There are layers to this.

Yes, there is zero chance any of these investments are going to turn a profit.

But research and technology is fundamentally built around developing capabilities for long term power (soft or hard). That is WHY governments invest so much into university groups and research divisions at companies to develop features of interest. You are never going to make back the money that funded hundreds of PhD students to develop a slightly more durable polymer compound. But you will benefit because you now have hundreds of new graduates aligned with fields of interest AND a slightly better grip on your military grade sybian.

And, regardless of what people want to believe, AI genuinely does have some great uses (primarily pattern matching and human interfaces). And… those have very big implications both in terms of military capability and soft power where the entire world is dependent on one nation’s companies for basic functionality.

Of course, the problem is that the “AI craze” isn’t really being driven by state governments at this point. It is being driven by the tech companies themselves and the politicians who profit off of them. Hence why we are so focused on insanely expensive search engine replacements and “AI powered toaster ovens” rather than developing the core technologies and capabilities that will make this more power efficient and more feasible for edge computing.

And… when one of (if not ) the super powers is actively divesting itself of all soft power at an alarming rate… yeah.

That is a distinction without difference. It doesn’t matter what mechanism is used to collect those metrics. The fact is they are there

And, at a glance: Forgejo/Codeberg definitely has stars and watches and fork tracking as well

Which is all fundamentally the supply and demand aspects of consumerism. It is the idea that people can identify what there is a high demand for and work to provide a supply. Which is not at all a bad thing and extends far beyond capitalism.

But it goes back to the previous poster’s comments about how they don’t like that netflix analyzes everything they do and greenlights projects based on that. That extends FAR beyond netflix and well into even open source projects.

Speaking of Linus Tech Tips, here is mister sebastien himself just joshing with the folk at <checks notes> kiwi farms. And… telling them to use more slurs.

https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1pbp23m/linus_the_other_one_posted_on_kiwifarms_to_talk/ and confirmed by mister tech tips himself https://www.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1pbp23m/comment/nrsdlzk/

So… he has been a pretty mask off piece of shit for years. But… damned if this isn’t a new world record for a collaboration to age into sour milk

Uhm… the brits have a long string of horribly incompetent (and evil) PMs and the royal family is the same level of inbred rapers of children so…

Let’s not try to compare the two and acknowledge we are both horrifically imperialist nations with self destructive tendencies who just happen to be at different points on the curve.

Open source/selfhost projects 100% keep track of how many people star a repo, what MRs are submitted, and even usage/install data. And many of them are specifically designed to fulfill a role that industry standard tools aren’t (or are too expensive for) and… guess where the data on that comes from?

The reality is that you cannot escape consumerism in the modern world. You can pretend you are but… you aren’t. What you CAN do is focus on supporting tools and media that you want/approve of and making your own life better as a result.

And a big chunk of that involves actually thinking through consequences.

I mean… depending on how new an item is and what “tier” the restaurant is? They are 100% watching for stuff like that and probably making a note that you got up after eating only a quarter of your burger. Because if the burger were good, you would want to finish it. Is it too sloppy? Did you feel the need to wash your hands mid bite? Did it make you nauseous?

Same with taking out your phone. Does it look like you are telling a friend what a great burger you had? Or are you feeling bloated and trying to digest a bit before you eat more?

This level of market analysis is not at all new. Streaming services just have a much easier time automating it but… give it time until startups are selling cameras to monitor the dining area and automate analytics based on who ordered what and did what.

I mean… that IS how restaurants work. If people don’t order the fish of the day then they buy fewer and fewer fishes until it is no longer a thing. Even the speed people eat DOES matter since restaraunts tend to be designed around each customer spending a certain amount of time dining. Too short and they will never order a dessert. Too long and they are costing you money while they nurse that coffee.

And similar happens with even buying blu-rays. If nobody bought Master and Commander in 4k then you can be sure that experiment would be over. Instead? That thing sold like toiler paper during COVID and we’ll likely see more “prestige” releases with a huge dose of FOMO.

As for up fronts versus long tails? Guess what is motivating all those revivals “nobody asked for”?

Don’t get me wrong. I vastly prefer to rip blu rays to my NAS and watch via plex. But the idea that you are somehow no longer part of the marketing cycle is just… wrong.

Yeah. Fiddled with Heroic a bit to see if it could do generic installs. Not gonna lie… it took me WAY too long to realize “App Image” meant “icon” not “Appimage”. Shout out to A1RM4X for having a video that actually demonstrated how to use that. Will set up Guild Wars 2 on my laptop with that and see if I notice any meaningful difference from Lutris

I would still prefer something that is built around scripted installs since a lot of games not in the major stores tend to be… kind of a cluster to get working. And it’s always struck me as kind of stupid to find the same gist everyone else used when that gist could just be a script the Launcher pulls. Although your experience very much highlights the dangers of that…

Yeah… that may be the video I was mentioning as being very clearly inspired by pewdiepie… That approach where it is clear they are emulating children’s shows because they want an audience with the attention span of a goldfish.

