People won't revolt even for genocide so why would they do anything about their computers?
We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer.
We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance.
GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.
I don't think "care" is the right word here at all. We simply don't have options.
This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition, but competition eventually leads to winners that then consolidate their positions and we end up with no real choices.
You're telling me people would pick a worse OS because they don't care even if they had real options? I don't believe that for a second.
Right, and even when there are options that doesn't mean you actually get to choose what you want for all things you care about, e.g. there might be option A with feature a (e.g. no ads) and option B with feature b (e.g. no vendor lock in) but none with both a and b - so you only really get a choice for the things you care most about. Which is effectively why gradual enshittification is effective: Most users will put up with minor anti-features rather than jump to a different platform that will require new programs and/or relearning.
iirc it was bmw who was selling their electric seats as a service. It maybe the only way to avoid this exploitation is a socialist model, nationalize industries and/or pay the workers for their time inside of for their product.
That worked in a case i know of locally, there was a forestry company that had workers speeding for years. So a karen i know got on to a politician and managed to get them to pay by the hour instead of by the load. I still see the trucks on the road, they are much safer now.
> This is capitalism's biggest flaw: it's based on the assumption that there will be competition
The fact that governments allow Microsoft to abuse its position to force OEMs to install Windows is the biggest problem. This would never happen in a market where regulation ensures healthy competition.
That version of capitalism sailed 40 years ago in the USA, antitrust enforcement has slowly disappeared which creates a race to the bottom for other countries who would like their companies to compete against USA's companies. If they enforce antitrust then the behemoths created in the USA by absorbing competitors without antitrust enforcement can eat their lunch, even though it's better for consumers.
Unfortunately this also allowed the USA to have companies so large that they basically control the government, changing this now will require massive political will and a political body untethered from corporate interests. I really don't see that happening in the USA, it's been thoroughly captured after so many years driving on that path.
I totally agree. There seems to be absolutely zero focus on Glass Steagall or Citizens United so I can't see how this actually happens without political revolt at this point.
Yes, the neo-liberal economy we've ended up with has drifted quite far from well-regulated Capitalism. I'd still argue that we owe a lot of our rights to hard-fought socialist policy though.
That argument doesn't really hold when the barriers of entry are so high. Believing that one of the biggest tech firms in the world is doing something undesirable and having a better idea that many people would in fact pay for is not the same as having the resources to become a unicorn with a huge global customer base that can practically implement that idea.
Plus, specifically for Microsoft, competing doesn't mean an alternative to Windows. It means an alternative to the entire enterprise stack, especially Office & M365.
Google hasn't enticed the big entrenched MS orgs to move over to Workspace, so if Google can't how can a smaller startup ever hope to accomplish that in the face of these behemoths that can just outlast them in a race to the bottom until they are insolvent or get bought by said behemoths?
Microsoft doesn't just sell an OS, or some services, they sell "IT in a box"
Sometimes companies will make more money by refusing to give consumers what they want. Collusion is also extremely profitable. A competitor that isn't interested in playing along can be bought out, but once shareholders get involved they're going to insist on screwing over their customers just like everyone else does anyway because they'd be leaving a huge pile of cash on the table otherwise and short term profits are all shareholders care about.
"by refusing to give consumers what they want." in practice consumers don't really want that, that much. The companies do similar things due to the similar ways consumers react to them. That's the point of this rely chain.
There are lots of things consumers want. They'd love a cell phone that didn't spy on them, they want a smart TV that isn't full of ads, they want an ink jet printer that doesn't refuse to print when there's still ink available. These aren't huge asks but because subjecting customers to them make companies money it's difficult, if not impossible to avoid.
What makes you think a competitor that "plays fair" can compete with a competitor that takes advantage of the system and extracts as much value as they can?
This is about markets. It has nothing to do with capitalism. And in fact, it is usually _because_ of healthy competition that this type of enshittification happens everywhere because quality is hard to compare for the buyers and so the sellers are forced to compete on cost.
