If you’re wondering why house prices have DOUBLED in the past few years, this is why: private equity. That is, large investment groups, like Blackrock and Vanguard, which own substantial stakes in nearly EVERY US corporation.
These firms are buying up single-family homes, to turn around and rent back to us, paying WAY over asking price to snap them up. This lady points out that we knew it was happening, we just didn’t know how fast. And it’s bad. Really bad. TWICE as bad as we thought. In less than a dozen years, an average family will simply not be able to buy a house. Period.
“You’ll own nothing, and be happy,” say people at the World Economic Forum.
I blame private equity for just about everything bad happening now, but I’ll save the full rant for another time.
That’s why the only serious competitor to Google is Bing, another Big Tech company (Bing is also the primary source of results on Duckduckgo, which is why DDG sometimes makes exceptions for Microsoft’s privacy-invading tracking):
Google tells us that the quid-pro-quo of search monopolization is search excellence. The hundreds of billions it makes every year through monopoly control gives it the resources it needs to fight spammers and maintain search result quality. Anyone who’s paid attention recently knows that this is bullshit: Google search quality is in free-fall, across all its products:
But Google doesn’t seem to think it has a problem. Rather than devoting all its available resources to fighting botshit, spam and scams, the company set $80 billion dollars alight last year with a stock buyback that was swiftly followed with 12,000 layoffs, followed by multiple subsequent rounds of layoffs:
If you want to know why everything sucks, that was it, in a nutshell. Corporations are colluding to get to 2 or 3 per market, so as to avoid the strictest definition of a “monopoly,” so they settle for duopolies and triopolies. And then they work together to take ALL the profit out of the entire ecosystem, and do things like use that money to buy back stocks and then sell their options and put that money in their pocket. Good for the people at the top, with those options, I guess. Everyone else? In the entire world? Suck it.
Jumping into the middle of the story, I tried cortisone injections to help with my chronic pain, but they only seem to have made things worse. A friend at church gave me a whole new approach to try, but I needed a referral from my primary care physician.
My PCP wouldn’t do the referral over email. She insisted that I needed to make an appointment, and that it had to be a 30-minute one. Because of the length of the appointment, I couldn’t get on her schedule for FIVE WEEKS. But I thought, hey, I have other requests. Maybe because I’m seeing her, she’ll address them.
I just had the appointment. She was 15 minutes late to a 30-minute appointment, and only used 10 minutes of the time. She told me she wouldn’t address my other concerns, and pushed them on the referral. She agreed that this was a good next step, but added 5 weeks of unnecessary extra time to my journey.
Obviously, I’m in a bad mood, and there’s just literally no comfort or rest to be found. Excuse me while I order a pizza, and stick my head inside a video game until I’m exhausted enough to go to sleep.
The US government explicitly recommends 6 memory safe languages:
C# – created by Microsoft Go – created by Google Java – created by Sun, bought by Oracle Rust – create bor Mozilla Swift – created by Apple And … Python – create by one fucking genius on his own in his Christmas… pic.twitter.com/23ahJIVfiB
Programming language gatekeeping, from the government. As if “the government” knows anything about anything, let alone technology created in the last 50 years, let alone programming languages specifically.
This guy gets it. As usual, it’s governmental interference to impede free markets for literally anything and everything, to protect campaign-contributing incumbents in a segment, and guarantee re-election funds.
Nevermind that VB.Net compiles to the same bytecode as C#. That’s officially off the list. Feels like Microsoft is getting the feds to pressure people away from a language that is still popular, but which they don’t want to support any more.
I can hear it from the decades-behind-the-curve gatekeepers in my Fortune 250 now: “Sorry, Dave, but Ruby isn’t on the government’s recommended languages list, so you can’t use it.”
BulletFarm is developing a “new and ambitious AAA game, built in Unreal Engine 5 and set in an original universe with an emphasis on co-operative gameplay,” according to a news release. BulletFarm and parent company NetEase Games say the new studio’s untitled project will be a “more intimate and relatable experience while offering a fresh take on first-person gameplay.”
I knew the success of Helldivers 2 was going to change the direction of the entire industry. I ran with my first rando on HD2 the other night, and it was great. We’re going to be seeing more press releases about games with co-op at the center.
I “use” Reddit to look at subs for ESO and Fallout 76. That’s it. When I’m bored, I sometimes click over to the “popular” tab, and just have a look. It’s more of an anthropological experiment than an interest in reading what’s there. Sometimes, I can’t get past the front page, because, most of the time, Reddit is just a living monument to people being awful to each other. Sometimes, I make it to the next page. Sometimes, I make it to a gem. Most of the time, I see Reddit’s twenty-something, white, middle-class, male, under-sexed, under-employed hive mind on full display, like this.