But it also isn’t even really a good one for showing off what Faugus actually brings to the table? Installing ubi and ea is definitely nice. But he spends more time telling people he pirated games than actually showing off anything Faugus provides on the individual game front. And the reason why Lutris took off so much is that those community scripts actually were REALLY nice for not having to care what settings to use in wine or what TPLs are needed and so forth.

Which gets back to it feeling like more of a replacement for Bottles than Lutris.

At best you can argue that Valve will not protect you. Hence, not your friend.

It varies.

There are definitely cases where the latest update outright breaks the game and that is bad QC.

But what people generally refer to here are games with a modding scene. A vocal part of the userbase rely heavily on mods and/or custom DLLs. So when the game updates, all of those break until the modders and tool writers are able to catch up.

There are a lot of implications to this for games with (meaningful) online components. But for predominantly SP games? It is a fun time when you sit down to play a game in the evening and see it was updated and know you can’t go back to that save/game for at least a few days. And there very much SHOULD be a way to opt out or freeze a version for those.

Yeah. GoG and Humble (as well as many MUCH smaller stores) have very much criticized the de facto Valve monopoly over the years (… decades?). As have many devs who have criticized just how much of a percentage Valve takes (and how they reduce that for the big games). They just generally are smart enough to say it VERY obliquely because they know they don’t want to antagonize a rabid userbase.

Epic… Epic increasingly are poised to “not need” PC gamers as it were. Fortnite is its own platform and Unreal Engine is increasingly used by film and industry. So they are much more willing to criticize Valve (and only occasionally remember EGS is sort of a thing…) which… tends to highlight why nobody else does.

Valve also gutted their LGBTQIA+ content a few months back. And they have had a MASSIVE nazi infestation basically since they set up message boards because Gabe Newell is infamously libertarian.

So… chill a bit with the glazing. They are better in a lot of ways but they are not our friends.

Which is why people who actually look at trends tend to compare it more to the Dot-com bubble.

The short version? A few early internet adopting sites (like Amazon…) set up online retail presences. People were ecstatic because you could now do most of the monthly shopping online and even re-buy pants that you know will fit and so forth.

Seeing money, EVERYBODY made an online retailer or service website and EVERYONE wanted to invest in that.

Then the market was oversaturated and companies with no right to exist went bankrupt and it was a bloodbath.

Except… not really. Because while the massively overinflated stock market did indeed “downturn” and a LOT of those scam companies went away, the actual fundamental premise of online first companies was a very sound one. I mean… just look at “Cyber Monday” and so forth.

And “AI” will almost definitely go the same route. Because, yeah, LLMs are HORRIBLE for accounting and finance. But they are actually really good for replacing the early career folk who translate earnings into reports. And ML in general is excellent at detecting patterns which can mean potentially billions of dollars in investing. But, like all things, it is about verification and caution. You actually need a human to read that earnings report before you send it to the investors. And you only give your “AI” a small portion of your portfolio. Same as with any team.

What you are describing is something different… that is “close enough” to Moore’s Law for all but the most pedantic.

The (I forget the proper economics term so) base price of RAM/Storage does indeed go down as new processes and economies of scale are developed. But the cost of a “laptop hard drive” remains pretty steady in the sense that a couple hundred MB was enough back in the day but you REALLY want at least 500 gigs now. The price per byte does indeed drop rapidly but the price per “drive” is far more stable (not fully stable due to inflation and how many people are buying them, but within spitting distance).

Its why a good rule of thumb was to always just spend roughly the same on storage during an upgrade and that would result in faster technologies and larger capacity drives and so forth.

That isn’t what is happening with RAM in 2025. A much better comparison is GPUs because… it is the same problem. It is ridiculously high demand from businesses (often startups pouring dump trucks of VC money into their only hope… well, VC money or drug money in the case of miners but they matter a lot less these days) driving this. A quick search didn’t yield an easy graph and I can’t be bothered to go dig through Gamers Nexus’s twelve videos on it, but the price of an “entry level” GPU has drastically changed in the past decade.

But just for two-ish data points?

• The GTX 980 and 970 had an MSRP (probably) of 550 and 330 USD, respectively, back in 2014
• While there is some other bullshit involved, the RTX 5080 and 5070 have MSRPs of 1000 USD and 550 USD in 2025
• Adjusting for inflation, the 980 and 970 would still only be about 753 and 451 USD in 2025 dollars
• And let’s not forget that basically no cards were sold at MSRP back in early 2025…

The last point being what is, by all accounts, going to be the new normal. Barring outside impacts like… RAM going through the roof. Vendors will sell the cards for the ACTUAL MSRP rather than the inflated demand prices. And they will still be considerably more expensive as a result.

All of which is to say… my current card is definitely good enough but having a hard time deciding if I do one “final” upgrade for the decade. But I am an AMD boi so those are at least “reasonable” in terms of price per performance.

