BananaTrifleViolin

They didn’t miss the “wave”, they discovered it’s just hype and a bubble. They spent a fortune and damaged their core products to try and get in on AI, and have realised it was fools gold that their actual paying customers don’t want. This really sums the problem up well:

According to Velloso, less than 3% of paying users actively use Copilot, even though Microsoft has pre-deployed it directly into the Windows 11 taskbar and across the Office suite.

Out of Microsoft’s 450 million Microsoft 365 user base, the company has only managed to convert roughly 15 million paid Copilot seats. This means a staggering 96.7% of users are rejecting the premium AI features, yielding just a 3.3% paid adoption rate. When viewed against Microsoft’s estimated $37.5 billion quarterly AI spending, this is an alarmingly low adoption rate.

I’m sure I’m like many people - I tried Copilot a couple of times; it’s ok to make an email or even document text a bit more concise, but that’s really it. I don’t find it useful; I do all the actual work and then occasionally get an AI to help make it a bit easier to read very similar to a spell check and grammar check. It’s not good enough to do anything else; it bullshits and is error ridden and like all the AI I’ve tried it’s really plateaued. I just really don’t see where the value in that $37.5bn spent by Microsoft is.

I certainly wouldn’t pay for copilot myself. Instead I object to it being rammed down my throat at work, and Windows 11 just being generally awful but not improved. Microsoft are finally making the right noises but the damage is already done.

News coverage of elections is so poor.

Plaid “won” the election with 35.4% of the vote. UK journalists are so used to the “winner takes all” First past the post system, they report proportional representation elections like this as if they’re the same. Plaid is going to be a minority government, and the reality is even if the Greens and Lib Dems went into coalition with them they would be short of a majority. Reform, Labour and Conservatives (and probably Greens and Lib Dems regardless) would not be motivated to support Plaid so it’ll be a slow process of negotiating every piece of legislation.

Wales is well used to minority governments but the stakes are higher this time for all the opposition parties, as all of them are going to be vying for Wales’ Parliamentary seats in the next general election. Plaid will too of course, but unlike the other parties Plaid is not part of the 5 way split in national politics that will dominate the next few years. So Plaid will be dealing with opposition parties that may not be that co-operative in Wales, as they care much more about how things look going into a General election.

Wales was pro-brexit (52.5% Brexit) like England (53.4% Brexit). Scotland was pro EU (62% remain) and Northern Ireland too (55% remain).

Also Plaid are the largest party but don’t have a majority; they got 35.4% of the vote - way off getting a mandate for an independence referendum. Second with 29.3% of the vote was Reform, which is rabidly anti EU and a unionist party.

No, it has better frameworks to regulate local companies but seems to give a free pass to international conglomerates that come in and avoid tax by off shoring it in other EU states. The EU has allowed the US tech companies in on an uneven playing field and they have obliterated EU tech companies, with Ireland in particular taking the proverbial by enticing them with low taxes to benefit it’s own economy.

This was also perhaps tolerated as it was believed the US and EU were close and Europe benefited in other ways from the open trade with the US. Now it looks very short sighted and foolish. When Europe does try to regulate the big US tech companies, the US - not just Trump - objects and undermines it.

I agree it’s a hyperbolic headline and article; more of an opinion piece than news. It’s subjective but I think I would describe it as “sneaky” to add a 4gb AI component to a browser. The AI features were added as a default feature, opt-outs were only added later, and the users are not asked for permission before the download of the 4gb file to support the AI service. This doesn’t benefit users; it benefits Google in it’s quest to try to dominate the AI space by pushing it’s own AI features and integrations.

Which “British research firm” labels them a loophole?

The paper is from the European Parliament Research Service, which is an in-house EU Parliament service. And the “briefing” they published has a section titled “A loop hole that needs closing” that starts “Some argue that this is a loophole in the legislation that needs closing and call for age verification to be required for VPNs as well”. The words “Some argue” are a hyperlink to a South African news article / opinion piece by some random journalist who writes in a slightly snarky way about VPNs allowing people to bypass the Online Safety Act.

So the TomsHardware article is nonsense - it’s an EU briefing paper which seems to think a random south african opinion piece counts as “research”. No British research firm, and in fact no real research at all - just crap layerd on crap and making it’s way into a crap briefing paper. If this is the quality of the information been given to MEPs, EU citizens should be worried.

