#End User Computing Market

[nixcraft]

Tech support

via https://www.instagram.com/p/CsmuBmjxXIp/

[david843346]

End User Computing Market: Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2035

Research Nester’s recent market research analysis on “End User Computing Market: Global Demand Analysis & Opportunity Outlook 2035” delivers a detailed competitor’s analysis and a detailed overview of the global end-user computing market in terms of market segmentation by solution, service, deployment model, organization size, end-user industry, and by region.

Widespread Remote Working Culture to Promote Global Market Share of End User Computing

The global end-user computing market is estimated to grow majorly on account of the rising technological advances such as the advent of digital technologies, artificial intelligence, machine learning, and big data that are playing a major role in managing remote staff. According to a survey conducted in June of 2022, 8 in 10 people are working hybrid or remote, while only 2 in 10 are entirely on-site. And this trend is anticipated to continue shortly. With the increasing transition in working methods and the rising need to make it a seamless process, the adoption of EUC is also exponentially expanding. Moreover, the uptrend of bring your device (BYOD) and other such trends led more organizations to employ end-user computing to provide access to corporate applications and data across multiple device types. As per research, it is also estimated that companies that switch to BYOD smartphones can save up to around USD 341 per employee, which is why this culture is further expected to uptrend.

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Some of the major growth factors and challenges that are associated with the growth of the global end-user computing market are:

Growth Drivers:

Increasing Consumerization of Information Technology (IT)

Growing Workforce Mobility

Challenges:

The growing concern for risks associated with data security with end-user computing, and the lack of audit trails are some of the major factors anticipated to hamper the global market size of end-user computing. The rising risk of security as unsecured files may be easily traded among users is responsible for hindering the market demand.

By deployment model, the global end-user computing market is segmented into on-premise and cloud. The cloud segment is to garner the highest revenue by the end of 2035 by growing at a significant CAGR over the forecast period. Expanding collaboration between giant cloud service providers as well as the rise in the adoption of cloud services by several enterprises across the globe is expected to boost the segment growth. Infosys Limited, a global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting, announced that it will expand its collaboration with Microsoft Corporation, to accelerate enterprise cloud transformation journeys globally. As per Infosys Cloud Radar, through effective cloud adoption, each year enterprises can add up to USD 414 billion in net new profits.

By region, the North American end-user computing market is to generate the highest revenue by the end of 2035. This growth is anticipated by increasing transitions among organizations from a design-build-support model to an as-a-service model together with the growing adoption of BYOD culture which generated the need to access the data anywhere, anytime, on enterprise's premises or in the public cloud. According to the data, more than 82% of the organizations in the United States have some kind of a BYOD program.

This report also provides the existing competitive scenario of some of the key players of the global end-user computing market which includes company profiling of VMware, Inc., Citrix Systems Inc., IGEL Technology Gmbh, Genpact, Fujitsu, Ltd., Infosys Limited, Amazon Web Services Inc., Data Integrity Inc., Patriot Technologies Inc., Dell Inc., Nutanix, and others.     

Access our detailed report at:

[abbiistabbii]

I don't think people realize how absolutely wild Linux is.

Here we have an Operating system that now has 100 different varieties, all of them with their own little features and markets that are also so customizable that you can literally choose what desktop environment you want. Alongside that it is the OS of choice for Supercomputers, most Web servers, and even tiny little toy computers that hackers and gadget makers use. It is the Operating System running on most of the world's smartphones. That's right. Android is a version of Linux.

It can run on literally anything up to and including a potato, and as of now desktop Linux Distros like Ubuntu and Mint are so easily to use and user friendly that technological novices can use them. This Operating system has had App stores since the 90s.

Oh, and what's more, this operating system was fuckin' built by volunteers and users alongside businesses and universities because they needed an all purpose operating system so they built one themselves and released it for free. If you know how to, you can add to this.

Oh, and it's founder wasn't some corporate hotshot. It's an introverted Swedish-speaking Finn who, while he was a student, started making his own Operating system after playing around with someone else's OS. He was going to call it Freax but the guy he got server space from named the folder of his project "Linux" (Linus Unix) and the name stuck. He operates this project from his Home office which is painted in a colour used in asylums. Man's so fucking introverted he developed the world's biggest code repo, Git, so he didn't have to deal with drama and email.

