microsoft. At least let us bitch about this here, dude!

There are two things hidden here:

1. People totally got killed by doing their own maintenance
2. There is a difference between physical maintenance and, well, you know that people will install some buggy self driving app

It kind of makes sense to not allow people to do that - just imagine what horrors people will create that totally will kill people. Cars are dangerous.