Links:

• The briefing paper: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/ATAG/2026/782618/EPRS_ATA(2026)782618_EN.pdf
• The linked article that is being called “research”: https://htxt.co.za/2025/08/the-uk-seems-to-have-just-realised-that-vpns-are-a-loophole-in-age-verification-measures/

The problem is a navy can’t win this kind of battle no matter how many reserves it has. The more ships the US bring in, the more targets for the iranian drones to hit. They’re just there as expensive decoys, not able to clear mines and not able to destroy the drone launchers.

And from Iran’s point of view they don’t need to hit much to cause chaos - the threat of being hit is enough to drive insurance prices through the roof and dissuade shipping to take the risk of traversing the strait.

Do you have basic security like 1 email is a unique account, and the email needs verification before an order can be placed? Because that simple step will be rate limiting for the attackers but normal and expected for real users.

Also could be worth considering using a dedicated payment processor to handle things. It adds overhead, but so does fraud.

Valve are doing well because they give their customers what they want. But they are also a monopoly, and they’re also capable of going to crap.

Microsoft used to give it’s customers what they wanted but that is long gone. I fear one day Valve will end up the same should it be sold or float on the stock market. It has its own stranglehold on PC gaming and that is worrying to be honest.

The BBC has had below inflation (or no) uplifts in the license fee for years which means it’s been effectively cut.

If you look at wikipedia there is a nice graph of the license fee corrected for inflation, based around 2015 prices. The recent license fee in 2019 was equivalent to about £154, but it used to be worth £192. That’s a 20% cut, and on top of that we’ve had 6 more years of below inflation rises, and of course some big spikes in inflation.

Using the Bank of England inflation calculator ; the license fee should be worth £201 now in 2026 if it’d just stayed equivalent to £154 in 2019, but the actual license fee is £180 so another 10% cut on top of the existing 20% cut from it’s peak. If the license fee was still at it’s peak value of equivalent to £192 in 2009 (in 2019 money), then it should be £250 now.

So long story short, the current license fee of £180 is a 28% cut in value in 17 years. No wonder the BBC is in trouble, is constantly cutting costs and shrinking. It’s a managed decline by successive UK governments who won’t deal with funding the BBC properly.

Personally, I’d abolish the license fee and pay for the BBC out of general taxation. I personally favour a household free-media precept, a bit like the Fire precept we get in council tax; but I get that council tax is also a mess. Regardless, every household should be paying in some way even if they “don’t use the BBC”, because it’s about so much more than about whether someone owns and watches live TV. The BBC is one of the ways we preserve our culture and identity in the face of the massive global media and tech conglomerates like Netflix, Amazon etc. And the license fee is used to fund more than just TV (Radio, Online, local and national news services).

Yeah this is a good example of how to look at Steam’s hardware survey.

Valve has loads more data than they provide in the survey so they can correct the data to give themselves a much more accurate picture. We just get a monthly snapshot and in aggregate which only shows who happens to have completed the survey. So we can’t know the actual absolute numbers and we can’t match individual users together like Valve can - but we can see trends in each dataset.

The spiking up and down month to month for OS doesn’t matter, the overall trend is up for Linux. It can’t tell us actual numbers even using trends, but we can be confident Linux use has been trending up. And while Linux use remains low, it does look like it’s tripled or quadrupled in the past.

How much of that is Linux desktop vs Steam deck growth is harder to tell. But in some ways it doesn’t matter; even if Linux remains small as a proportion, that is still a lot of users which means the whole Linux gaming ecosystem is healthy.

Thanks for sharing this; for people on atomic distributions this is important for getting things set up how you want.

I’d say though, if you’re not on an atomic distribution then I’d use native builds of Steam and Gamescope for your distro wherever possible. The overhead of flatpaks is pretty minimal in practice, but the faff of having to configure things is higher with interconnecting flatpaks. It can be difficult to problem solve errors and by default just generally requires more configuration work (like installing the Proton-GE flatpak) without much real benefit. A native install will largely involve just installing Steam and Gamescope and letting Steam configure it’s own versions of proton.

In addition there can be real faff in setting up controllers (as you have to pass udev rules through to the container) and the game data will be stored in the flatpak’s file system for the sandbox instead of ~/.steam (which can be annoying for modding but is manageable).

Flatpaks can fail without seemingly clear reason; in my experience they’re often actually working perfectly it’s just that the sandbox isn’t quite configured for what you’re trying to do. In my opinion for Steam, it’s an unnecessary added layer of complexity for little to no gain. Flatpak is great in many ways, but not ideal for this unless no other options.

