Yup, same “hide it behind a wall of babble” strategy. With a key difference: what is being hidden.

Trump typically uses this strategy to conceal outrageous claims, like this:

by the way and if she gets the pick, if she gets the pick, her judges, nothing you can do folks, although the Second Amendment people there is I don’t know but

He can’t say “if Clinton gets elected, please start a civil war” in the open, right? So he hides it behind babble.

Davaluri, though? He’s hiding… nothing. That’s the point, his comment says nothing of value. Social pressure forced Microsoft to release a public statement, and MS had three choices:

1. Tell complainers to fuck off. People get pissed, ditch MS products, margin of profit goes slightly lower.
2. Listen to the complainers’ demands. People get happy in the short term, but then really pissed since MS won’t change shit, and people hate to be lied to.
3. Say nothing. Complainers get louder and louder.

He picked #3, but disguised it as #2.

Title:

Article:

[Doug Henwood] Maybe I need to take some more drugs before I make any sense of this.

Nah. It doesn’t make sense, not even if you’re high.

Before reading the link, lemme guess: “we’ll dress it in a different way, and still ship it. Regards, Microsoft.”

After reading the link: wow! I managed to overestimate Microsoft!

[Davaluri] Hey Gergely, I am responding here, and I think this applies to a bunch of the comments that people have made. I mean, a lot of comments . The team (and I) take in a ton of feedback

“Feedback”: mincing words for “backslash”.

We balance what we see in our product feedback systems with what we hear directly. They don’t always match, but both are important.

Emphasis mine. So, the data of those “feedback systems” clash with user complains. Are the systems broken? Naaah, it must be the users /s

I’ve read through the comments and see focus on things like reliability, performance, ease of use and more. But I want to spend a moment just on the point you are making, and I’ll boil it down, we care deeply about developers.

He’s babbling “we care about you” to distract the reader. Diversion tactic.

We know we have work to do on the experience, both on the everyday usability, from inconsistent dialogs to power user experiences. When we meet as a team, we discuss these paint points and others in detail, because we want developers to choose Windows.

Blah blah blah. Diversion tactic still going…

We know words aren’t enough

Implicit: “trust us (be gullible trash), this will be more than just words”.

Specially hilarious because he’s babbling a lot, but in no moment he says anything MS will do to address the complains.

it’s on us to continue improving and shipping. Would love to connect with you about what the team is doing to address these areas if you are open to it.

“Let me pretend this is a problem with you, as if you were the only one complaining about this. And let’s make it personal.”

[Jawad] It’s good to see Microsoft’s Windows chief at least acknowledging feedback

He isn’t.

while Davaluri’s comments on the direction of Windows are slightly encouraging

If you think corporate babble is “slightly encouraging”, I have bad news for you.

AI could have written both Davaluri’s quote and the article as a whole.

TL;DW: execs assume monopoly from market dominance, without taking into account other stores could contest said market dominance.

Lemmy has Reddit. PieFed has Lemmy.

Also, from 4chan’s PoV, Reddit is more like a boogerman than a boogeyman: it’s that weirdo creepo that makes you say “eew”, avoid at all costs, and if you touch them by accident or social pressures (“why no handshake?”), you immediately wash your hands.

Instead the actual boogeymen are internal: for /g/ it’s /a/, for /b/ and /int/ it’s /pol/, and for almost everyone else it’s /b/.

I’m trying to parse it.

In case it helps anyone here, the Unicode for his text is 𓇍𓇋𓏭𓂻 𓍘𓇋𓇾𓂋𓇥𓂋𓈐𓆑. I think the first four hieroglyphs are supposed to be read as /ji:/, roughly “yee”; I think they encode /j/, /i/, [lengthens the preceding vowel], [determinant for movement].

That explains it - they’re most likely doing it with OpenAI.

…I’m low-key wishing the bubble bursts before SoftBank is able to cash out.

“This should not be seen, in our view, as a cautious or negative stance on Nvidia, but rather in the context of SoftBank needing at least $30.5bn of capital for investments in the Oct-Dec quarter, including $22.5bn for OpenAI and $6.5bn for Ampere,” Rolf Bulk, equity research analyst at New Street Research, told CNBC.

When I read that, I was puzzled; when the bubble bursts, OpenAI will be way more affected than nVidia, as the later is basically the guy selling shovels in the gold rush. And odds are SoftBank’s CEO knows it; so why are they moving its investments this way?

Then I remembered this often quoted excerpt from The 18te Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte applies here: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

The “first time” here is the dotcom bubble, often compared with the current AI bubble. When the internet was becoming popular, you had that flood of dotcom businesses with overpriced stocks, stocks went brrr then kaboom, bursting around early '00. Like this:

Note however how sharply the prices raised in '99. I think SoftBank is betting on that: buy stocks, sell them juuuuust before the bubble bursts, and you got some nice profit.

Here’s the open letter. I also recommend people to read what Wikipedia says about her, and take your own conclusions.

“We are not predicting human-level AI next year,” a Commission spokesperson told Euractiv in response to the scientists’ open letter, arguing that AI is developing faster and less predictably than older forecasts had suggested.

“This is about being prepared, not declaring a date,” they added. “Responsible planning is not guessing the future, it’s preparing for different scenarios.”

CUT OFF THE CRAP. Even if we interpret her statement as a figure of speech, she still fucked it up. She is a politician dammit; it’s part of her job to be careful with the shit she says.

