>"Who can live on that? Not in 2026."

Maybe not with MS-Windows. Works fine with Linux for most use cases. I manage lots of Linux machines with 8GB of RAM, even more with 4GB. Admittedly, 4GB is tight.

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

Yeah, but why not? You're clearly not doing anything with the property. Might as well let someone get good use out of it.

Microsoft seems intent on destroying every one of their valuable properties with enshitification, trying to pull the last dollar out of existing products instead of innovating or providing anything for their customers.

As for Xbox being a loss leader... what are they smoking? The boxes themselves have been for a long time, that's just game industry economics. They've already divested from that, pushing the hardware cost onto manufacturers, which is sure to make the platform price go up. But the software side of that business? It's always been incredibly lucrative.

What have MS done, lately? The only things that come to mind are increased "vertical integration", pushing their customers to the cloud while at the same time increasing the licensing costs and decreasing the quality and usability of all of their self-hosted products. Managing Windows has become increasingly difficult, and once useful tools don't even work. The tools that do work, Powershell, usually don't even work, with constant drift across products as to what works and what doesn't.

There are further cultural observations to make specifically related to Xbox, but I'm sure that would get some people in a tizzy.

Lol, a company dominated by Rationalists/Yudowski fans is "far left activists" now ;) The entire premise of HPOMR is that Lily Potter cast a spell to make her sister Petunia more attractive so she could marry a better husband, and when they adopted Harry, instead of having him attend public school, they homeschooled him, so he became brilliant. Very "woke" premise there ;) I don't know if you've heard, but the Rationalist community is the middle of a scandal right now for putting career-limiting pressure on women in the AI space to attend sex parties, including rape-themed ones. All those dang woke feminists, amiright?

The electronic price price tag on the grocery store shelf is updated in HFT real-time now, tied directly to the price-per-gallon of diesel fuel at the pump.

Inflation has no fucking idea how to measure the economy anymore when it has become that corrupt.

(HP GLP1-flavored Marketing) "Yeah. Thinner. That's the shit."

(Apple) "Uh, just so you know..even we filed Bendgate in the Lessons Learned folder."

It's more like someone standing on public ground outside movie theatre holding up signs like, "Bruce Willis has been dead the whole time!" ""Verbal" Kint makes up his whole testimony on the spot - he's actually Keyser Soze!" "Dr. Mann is a liar, and the "ghost" pushing books off Murphy’s childhood bookshelf is her father, through a time portal from within the black hole!", etc, and then people skip buying a ticket and head back home. Now the plot-spoiler has decided to make it up to the movie theatre by buying some tickets from them.

It seems you went into a friendly, informative, non-disagreeing reply with a view to win a "Being An Argumentative Asshole Online" competition, and congratulations, you won!

Most of the other frontiers are like 1 ELO apart, so yeah, 20 is a big lead.

Maybe in one of the agent categories? It seems poorer there. But under the category "Best Text Models", it's crushingly in the lead.

They probably need another trillion dollars and this time they'll do it right!

No accountability, no consequences for failure.

Oh, sure. That's why native Europeans are so fecund, after all!

You realize all your "solutions" have been tried, right?

We should be at about negative one million family farms in the US by now. Because trend lines never change ...

10% brighter every year. How long until we go supernova?

Dimming them not only directly saves power, but also dramatically increases their longevity, and also increases their efficiency (saving even more power). :)