How small is your smallest device? BTRFS doesn’t have a minimum size, but practically probably 50-100mb is just about doable before even just setting things up get complex. Having said that though, it’s copy-on-write and has overhead as a result, so may not function well below 1gb.

ZFS meanwhile really won’t work well below probably 8gb. It’s also copy-on-write but with a lot more overhead due to how it works. It really works best on big drives and filesystems.

If your old storage is in the mb range, then really neither will help you achieve what you want.

BTRFS and ZFS do offer the same benefits as NTFS with regard to compression and speeding up some slower devices (due to lowering the actual read/writes needed to achieve the same result as the data is compressed into a smaller space and decompressed rapidly by the PC in memory), but NTFS can go be used on much smaller disk sizes due to how it works. BTRFS and ZFS are designed and optimised with other benefits in mind. And NTFS compression isn’t well supported in Linux.

There are few big differences that account for the difference in effect and response so far.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, the tail end of winter, and had an immediate impact on gas supplies due to sanctions. Europe, particularly Eastern Europe and Germany, was particularly dependent on Russian gas for heating. There was an immediate potential issue if we’d had a cold snap as well as an inevitability of limited gas supplies to rebuild the reserves over the summer into the next winter.

The Iran conflict started at the end of March 2026, the beginning of spring, and has impacted on oil supplies. But Europe does not get oil from the middle east via the Strait of Hormuz; instead those supplies go east to India, China and Japan for example.

At present there is not a physical shortage in Europe; supplies have already been secured and paid for before the conflict. That will change as the crisis goes on. Oil prices are at persistent high, and also there is going to be increased competition for the 80% of energy supplies not blockaded. That will impact Europe as much as the rest of the world. It is unlikely oil will run out completely, but certain users will be priced out of the market as oil contracts are renewed and prices feed through to end users. It’s likely some businesses across many countries that are not economical when oil is above $100 a barrel will suffer or even close, and fuel prices will dissuade people form using their cars and flying. So there will be shortages more in the sense of affordability which will cause inflation and probably a recession.

There isn’t much point in Europe doing much to try to intervene right now. The shortages are currently focused in countries with current contracts for oil that should have come via the strait. That will change, but until it does it is unpredictable exactly how it will impact Europe. Add to that the perhaps foolish hope (and gamble by markets) that this will be temporary and that explains why there is a reluctance to act.

I’m amazed that anyone believes a word Trump says on this. We have a stalemate in the middle east at present, and its unlikely either side will back down in the next few weeks. The general feeling seems to be that the US has lost this war, and is more likely to back down first as it cannot reopen the strait be force. Iran is certainly suffering economically from the US blockade, but no where near as badly as the US and global economy will suffer if this continues.

The EU should give the UK good terms: the same terms everyone else is on. Nothing more, nothing less.

The opt outs were bad for the UK and the EU and good riddance. If we rejoin we will actually have to commit fully instead of the default position being opting out of things because the right wing don’t like them.

Sadly I think it’s still 10 years away from even being a realistic possibility. Although Trumps behaviour is doing a good job of accelerating changes in attitude so maybe it will be sooner.

Windows is in no way free. Every new Windows Laptop and PC comes with a license; when you pay for the PC part of that money goes directly to Microsoft.

Microsoft made upgrading to Windows 10 and 11 “free” for those on older hardware who already had paid for a license because they wanted to move people onto the latest versions and stop supporting the old versions. At the same time they’ve been harvesting and selling users data to make even more money.

They are not trying to “kill” Windows, they are trying to change it into a cloud based system too so that you do have to pay a subscription to use it. They want new PCs and Laptops to be essentially nothing more than thin terminals, using your hardware to support their cloud based system but not actually owning any of the software at all.

But they are less bothered about the absolute revenue Windows makes now, and more bothered about making it a walled garden they control and which up-sells you to all their other subscription services under Office, and Xbox.

Leads in the polls at 35%, so he is far off a majority. People like simple narratives about someone “winning” an election as it’s easier to follow, but realistically even if he “wins” with 35% he will also struggle to form a stable government or exercise power.

We’re seeing this pattern across Europe at the moment - electorates are fragmented and split, as politicians seem incapable of offering what people actually want. In the UK for example, current opinion polls have us on a 5-way split between Labour, Conservatives, Reform, Green and Lib Dems. This is despite Labour winning a big majority in the election only 2 years ago.