It is important to realise that the current pricing mechanism is not an accident, and has some non-obvious benefits that need to be weighed against the obvious drawbacks. Clearly other mechanisms exist, which might solve the obvious drawbacks, but it is a choice of tradeoffs rather than a simple fix.
> This price-setting dominance is being eroded by renewables, with recent analysis from the UK Energy Research Centre showing that gas set power prices 90% of the time in 2025.
One could argue that it’s the “big boys” favour to build out “just enough” renewables in places that are further away from demand, so that gas still sets the price even if it’s just a fraction of what’s actually being used.
Min/max profits, but that would be crazy talk right! I’m sure the large energy producers have my best interests at heart really.
I've been mostly using Windows for the past few decades, but that's mainly because of the GUI; I think *nix shells are awesome compared to COMMAND.COM/CMD.EXE.
(As for PowersHell... yuck. It's like MS decided to reinvent bash but in the most bureaucratic and obfuscated way they could.)
I deploy all my code on linux and have been thinking about switching from windows to linux for my daily driver. But even I dread that. It´s as if linux has tried as hard as possible to make every single little thing as complicated as possible.
imho, user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape. There is very little focus on that. People will tell you try this or that distro. But once you run into a simple problem, it´s often a rabbit hole of a gazilling cli commands to fix it. In the mean time you´re praying to god to not brick something that used to work before.
If I could wave a wand and ban a single class of comments on HN, it would be this. Rambling, non-specific handwaving useless text.
> user experience is nowhere to be found in the linux landscape.
It's ignorant, and its insulting, and it's stupid. You can read one or two KDE blog posts, look at the roadmap for Cosmic, look at the attention Valve has put into Linux and know that sentence is just rude. It's just so frustrating.
> People will tell you try this or that distro.
Dumbasses on reddit will. No one that has a single clue encourages distro-hopping.
I agree with you, that it is irritating when people make sweeping statements that casually dismiss a lot of things as not existing when they do, but it's an endless arguement. Operating systems are not the problem, support is. Just making a good operating system isn't what drives adoption.
reducing _pain_ does. Nerds arent good at empathy, so the response is normally "just read x and use y" and call people stupid if they still cant figure it how to use it
One of the best points here so far is empathy. If nerds even half understood this idea, that what they create, must be a relationship with the user; it must be to get people to feel and understand the benefit of what the creator is offering, that is the single, most important part of all of this! You have to show, don’t tell. Oh sure, you’ll have a few curious people poke at your idea, but without directly offering a Good Experience and to emotionally and cognitively realize the benefit of your creation you are going nowhere fast, generally. Steve Jobs seemed to intimately understand this concept, and it helped put him light years ahead of the competition. First impressions are supremely important, and ongoing impressions which lack pain probably even more important.
Your software or hardware is a relationship with whoever experiences it. You need to curate that relationship and represent it somehow using a fixed thing, software or hardware, and in a way it almost needs to anticipate and read people’s minds . Represent the product factually, so it can do what a person expects, and represent it emotionally so people have a good feeling when they perceive it. Obviously, the technical side must be good to fulfill both of these too. But that is only the first step.
Technology should serve mankind, not the other way around, and people who are too locked into the technical side seem 1000% blind to this idea. They feel excited at their own accomplishment, which is a totally valid by the way, but failed to take it the next step to represent it to other people. Sometimes it isn’t an idea that can be represented well with things as they are, so it’s a non-starter and just a personal project.
At this point in my life, I have a very old house that needs fixing. I have a partner that needs attention. I have my self who needs attention. I have 1.5 jobs that need attention. I have a network of social friends who are worth attention…
Well, it used to be fun a long time ago to go down a rabbit hole for endless hours or days trying to fix things. AI has helped lessen that time too!
My benchmark for a good OS, or a painful one, depending on how you want to look at it, is how often I need to spend an hour or two diagnosing and fixing something. Is that simplistic? Yes. Am I a power user? Only once in a blue moon because I don’t really have to be yet.
Do I learn a little something? Yes. Am I curious to learn? Yes, and no… I have the urgency certainly to fix it because I am frustrated and the system is not doing what I wanted to do…
Look forward to further increases in pricing, whether through subscription rates or ad frequency or anti-ad-blocker measures, I guess.
I was thinking the same thing recently after reading a statement by Deezer that their AI music detector now flags more than a third of newly added music. Even if it gets no listens, all that junk has to be processed, stored, and kept available.
The Xbox runs on a custom OS derived from Windows Core. Not the same as a consumer version of Windows.
[Edit] The answer you’re probably looking for is I/O. The PS5 is much faster than the Series X in terms of getting stuff off disk and actually using it. That more than compensates for the small speed advantage the Series X has.
I consider that the core of Windows (the NT kernel and win32 api) is actually a very polished gem but it is encased in layers of upon layers of barely polished turds ( winui, the win11 shell, the over agressive telemetry, forced ms635 integration, etc..)
I've heard that too. And also Xbox had 2 different DirectX APIs, one more customised to the console, and one that's the standard Windows DirectX which is not as performant. From what I've heard most devs used the latter as it made porting the PC version of the game easier, and sales on Xbox would be tiny compared to PlayStation (1/3rd the install base, sales even less than that due to Xbox users not buying games and just using gamepass) there was less incentive to optimise.
This was always the case. Ps3 was supposedly more powerful but devs didn’t care to make use of it and just port and move on to the next project. Only nintendo hardware seemed to get special treatment with game design probably because it was like a generation behind in power.
I was so excited for the Series X and it's just another crap-tier wannabe gaming PC, with none of the flexibility. It makes me so sad how miserable the XBox has become. I fucking LOVED the 360 back in the day, I used to run home from school to get on Halo 3 and play with friends.
And granted, those same friends and I still play Halo Infinite, but we're all on PCs. Nobody bothers with the goddamn XBox.
The Xbox died the moment they announced it would require a constant connection to the Kinect, and internet in order to function. Even after backtracking from that, it never recovered. There’s also just a lack of reason for it to exist anymore. The PlayStation fills the need for a high power console, Nintendo offers something portable and gimmicky, what would Xbox even offer here?
These days most consoles run fairly standard hardware and games are programmed to be generic and published on every console.
They need to fix their market pricing mechanism before the public benefit from cheaper renewable energy sources.