deliriousdreams

This is a threat. They know that they’re using the stock market to fund their greed and that anyone with savings tied up there (Retirement funds that are invested in the market) will be on the hook. Plus the tax payer money they’re going to ask for because they’re “too big to fail”.

Sigh. This article is all over the place.

The headline suggests that payment processors/AI companies/retailers are fighting about the collection of shopper data.

AI obviously doesn’t collect the kind of data that would be useful to the retailers or even the payment processors. So it does stand to reason that the retailers would be a little miffed about “agentic AI” insinuating itself as the middle man between them and shoppers, effectively cutting them off from that data flow.

But that’s not actually what’s happening. It seems like (potentially), the AI companies want to sell “agentic AI shopping” to the retailers and possibly payment processors? But these entities want information about the shoppers that the AI doesn’t collect and the quibble is over whether the AI can be made to collect that data?

Here’s the thing. Since November 2022 Valve’s Steam OS has carved out almost a 5% share of the market for Linux (if we include Linux users who don’t use Steam OS). Windows has something like a 25-30 year head start on steam in this respect.

Something like 35% of PC gamers are still using Windows 10 after the EOL BS MS pulled in October. There is something to be said for those users being more willing to jump ship to steam than there is for them to buy exhorbitantly priced hardware to stay on windows when their hardware inevitably begins to show its age.

I think it’s fairly likely that Steam OS will continue to take chunks of user base out of MS for the foreseeable future.

It may not be the year of the Linux desktop, but it’s not nothing either. Valve’s devices are more hamstrung (as someone else in one of these threads said) by where you can source their hardware than they are by the MS dominated market share.

It can’t hurt to support this, despite the popular games it /may/ not be compatible with over time, because users are also becoming increasingly disillusioned with MS in general.

Lots of things remain to be seen but nobody (MS included) was expecting Steam to be successful as a platform for game sales, nor were they expecting them to be successful with physical hardware and yet here we are. Is that success limited? Sure. But it has become less limited over time.