The "They" here are the folks who are currently investing in 'selling' AI solutions to other companies. OpenAI, Microsoft, Google's Gemini, and a slew of AI-backed startups are good examples.
They don't need AI to turn a profit.
They need AI to be seen as widely adopted and "a part of life".
They need certain categories of folks (CEOs, CIOs, Boards of Directors) to see AI as valuable enough to invest in.
They need to keep up the veneer of success long enough to make their investments attractive to acquisition by Private Equity or to an IPO.
They need to juice the short-term stock price.
Their goal isn't to produce a long-term business, their goal is to raise short-term returns to the point that the investors get a nice return on their investment, and then it becomes someone else's problem.
"How money works" YouTube channel had a nice video about this trend in particular going back to making stock buybacks legal in 1982 I think, which made CEO and execs wealth acquisition driven not by a long successful career with healthy margins and dividends, but a short-tenured local maximum pump-and-dump and a hold-the-bag game funded by endless fiat currency which is printed on the backs of other people. Other people's money , Gordon Gecko, they're not just real, they're celebrity sociopaths running us into the ground because of a fragile ego.
On the other hand some notable open source leaders seem to be abrasive assholes. Linus, Theo, DHH, just three examples who come to mind. I think if you have a clear vision of what you want your project to be then being agressively dismissive of ideas that don't further that vision is necessary just to keep the noise to a low roar.
I immediately went to the menu to see how I could buy a subscription, and there isn’t a place, as far as I can tell through my search, to do so.
This goes for all new startups (non-profit or not!) if you want me to give you money, make it easy for me to give you money.
This is an online magazine, ostensibly, and as such I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
I fully agree with you. We are slooowly working towards having also the printed version available in a subscription model (note: PDFs will remain free and we will also continue to give out free - as in "sponsored by [some company or event]" - on conferences / demoscene parties / etc). We still have to do a couple of things first, like:
1. Make sure our prints are consistently of good quality. As we've learnt this year, printing is hard, especially if you have to support multiple different printing companies. We're well on our way with this.
2. Rebuild the older versions to have them print ready - this is required for e.g. ISSN registration which we are working on. As we don't do typical DTP, but rather use a waay more complex process of Python-scripts-processing-incoming-PDFs (perhaps this wasn't my brightest idea, but it has its upsides), this takes a while (mostly because older issues were built using previous build engine and PDFs are hard - our DTP programmer has a lot of horror stories).
3. Well, find a company (or multiple companies) that offers subscriptions and ships worldwide and test them.
So it will still take a bit of time, but we'll get there :)
As I said, this magazine is wonderful. One caution I have, taking what you said that you only intend to charge for prints, is that I don’t think it’s a great idea to self-devalue the PDF version by not charging for it as well.
1. Visit the site and get it free.
2. Subscribe, get the PDF delivered to your inbox and discount on printed version.
That way, you give folks an easy on-ramp to paying you while still giving out the free version.
What you're saying makes sense and it's a good idea. It's not fully directly applicable to Paged Out! though due to certain assumptions we've made with our base operating model.
I.e. our intention is to charge readers neither for PDF nor for print, to the extent that is possible. In case of print-on-demand or print-subscription that of course won't be possible, but at various events we're successfully bringing printed Paged Out! issues to distribute for free. The idea is rather for the zine to finance itself through ad sales, sponsorship editions, and special collector bundled editions. We have a couple of other more-typical ideas as well, like Pateron later on.
Admittedly, so far we're in the red (not terribly though), but that's OK. There are still certain things we need to roll out before being able to evaluate whether we need to change the base operating model. If we do have to change it, it's not unlikely to start with ideas like the one you proposed - they do make sense.
There's an RSS feed that is exposed in the standard manner (link tag in head), precisely what you're looking for. They do not offer a paid subscription, just the option to 'buy' individual issues, which is also linked under every issue.
That sort of friction is just enough to keep folks from giving money.
And that’s not me saying this, there’s an entire cottage industry devoted to pricing and buying decisions, and how friction reduces revenue.
If I take your suggestion to its logical conclusion, I would need to:
1. Get an RSS reader (I don’t have one, haven’t used one since google reader shut down)
2. Subscribe to their RSS feed.
3. Remember to check my RSS reader.
4. Each 3-4 months (just long enough for it not to be a habit forming exercise), click on the link.
5. Put in my credit card information each time.
6. buy the issue.
Or, I could use their “preferred” method:
1. Subscribe to their email list.
2. Click the link every 3-4 months when an issue drops.
3. Put in my credit card information every 3-4 months?
4. Buy the issue.
Each of these has far more friction in them than necessary, and hurts their overall goal, which is to make their magazine self-sustaining.
I think the magazine is not designed to be a product that is bought, but rather something that is given away for free. A lot of the verbiage on the website discusses various ways to get and reproduce the magazine for free. Most of the content is submitted with a creative content license.
> I would expect to see a “subscribe” page, which would take payment information, and I would get emailed new issues as they come out.
>This goes for all new startups (non-profit or not!) if you want me to give you money, make it easy for me to give you money.