How the hell can healthy competition breed enshittification? That makes absolutely no sense to me.
Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Now tell me how that competition enshittified eating at restaurants?
For me, nothing stands out. If a restaurant charges nonsense fees, under-staffs to increase profits, reduce portions with the same value, etc. I can simply go to another one. Restaurants that enshittify will almost inevitably close.
But if we look at a closely related industry like the food delivery apps, we see the same exact signs of enshittification we see on the tech world due to monopolies (or oligopolies to be more exact) like:
- Increased/hidden fees
- Increased delivery times
- Crappy apps with ads everywhere
- Ineffective review systems
- Pay-to-win search
- Dynamic pricing
They can get away with it because realistically, you don't have any other options. The cost to entry might not be that high but the network effect all but prohibits competition.
> Take an industry with healthy competition like restaurants. You can compete in price, quality, format, service and probably a lot more.
Yes, and you correctly point out: On the average restaurant visit, nothing stands out. A good restaurant only needs to provide not-terrible food and not-terrible service to be almost indistinguishable from all others. Quality of a restaurant visit is hard to measure and compare. Price is easy to measure. Thus, the rational consumer will prefer the cheaper option (and even at the same price, a restaurant with lower costs will be more profitable, thus expand more easily).
The same thing happens on Amazon and other market places: When it is difficult to compare quality, price always wins out. Some products are interchangeable with well defined specs, like a 16GB RAM stick is obviously twice as good as 8GB RAM and so it can be twice as expensive and still sell. But when I'm looking for a new light for my bicycle there are no standardized specs to compare. All the product descriptions and pictures are exaggerated. I have no reliable information to tell if the lamp that is twice as expensive is really twice as good (and from personal experience: they never are), so I'm buying the cheapest one cause I expect all of the products to be equally crappy no matter the price.
This point is irrelevant when discussing capabilities. It's like saying that your brain is literally just a bunch of atoms following a set of physics laws. Absolutely true but not particularly helpful. Complex systems have emergent properties.
Even disregarding what he has done, this is utterly absurd. I almost spit my coffee reading that.
You are going to tell me that the vibe coders care and read the code they merge with the same attention to detail and care that Linus has? Come on...
That's the key for me. People are churning out "full features" or even apps claiming they are dealing with a new abstraction level, but they don't give a fuck about the quality of that shit. They don't care if it breaks in 3 weeks/months/years or if that code's even needed or not.
Someone will surely come say "I read all the code I generate" and then I'll say either you're not getting these BS productivity boost people claim or you're lying.
I've seen people pushing out 40k lines of code in a single PR and have the audacity to tell me they've reviewed the code. It's preposterous. People skim over it and YOLO merge.
Or if you do review everything, then it's not gonna be much faster than writing it yourself unless it's extremely simple CRUD stuff that's been done a billion times over. If you're only using AI for these tasks maybe you're a bit more efficient, but nothing close to the claims I keep reading.
I wish people cared about what code they wrote/merged like Linus does, because we'd have a hell of a lot less issues.
I don't get why so much mental gymnastics is done to avoid the fact that locking their lower prices to effectively subsidize their shitty product is the anti competitive behavior.
They simply don't want to compete, they want to force the majority of people that can't spend a lot on tokens to use their inferior product.
Why build a better product if you control the cost?
They don't care. This is clearly someone looking to score points and impress with the AI magic trick.
The best part is that they can say the AI will get some stuff wrong, they knew that, and it's not their fault when it breaks. Or more likely, it'll break in subtle ways, nobody will ever notice and the consequences won't be traced back to this. YOLO!
We'll pay the subscription and be done with it. Those who can't will suffer.
We live too comfortably and independently to risk it all for the thousands of paper-cuts eroding our lives. The capitalists learned from history: isolate us and change into the dystopia little by little and there will never be enough resistance.
GP's right in pointing that out even if it hurts to read it.
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