The apps may have been a bit anemic, but it was early enough that all the app stores were not great. They were certainly hurt by their initial “JavaScript only” stance.

Really painful was that they had exclusivity with Sprint of all carriers. That was a really limiting decision.

I think ultimately the singularly fatal issue was the HP debacle. The initial circumstances of the acquisition might have been ok for the platform. Thanks to some leaked material HP under Hurd actually seemed to have some vision for reinvigorating their consumer brand including an emphasis on former palm products. But Hurd was ousted and that whole initiative was canned and the new leadership killed the product line that they had just bought. Which was the most baffling call, they didn’t make room for some other smartphone or tablet platform, they just shrugged and killed off a product that was their only shot at relevance for a clearly exploding new consumer market.

I’ve seen enough traps set by Oracle to be extra afraid of any wooden horses they are offering up.

That was one thing that was wild about the Palm WebOS devices. It was just plain old linux. Games? They were just Linux games using SDL. Porting WebOS applications to desktop linux would have been nearly trivial. It would have just been amazing if Palm had pulled it off (alas, they chased a single design, Blackberry-style with small form factor, which missed just so much of the market). The users were utterly oblivious to all this (which is good) and it was just the best combination of capable of great things easily with a power user and able to run whatever the casual user would have needed.

It was still before Android was pretty much a sealed deal in the market (2009 Android was still horribly rough) so it had a shot, but Palm just couldn’t pull it off.

Eh, analogy will be imperfect due to nuance, but I’d say it is close.

The big deals are:

• DeepSeek isn’t one of the “presumed winners” that investors had been betting on, and they caught up very quickly
• DeepSeek let people download the model, meaning others can host it free and clear. The investors largely assumed at least folks would all abide by the ‘keep our model private if it is competitive and only allow access as a service offering’, and this really fouls up assumptions that an AI provider would hold lock-in
• DeepSeek is pricing way way lower than OpenAI.
• Purportedly they didn’t need to push their luck with just tons of H100 to get where they are. You are right that you still need pretty beefy to run it, but nVidia’s stock was predicated on even bigger stakes. Reportedly an attempt to train a model by OpenAI involved $500 million, and a claim to train a “good enough” for less than $10 million dramatically reduces the value of nVidia. Note that why they are “way down” they still have almost a 3 trillion dollar market cap. That’s still over 30 Intels or 12 AMDs. There’s just some pessimism because OpenAI and Anthropic either directly or indirectly drove potentially a majority of nVidia revenue, and there’s a lot more uncertainty about those companies now.

I also think this is on the back of a fairly long relatively stagnant run. After the folks saw the leap from GPT2 to ChatGPT they assumed a future of similar dramatic leaps, but have instead gotten increasingly modest refinements. So against a backdrop of a more “meh” sentiment over where they are going you have this thing to disturb some presumed fundamentals in the popular opinion.

And even as OpenAI struggles, they set fire to a lot of money in the process: https://www.notebookcheck.net/GPT-5-development-hits-major-setbacks-as-OpenAI-runs-out-of-training-data.937049.0.html

• 7-zip
• VLC
• OBS
• Firefox did it only to mostly falter to Chrome but Chrome is largely Chromium which is open source.
• Linux (superseded all the Unix, very severely curtailed Windows Server market)
• Nearly all programming language tools (IDEs, Compilers, Interpreters)
• Essentially all command line ecosystem (obviously on the *nix side, but MS was pretty much compelled to open source Powershell and their new Terminal to try to compete)

In some contexts you aren’t going to have a lively enough community to drive a compelling product even as there’s enough revenue to facilitate a company to make a go of it, but to say ‘no open source software has acheived that’ is a bit much.

Though it’s arguably not important whether they are fully transparent about their methods and costs, the result is similar: they have a more affordable and accessible offering that really screws over the companies trying to get more investor money.

But now the companies sweating an explanation for why they failed to get to profitable can blame China instead of their own poor business plans.

