I suspect the tooling isn't quite there yet for desktop use cases.
If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.
The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.
I got a ~6k Dogecoin windfall a few years back. (Found the coins I bought in 2014 at <0.1c, sold at 25c)
I think I put like 1k into my more conventional investments, blew like $2k in indulgences (new GPU, collectibles), and set most of the rest aside for the revenuers.
We get, for some reason, a huge number of window replacement contractors coming door-to-door. Because I really want to be high-pressure sold $10k worth of low quality glass from the people who are running big enough marhins to put a full page colour ad in the local newspaper every day to go with their 6 hours a day of local TV spots.
I actually said to one "We're a Linux household. Not interested in Windows" and slammed the door on them.
I now realize cocking a rifle would have made the effect even better.
I had high hopes for Zach and Cody: The Re-education Camp Life but that seems to be in development limbo.
The "80 year old main character who looks 90 and acts 120" bit is played out. I hope the next time they roll out an ancient character, they at least pull the "I'm a vampire so I'm 450 years old but with the body of a smoking hot 24-year-old" trope.
The terrible secret is that immigrarion is the secret sauce behind "American Exceptionalism"
High recent immigrant populations essentially select for people willing to put in the extra effort to migrate, which is a close proxy for to things like "entrepeneurship" and "seeking out better education/opportunities for their children."
No, this is a general practice-- I see it a lot with third-party vendors who want you to integrate with their services. They'll expire the documentation portal password after 90 days, but the actual user facing service still accepts the same "password123" that's been set since 2004.
I suspect the pattern is to protect the vendors from developer scrutiny: by the time you've jumped through enough hoops to read the docs and realize it's trash, the execs have signed the contracts and the sunk costs are too high to bail out.
Also add another 6 months to actually get the credentials for the test environment.
They've got a guy at work whose job title is basically AI Evangelist. This is terrifying in that it's a financial tech firm handling twelve figures a year of business-- the last place where people will put up with "plausible bullshit" in their products.
I grudgingly installed the Copilot plugin, but I'm not sure what it can do for me better than a snippet library.
I asked it to generate a test suite for a function, as a rudimentary exercise, so it was able to identify "yes, there are n return values, so write n test cases" and "You're going to actually have to CALL the function under test", but was unable to figure out how to build the object being fed in to trigger any of those cases; to do so would require grokking much of the code base. I didn't need to burn half a barrel of oil for that.
I'd be hesitant to trust it with "summarize this obtuse spec document" when half the time said documents are self-contradictory or downright wrong. Again, plausible bullshit isn't suitable.
Maybe the problem is that I'm too close to the specific problem. AI tooling might be better for open-ended or free-association "why not try glue on pizza" type discussions, but when you already know "send exactly 4-7-Q-unicorn emoji in this field or the transaction is converted from USD to KPW" having to coax the machine to come to that conclusion 100% of the time is harder than just doing it yourself.
I can see the marketing and sales people love it, maybe customer service too, click one button and take one coherent "here's why it's broken" sentence and turn it into 500 words of flowery says-nothing prose, but I demand better from my machine overlords.
Tell me when Stable Diffusion figures out that "Carrying battleaxe" doesn't mean "katana randomly jutting out from forearms", maybe at that point AI will be good enough for code.
I expect the shattering will wound the movement. With Trump, they have a consensus leader and model. Everyone else will fight each other to fill the vacuum.
I'm sort of intrigued how they got the startup funding.
You're building a retail business around a meme. Even in the best possible case, you have a couple years of relevance to pay down the debt.
It's brick-and-mortar, with real inventory, not like just online drop-shipping stuff silkscreened on demand, so the overhead is pretty high.
If a bank financed any of this nonsense, I want to know so we can send the FDIC Shock Troops in to find out what other stupid shit they're doing with depositor money.
Small businesses just get replaced with "hobby" businesses where it's obviously someone with money cosplaying as a storekeeper selling scrapbooking suppkies or country decor items.
Since so much of Trump's rationale is to get into a position where he's out of legal jeopardy, U'm amazed nobody's tried the plea deal switcharoo: end your candidacy and we'll give you immunity. Come November 6th, the judge throws out the deal. I'm pretty sure there's been at least one Law & Order doing that, although the President was played by a guest star in an orange wig.
With American comics, it's not even the shattered continuity, it's that availability is a mess because some of the franchises are so ancient and collectible.
If I want to read through One Piece from the 1997 start, my library probably has/can inter-library loan all 105 volumes, or I can go to mainstream retailers and get any I'm missing without a huge fracas.
If I want to read Batman from the 1940 start, I'd better hope some of the rarer issues come up at auction in the near future AND that I can mortgage my house to afford them.
I'm amazed they never put out a DVD-ROM collection that's "Everything Marvel/DC did prior to, say, 1990, as PDF scans" just so mere mortals have a chance to enjoy the experience of completionism.
I suppose the weird surprise lesson of the Windows 8 fiasco is no matter how badly they bollixed it up, they wouldn't lose enough customers that they could afford break a lot more of the user experience than they ever originally thought.
Even Vista, while people had issues*, still provided a largely familiar interface and didn't go out of its way to break muscle memory and traditional workflows.
IMO, Vista wasn't as bad as is commonly held. A lot of the problem was that it was more resource-intensive than previous systems-- it really asked for decent graphics cards and 2Gb memory, but they sold a lot of cheap machines with 512Mb and crappy shared-memory chipsets that only qualified as "Vista Basic Capable" so that the manufacturers wouldn't have to formally declare them obsolete. Some drivers had teething trouble, but switching to 64 bit was going to have growing pains anyway.
I might not be able to write/draw (insert famous large work) but perhaps I can correct one clunky sentence on page 279. And when thousands of people are free to do so without the original artist beung able to gatekeep, the work can move in exciting new directions.
I suspect the tooling isn't quite there yet for desktop use cases.
If I were to try to replicate my current desktop in an immutable model, it would involve a lot of manual labour in scripting or checkpointing every time I installed or configured something, to save a few hours of labour in 2 years time when I get a new drive or do a full install.
The case is easier for defined workload servers and dev environments that are regularly spun up fresh.