Reminds me of Agent Smith's PoV from the Matrix, that humans define their existence through suffering. The first version of the matrix had everyone living in paradise and made the system unstable as humans couldn't accept it and would try to wake up from it, dying in the process. Once they introduced misery, humans accepted the programming. Yeah, it's a fantasy movie, but it has great symbolisms that rings true.
Google is so entrenched they're the default search engine on 3 major browsers and it even became a verb in the English dictionary. Do you think the average members of the public are gonna start Googling stuff on Bing anytime soon?
I think most non-tech people don't even realize if they are or aren't getting meaningful results. They got conditioned that whatever is on the first results page of google is what's relevant for what they're looking for and if it's not there then it must not exist.
I really don't see any major market shift away from Google search any time soon. Maybe if Apple launched their own could change things up a bit.
Meh, if I had a dollar for every time someone said "this time Microsoft is gonna fail for sure", I'd be richer than Elon. People were singing Microsoft's funeral at every new Windows or product launch and assumed it would burry them for good. Turns out, despite many failures, Microsoft is still among us, still growing, buying new companies and IPs, branching in new areas and firing on all cylinders despite all the haters and doomers predicting otherwise for the past 3 decades. Maybe individual products will die, like Windows, but Microsoft as a company will survive, as it grew to be a lot more than the Windows/Office company.
My point is, people are generally bad at making accurate predictions into the future and competent CEOs are good at turning things around.
Google's monopoly over search, email, ads, Android and Youtube will be hard to beat by smaller and nimble competitors. It's far too entrenched and the moat it has built is too tough and impossibly expensive for newcomers to beat. And if newcomers do turn into a threat, they will be swiftly acquired and absorbed into the machine.
If it was possible, it would have happened already. Everyone is waiting for a Youtube competitor, but nobody can afford to build and run one at Youtube's scale.
Same for the likes of Nvidia.
The only real threat to Google is government regulators breaking their products up into separate entities that will have to fund and fend for themselves without Big-daddy G's ad money.
>I'm not a fan of some standardization of protocols that is going on in Linux desktops
Standardization and Linux desktops are sometimes mutual conflicting terms.
There's doesn't seem to be much standardization on this front but tribes of people saying "new things should be this way" and other tribes saying "n'ah mate, that sucks, we'll keep using our own better way".
Linux desktops don't have the Apple/Microsoft dictatorship powers to actually enforce any kind of GUI standards so we get this constant hassle and even more fragmentation.
Very interesting. A very basic house in Austria is over 500k and not in a hot location, while to my knowledge wages here are not higher than in Finland. How is a house so cheap in Finland? 200k is basically Eastern/Southern European house prices, where wages are lower.
I feel like the insane housing prices here are not just related to nimbyism that restricts supply, but mostly to speculation driven by banking, political greed, realtors, investors, basically any and all large piles of money that have housing constantly going up fast so that their piles of money get even bigger.
>Have you tried to price out a comparative PC? Because there aren't many that will take as much RAM as that $50K Mac Pro and when you do find a PC that will all of the sudden you realize there isn't much of an Apple tax at all for the equivalent hardware
You're deluding yourself with your claim. If you would have done 30 seconds of googling, you would have found out that Dell, HP, Lenovo and Puget Systems, all sell workstations that can beat the top spec Mac Pro or can build one yourself for way cheaper than them but as a business you want the support and no headache so it makes sense to buy prebuilts.
>Are any countries accepting refuges from Russia that seek asylum?
This is an important topic. Some EU countries like Czechia are even blocking visas for Russian citizens now and I think this will be a trend in other EU countries.
AFAIK, since Russia is the aggressor here and is (on paper) a democratic country (but not really), then its citizens are not considered yet victims of the war, and are most likely not falling under the rules of refugee status, unless they can clearly prove that the Russian government is a threat to their life, which would be a bit difficult (like if you're in political opposition to Putin).
I honestly don't envy the Russian people now. They're forced into a conflict they don't want to be in, and are suffering the consequences.
>Do you somehow think that taxes will encourage innovation ?
That's what some EU members think. Ask us how that's going :)
That's why most of the big and wealthy companies hare are around 100 years old or more, vs about 30 years old in the US.
Here in Austria you can get various government and EU grants for your startup and tax waivers on social security, and if by some miracle, you don't crash and burn like 95% of startups and manage to produce a semi-profitable company in the end, then you have to pay to the government retroactively all the social security contributions and taxes that have been previously waived over the past years, which is the final nail in the coffin for most companies here never growing or scaling beyond a couple of guys from uni in an apartment kind of company.
Therefore most of the innovation happens nearly exclusively within academia, as "outside" it's a pretty hostile tax environment that mostly favors those 100 year old companies that already have solid revenue streams.
>I just wonder how did he afford all this equipment.
Living in the US comes with certain advantages like some of the lowest consumer prices in the West including HW equipment being dirt cheap on the second hand market plus houses being big enough for space for such hobbies along with the biggest take home pays yielding some of the highest purchasing power in the West, a formula tough to replicate anywhere else.
At least compared to where I live now in Europe, such hobbies would definitely be unaffordable for me monetary and real-estate wise, which is also a monetary issue at the end of the day.
I was looking on an interesting blog about buying certain older ThinkPads or older multi-core server chips for $50 used for building a cheap home lab, and when I checked, super exited, on my local second hand market, such machines or chips were fetching north of €250 and that was before the chip shortage broke the market. That's just one anecdote, but you get the point.
>We engineers love skunkworks: working on cool stuff, without accountability and a lot of freedom
I'm pretty sure people who keep saying this have no idea what working at Skunkwork was actually like.
If you read Ben Rich's book, which I recommend you do, you'll find out that they had tons of accountability, the more classified their projects were, the more they were drowning in paperwork. No employee was to be left alone with the blueprints and if one of two needed to go to the bathroom then the plans had to be locked in a safe during that time.
Also, the hours of work and the stress they were under was insane as shit would break unexpectedly all the time.
I'm sure this is not what engineers love, and what they tink they mean by Skunworks is cowboy coding and being paid handsomely to play like kindergarten kids in the sandbox with the latest shiny toys, while leaving work at 5 PM.
Because the US pays much, much more for the same jobs, than what the EU or UK pay.