Man, as far as I know this is not some wanna be unicorn startup, this is curiosity-driven, for-hackers content managed by people who were top at competitive security for many years
If we can't agree on a definition of AGI, then what good is it to say we have "human-in-the-loop AGI"? The only folks that will agree with you will be using your definition of AGI, which you haven't shared (at least in this posting). So, what is your definition of AGI?
> The verification ability is especially important in the case of AI, which is presently a lot more fallible in a great variety of ways compared to calculators.
Um. yea. This is the first time a non-deterministic technology has achieved mass adoption for every day use. Despite repeated warnings (which are not even close to the tenor of warnings they should broadcast), folks don’t understand that AI will likely hallucinate some or all of their answer.
A calculator will not, and even the closest aspect of buggy behavior for a calculator (exploring the fringes of floating point numbers, for example) is light years away from the hallucination of generated AI for general, every day questions.
The mass exuberance over generative AI has been clouding folks from the very real effects of over-adoption or AI, and we aren’t going to see the full impact of that for some time, and when we do, folks are going to ask questions like “how were we so dumb?” And of course the answer will be “no one saw this coming.”
My spouse is an educator with nearly 20 years in the industry, and even her school has adopted AI. It’s shocking how quickly it has taken hold, even in otherwise lagging adoption segments. Her school finally went “1-1” with devices in 2020, just prior to COVID.
The writing is laughably bad. I can’t tell if it’s someone that over relied on AI or if they just mimic the structure and mannerisms of AI produced writing because that’s what they see.
A few choice examples:
> Checkout part one of this series for an intro to HipKittens and checkout this post for a technical deep dive.
> Unsurprisingly, making AMD GPUs go brr boils down to keeping the “matrix cores” (tensor cores on NVIDIA) fed.
> These two patterns tradeoff programmability and performance, where 8-wave and its large tile primitives lead to compact code and 4-wave fine-grained interleaving expands code size. Surprisingly, the 8-wave schedule is sufficient to achieve SoTA-level performance on GEMMs and attention forwards. For GQA non-causal attention backwards, 8-wave also outperforms all AMD baselines by
1.8
×
1.8×, and our HK 4-wave further outperforms by
2.3
×
2.3×.
And I could go on. And on.
But overall besides the overuse of cliche/memespeak places it doesn’t make sense, the entire section that deals with the hot loop describes something that should be explained in a graph and instead explained in 100 lines of source code.
The wild thing about this is that for the longest time, URLs were the mechanism for maintaining state on a page. It is only with the complete takeover of JavaScript-based web pages that we even got away from this being "just the way it is". Browsers and server-rendered pages have a number of features that folks try their best to recreate with javascript, and often recreate it rather poorly.
Yes and the comments in this thread don’t give me much hope that we will ever progress from the SPA mess to the idea that „simple is best“. Developers love to overengineer.
I use Windows for one reason only: Steam and best performance and compatibility for high resolution gaming.
If I didn’t want that, I wouldn’t be on windows at all.
The issue I have with Linux is that it’s 2025 and every single time I’ve created a Linux system in the past ten years, I have some sort of issue that I spend too much of my time figuring out. I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”
The downside of open source is you have to have the time to fix it yourself, and that lack of time is what keeps me from pursuing Linux, even though I am absolutely furious at the crap Microsoft is pulling lately, from shutting off ability to create a local account, to forcing OneDrive, to throwing Ads onto the desktop, to the telemetry and marketing spyware that is now standard on Windows 11.
I find it's the opposite nowadays. I run Kubuntu LTS on an all AMD system and most Steam games just work out of the box. No tinkering with the OS, takes 15 minutes to install and set up.
Compared to the hours and hours of battling Windows to get it to a usable state. Drivers, removing bloat, hunting for exes on the internet, dealing with low quality commercial software, etc. Then you get to do it all over again when a major update drops.
Just speaking personally, but one thing I wonder about with the issues is putting aside the 'internet knowledge base' how much I've accumulated knowledge of how to gloss over all the little issues in windows that doesn't translate over, and whether that applies to other people in general. There's the common "I migrated grandma and pointed her at firefox and she's loves it" anecdote for users with little assumptions, so for different types of user it'd be an interesting project to catalogue what pain points they come across, major ones are likely well known but I expect it'd be really interesting to gather minor ones. How much is adaptation to the windows/linux "DNA" or ways of doing things that would cause breakage if they were changed and how much could be looked at by various projects.
True about open source though it's the only place where your computer is and feels like yours. Macs and Windows have you beholden to companies that have increasingly been user hostile and both have been keeping me in a constant state of revulsion.
That said, if you're having to fix your system constantly then something is off, as many distros have become incredibly stable. Of course I don't know your circumstances so can't say anything specific.
On any Linux distro it feels somewhat like my computer belongs to a bunch of opinionated nerds, and none of them are me, and their motivations are peculiar. But also somewhat like it's mine, I must admit.