This guy thinks “backend and fullstack” programmers “know shit about OSes and PC in general.” And, as of 13 hours of being posted, deep in the thread, has 84 upvotes. (On a post with 2200+ votes.)
I’ve been programming since I was 12, on a Vic-20. I’ve been doing it professionally my entire career, for about 30 years now. Even the people who I would consider “casual” programmers know how operating systems and PC’s work. I’ve met some posers, but they wash out. To blithely say “most” programmers “don’t understand computers” is utter nonsense, and, frankly, weapons-grade cope.
Welcome to Reddit, I guess. “Enjoy” your stay.
Reddit just made a deal to sell their “content” to Google, to train AI. Good luck with that. With what we’ve seen over the past few days with their AI product, using Reddit seems like a really good fit.
A few weeks after our conversation, Apple released version 10.8 of Logic Pro, its flagship digital audio workstation (DAW) and the big sibling to GarageBand. Stuffed inside the update was Mastering Assistant, Apple’s own take on AI-powered mastering. If you were a Logic user, you suddenly got this capability for free—and you could run it right inside your laptop, desktop, or iPad.
Keep in mind, they’re not talking about mixing, but mastering, which are two very different things. I’ve tried a service that did this a few years ago, and, it did really well, even back then. If you’re not semi-knowledgable about this space, it might scare you, but there have been hardware versions of this sort of thing for decades. It’s more science than art. There’s just no amount of listening on various speakers and in different rooms that can dial in whole-mix EQ so that it sounds right on everything these days. The process is, in fact, very mathematical, and can be automated. In short, “nothing to see here; move along.” This is just the next logical step.
According to sources, we understand that currently Microsoft are planning a launch for Starfield on PlayStation 5 post the release of the already announced “Shattered Space” expansion for Xbox and PC, which is on target to arrive at some point later this year. We’ve also been informed that Microsoft have made additional investment into PlayStation 5 dev kits to support ongoing development efforts – adding further fuel to the fire.
During COVID, I and several friends started playing Elder Scrolls Online together on PC. It’s a long story, but we all eventually drifted away from it. Eventually, I literally threw away the 12-year-old potato that I used to play it, and had moved all my gaming to a Playstation (except Civ V on my Mac). Then I suddenly developed serious health issues, and started playing ESO again, on the PlayStation. I was rather enjoying the simplicity of NOT having mods, and liked using a controller for combat much better than a keyboard and mouse.
A year and a half ago, Microsoft was saying that Starfield would be an PC/Xbox exclusive. I was kind of ticked. I had long since made my bed with Playstation, but I expected that the game would be Skyrim-level good, and I got sucked into the hype. So I bought an Xbox in anticipation, months ahead of time. I was replaying Fallout New Vegas in glorious 4K at 60 FPS, but I got the bug to go back to PC for ESO, where I could get mods again, mainly for inventory management. So I sold the Xbox and bought a low-spec gaming PC just for ESO.
Microsoft’s stance on making Starfield an exclusive was heralded by the head of the Xbox decision as a serious business strategy, and something on which they were going to build a new era of gaming competitiveness. When they bought Bethesda, they also made a promise not to touch pre-acquisition IP. Hold this thought.
I bought the digital deluxe pre-release of Starfield on Steam. I played over the weekend before the general release, and thought it sucked. After a dozen hours or so, you will hit a wall with inventory management, and you will naturally build a base to try to fix the problem, and find that bases do not solve anything. Unlike Skyrim or Fallout, there simply is no concept of a bottomless container that keeps a game like this from being insane. Being a pre-release copy, I found that I could refund the purchase before the actual release, so, after 13 hours, I did.
Now that the Microsoft purchase of Activision has “gone through,” they now own Blizzard, which runs World of Warcraft. It is, superficially, very similar to ESO, but has over ten times the number of players. You can just smell that someone high up in Microsoft is asking the question: Why are we paying to develop ESO when we could kill it, and most of the player base would probably move over to WoW? The “synergies” from these two acquisitions must be frighteningly tempting.
They’re reversing course on keeping Starfield exclusive, and now I worry that the other “half” of their promises at the time of the acquisition are similarly precarious. Will they, in fact, start messing with pre-merger games? Will they somehow change the offerings or their monetization to better fit within a corporate strategy which now must be conducive to other franchises that were previously competitors? Microsoft breaks a lot of promises. A lot. Just search on it for yourself.
I’m worried for the future of ESO.
And, while I want a vibrant, competitive landscape in gaming and consoles, and this announcement does not bode well for that, the saltiness of the tears of the fanboys in the Xbox subreddit over this announcement — as Microsoft pulls off their mask, and shows them the face of the monster that hasn’t changed since the 90’s — is just too delicious.
