Each version up thru Win8 had a style guide. If you wanted the windows sticker on your box you made it consistent. Why would you want that sticker? If you did not have it it was much harder to get floor space at many of the big box stores.
It was at win8 where everyone just noped out and just started doing whatever they wanted. XP/2000 was the last era where anyone really cared.
MS has done this for years. The have had several overall brands. Visual, live, .net, direct, Active, X, etc etc etc. They will even sometimes have a couple in flight at the same time. Right now now it seems to be copilot and m365. I probably even forgot a couple.
Arguably it's even worse when they try to give "unique" names to similar-in-spirit products.
I will never forgive them for all the hair pulling I had to do to try differentiating between Team Foundation Version Control, Team Foundation Server, Team Foundation Services, Visual Studio Team Services, Visual Studio Online, Azure DevOps Server, and Azure DevOps Services.
I have long suspected that Microsoft product branding and naming has more to do with their intended sales and contract structure than actually being informative with respect to what the product does.
It will be exactly that. But that is a 'them' problem. I can look at it a go 'that looks like a bad idea' but they are the ones who have to live with it.
At some point someone will probably take their LLM code and repoint it at the LLM and say 'hey lets refactor this so it uses less code is easier to read but does the same thing' and let it chrun.
One project I worked on I saw one engineer delete 20k lines of code one day. He replaced it with a few lines of stored procedure. That 20k lines of code was in production for years. No one wanted to do anything with it but it was a crucial part of the way the thing worked. It just takes someone going 'hey this isnt right' and sit down and fix it.
When a TUI requires 68 GB of RAM to run, or when they spend a week not being able to find a bug that causes multiple people to immediately run out of tokens, it's not a "them" problem.
My wife plays 'dont starve' like mad (well into 4k hours). She has never step foot in the underworld. Building huge structures on the main area. So I figured I would show her terraria and minecraft. No interest at all. She voraciously played any point and click adventure game she could. That included many hidden object games (good and terrible). There is one Sudoku game she has also several thousand hours into. The match 3 games were amusing to her for a few weeks and she gave up on them. FPS and factory sims are out for her ('they look boring'). So what sticks and doesn't is all over the place.
I guess it's like me and movies. I like sci-fi, but that's not enough for me to like a movie. I don't typically watch dramas, but if it's got enough other interesting things going for it, I can enjoy a drama film.
I really like certain directors, but not everything they make.
I know there are some that can enjoy something based on a single aspect alone, but I imagine most are like me. Then again, it's possible I'm the weird one.
Don't Starve has a certain point-and-clickiness about it. There's one player character and a lot of noticing objects of interest and clicking to pick them up. That's probably important.
If I had to guess, I would say no. Also if I had to guess she would say Rimworld is 'too scifi' and Dwarf Fortress would be wildly too much management for what she wants. I showed her Oxygen Not Included. It was too sci fi even though she liked the graphics. I can usually spot games she would like, with an occasional miss. Those two would be surprising if she did. I can usually pick out the ones she would not like. There is even a bugged out game 'tale of a pale swordsman' that she used to play all the time. But I think she has grown tired of that one. As it is bugged out on the ending.
Me on the other hand 'yeah I forgot about those two and need to check them out'. My back catalog is quite deep at the moment so I am trying not to buy anything until I play what I got.
That is the thing about suggesting games to someone. It is tough to do. Even though you wildly like the game others do not.
This reminds me of the early days of cell phones. Limits everywhere and you paid for it by the kilobyte. Think at one point I was paying 45c per text message. I hope this gets better and we do not need gigawatt datacenters to do this stuff.
We're in the process of building new gigawatt datacenters for the sole purpose of doing this stuff. If we end up not needing them, there's gonna be a whole lot of capacity sitting around soaking up ongoing maintenance costs.
For ex. of the five new data centers being planned in Wisconsin, the two I know of that have public energy consumption estimates will need more electricity than all of the residential electric usage in Wisconsin combined at 3.9 gigawatts.
All I know is I never want to hear another person talk about how my personal electrical usage is excessive after all the power usage needed for these data centers. My house should be able to feel comfortable in the summer if we're building these many data centers.
You have a semi expensive process. But you want to keep particular known context out. So a quick and dirty search just in front of the expensive process. So instead of 'figure sentiment (20seconds)'. You have 'quick check sentiment (<1sec)' then do the 'figure sentiment v2 (5seconds)'. Now if it is just pure regex then your analogy would hold up just fine.
I could see me totally making a design choice like that.
I do not think it is the money that made them terrible. I know all sorts of terrible people that would do the exact same things. The only difference really is they do not have the money to execute on those ideas.
Money does not make you a good or bad person. It just makes you more of who you are already.
I specifically did not say money makes them mentally ill, but rather the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness.