Steam adopted it meaning a LOT of games now natively run in Linux and what cannot be run natively can be adapted to run. It's now the OS used on their consoles (Steam Deck) and to this, a lot of people have found games run better on Linux than on Windows. More computers run Steam on Linux than MacOS.

On top of that the Arctic World Archive (basically the Svalbard Seed bank, but for Data) have this OS saved in their databanks so if the world ends the survivors are going to be using it.

On top of this? It's Free! No "Freemium" bullshit, no "pay to unlock" shit, no licenses, no tracking or data harvesting. If you have an old laptop that still works and a 16GB USB drive, you can go get it and install it and have a functioning computer because it uses less fucking resources than Windows. Got a shit PC? Linux Mint XFCE or Xubuntu is lightweight af. This shit is stopping eWaste.

What's more, it doesn't even scrimp on style. KDE, XFCE, Gnome, Cinnamon, all look pretty and are functional and there's even a load of people who try make their installs look pretty AF as a hobby called "ricing" with a subreddit (/r/unixporn) dedicated to it.

Linux is fucking wild.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kickstarting a book to end enshittification, because Amazon will not carry it

My next book is The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation: it’s a Big Tech disassembly manual that explains how to disenshittify the web and bring back the old good internet. The hardcover comes from Verso on Sept 5, but the audiobook comes from me — because Amazon refuses to sell my audio:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

Amazon owns Audible, the monopoly audiobook platform that controls >90% of the audio market. They require mandatory DRM for every book sold, locking those books forever to Amazon’s monopoly platform. If you break up with Amazon, you have to throw away your entire audiobook library.

That’s a hell of a lot of leverage to hand to any company, let alone a rapacious monopoly that ran a program targeting small publishers called “Project Gazelle,” where execs were ordered to attack indie publishers “the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle”:

https://www.businessinsider.com/sadistic-amazon-treated-book-sellers-the-way-a-cheetah-would-pursue-a-sickly-gazelle-2013-10

[Image ID: Journalist and novelist Doctorow (Red Team Blues) details a plan for how to break up Big Tech in this impassioned and perceptive manifesto….Doctorow’s sense of urgency is contagious -Publishers Weekly]

I won’t sell my work with DRM, because DRM is key to the enshittification of the internet. Enshittification is why the old, good internet died and became “five giant websites filled with screenshots of the other four” (h/t Tom Eastman). When a tech company can lock in its users and suppliers, it can drain value from both sides, using DRM and other lock-in gimmicks to keep their business even as they grow ever more miserable on the platform.

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

[Image ID: A brilliant barn burner of a book. Cory is one of the sharpest tech critics, and he shows with fierce clarity how our computational future could be otherwise -Kate Crawford, author of The Atlas of AI”]

The Internet Con isn’t just an analysis of where enshittification comes from: it’s a detailed, shovel-ready policy prescription for halting enshittification, throwing it into reverse and bringing back the old, good internet.

How do we do that? With interoperability: the ability to plug new technology into those crapulent, decaying platform. Interop lets you choose which parts of the service you want and block the parts you don’t (think of how an adblocker lets you take the take-it-or-leave “offer” from a website and reply with “How about nah?”):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

But interop isn’t just about making platforms less terrible — it’s an explosive charge that demolishes walled gardens. With interop, you can leave a social media service, but keep talking to the people who stay. With interop, you can leave your mobile platform, but bring your apps and media with you to a rival’s service. With interop, you can break up with Amazon, and still keep your audiobooks.

So, if interop is so great, why isn’t it everywhere?

Well, it used to be. Interop is how Microsoft became the dominant operating system:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

[Image ID: Nobody gets the internet-both the nuts and bolts that make it hum and the laws that shaped it into the mess it is-quite like Cory, and no one’s better qualified to deliver us a user manual for fixing it. That’s The Internet Con: a rousing, imaginative, and accessible treatise for correcting our curdled online world. If you care about the internet, get ready to dedicate yourself to making interoperability a reality. -Brian Merchant, author of Blood in the Machine]

It’s how Apple saved itself from Microsoft’s vicious campaign to destroy it:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/06/adversarial-interoperability-reviving-elegant-weapon-more-civilized-age-slay

Every tech giant used interop to grow, and then every tech giant promptly turned around and attacked interoperators. Every pirate wants to be an admiral. When Big Tech did it, that was progress; when you do it back to Big Tech, that’s piracy. The tech giants used their monopoly power to make interop without permission illegal, creating a kind of “felony contempt of business model” (h/t Jay Freeman).

