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It's almost like LLMs are trained on human writing...

> By law they are required to do whatever they can to maximize profits.

I know it's a nit-pick, but I hate that this always gets brought up when it's not actually true. Public corporations face pressure from investors to maximize returns, sure, but there is no law stating that they have to maximize profits at all costs. Public companies can (and often do) act against the interest of immediate profits for some other gain. The only real leverage that investors have is the board's ability to fire executives, but that assumes that they have the necessary votes to do so. As a counter-example, Mark Zuckerberg still controls the majority of voting power at Meta, so he can effectively do whatever he wants with the company without major consequence (assuming you don't consider stock price fluctuations "major").

But I say this not to take away from your broader point, which I agree with: the short-term profit-maximizing culture is indeed the default when it comes to publicly traded corporations. It just isn't something inherent in being publicly traded, and in the inverse, private companies often have the same kind of culture, so that's not a silver bullet either.


It's a worthwhile point to make because if people believe that misconception then it lets companies wash their hands of flagrantly bad behavior. "Gosh, we should really get around to changing the law that makes them act that way."

You're perfectly right and I don't consider it a nitpick. I really should be more precise about this, instead of spreading inaccuracies. Thank you!

There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company. And before you say something along the lines of, "But they don't need to compete, they just need to be good enough", that still requires business to put their apps on some open source app store and make them compatible with the open source OS, and there is close to zero incentive for them to do so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux

MSFT Market cap: 2.951T AAPL Market cap: 3.883T


You've made my point. How many people use Linux as their primary desktop or mobile OS? And that's arguably the world's largest open source project.

> How many people use Linux as their primary desktop or mobile OS?

Literally everyone who uses Android or Chrome OS, for one.


> their primary desktop

You're moving the goal post. Linix competed with the biggest software companies in the world in the server world and won. We can do it again in another market.


I'm not moving the goal post. We're talking about a consumer OS (Android). Servers are a completely different ball game with an entirely separate set of tradeoffs. On average, it's much easier for a company to adopt new, unknown tech than it is for laypeople who are not tech savvy.

You said, "There is just no reasonable way that the open source community can compete with a $3.8T company." But, Linux has completely decimated Microsoft's presence in the server and embedded markets. Look at what Microsoft was doing in the mid-2000's, they had a healthy server OS business, and they were spending billions trying to get Windows in embedded stuff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_Automotive)and it was a total failure because they could not compete with open source software, in the end, it wasn't even close.

These are markets far bigger than the consumer desktop licensing market where Microsoft can't even make a dent into Linux's dominance, this represents >$100B in annual lost revenue for microsoft. So yes, Linux already won, and it won big time, despite going up against the MSFT behemoth as you say.

Global Linux desktop usage is at about ~5% and growing while Windows is bleeding out and dying. And Microsoft doesn't care, go read their earnings reports to see why, their consumer desktop business does not matter except for it's ability to generate leads and demand for their actual core products. And geopolitical levers are also in Linux's favor, e.g. EU's desires for tech independence: the moves European governments were already making away from global tech products while funding domestic (often open source) alternatives are going to continue to accelerate:

- https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135795

- https://nlnet.nl/project/index.html

- https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/denmarks-strategic-leap...

- https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/schleswig_holstein_op...

And to answer your original question again, yes, open source software can compete, and it often can compete with a comical fraction of the resources of its closed source competitor. It's not a surprise: The open source model works extremely well and is the most efficient way to build software and technology that we know of; human beings have been sharing technology in this way for the duration of recorded history.


Enough. Linux has finally caught on. I literally never use windows or mac and life has been fine.

I think the parent meant that Zed could not have used an established UI library like GTK or Electron since performance was such a big focus of the editor.

On macOS, Option+Shift+- and Option+- insert an em dash (—) and en dash (–), respectively. On Linux, you can hit the Compose Key and type --- (three hyphens) to get an em dash, or --. (hyphen hyphen period) for an en dash. Windows has some dumb incantation that you'll never remember.


For Windows it's just easier to make a custom keyboard layout and go to town with that: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=102...


I prefer the linux compose-key style: https://github.com/samhocevar/wincompose

On MacOS and iOS, two dashes (i.e., the -- characters) automagically turns into an em dash (—). No special commands needed.


Alt+0151 or WIN+SHIFT+-, but I can't seem to make the WIN+SHIFT+- combo work in browser, only in a text editor.


In my experience, Composer is billed like the rest of the models, but Auto mode is billed separately. I recently hit the limit on my plan and was being billed for on demand usage, but using Auto kept it within the "included" allowance (i.e. "free").

I'm not sure how much free usage they give you with Auto mode.


I'm not positive I could draw a technically correct bike with pen and paper (without a reference), let alone with SVG!


I highly doubt it. Most people are in rooms with bad acoustics to begin with.


I'm not sure if you're serious, but everyone knows.


This is also true of heating and cooling, and I've never understood why we (in the US) build relatively dense housing communities but don't implement things like this. Having a separate air conditioner for each home, especially in a condominium/townhouse complex, has never made sense to me as it's so inefficient compared to central heating/cooling.


Not everyone lives in an area where they can afford not to have one, especially with climates changing and temperatures hitting higher/lower extremes.


It all comes down to building techniques, insulation, airtightness, eliminating thermal bridges, &c. There are also many low tech solutions for heating/cooling, such as air/air heat exchanger couples with ground/water or ground/air heat exchanger at a fraction of the price and a fraction of the maintenance.

Of course the average american living in a mcmansion which wouldn't pass regulations in 1992 Poland cannot use such solutions, but really it isn't a problem of climate, you'll find passive houses from africa to norway and everywhere in between, most of them without heat pumps


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