People meme on 'lol government efficiency', but actually sit down and calculate your marginal cost for the services you pay for that are funded by taxation. It's not even close - the cost to operate these services per person is crazy low.

In fact, you don't even have to look that far for government-adjacent programs. Co-ops for utilities are notoriously cheaper for their service area than a private utility, almost without exception.

So yeah - the government is not perfectly efficient. It's not going to give you exactly what you want all the time, but it's still 2-3x more efficient than the private sector when it comes to actually absorbing the costs as a citizen or user of a service. "Lol government efficiency" is not the burn you think it is.

Brother, I don't even want a phone. I need devices that actually, ya know, do stuff. A phone is barely functional even at the best of times. A device that might do the thing I ask it to 60% of the way there, sometimes, on a full moon, when the LLM cooperates... No thanks. I'm absolutely confident that I will never want such a device - it's simply not useful as a tool because it's not a tool. It's just a toy - an expensive toy that can do a cute party trick.

The big bullet points though are:

• Apple has crazy opinions about hardware

• And increasingly crazy opinions about what software you can put on it.

• And goes out of it's way to not work with open standards because 'fuck you'.

So examples here - non-exhaustive, just examples.

Hardware is not something I need to explain. You are stuck on their hardware. You can't upgrade it, by design.

Software has been touched on re: DRM nonsense, but they are leaning more and more into 'only signed apps' and even 'only apps you get on the app store' (which I assume is the future for that OS). They also just don't really give a shit about compatibility and will happily break API when it suits them.

Open standards is completely obnoxious and just an unforced error, but it's not actually an error because they want users and developers both to be exclusively in their ecosystem. Vulcan is example prime in my head. They could support that, but they choose not to because they want everyone on Metal. The platform is not about being useful - it's about generating mind share and revenue.

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There are a lot of Apple users who will insist they don't feel like they are missing anything, and I do genuinely believe that they do feel that way. They just don't know what they are missing and if something isn't introduced as an option, it's not even in their mental model when choosing a solution for a problem. It's like trying to explain the virtues of a mouse and keyboard and an OS that supports multi tasking to a modern day teenager attached to an iPad and a phone - the idea of a more capable, more complex input stack is so foreign that it doesn't even register meaningfully. I don't mean to be a dick here, but I wouldn't go around saying, 'I've used Mac for 20 years and haven't ran into any issues with the OS' -- You're kinda telling on yourself a bit there.

Do we really have to litigate this? Have you been on the Internet at all in the last 2 decades? Do you seriously think that even if that kind of advertising vector isn't being paid for today, it won't be tomorrow?

It is almost childishly naive to assume that these companies that are bleeding billions will have the ethical fortitude to say 'no' to Chevy / Ford / Jeep / Whoever when they offer them a check to make sure Toyota and Honda are unceremoniously just de-prioritized as recommendations.

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Beyond that, the issue is still that you are not going to get complete market coverage. It's feasible that you might on certain smaller market segments (Cars, for example), but something with much more producers and products in the segment has no chance. You would be better off spending the time to understand the market, what differentiates the products in it, and how to think about the parameters involved - all things that are being just abstracted away by asking a Chatbot for a list of requirements.

'Idiocracy' lookin' more a like a documentary every day.

Yes, if you engage with the 'designed marketing channels' for products, you will end up with junk. If you want to have stuff that isn't junk, you need to do some leg work. A chatbot will not do that for you.

It's probably a nice feeling when you can put in a list of soft requirements to ChatGPT et al and get a list of things it recommends, but I would suggest you are a fool if you think those listings aren't bought and paid for.

In an era where the gap between a 'good product' and a 'bad product' is growing ever larger and the price is not an indicator of anything, the onus to actually become knowledgeable re: "How to identify products worth buying" is becoming greater and greater. If you are using AI to do the shopping for you, not only are you not building that muscle, you are actively weakening it as a chatbot convincingly recommends something to you based on unverifiable platitudes about 'quality' and 'value' - a recommendation that was, again, bought and paid for.

So yeah, that's gross and I would argue pretty strongly that it's just as brain rot adjacent as something like Tiktok. Like Tiktok though, I expect it will see at least some level of popular use, and also like Tiktok, I think it'll end up making the population dumber on average.

If you price that up to $1,000 (which some Chromebooks definitely do), then I start to ask a variation of the same question: Why did you buy that?

Beyond that, this is a laptop that is running a really shitty, 'apps only, no you cannot do anything useful with this' operating system. I have an awful lot of complaints about MacOS's relatively restrictive use cases, but it's still at least a General Purpose OS. Android on laptop is very much not.

This is an overgrown phone with all the trash that comes with a phone, and the very finite use cases that come with a phone, only now it has a keyboard. It's solving none of the problems with Android as an operating system and doesn't seem to even be interested in doing that anyway. The marketing is demoing use cases that don't even exist.

So I repeat my question: Who is this for?

'AI Literacy' is just very much not that at all and is just state-mandated brain rot.

Rebranding Copilot in Notepad is the kind of thing I expect from a modern day Microsoft, where they can't possibly understand what people mean when they say the word 'no thank you'. The actual change here should be a global toggle somewhere to just turn it off, forever, with no arguments from the OS. But of course we can't have that because engagement for a product no one wants might fall off.

I so, so badly wish this team would pull their head out of their ass, but if this is what their idea of improvement is, then I guess I might be done with Windows when I can't use W10 any more.

I assume you are keenly aware that Windows, Office, and by extension, all of MS's customer facing products are not exactly regarded particularly well. Windows 11 specifically is a laughing stock today, even among folks who don't necessarily know computers, and a lot of that resentment is driven by 2 things:

• Pushing AI everywhere when no one asked for it. • Not reading the room and adding junk features that no one wants.

This change is both of those, again, wrapped up in another package. The timing of this is extremely bad for VS Code as a project as it looks an awful lot like, 'Microsoft is just shoving my AI junk into my stuff and failing to work on the features we actually want'.

I'm not taking a side on this either way as I will jam a fork into my eye before I use VS Code over VS proper and have no stake in this, but I'm just saying that the powers that be that are approving these kinds of changes are ~continuing~ to fail to read the room.

I'll add as someone who may be forced to consider VS Code in the future (Depending on if Windows unfucks itself before something critical breaks for me on W10), I would read something like that and I think rightly assume bad intent. I know VS Code and VS and Office and Windows are not the same team, but again, MS as a whole has a very serious optics problems and my read of this on the surface level is: "Oh, they tried to sneak in more AI junk, and when called out on it, they pushed it to the back, probably to make it a default again in some future update that they can hide it in". It just looks very, very bad at a time when no MS products have negative social capital to spend on this kind of stuff.