The Internet Con describes how this came to pass, but, more importantly, it tells us how to fix it. It lays out how we can combine different kinds of interop requirements (like the EU’s Digital Markets Act and Massachusetts’s Right to Repair law) with protections for reverse-engineering and other guerrilla tactics to create a system that is strong without being brittle, hard to cheat on and easy to enforce.

What’s more, this book explains how to get these policies: what existing legislative, regulatory and judicial powers can be invoked to make them a reality. Because we are living through the Great Enshittification, and crises erupt every ten seconds, and when those crises occur, the “good ideas lying around” can move from the fringes to the center in an eyeblink:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/12/only-a-crisis/#lets-gooooo

[Image ID: Thoughtfully written and patiently presented, The Internet Con explains how the promise of a free and open internet was lost to predatory business practices and the rush to commodify every aspect of our lives. An essential read for anyone that wants to understand how we lost control of our digital spaces and infrastructure to Silicon Valley’s tech giants, and how we can start fighting to get it back. -Tim Maughan, author of INFINITE DETAIL]

After all, we’ve known Big Tech was rotten for years, but we had no idea what to do about it. Every time a Big Tech colossus did something ghastly to millions or billions of people, we tried to fix the tech company. There’s no fixing the tech companies. They need to burn. The way to make users safe from Big Tech predators isn’t to make those predators behave better — it’s to evacuate those users:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/18/urban-wildlife-interface/#combustible-walled-gardens

I’ve been campaigning for human rights in the digital world for more than 20 years; I’ve been EFF’s European Director, representing the public interest at the EU, the UN, Westminster, Ottawa and DC. This is the subject I’ve devoted my life to, and I live my principles. I won’t let my books be sold with DRM, which means that Audible won’t carry my audiobooks. My agent tells me that this decision has cost me enough money to pay off my mortgage and put my kid through college. That’s a price I’m willing to pay if it means that my books aren’t enshittification bait.

But not selling on Audible has another cost, one that’s more important to me: a lot of readers prefer audiobooks and 9 out of 10 of those readers start and end their searches on Audible. When they don’t find an author there, they assume no audiobook exists, period. It got so bad I put up an audiobook on Amazon — me, reading an essay, explaining how Audible rips off writers and readers. It’s called “Why None of My Audiobooks Are For Sale on Audible”:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/07/25/can-you-hear-me-now/#acx-ripoff

[Image ID: Doctorow has been thinking longer and smarter than anyone else I know about how we create and exchange value in a digital age. -Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock]

To get my audiobooks into readers’ ears, I pre-sell them on Kickstarter. This has been wildly successful, both financially and as a means of getting other prominent authors to break up with Amazon and use crowdfunding to fill the gap. Writers like Brandon Sanderson are doing heroic work, smashing Amazon’s monopoly:

https://www.brandonsanderson.com/guest-editorial-cory-doctorow-is-a-bestselling-author-but-audible-wont-carry-his-audiobooks/

And to be frank, I love audiobooks, too. I swim every day as physio for a chronic pain condition, and I listen to 2–3 books/month on my underwater MP3 player, disappearing into an imaginary world as I scull back and forth in my public pool. I’m able to get those audiobooks on my MP3 player thanks to Libro.fm, a DRM-free store that supports indie booksellers all over the world:

https://blog.libro.fm/a-qa-with-mark-pearson-libro-fm-ceo-and-co-founder/

Producing my own audiobooks has been a dream. Working with Skyboat Media, I’ve gotten narrators like @wilwheaton​, Amber Benson, @neil-gaiman​ and Stefan Rudnicki for my work:

https://craphound.com/shop/

[Image ID: “This book is the instruction manual Big Tech doesn’t want you to read. It deconstructs their crummy products, undemocratic business models, rigged legal regimes, and lies. Crack this book and help build something better. -Astra Taylor, author of Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When Its Gone”]

But for this title, I decided that I would read it myself. After all, I’ve been podcasting since 2006, reading my own work aloud every week or so, even as I traveled the world and gave thousands of speeches about the subject of this book. I was excited (and a little trepedatious) at the prospect, but how could I pass up a chance to work with director Gabrielle de Cuir, who has directed everyone from Anne Hathaway to LeVar Burton to Eric Idle?