> the type of person that seeks to hoard so much wealth that they have billions is correlated with mental illness
Do we have any actual evidence of this? I know plenty of exorbitantly wealthy people who aren’t hoarding anything, they just didn’t sell their piece of the closely-held business they started, and they spend their time skiing, reading, travelling and taking care of their friends and family.
> they would suggest that the thing those exorbitantly wealthy people are hoarding is money
And I’d say they’re literally wrong. They may be hoarding capital. And yes, some wealthy people do hoard money per se. But outside the Epstein class there are lots of people we just don’t hear about because they aren’t on social media talking about how rich they are. Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
while this distinction may be important to you, i dont think it really changes anything about malfists question/point.
>Because while it’s fun to postulate that the rich have mental illnesses, it’s documented that social-media addiction causes them.
and cigarettes cause cancer. not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad (smoking, too).
(please note: i am not arguing for or against what you or malfist have said, just thought there was a little something lost in translation re: you asking for evidence after a conversation that started with "makes you wonder")
> i dont think it really changes anything about what malfist question/point
Of course it does. Turning capital into spendable or transferable wealth takes work. Plenty of rich people are just enjoying their lives in the same way retirees do.
> not sure what this has to do with the conversation, but yeah, social media is bad
I’m saying the folks we tend to get upset about being rich at are also the rich who are prominently on social media. The problem isn’t that they’re rich. It’s that they’re on social media so much. I think there is a genuine argument to be made that even Elon Musk would have been a better-liked person, maybe even a better person, if he never got on Twitter.
> thought there was a little something lost in translation re: "makes you wonder"
Perhaps. And appreciate your clarifying for them. In 2026 I’m just sceptical of the “just asking questions” bit, particularly when it comes to cultural tropes. (And for what it’s worth, my query for a source was genuine. I’m always down to change my mind on a loosely-held belief.)
> a hell of a difference between a multimillionare who has a successful business and a billionare
Yeah, I'm saying the ones worth hundreds of millions to low billions who aren't on social media are, in my personal experience, often fine people. The ones I don't like are the ones on social media, but that's also true of the folks worth a few thousand dollars.
Plenty of billionaires are assholes. The world's GDP is over $100 trillion. That's going to produce diversity among the rich.
And who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
> who are you to personally know enough billionaires intimately enough to absolve them of any guilt
I'm not absolving anyone. I'm saying I know good people who are also billiionaires who most people have never heard of. The billionaires I've heard of I tend to dislike. But I think the correlate is the fame, not the wealth.
> guilt they might have earned hoarding enough wealth to reach that level?
This is where the hoarding metaphor breaks down. If you build a company, is it hoarding to not sell your stake off to a private equity firm?
Because practically speaking, those are their choices. Hold it, manage it and live off the income. (They all donate most of their incomes, but that's neither here nor there. You can be a good person even if not philanthropic.) Or sell it to a private equity firm and then have a pot of money to stare at.
What does "hoard wealth" mean to you? A vault full of gold that they swim in?
Jeff Bezos's net worth is mostly in the form of server racks and amazon inventory.
Elon's net worth is mostly in the form of share certificates that are marked to market and contingent on delusional investors swallowing Elons own promises.
This is the peg that society is constantly snagging on. The billionaire class doesn't actually have much "hoarded" wealth. If we want to go after wealth that more classically fits the idea of "hoarded", i.e. cash and cash equivalents, then the middle/upper middle class is the golden goose (most people are surprised to learn they have almost twice the wealth billionaires have too, not a very clickable headline though...)
The idea that everyone gets a suburban house and premium healthcare if we can only pass legislation that taxes billionaires, is a delusion on par with Jesus coming down to battle the transsexuals.
The actual strain in the economy is between the upper middle class and the lower class. The senior developers and the shipping room clerks.
Of course the money doesn't make them terrible. Being terrible makes them money. Lots of money. There aren't really other ways of obtaining so much money, which is why if you see someone that has that amount, they should be viewed with suspicion.
Having done a multi targeted project in the 2005 range. I can tell you. The APIs that both systems provide are quite expansive and do quite a bit. However there is a mismatch on details and gaps. In this case the NT mutex system is 'there' in linux however the way it works is subtly different. You have to basically emulate waitforxxxxxxobject set of windows calls. Getting that right and performant can be quite a challenge.
My particular challenge was similar in around how threads were created destroyed and signals between them (such as mutex). We ended up making our own wrappers to insure the different platforms acted the same. Even something simple as just moving between two supposedly 'same' linux distros could be different depending on what the ODM did to their packages and supported libs. Having a dedicated linux object that acts exactly like the windows one would have made that code much simpler to do.
Another place where there is a huge impedance mismatch is in the permission system. In many ways the VMS/NT way is wildly detailed. Linux can do that but you have to emulate it or use it directly and hope you get it right on both sides. There are several places where windows/linux have the same functionality but the APIs are different enough that multi platform support is kinda awful to do.
It was at win8 where everyone just noped out and just started doing whatever they wanted. XP/2000 was the last era where anyone really cared.
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