Windows 11 performs like a pig, it’s full of unnecessary notifications and apps that constantly seek attention, copilot isn’t useful, I feel like I’m being spied on, the UI is weird.
It could be turned into a great OS if they simply remove some things. Get rid of the ads, make copilot an optional component, stop trying to sell 365, let me turn off telemetry, etc.
Remember when installers allowed you to personalize the components you wanted to install? I miss that. I wasn't on windows but I remember that office allowed you to choose which components you wanted
Many retailers increase their prices by multiples of the tariff increase rather than a straight passthrough so that they can maintain their margins. It's probably why a lot of the biggest retailers with monopolies aren't complaining much about tariffs. They mostly keep the same margin and actually increase revenue. Meanwhile, it's been incredibly damaging to small businesses and consumers. Functionally, tariffs have been a massive wealth transfer.
Can't repeat this enough and I'd like to make sure to connect the dots. The Big Beautiful Bill that was signed into law cut taxes. To keep the US Federal Government from going (even more) into debt, Trump introduced aggressive tariffs (it doesn't matter that he introduced the tariffs before the BBB became law because he/they knew the BBB would pass and that was baked into the tariff decision).
The BBB tax cuts benefit the wealthy much more than the average person. The tariffs are borne by both the wealthy and by the average person when they buy tariffed goods, but those tariffs are easily absorbed by the wealthy while acting as an additional tax on the average person by increasing prices. This is just about as direct a transfer of wealth from the average person to the wealthy as you could possibly put into place (barring an actual transfer where the average person is taxed and those dollars are literally transferred directly into a wealthy person's bank account).
In a way, it's a genius move. Convince a healthy chunk of the US population that you're on a populist crusade to bring jobs back to America while increasing the wealth of the wealthy and taking even more of the average person's income. Don't forget that the reason the jobs were exported in the first place was to decrease costs so that, you guessed it, wealthy people would get wealthier (but at least in that scenario the cost of a tv went way down, am I right???).
All that said, I don't mean to suggest that bringing jobs back isn't actually a goal. It's just not the primary goal. My take on the priorities of the current admin's tax policy, including the tariffs (which, broken record, are taxes) 1. decrease taxes on the wealthy 2. decrease income taxes on everyone else who pays taxes 3. get "everyone else who pays taxes" to fund the decreased taxes on the wealthy 4. bring jobs back. Somewhere in there is also "create a mechanism for opaque profiteering." I'm not quite sure where that falls on the list. Cynically it's probably number 2.
Based on the graph, the increase in cost to the retailer was $0.49 and they marked up $1.10. I imagine this is pretty standard markup but multiplies the effect of the tariff and passes it to the consumer, not to mention the producer and importer.
also, I'm not sure retailers are necessarily to blame. some use pretty simple math in calculating the retail price based on cost and don't necessarily have visibility into the tariffs.
I can share my own experience as a small business owner. I sell coffee. I engage in some direct trade and also buy some coffee from domestic vendors who already have the coffee stateside.
I primarily buy Costa Rican coffee and they got hit with a 10% tariff. That adds like 5 cents to a latte. Whatever. I’m not raising my prices over that. But then Brazil got nailed with much higher tariffs and they are the #1 exporter. Colombia was another one that got hit with high tariffs and they are a major producer. Suddenly, that was driving up the cost of my Costa Rican coffee as demand that was previously met by Brazil and Colombia shifted to other countries. I went from being the exclusive U.S. importer of my coffee to being in a bidding war. The last time I imported coffee, it cost me twice as much as the shipment prior. Then they tried to raise the price again. I ended up having to find new suppliers before things eventually settled down when the people in charge realized you can’t produce coffee in the U.S. (Technically, Hawaii produces exorbitantly priced coffee at a max capacity that amounts to a rounding error relative to domestic demand. There’s no other place in the U.S. with the climate to grow coffee. Besides, it’s incredibly labor intensive. Coffee essentially can’t be produced here.)
Cups were a real pain in the ass too. We were buying our stuff from the Dominican Republic and Latin America, but people are mostly getting that stuff from China. When China became prohibitively expensive, everyone rushed to find other suppliers. That drove prices up and messed up lead times in the short term. The story with most packaging was the same.
Literally every single item required for my business increased in price. It turns out nobody produces anything 100% domestically without any foreign input. My syrups are made in the USA but the bottles they come in are from somewhere else. My empanada shells come from Argentina. Everything from chocolate to pistachios to straws and cleaning supplies. Everything is a product of global trade, whether it’s ingredients, raw materials, packaging, or the machinery and tools used to manufacture it. To maintain my own equipment, I have to buy parts from Italy.