Reader, I fucking nailed it. I went back to those daily recordings fully prepared to hate them, but they were good — even great (especially after my engineer John Taylor Williams mastered them). Listen for yourself!

https://archive.org/details/cory_doctorow_internet_con_chapter_01

I hope you’ll consider backing this Kickstarter. If you’ve ever read my free, open access, CC-licensed blog posts and novels, or listened to my podcasts, or come to one of my talks and wished there was a way to say thank you, this is it. These crowdfunders make my DRM-free publishing program viable, even as audiobooks grow more central to a writer’s income and even as a single company takes over nearly the entire audiobook market.

Backers can choose from the DRM-free audiobook, DRM-free ebook (EPUB and MOBI) and a hardcover — including a signed, personalized option, fulfilled through the great LA indie bookstore Book Soup:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/the-internet-con-how-to-seize-the-means-of-computation

What’s more, these ebooks and audiobooks are unlike any you’ll get anywhere else because they are sold without any terms of service or license agreements. As has been the case since time immemorial, when you buy these books, they’re yours, and you are allowed to do anything with them that copyright law permits — give them away, lend them to friends, or simply read them with any technology you choose.

As with my previous Kickstarters, backers can get their audiobooks delivered with an app (from libro.fm) or as a folder of MP3s. That helps people who struggle with “sideloading,” a process that Apple and Google have made progressively harder, even as they force audiobook and ebook sellers to hand over a 30% app tax on every dollar they make:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/doctorow/red-team-blues-another-audiobook-that-amazon-wont-sell/posts/3788112

Enshittification is rotting every layer of the tech stack: mobile, payments, hosting, social, delivery, playback. Every tech company is pulling the rug out from under us, using the chokepoints they built between audiences and speakers, artists and fans, to pick all of our pockets.

The Internet Con isn’t just a lament for the internet we lost — it’s a plan to get it back. I hope you’ll get a copy and share it with the people you love, even as the tech platforms choke off your communities to pad their quarterly numbers.

Next weekend (Aug 4-6), I'll be in Austin for Armadillocon, a science fiction convention, where I'm the Guest of Honor:

https://armadillocon.org/d45/

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/31/seize-the-means-of-computation/#the-internet-con

[Image ID: My forthcoming book 'The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation' in various editions: Verso hardcover, audiobook displayed on a phone, and ebook displayed on an e-ink reader.]

[tangibletechnomancy]

Neural Nets, Walled Gardens, and Positive Vibes Only

the crystal spire at the center of the techno-utopian walled garden

Anyone who knows or even just follows me knows that as much as I love neural nets, I'm far from being a fan of AI as a corporate fad. Despite this, I am willing to use big-name fad-chasing tools...sometimes, particularly on a free basis. My reasons for this are twofold:

Many people don't realize this, but these tools are more expensive for the companies to operate than they earn from increased interest in the technology. Using many of these free tools can, in fact, be the opposite of "support" at this time. Corporate AI is dying, use it to kill it faster!

You can't give a full, educated critique of something's flaws and failings without engaging with it yourself, and I fully intend to rip Dall-E 3, or more accurately the companies behind it, a whole new asshole - so I want it to be a fair, nuanced, and most importantly personally informed new asshole.

Now, much has already been said about the biases inherent to current AI models. This isn't a problem exclusive to closed-source corporate models; any model is only as good as its dataset, and it turns out that people across the whole wide internet are...pretty biased. Most major models right now, trained primarily on the English-language internet, present a very western point of view - treating young conventionally attractive white people as a default at best, and presenting blatantly misinformative stereotypes at worst. While awareness of the issue can turn it into a valuable tool to study those biases and how they intertwine, the marketing and hype around AI combined with the popular idea that computers can't possibly be biased tends to make it so they're likely to perpetuate them instead.