Last I saw the promise was 'AGI real soon, but not before 2027", threading the needle between “we are going to have an advancement that will change the fundamentals of how the economy even works” and “but there’s still time to get in and get the benefits of the current economy on our way to that breakthrough”

The main issue is that the business folks are pushing it to be used way more than demand, as they see dollar signs if they can pull off a grift. If this or anything else pops the bubble, then the excessive footprint will subside, even as the technology persists at a more reasonable level.

For example, according to some report I saw OpenAI spent over a billion on ultimately failed attempts to train GPT5 that had to be scrapped. Essentially trying to brute force their way to better results when we have may have hit the limits of their approach. Investors tossed more billions their way to keep trying, but if it pops, that money is not available and they can’t waste resources on this.

Similarly, with the pressure off Google might stop throwing every search at AI. For every person asking for help translating a formula to code, there’s hundreds of people accidentally running a model due to Google search.

So the folks for whom it’s sincerely useful might get their benefit with a more reasonable impact as the overuse subsides.

Well LLMs don’t necessarily always suck, but they do suck compared to how much key parties are trying to shove then down our throats. If this pops the bubble by making it too cheap to be worth grifting over, then maybe a lot of the worst players and investors back off and no one cares if you use an LLM or not and they settle in to be used only to the extent people actually want to. We also move past people claiming the are way better than they are, or that they are always just on the cusp of something bigger, if the grifters lose motivation.

I’m running the one true distribution, SCO

The software side bubble should take a hit here because:

• Trained model made available for download and offline execution, versus locking it behind a subscription friendly cloud only access. Not the first, but it is more famous.

• It came from an unexpected organization, which throws a wrench in the assumption that one of the few known entities would “win it”.

I’m unsure.

I will readily admit that Vance is younger, healthier, more competent, and just as vile but better at not saying the quiet part out loud.

However, for whatever crazy reason, Trump has his fanatics, and Vance doesn’t have those. What’s left of the GOP are people that have learned the lesson of kissing the ring of Trump. That’s no room for anyone else to lead, submit to Trump. Make no trouble for Trump, do everything you can to advance whatever he says. Do not call him on craziness, you’ll only hurt yourself. As a result, the GOP is unified behind him, with no one even pretending they would ever hold him accountable for anything anymore (remember whiffs of rhetoric early in his first term about accountability, with that having out quickly and stomped out thoroughly with the repudiation of Romney and Chaney).

I don’t see Vance having that status. Without that status, I think vying to be the head of the party is back on the table. Infighting with the current leader becomes a plausible path forward. While he may chase his particular brand of vile agenda, he would be in competition with other GOP agendas.

The daily show did a segment on this. Basically translators can’t bring themselves to speak as embarrassingly as trump. They will think audience will assume them to be bad at translating if they tried for a more true representation. Especially if they try to imitate how the words are spoken as well as what words are spoken.

A few more quarter pounders and perhaps less than four years…

Given the use of the word settle, I am concerned it means Russia can promise to stop with only half of Ukraine and Trump will turn that into a victory and blame Ukraine for being unreasonable…

They are back with the “no buttons” design. People swear the haptics make it better, but it doesn’t. My work gave me one and the touchpad gets phantom taps and now the pad “clicks” when it hasn’t even been touched sometimes and there’s nothing that can be done.

Reminds me of a coworker who went on a rant about how the workplace was so unfair and didn’t give opportunities to white men.

Nevermind the workplace is about 90% white men, and pretty much all the higher paid folks are white men.

The delusion is strong, to bitch to the face of the pretty much token underpaid minorities and women that they are getting way too many opportunities that should be going to white men.

However they do nothing particularly responsible about the indicated fiscal problems. GOP administrations have a track record of spending even more than the democratic administrations, while pulling in less revenue.

So they jump up and down at a credible issue, but have no credibility as they have zero track record of fixing it, just making things even worse.