Not that I’d ever buy it, but I’m looking forward to the price tag so I can have a good laugh.

Microsoft has gone all-in on AI to the detriment of basically every other aspect of their business. They are in deep deep shit when the bubble finally pops.

I remember when this garbage used to be called malware.

So glad I switched email and calender services years ago.

Been with Posteo for years now. They’re very solid.

I’m with Posteo.

I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.

But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.

To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD

They need lifetimes in prison for treason and domestic terrorism.

The 1080p for premium users is garbage too. Youtube’s video quality in general is shockingly poor. If there is even a slight amount of noisy movement on screen (foliage, confetti, rain, snow, etc) the the video can literally become unwatchable.

Kind of a tangent, but properly encoded 1080p video with a decent bitrate actually looks pretty damn good.

A big problem is that we’ve gotten so used to streaming services delivering visual slop, like YouTube’s 1080p option which is basically just upscaled 720p and can even look as bad as 480p.

I cannot think of a piece of software that I want on my computer less than something like this. Literal voluntary malware.

Microsoft is so incredibly fucked when the AI bubble starts to burst. They’ve abandoned so many of their other projects and customers to go all-in on it.

They’re correct, though.

The US has surrendered almost all of their manufacturing power and knowledge, absolutely kneecapped their education system(s), and stripped away most of its incentives and soft power projection. Trump certainly put the final nail in the coffin but the process has been ongoing for decades.

The US doesn’t make anything and a lot of what it does make is bullshit like the entire corn industry. Much of the “value” in the US is speculative and, for lack of a better way of putting it, a complete and utter fantasy. As soon as that house of cards starts to become unstable and the world moves away from the USD then the US economy is going to implode so hard that it would make a black hole blush. They have less and less to bring to the table except their buying power and that is tumbling quickly as their wealth inequality shifts dramatically.

And that’s before you even factor in the self-sabotage with things like the random tariffs every 15 minutes and constant threat of being arrested and thrown into a camp. There are companies in the US that have to do their business outside the US because they can’t feasibly import product into their own country. It really is difficult to express just how badly the US has backed themselves into a corner.

Shareholder-led design.

I use Win11 on my main computer for work and school reasons. I need maximum compatibility and reliability and it has met those goals. Back in the day, I used to use Linux on my old laptops and I dual-booted it on my main PC. It has been awesome seeing how far it has come and I would like to get back into it some day.

That being said, a huge barrier for Linux and prospective new users is the community. The Linux community is highly combative and toxic and it absolutely sours what should (and could!) be a great experience. Almost every interaction I had while troubleshooting had some level of condescending attitude or outright hostility and there were numerous times I was directly insulted for asking for help - the most recent being a couple years ago when I was trying out a distro and had sound driver issues.

Only a matter of time before Google will shut that down too.

I stopped using Spotify years ago and every time I hear about it I only get my decision further reinforced. What an absolutely cancerous company.

An American solution to an American problem.

The quality of those games is irrelevant. The user asked why people still use Windows and I gave a few examples. Simple as that.

You are arguing for the sake of it.