I can think of very few things that I'd rather not do then to be an OS. Talk about a thankless "game"...and I'm glad this came up.
Since when have games become more about just completing boring tasks and not about using your mind and dexterity to kill evildoers? Hell, the original Space Invaders was 100x more fun then this, and all we had to do was press a button to kill advancing aliens.
So if three Tech companies (Boston Dynamics, Google, and Softbank), very smart ones at that, couldn't think of a way to make Atlas profitable, well for sure an automotive company should have no problem at all figuring it out.
Huh?
I mean...what evidence does the management at Hyundai have that shows them that these things aren't just YouTube stars? What teams does it have in place to start the transition from not profitable?
> and they tell us they use $2K per month in tokens with their current employers...
perhaps they are simply trying to impress you with their mad prompting skills and like, what self-respecting engineer would be caught dead using less then $2k/month?
giving the context of your interaction with those people, it probably is the simplest answer to your rather baffling question. for the life of me the idea of using $2k/month doesn't even seem possible unless your telling it to waste credits.
It only works if you tell Claude..."grow me some fucking corn profitably and have it ready in 9 months" and it does it.
If it's being used as manager to simply flesh out the daily commands that someone is telling it, well then that isn't "working" thats just a new level of what we already have with APIs and crap.
I just turned 60. My first computer was a 4.77MHz IBM PC with an 8088 processor, two floppy drives, and that magnificent mechanical keyboard IBM shipped in those days. My father, clearly receiving excellent financial advice at the time, picked up a 300bps Hayes modem for the princely sum of $599. CompuServe, here I come!
For context, this was early 1982. That 599 would cost 1,900 today — still a lot for a modem, but not quite the "gazillion" I remembered. Still, it illustrates just how far we've come.
Since then, I've written software professionally for over 40 years (with varying degrees of success). I've owned well over 200 computers — roughly 90% Wintel machines and 10% MacBooks. I've built them, repaired them, debugged them, and occasionally, after particularly frustrating days, set them back together again. I like to think I know my way around a PC.
Six months ago, I decided it was time. "This is the year of the Linux desktop on my machine," I declared, and I meant it. I installed over 20 of the most popular distributions from DistroWatch and used each one for at least two weeks. I was on a mission to rediscover the joy of computing.
For a while, it was genuinely fun. The sheer number of options was overwhelming in the best way possible. Customization everywhere I looked. All those incredible free software packages waiting in the repositories. In the beginning, I didn't even mind that I found myself doing full reinstalls every two or three days due to random instabilities. I was living the dream. Desktop effects and visual flair? Bring it on. Why does Compiz get so much criticism these days? What's more satisfying than a beautifully animated window?
Six weeks in, things changed. The Linux installations started to degrade — subtle at first, then undeniable. Random slowdowns. Browser links that wouldn't register for 10 or 15 seconds. The kind of frustration that makes you stare at the screen and wonder what's happening under the hood. It was consistent across distributions, which suggests this wasn't just a bad package here or there. Something fundamental was happening.
And yes, I'm aware of the irony. The system celebrated for its stability and reliability was the one leaving me longing for a responsive desktop environment. But that's exactly what I experienced, and I gave each distribution a fair shot.
There's also the practical reality: I'm a heavy Ableton Live user, and dual-booting has become increasingly grating. The Linux audio ecosystem has made real progress, but for my specific workflow, it's not there yet. Maybe in another year or two.
So I'm back on Windows 11. It works. It doesn't surprise me. After four decades, I'm okay with "it works" as a primary criterion.
Will I try Linux again? Maybe. The ecosystem continues to improve, and who knows what the next wave of AI-assisted tools might change. But for now, I wanted to share an honest account of what I encountered — because I genuinely wanted Linux to win.
Its hard to pirate SaaS for rather obvious reasons. The cracks don't work for very long and usually don't work for 20% of the system.
However, I agree...pirating is a must-do these days. It's almost impossible to figure out how well a software package is going to react to your needs without actually using it on said needs.
I do, however, think it's very important to remind everyone that you eventually must buy the product if it's filling your needs well enough.
Pirating is a crappy solution to a crappy problem.
really? i thought it's purpose was to take us back to the good old days of sellable proprietary binary blobs instead of the more open HTML/JS/CSS stack.
Well by "validating git" aren't you by proxy validating its design by its creator?
Or am I missing something key here? Yes of course it's been extended by very smart people has new features etc etc...but a weekend project that was robust enough to handle the Linux kernel codebase for him? That's is no small feat.
Oh yes perhaps its the new meme among developers that there are no real genius architects and coders and that anyone could have done it really so why distribute props to any one creator?
Yeah given my experience I have a hard time buying into that mindset.
Isn't this perhaps the greatest validation of Linus's design genius that what was initially a weekend project[0] has successfully scaled to this?
They could no longer use their revision control system BitKeeper and no other Source Control Management (SCMs) met their needs for a distributed system. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, took the challenge into his own hands and disappeared over the weekend to emerge the following week with Git.
Since when have games become more about just completing boring tasks and not about using your mind and dexterity to kill evildoers? Hell, the original Space Invaders was 100x more fun then this, and all we had to do was press a button to kill advancing aliens.