This problem only gets magnified when introduced to my mortal enemy-

If I never see this FUCKING dog again it will be too soon-

Content filters.

Theoretically, content filters exist to prevent some of the worst-faith uses of AI - deepfakes, true plagiarism and forgery, sexual exploitation, and more. In practice, many of them block anything that can be remotely construed as potentially sexual, violent, or even negative in any way. Frequently banned subjects include artistic nudity or even partial nudity, fight scenes, anything even remotely adjacent to horror, and still more.

The problems with this expand fractally.

While the belief that AI is capable of supplanting all other art forms, let alone should do so, is...far less widespread among its users than the more reactionary subset of its critics seem to believe (and in fact arguably less common among AI users than non-users in the first place; see again: you cannot give a full, educated critique of something's failings without engaging with it yourself), it's not nonexistent - and the business majors who have rarely if ever engaged with other forms of art, who make up a good percentage of the executives of these companies, often do fall on that side, or at least claim to in order to make more sales (but let's keep the lid on that can of worms for now).

When this ties to existing online censorship issues, such as a billionaire manchild taking over Twitter to "help humanity" (read: boost US far-right voices and promote and/or redefine hate speech), or arcane algorithms on TikTok determining what to boost and deboost leading to proliferation of neologisms to soften and obfuscate "sensitive" subjects (of which "unalive" is frequently considered emblematic), including such horrible, traumatizing things as...the existence of fat people, disabled people, and queer people (where the censorship is claimed to be for their benefit, no less!), the potential impact is apparent: while the end goal is impossible, in part because AI is not, in fact, capable of supplanting all other forms of art, what we're seeing is yet another part of a continuing, ever more aggressive push for sanitizing what kinds of ideas people can express at all, with the law looking to only make it worse rather than better through bills such as KOSA (which you can sign a petition against here).

And just like the other forms of censorship before and alongside it, AI content filtering targets the most vulnerable in society far more readily than it targets those looking to harm them. The filters have no idea what makes something an expression of a marginalized identity vs. what makes it a derogatory statement against that group, or an attempt at creating superficially safe-for-work fetish art - so, they frequently err on the side of removing anything uncertain. Boys in skirts and dresses are frequently blocked, presumably because they're taken for fetish art. Results of prompts about sadness or loneliness are frequently blocked, presumably because they may promote self harm, somehow. In my (admittedly limited) experiment, attempts at generating dark-skinned characters were blocked more frequently than attempts at generating light-skinned ones, presumably because the filter decided that it was racist to [checks notes] ...acknowledge that a character has a different skin tone than the default white characters it wanted to give me. Facial and limb differences are often either erased from results, or blocked presumably on suspicion of "violent content".

But note that I say "presumably" - the error message doesn't say on what grounds the detected images are "unsafe". Users are left only to speculate on what grounds we're being warned.

But what makes censorship of AI generated work even more alarming, in the context of the executive belief that it can render all other art forms obsolete, is that other forms of censorship only target where a person can say such earth-shaking, controversial things as "I am disabled and I like existing" or "I am happy being queer" or "mental health is important" or "I survived a violent crime" - you can be prevented from posting it on TikTok, but not from saying it to a friend next to you, let alone your therapist. AI content filtering, on the other hand, aims to prevent you from expressing it at all.

This becomes particularly alarming when you recall one of the most valuable use cases for AI generation: enabling disabled people to express themselves more clearly, or in new forms. Most people can find other workarounds in the form of more conventional, manual modes of expression, sure, but no amount of desperation can reverse hand paralysis that prevents a person from holding a pen, nor a traumatic brain injury or mental disability that blocks them from speaking or writing in a way that's easy to understand. And who is one of the most frequently censored groups? Disabled people.

So, my question to Bing and OpenAI is this: in what FUCKING universe is banning me from expressing my very existence "protecting" me?

Bad dog! Stop breaking my shit and get the FUCK out of my way!

Generated as a gift for a friend who was even more frustrated with that FUCKING dog than I was

All images - except the FUCKING dog - generated with Dall-E 3 via Bing Image Creator, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[ralfmaximus]

Recently, StatCounter posted a chart showing that Windows 10's market share is growing, while Windows 11's is shrinking. This flies in the face of what Microsoft has planned, especially given how Windows 10's end-of-life date is looming in the distance. As such, I wanted to do some research into the topic; did StatCounter's statistics get things wrong? Or are people downgrading from Windows 11 to Windows 10? While there's no way to state without a doubt that people are downgrading, I did find people with pain points with Windows 11 that might be contributing to the system's downfall.