1. Prices rarely, if ever, go down in a meaningful degree. Stuff like this is partially necessity and partially a REALLY good excuse to see what the price ceiling actually is… and then turn that into the floor moving forward. Just look at gas prices
2. The “AI Bubble” is likely to be on the same level as the Dotcom Bubble and the like. It is going to be brutal and a LOT of people are going to lose their jobs… and then much of the same tech will still dominate just with more realistic expectations. And that will still need large amounts of memory
3. If the “AI Bubble” really is as bad as people seem to want it to be: A LOT of the vendors who make the parts you are buying RAM to use are going to be gutted. And then RAM production will drop drastically. Which will decrease supply and…

If you process digital photos, the edits get saved, so you can change them. It’s like a digital darkroom. I’d lose all that and be left with the unprocessed photos.

And you export them when you are finished? So you have the unprocessed photos AND the finalized processed once? And you just have the ones that were in flight that are… in flight.

But it sounds like you think this is worth using. If you think you understand the crack and understand the risks then go for it? Just understand that piracy of media and games is very different than piracy of productivity software and the risks and liability go up drastically with the latter.

I guess I am confused what what is actually going on.

All your photos should be stored locally first. It looks like Capture One provides some form of cloud based access if you want to edit with a mobile device but you should still have the raw (possibly RAW format) files yourself?

So the only thing you are “risking” is your most recent batch of edits that you haven’t exported/finalized yet. So if you are actually a hobbyist… who cares?

As for whether you should crack it:

1. If you are relying on cloud storage, this is a deeply stupid idea. They will have logs of your data store being accessed and will have logs of you not having a valid license. A paralegal can pound out the lawsuit over lunch.
2. If you are less a “hobbyist” and more running a business (what it sounds like): You are inherently playing with fire if you use pirated software for profit. Up to you but my general rule of thumb is that if you are making enough to do something professionally then you are making enough to buy a seat for the industry standard software (or to take the time to learn something jank but cheap)

A LOT of people complained when Thinkpad transferred from IBM to Lenovo. Like almost all things, it was progress conflated with racism.

The big “meaningful” complaint is that Lenovo used more plastics than aluminum. On the one hand, I get it: my T41 was a god damned beast that felt like it could stop a bullet (an important consideration in the US). It also apparently weighted 2.22 kg and I 100% noticed that on trips and even walking around town/campus.

And Lenovo bought the brand around the time that a LOT of people were noticing the weight of their laptops and there was a huge push for “ultrabook” form factors and the realization that it makes more sense to protect your device with a sleeve and a padded compartment rather than “military grade” construction. And… Asian factories were (and still are) much more agile and able to pivot. Whereas US factories still tend to take years (or decades…) to catch up to the rest of the world.

So we got the same xenophobic nonsense we’ve had in every other industry. These thin and light laptops with plastic shells ARE CHEAP PIECES OF SHIT THAT NOBODY CAN EVER REPAIR AND ARE ALL A SCAM SO BUY AMERICAN!!! Even though the shell has almost nothing to do with it and those still had screw based constructions. The real problem was the rapid shift towards soldering/gluing hardware in place. Some of that was to support ultrabook designs and some are just pure bullshit to prevent upgrades.

These days? Aluminum is king again because it “feels premium” but those shells are so ridiculously thin that they are arguably worse than polymer (still feels great though). I blame Apple.

But build quality wise? Lenovo straight up bought IBM’s laptop (and consumer PC?) divisions. It was the exact same factories and designers and capabilities.

All that said: Lenovo is also a REALLY Chinese company. For a personal device? I have zero qualms and literally bought a new laptop for the first time in like 9 years and it is a Thinkpad. From a professional standpoint? A competent IT department can vet devices. I… think I worked with a competent IT department once in my life. But, more importantly, if we are trying to do business with a government org or a high value company/target? They are fundamentally concerned about Supply Chain Hardening (and for good reason) and that just reeks of “We, personally, don’t care about that”. Which generally won’t outright kill a deal but it does put you on a back footing.

Framework Corp is massively frustrating because their secret sauce tech makes absolutely no sense for individuals (seriously, run the actual numbers. It is almost always cheaper to just buy two laptops AND you have less ewaste because there is no box of spare parts) but is PERFECT for enterprise/fleet deployments.

But Framework Corp has no interest in fulfilling that role. To my knowledge, there are no bulk ordering programs and their software/OEM support is fairly mediocre.

As far as enterprise laptops go? There is a full industry around macs for obvious reasons. On the PC side? The only vendors I really “trust” are Dell and Lenovo with MAYBE HP if the middleman org is confident. And… I LOVE a Thinkpad for my personal use (the nub is love. the nub is life) but there are very serious supply chain concerns for professional purposes.

But if Framework could cut the bullshit and either branch out or work with a middleman? Rapid repairs for keyboards and drives as well as tricking people into using USB C dongles would go a long way for many (most?) midsize companies.