As I said in another thread, a week ago: AI is not screwing workers over because it’s stealing jobs. It’s more like suckers at the top will lose big money on AI fluff, and to cut costs off they’ll fire a lot of people.

Based on stuff said in the comments (“İt happened when I asked for weather, maybe someone can replicate it.”), I did some dumb test. Using duck.ai because… well, guess why I’m not subscribed to ChatGPT? Privacy. The article confirms my decision, by the way.

Anyway, I was curious, I wanted to know which location it would assume I’m from.

I don’t know which is the dumbest part - making shit up / lying / assuming, acknowledging its own intellectual dishonesty… or not taking spelling into account. (Using British spelling might not be a sign someone is from the UK [I’m not], but it’s a pretty good sign the person is not in USA.)

Indeed. Sadly, corporations abused telemetry so much that it makes users automatically distrust software with it - even when it’s opt-in. As such I’m not surprised it isn’t more common, specially in the Linux ecosystem.

If we take distro defaults into account, it’s possible Arch stats overestimate GNOME market share.

Based on tecmint list, the top 3 distros are Mint, MX Linux, and Endeavour. Their defaults are:

• Mint - Cinnamon, MATE
• MX Linux - Xfce, Plasma, Fluxbox
• Endeavour - Plasma

Granted, the fourth one (Debian) does default to GNOME, but your typical Debian user is more experienced, so it’s less likely they stick to the default.

…I wish I had actual data instead of a bunch of guesses. :-/

I wouldn’t be surprised if other big DEs, such as KDE, start making firmer plans for dropping X11.

If going by Arch Linux statistics, KDE dropping X11 will have a bigger impact than GNOME doing it.

In this video (Odysee link), someone asks X11 users why they’re still using it in 2025. The main answers were

1. DE or WM doesn’t support Wayland, or its Wayland session is currently WIP.
2. [lack of] support for certain graphic tablets and their features.
3. old hardware. Specially old nVidia GPUs.
4. [If I got this right] Some software expects to be able to dictate window position, and Wayland doesn’t let it to.
5. OpenBSD.

In the light of the above, I think GNOME’s decision to drop the X11 backend is a big “meh, who cares”. If you use GNOME you’re likely not in the first case; #2 and #3 boil down to hardware support, not something DE developers can interfere directly; I’m not sure on #4 and #5, however.

Before I even read the article, let me guess:

1. it keeps Google under control of everything, giving it power to kick out competitors on a whim
2. it claims it’s “to protect those disgusting pieces of shit called users from causing themselves harm”
3. it claims Google did nothing wrong

Now, reading the article…

• “Google has denied any wrongdoing throughout the closely watched litigation.” - that’s #3 right off the bat
• “Under the new proposal, Google would allow users to more easily download and install third-party app stores that meet new security and safety standards.” - who decides those standards? If Google itself, that’s #1
• Sameer Samat, Google’s president of Android Ecosystem, said, opens new tab on Tuesday the proposed changes maintained user safety - #2.

*Yawn*

…okay, to any fleshy sammich! (Jelly and mustard? Eww.)

Reminder mustard is a great addition to any sandwich.

TL;DR: don’t be a dumbarse like Lvxferre. Don’t waste your time reading this text; it is not worth it. It’s basically some guy building a prediction around a big assumption.

The core claim of the article is that generative artificial¹ "intelligence"² in 2025 is roughly in the same situation as the internet in 1995. As in: back then it was impossible to predict how, and both optimists and pessimists were dead wrong on their predictions, and yet the internet did have a huge impact on our lives.

In no moment he backs that core claim up. He takes it for granted. He assumes³ that genAI will revolutionise everything, internet style. Will it? I don’t know, you don’t, he doesn’t either - nobody knows, because it boils down to future events, and only a goddamn liar (no, worse - a moron) claims to know the future in this regard.

And the fact he’s assuming is further reinforced by his claim at the end that “We’re early in the AI revolution.”.

Then he spends the a good chunk of the text trying to predict the supply and demand effects of his certainty on jobs. His analysis is interesting, but at the end of the day it’s just a big red herring - it distracts the reader from the core claim he was supposed to back up, and failed to.

Immediately afterwards, he does it again, now talking about bubbles. Same deal: interesting-ish analysis spoiled by the fact it’s a red herring, taking for granted a core claim that might be false.

The Predictably Unpredictable Future

Or: “The Moronic Oxymoron”.

no one can predict with certainty what our AI future will look like. Not the tech CEOs, not the AI researchers, and certainly not some random guy pontificating on the internet. But whether we get the details right or not, our AI future is loading.

You were so close, author. So fucking close. Then you dropped the ball by vomiting certainty one final time.

1. I’m not sure if I should be adding quotation marks around that “artificial”; here’s some food for thought regarding that.
2. The ones around “intelligence” stay, however. I’ll go further: I’m not wasting my time with anyone disingenuous (or moronic - same thing) enough to argue the current systems are intelligent, or babbling about definitions of intelligence.
3. By “to assume”, in this context, I mean “to utter certainty on what one cannot reliably know”. Such as the future. Note it’s fairly distinct from “to hypothesise” (where one acknowledges a claim might be incorrect, but is still willing to play with it). Hypotheses are good, assumptions are trash.

No worries - the way you phrased kind of suggests you weren’t endorsing it. I mentioned your username mostly as a reference to which comment I was talking about.