I held out for several months. I was feeling it as a business owner as well as every time I went to the store. I knew my customers were feeling it. I live in the neighborhood where my business is located. A lot of my customers are retirees on a fixed income. The last thing I want to do is add to the pressure. Meanwhile, I have employees who deserve a living wage. I have my own needs. I dumped some products and suppliers that became too expensive for me to sell and have any remaining dignity. I saved everywhere I could without compromising on quality.
About 7 months into this bullshit I had to raise prices for most of my products. It couldn’t be helped. Still, I’m embarrassed at how much we have to charge for some items.
I feel like the last year has been complete chaos. It’s economic shocks and supply chain disruptions everywhere I look. It’s just one thing after another and that’s before I even turn on the news.
And I bet when you did eventually raise your prices, you raised them by more than you strictly needed to. Partly to help offset the losses you took for the 7 months you didn't raise prices, and partly to give yourself enough margin so that if your supplier's prices go up tomorrow (which they will) you don't have to raise your prices immediately.
That's classic "prices are sticky behavior". Prices change less often, and by more, than they would in a classical economics model.
Thankfully Firefox has a mute button on every tab but I also frantically scrolled down the page looking for a video to stop, but it was futile - there is no video!? It's just a podcast, describing phones with keyboards? CNET really has fallen.
It took all of 2 minutes to delete my account and block Discord from my network. Credit to Discord for making the process very easy using the mobile app. I'm not going to put up with this crap just to occasionally use this app to play games with friends. My kids sure as hell aren't going to comply with this policy either.
Some people just want their name in the contributor list, whether it's for ego, to build a portfolio, etc. I think that's what it comes down to. Many projects, especially high profile ones, have to deal with low effort contributions - correcting spelling mistakes, reformatting code, etc. It's been going on for a long time. The Linux contributor guidelines - probably a lot of other projects too - specifically call this stuff out and caution people not to do it lest they suffer the wrath of the LKML. AI coding tools open up all kinds of new possibilities for these types of contributors, but it's not AI that's the problem.
Really cool product. How do you plan to monetize it?
You guys need some marketing help. There’s a lot of potential here, but you don’t do a good job of selling it. Tell me what problems I’m going to be able to solve or what headaches it will eliminate. Can it going into that shitty Canvas app my kids’ school uses, identify outstanding assignments or low grades and send me a daily text summary? Can it automate buying everything on my grocery list and setting up delivery? Or look up flight options, ask me what I want and book it for me? Even better, I’m stuck having to look up international flights for 7 people in three households, get everyone to agree on one and then book them. Please build something that will do that.
Have you ever thought about a marketplace for premade workflows? Or a library of integrations that are already tested that a user can mix and match to create complex automations? Or access to more MCP servers?
For example, it would be really neat to trigger jobs that perform some task and then make a call to Twilio or something to send an alert. Or some building blocks that tie into my Square account or Amazon account. I want to be able to describe the results I want, but I don’t want to explain how to interact with a particular service and then test that.
I would love to be able to give a prompt like this: “review my item library in Square, identify items that are missing descriptions or are miscategorized, propose the fixes, and confirm with me before making any changes.” That’s an extremely tedious task that requires a lot of clicking and page loads. I hate it and I would pay for your product if you could save me that time.
Or this: “Every month, alert me to any fluctuations in product cost and which items in my Square catalog are affected. Highlight any items where my COGS exceeds 35%. All the invoices are available in my email.” That would be incredibly powerful. Doing this manually can take days.
> “Every month, alert me to any fluctuations in product cost and which items in my Square catalog are affected. Highlight any items where my COGS exceeds 35%. All the invoices are available in my email.” That would be incredibly powerful.
You could try this use case on on agent builder even today. We also have a scheduled tasks for you to schedule it to run monthly
> Have you ever thought about a marketplace for premade workflows?
We want to do this and are moving towards that! But we first need to make the premade (or user published) workflows very reliable.
Why should Red Hat be expected to contribute to Gentoo? A distro is funded by its own users. What distro directly contributes to another distro if it’s not a derivative or something?
Red Hat primarily contributes code to the kernel and various OSS projects, paid for by the clients on enterprise contracts. A paying client needs something and it gets done. Then the rest of us get to benefit by receiving the code for free. It’s a beautiful model.
If you look at lists of top contributors, Red Hat (along with the usual suspects in enterprise) are consistently at the top.
It’s not exactly obscure. It’s Arch with a nice installer and binaries with compiler optimizations for the latest hardware. It’s not a crazy choice if you have very new hardware. It feels exactly like Arch because it is.
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