You could make the same argument about sugary beverages, that you can't legislate intelligence, yet every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board. This of course omits a lot of nuance, but the main takeaway remains the same. We all have that monkey brain inside us and sometimes we need guardrails to defend against it. It's the same reason we don't allow advertising alcohol and casinos to kids, and many other similar examples. (Or at least we don't allow it where I'm from, maybe the laws are different where you're from.)
>every country that has imposed a considerable sugar tax has seen benefits across the board
Is there strong evidence for that? The first study that pops up if I search this suggests otherwise, that it could increase consumption of sugar-substitutes and overall caloric intake. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tjnut.2025.05.019
>we need guardrails to defend against
There is no "we". You say that I and others need it, and you want to impose your opinion by taxing us.
This is honestly a very silly take. You could make the same counterargument about any tax of any kind, or really any law of any kind. Like it or not, we do need both taxes and laws to function as a society.
ChatGPT is providing a ridiculous amount of free service to gain/keep traction. Others also have free tiers, but to a much lesser extent. It's similar to Uber selling rides at a loss to win markets. It will get you traction, yes, but the bill has to be paid one day.
Even when you're subscribed, they're providing unreasonable amounts of compute for the price. I am subscribed to both Claude and ChatGPT, and Claude's limits are so tiny compared to ChatGPT's that it often feels like a rip-off.
If you take anxiety to include everything from stress to a bunch of disorders, I'd believe it. Our bodies were not made to handle the permanent stress we see in modern life. The first place I imagine goes to cardiovascular issues?
It either is the "second leading cause of disability and mortality" or it isn't, there's nothing to believe. I very much agree with GP that the claim is completely unsupported.
I found the study that the article bases this on[1]. It doesn't make this claim and instead associates a higher mortality rate to sufferers of all mental disorders, 67% of which are deaths by natural causes. That these natural causes are directly associated with the mental disorder isn't even something the study says. Anxiety is just one of the many disorders analyzed.
This is similar to attributing a lower life expectancy to all people with endocrine diseases (e.g. diabetes) and later saying hyperthyroidism (another endocrine disease) is the sole cause of death in that group.
There is space to suspend your belief/disbelief before you look it up and entertain an idea as plausible to consider what it might say about the discussion at hand. This doesn't mean blindly believing make believe, rather it means deferring coming to a conclusion, to quote the site guidelines, to converse curiously. Of course you can look it up and resolve it after the fact, but that doesn't mean the rest of the surrounding context can't be interesting without the resolution.
Because most of Microsoft's revenue is not generated by end-users. It's large government agencies and big corporations where the end-user is ten steps detached from the actual decision to buy or not to buy something.
It's a story in Germany all the time that some open source zealots get a town government to switch to an off-brand office suite which is so bad that the government worker's union goes on strike to get Microsoft Office back.
We have OnlyOffice as an alternative today. Personally I find the UI quite pleasing. But lately I haven't had any need to use office suite at home so I don't really use it so I have yet to find anything to complain (meanwhile, LibreOffice was horrible, while Office 365 was bearable until you stuff too many things in the equation editor).
Its really not that bad. I used to use it at work all the time. I did word processing, spreadsheets and presentations all the time with it. Maybe not as powerful as Excel, but I was never really a power user. But then again I never saw any spreadsheets that anybody used that were particularly complex.
LibreOffice is catastrophically bad. It is slow, buggy, and everything it does is either pointlessly emulating a bad product, or pointlessly going against expectations.
It exists for one reason only, which is OSS fervor. Great, but that doesn’t lead to great design.
I'm with wolvoleo. I'm forced to use MS Office at work but install only LO on my personal machines. It may lack features or pizzazz but as a reliable, unfussy authoring tool, it serves my needs very well.
> pointlessly going against expectations
If you're referring to the ribbon, I'm not sold on its superiority. The vast majority of other software still uses the familiar menu structure, which is what LO uses too.
Granted, well meaning educational programs expose students to MS Office and its paradigm, from an early age. For their sake, I eagerly await a coding assistant AI powerful enough to reskin LibreOffice to look just MS Office, ribbon and all.
I started my wife on LibreOffice, putting it on her Mac when her 365 subscription lapsed. She loves it. Her needs aren't fancy, though, and she can create her own or open others' documents and spreadsheets just fine.
