This all feels a lot like any low- or mid-range CAD suite that gets acquired by Autodesk, Siemens, or PTC. Promise enough to avoid a revolt, but start eroding with the next release.
The educational licensing for lock-in is also par for the course. It can be done well (Rhino 3D is legendary for letting small-shop designers use their cheap edu license forever, even commercially), but generally it’s just there to maintain the supply of baby drafters and get subscriptions from employers.
Wake me when they REALLY get back to their roots.
Girl on the right probably killed a Spanish swordsmith back in the day.
When you’re trying to get into DPs, the outside can be slippery and the screw part can be tight! Very dangerous for the workplace.
I thought I had NSFW turned off… 🤣
I think it’s a nice enough idea, and I hope it sets a reasonable baseline for what enthusiast and workstation laptops will be as the entabletification of the mainstream computing device continues, but right now it’s sort of a solution waiting for its problem. Economically, it doesn’t make much sense for one person to buy one. In an actuarial sense, it’s almost certainly better to buy something you like that’s less modular, and replace it if it breaks or stops being useful for your intended tasks. Of course if no one who wishes them well buys their computers, they won’t last long enough to be relevant.
Strictly speaking, just standardizing and providing the physical specifications ends up making their dongles more like headers on a desktop motherboard, potentially a commodity piece that anyone could replicate. Their other modular components seem to have a similar idea. It all seems elegant enough, and ready to “backscale” into a distributed niche industry if the big companies stop making powerful proprietary machines at the scale that keeps them cheap. As it stands, they sort of ARE de facto proprietary, but I guess the idea is that there will be enough enthusiasts, hardware hackers, and evangelists paying a sizeable, but not crippling, premium to keep them afloat and gain the mindshare to become a new standard (and hopefully halo brand) when people need to build laptops like they build towers now.
Just used it to do a clean install to move my ThinkPad from Ubuntu 22.04 to Kubuntu 23.10. Good tool, and much nicer than constantly “burning” ISOs to the flash drive.
Gmail was also both “federated” and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn’t all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.
I’m kinda sad to see it enshittify, for gamers and for those who find it fits their actual collaboration use case, but I also really hate the number forum-format communities that Discord has displaced or prevented from coalescing. Discoverability on Discord is terrible, as is having help available long term, as well as older advice and other content that helps newbies get the culture of a community. Even where the functionality exists, the general “real time” transitory feel of it reduces the quality of content and encourages people to be dicks, since it will all scroll by or be forgotten (if streaming) in a few moments anyway.
Horses for courses, and my old-ass X-ennial self thinks Discord has been pressed into service on a lot of courses where it’s terrible.