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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 2nd, 2023

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  • I’m pretty sure Windows is a key part of their “cloud stuff” strategy. You are right that consumers are not the direct focus of Windows, since they are not the direct paying audience, and that shows in the direction Windows is going, but getting consumers to use Windows is a big part of creating corporate buy in for Microsoft cloud services. Corporate environments will shun Microsoft cloud services if employees can’t use Windows, or Windows features run afoul of corporate policies (like blanket LLM bans).




  • The second part of this comment doesn’t make a lot of sense.

    My understanding is that the tax system allows for the declaration of depreciation in assets as a business expense. This is fine for assets with transparent market valuations.

    The part where this system could be abused is in willfully withholding the release of a movie, overvaluing the expected revenue, and then subsequently declaring the lack of revenue as a depreciation in assets which is then declared as a business expense to reduce the tax burden.

    A clearer example of this, with very obvious fraud, might be:

    • I paint a picture, spending about an hour of my time and 30$ of paint and canvas.
    • I then organize a silent/shady auction for my painting, and secretly bid $1,000,000 for my own painting
    • Then I decide to not pay for it and at the same time I decide to retract the sale instead of opening it up.
    • On paper I have a $1,000,000 asset that has been depreciated by $1,000,000 which allows me to deduct $1,000,000 from my other taxes.

    So obviously this example was fraudulous. It’s possible that the expected revenue on the cases involving movies was estimated transparently and was fair, because of market forces.

    Maybe something more scummy was at play?

    Who knows.




  • The license shall not restrict any party from selling or giving away the software as a component of an aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources. The license shall not require a royalty or other fee for such sale.

    https://opensource.org/osd/

    Paradoxically (or not), restrictions on selling software is a fundamental violation of freedom. When the OSS movement says free, it means freedom as in free to do what you want, not free as in free beer. Of course, that freedom also includes the freedom to give it away.

    So in practice, that usually results in exactly what you lament: free software with a business model on top to support its development and pay programmers so they can eat.




  • Just a thought, communities dedicated to one particular gender are often not inclusive by design, especially if you actively try to funnel people of a certain gender to certain communities. And therefore they, historically, have tended to devolve into echo chambers, and then subsequently into toxic spaces, with little room for nuanced discussion nor hosting a broad range of opinions. That’s not to say all communities are like this and most don’t start out like that either. There is value to have these communities if they themselves promote inclusion. But putting people of a particular gender into a gender-specific community is not at all the solution to “Too few women on Lemmy”.

    I’d rather see the focus on making the general communities be welcoming to everyone equally.




  • The right example is poorly executed. The left example is fine, but has one crucial deficiency: it’s not very modular, which makes it difficult to test and scale. Big problems need to be broken down and managed in discrete steps, and this is also true of computer code.

    The left example is like running a pizza shop where you explain all the steps to everyone and then let everyone loose at the same time to make a pizza. The right example is like creating stations and delegating specific responsabilities to one person at a time.

    The former creates redundancy and is manageable at small scale. But as you grow, you find that the added redundancy is of no additional value, while you end up with chaos, as people argue and fight over the process.

    Can you imagine five developers working on the monolithic pizza code all at the same time? Total chaos. Better to have one developper assigned to baking, another assigned to prep, etc.