If your games work with Linux, which you can check on protondb, they typically "just work" and the performance is comparable to (sometimes even slightly better than) Windows. At least using AMD. Nvidia performance is good I've heard but getting everything to work together is still a bit tricky.
> I am married, have three school age children, and have hobbies and I volunteer regularly. One of those hobbies is not “figuring out how to make Linux work.”
This comment literally asks him to go check to see if his games work with Linux, and that he needs specific hardware for that compatibility to be meaningfully successful. The alternative is he just uses Windows and plays his games. It's exactly the type of "extra steps" that he wants to avoid.
I use Linux systems daily, and every now and then I'll go FOSS-zealot enough to go rip my Thinkpad back out of the closet and port everything over. Then, I'm no longer interoperable with any part of society that isn't involved in a fringe movement of the Linux laptop, and then go back, somewhat disappointingly, to my MacBook Pro.
Unfortunately that is the standard behaviour every time some of us complain about Linux Desktop.
Just because we complain doesn't mean we are Linux newbies.
Many of us do use Linux at work, have been there since early days, myself kernel 1.0.9, do have multiple UNIX variants experience, what we lack is the willingness to keep doing the same over and over again on our free time.
Yet, a single complaint and there comes the same answer as back in the Usenet days.
It's standard behavior for a reason; gaming on Windows blows. It was user-hostile in the DOS era, user-hostile in the Steam Machine era, and it's user hostile today.
Go look at the reviews of the Xbox handhelds - every single one always mentions how bad the OS is. Windows is no longer a selling point outside the hyper-obsessive purist niche that is waning with the proliferation of hardware-based cheats. Gaming-based hardware is getting docked points for not running Linux as a standard, Windows 11 is a liability.
Complain until the cows come home, really. It just makes you look that much dumber next to the 8-year-olds installing and playing Metroidvanias on their Steam Deck.
You don't really need to check any more. Games just work, unless it's a competitive multiplayer FPS with kernel anticheat. In theory you should check but I've not run into any issues for years now.
And if the game isn’t supported? What then? Not buy it? Buy another PC and use windows for that?
Last time I tried a dual boot UEFI system with windows and Linux on separate drives, I spent three weeks trawling message boards for half answers from DenverCoder9 only to give up.
That is a solid option but alas voting with your wallet can be difficult (social reasons etc.)
The only thing that needs Windows for me is Valorant. Everything else runs on bazite.
> UEFI system with windows and Linux
That is weird. Were you trying to have some selection with grub?
Just having two drives and selecting a boot device in the Bios/Uefi of the MB has worked stable for at least four years with this configuration. Make your default Linux or Windows and only use the MB for one-time boots of the other one.
Last year I made the dumb decision to buy a Gigabyte Brix without really researching Linux support, after several months of trying to make its UEFI recognising Linux partitions on M2 drives instead of external USB it ended up on the recycling centre, as I eventually damaged the motherboard.
Better than what, modifying your UEFI to forcibly recognize your GPT? Once you reach that point you should know that you're heading towards paperweight territory.
Bother myself with the usual endless hours tracking computers that are supposed to work with Linux, noting serial numbers down to be sure what exact models to buy and the kind of stuff I was doing back in 2000's, when I cared.
Indeed, writing this on a laptop with Linux that cant sleep and gets random crashes with blinking caps lock about once a week. Whether its Realtek ethernet adapter can run at its nominal 5gbps on a 6.14+ or <6.10 kernel without CPU soft lockups is an open question
When windows has a problem, I am confident there will be a driver fix and windows/the manufacturer will update the driver and I download an update and I’m fixed, and I’m confident in this for a few reasons:
1. Microsoft spends a lot of time and money on driver compatibility.
2. Manufacturers are incentivized to make sure their stuff works on windows.
3. The time and money has been spent for ease-of-updates and on customer service (having notices and communications that there is a problem and it will be resolved).
When this has happened to me on an Ubuntu or Debian based system, it’s typically been surfaced through a GitHub or random forum post, with consulted instructions to fix, if there is a fix. When the instructions don’t work, I need to spend more of my time figuring out why. And this happens for even mainstream hardware.
I’ve never had trouble free windows, but the time to get the problem resolved is a lot less and generally requires little to no time on my part, which given my state in life, is what I want.
Outside of the absolute bare minimum to check this box for a plurality of observers, I can’t imagine anyone actually saying the App Store has a quality control process with a straight face, especially not one that would be championed as acceptable as a market practice.
The App Store "quality control" does its job (or tries to) to make sure developers aren't breaking their arbitrary rules. They would never actually do quality control because they benefit from all the junk being pushed to the App Store through their cut, search ads, etc.
They don't need AI to turn a profit.
They need AI to be seen as widely adopted and "a part of life".
They need certain categories of folks (CEOs, CIOs, Boards of Directors) to see AI as valuable enough to invest in.
They need to keep up the veneer of success long enough to make their investments attractive to acquisition by Private Equity or to an IPO.
They need to juice the short-term stock price.
Their goal isn't to produce a long-term business, their goal is to raise short-term returns to the point that the investors get a nice return on their investment, and then it becomes someone else's problem.
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