I don't agree, I use it all the time. I never use the 'real' office at home, though I do at work. And I'm really happy with it. It works fine, it's pretty light and it runs on every OS without me having to use a substandard web version.
I understand their copying the MS Office look and feel because that muscle memory is key to converting users. I like the way they didn't go all-in on those ribbons which have always been pretty terrible.
In that sense I think the biggest issues with the product is that it's taking so many cues from MS Office which on its own is pretty terrible but has grown to be abundant.
I think the whole office workflow is grossly outdated anyway. Excel is mostly misused as a pisspoor database which it deeply sucks at because it doesn't offer any way to safeguard data integrity. What MS should do is overhaul Access completely to make users grok it better. But they don't care.
Word docs are still full of weird template issues, PowerPoint still uses the old overhead projector transparent slide paradigm.
What it really needs is someone to look at this without any of the 1980s baggage and come up with tools for workflow problems from this century with techniques that fit this century. Adding an AI clippy like MS has done does not cut it at all.
But it does mean having to chip away at the entrenched market position of office, that's the problem. Microsoft stops innovating when they've cornered the market, just like they did with internet explorer. Someone has to do a chrome on office, but it will need someone with a big bag of money. Not an open source project run on a shoestring.
So yeah I think LibreOffice is not great but the not great bits are copied from MS Office because they simply have no alternative.
I recently began using markdown readers/writers like Typora and they’ve blown me away— what LibreOffice Writer could have been. Competing directly with MS Word was a trap.
You have to consider the origins, going back to Star Office in the days where most people were on really slow Dialup if they had internet at all. And even a lot of businesses were almost worse, sharing a single dialup or ISDN connection.
Which is why it is baffling to me that MS won't let the end users alone.
I am still battling with the fact they are hell bend on removing the whole "local users" approach of personal computing.
Why stop giving people the option to use their computer the way they want to?
What does MS get out of pushing everybody into online account for an on prem system?
It should be evident to them by now that there is a portion of users that will continue to find ways to use their computer the way they want to.
This cat and mouse game has gone on long enough. MS should be happy to retain any end user they can at this point and not continue to piss of some nerds that still use your operating system under the one condition that they get to do so the way they see fit.
MS wants control and they will figure out some way to monetize that control. Whether it is using the data stored in the cloud for AI training or something else.
If you want control then install Linux or get a Mac. I installed Linux in 1994 and I've got about 15 Linux computers and 2 Macs. My single windows VM gets booted about once a month if that often.
How's that different from Red Hat Linux? I mean, Linux is all about corporate takeover by IBM, Google and the like. The mainstream of Linux GUI is Android for crying out loud and X and Wayland are rounding errors compared to that.
There was a conspiracy theory in my company that M$ had plants in my company to turn everything into M$. "If it doesnt have the word M$ in it, we aren't using it."
I didn't hear this directly, but it was told to me. Call it telephone, but my director fired the python devs in favor of M$ Power Automate.
My company recently decided to move away from Power Automate after having trained lots of people on this 'no code' platform and then having to hire expensive consultants to support or flesh out the apps those users had actually written.
TFW does say there is an opportunity for reduced noise. However, conventional turboprops are very loud compared to their jet counterparts.
Each revolution of a prop blade sends out a shockwave of air against the airframe. The strength of the shockwave is likely proportional to the instantaneous thrust of the engine, and more blades are likely to weaken or smooth it.
A turbofan has a nacelle to contain the shockwave, and avoid the whole noisy mess.
It's only discussed in a similarly ambiguous way - like that they know noise is a potential problem that they're working on. Though to be fair, the designers probably have no idea themselves, since apparently nobody has built a prototype engine that could be run at the rated thrust level in a way they could check the real-world noise and vibration on.
Something working after a spike doesn't tell you much anything about how it did during the spike. At best, it's a hint that maybe the server did not physically burn to the ground, but even that is not for certain.
We used to run this back in the day which, granted, was quite a long time ago now. I don't think we ever went longer than a few months without a serious outage of sorts, and that certainly wasn't for a lack of resources or manpower.
It's all about efficiency. You can store heat in anything, but the question is for how long and how much energy can you get back out later. The first part is easy and how we got ovens and stoves, the second part can be pretty tricky depending on your requirements. Large scale energy storage sometimes uses massive amounts of sand for example, but they heat it to hundreds of degrees which is not really feasible in most settings.
reply