Go fash, lose cash. 👍🏻

Astounding, isn’t it? That’s publicly traded companies for you. The company’s objective is to keep its stock up and up and up. That means shareholders must want to keep buying the stock, which in turn means that the company must demonstrate that its value will keep growing, so that by buying the stock today the shareholders will get a positive return tomorrow.

Of course, the universe is finite and no growth is forever. The end state for such companies is not bankruptcy, at least in the immediate, but, more or less, the IBM fate: a previously uber-dominant mastodon whose market capitalization is now worth maybe one tenth of its modern competitors. The fact that it’s still turning a profit is only secondary: none of the big tech shops want to be the next IBM. Their executives are, after all, mostly paid in stocks.

And that’s how you end up with companies that are making amounts of revenue you and I can’t even comprehend flail in a panic like they’re on the edge of the precipice whenever the technological landscape shifts.

It’s both fascinating and remarkably dumb.

Interesting deep dive and very much worth a read. I’d say it probably underestimates the weight of finance-related pressures coming from the CFO’s office, though.

If you are considering picking up Outer Wilds, by god, go in blind. It’s all about finding out.

Correct, AFAIU.

It’s a trade-off that works for many. Not much you and I can do about it, even if it’s frustrating.

Thank you! I know all these things. This still doesn’t help when the DAW support and VST compatibility aren’t there.

If you’re intent on doing music production on Linux, at least do yourself a favor and get a Reaper license, there are few enough pro DAWs that are Linux native. But be aware that many of the big industry VSTs are still not going to work. If you’re fine sticking to e.g. ZynAddSubFX or Pianoteq, though, knock yourself out.

But you can’t reasonably expect musicians to jump those hoops and abandon their fav VSTs when their Windows tooling is there, and works.

JACK is very cool and if you’re willing to tinker there’s some really awesome stuff that can be done with LADISH session management and e.g. native Linux VSTs.

It’s still a non-option for musicians who just want to do music, not tinkering.

Considering it’s a reference to Monty Python’s Life of Brian, I’m gonna go with yes.

Could we, like, leave the clickbait headlines to reddit? Thanks. The queer.af admins just decided – wisely – not to renew the domain considering who the fee would go to.

Google has literally been reporting billions of net profit every quarter.

This is about appeasing shareholders. The capitalist class hates that tech employees have been able to command decent salaries and has been striving to push back for a while now.

Maybe read the fucking room, Mal.

Big missing piece there: cloud.

In the first half of the 2010s, there was a study from Gartner or another such company, that forecast that the cloud service market would amount to 1 trillion USD/year by 2030 or so, and since then the big players have been racing to try and carve as much as possible of the future juicy pie from Amazon’s hands.

Google completely missed the boat at first then pivoted hard. MS leveraged its deep enterprise presence as hard as it could to get existing customers into its cloud offering; that’s why your MS consumer products (Office, OneDrive, etc) are tied at the hip with cloud these days. Not for consumers, for the business market.

It’s business to business, however, so the generak public doesn’t hear about it a lot. It’s also largely non-sexy, and therefore not headline-worthy, with a few exceptions. The whole AI thing, for instance. But even there, consumers are not the target market. Cloud customers are.

In that sense Google, MS and Amazon absolutely already are the new IBM and Oracle.

Meanwhile, as far as I can tell, Meta is still trying to execute on its mission to connect people while still headed by people who have no idea how people connect. Apple is Apple, keeps just making oodles of money off the kind of people who buy Apple products.

I had the same problem on my first try! I’d been trying to do everything and talk to everyone about everything and just drowned in words.

On my second try, though, I took a different approach: what if I am this guy, just want to get the job done, and only do stuff for the purpose of trying to progress the case? That worked great for me, and the game is structured so this still takes you through much of its contents – only, now, there is a purpose to it.

So, thanks, friend! I am indeed now enjoying this game, and I hope you are enjoying whatever you are playing also.

Finally getting into Disco Elysium after a false start last year. Great game, spectacular writing, though it does require a little bit of investment.

It’s journalist for, someone blabbed but doesn’t want to be named. Don’t sweat it.

Hey, sorry to hear it’s been rough. Hope you’ll get better soon! For now, no need to rush into a game you’re not ready to play. Think of it as a treat to look forward to when you feel better. :)

It’s difficult to answer without a better understanding on your customers’ workloads and how those trigger your outages. There’s a bunch of valid angles from which to look at this.

If your product consistently buckles under customer workloads that they paid to be able to run, it sounds like you have either an underprovisioning or an overcommitment problem.

If you accept customer workload spikes that you don’t have the resources to serve but would be able to process if they were more spread over time, it sounds like you have an admission control problem.

If it’s a matter of adding resources to respond to customer activity spikes and you just have to do it manually, it sounds like you have an automation problem.

If your pager load is becoming such that you can’t do project work to address whichever ones of the above are relevant to you, it’s time to hand the pager back to devs. If you don’t have the institutional authority to hand back the pager to devs, it sounds like you have a management problem.