Oh, I'll tell you why: people are fucking pissed that Microsoft is (1) shoving unblockable pop-up ads onto their desktop and (2) adding AI to stuff that doesn't warrant AI.

Like, who needs AI in File Explorer?

Or a dedicated Copilot™ button that pops open a slow-as-hell panel that allows you to receive hallucinated lies to simple questions? And when it's not lying, its output is the typical LLM homogenized slurry of too-many-words to express simple concepts.

OR COURSE people are going to stop using your shitty product if you continually surprise them with bad "features" nobody asked for.

And Linux users, I love you. But the first one of y'all to chime in with JUST SWITCH TO LINUX gets bopped with a rolled up magazine because many people do not have that choice. Either work requires them to use Windows, or they don't have direct control over their computer. My elderly MIL is not going to install & maintain a fork of Ubuntu so she can play solitaire. It's a nice thought but Linux isn't the solution for some folks.

[ms-demeanor]

As I understand it you work in enterprise computer acquisitions?

TL;DR What's the general vibe for AI accelerating CPUs in the enterprise world for client compute?

Have you had any requests from your clients to help them upgrade their stuff to Core Ultra/Whateverthefuck Point with the NPUs? Or has the corporate world generally shown resistance rather than acquiescence to the wave of the future? I'm so sorry for phrasing it like that I had no idea how else to say that without using actual marketing buzzwords and also keeping it interesting to read.

I know in the enterprise, on-die neural acceleration has been ruining panties the world over (Korea's largest hyperscaler even opted for Intel Sapphire Rapids CPUs over Nvidia's Hopper GPUs due to poor supply and not super worth it for them specifically uplift in inference performance which was all that they really cared about), and I'm personally heavily enticed by the new NPU packing processors from both Team Red and Team We Finally Fucking Started Using Chiplets Are You Happy Now (though in large part for the integrated graphics). But I'm really curious to know, are actual corporate acquisitions folks scooping up the new AI-powered hotness to automagically blur giant pink dildos from the backgrounds of Zoom calls, or is it perceived more as a marketing fad at the moment (a situation I'm sure will change in the next year or so once OpenVINO finds footing outside of Audacity and fucking GIMP)?

So sorry for the extremely long, annoying, and tangent-laden ask, hope the TL;DR helps.

Ninety eight percent of our end users use their computers for email and browser stuff exclusively; the other two percent use CAD in relatively low-impact ways so none of them appear to give a shit about increasing their processing power in a really serious way.

Like, corporately speaking the heavy shit you're dealing with is going to be databases and math and computers are pretty good at dealing with those even on hardware from the nineties.

When Intel pitched the sapphire processors to us in May of 2023 the only discussion on AI was about improving performance for AI systems and deep learning applications, NOT using on-chip AI to speed things up.

The were discussing their "accelerators," not AI and in the webinar I attended it was mostly a conversation about the performance benefits of dynamic load balancing and talking about how different "acclerators" would redistribute processing power. This writeup from Intel in 2022 shows how little AI was part of the discussion for Sapphire Rapids.

In August of 2023, this was the marketing email for these processors:

So. Like. The processors are better. But AI is a marketing buzzword.

And yeah every business that I deal with has no use for the hot shit; we're still getting bronze and silver processors and having zero problems, though I work exclusively with businesses with under 500 employees.

Most of the demand that I see from my customers is "please can you help us limp this fifteen year old SAN along for another budget cycle?"

[cyber-clown]

intel and AMD have announced a new joint initiative to introduce the new "FCU" (Fluid Coagulating Unit) to all new pre-built PCs under the new "Liquid Certification Scheme", providing a strong incentive for manufacturers to start providing FCUs in the market at affordable retail prices. This comes amongst a new directive from the World Wide Web Executive Association Tribunal Administrative Support Scheme to move forward on Web 4.0 since Web 3.0 sucked balls and nobody gave a shit, with Web 4.0 focusing on the introduction of new "Wetsites" which rely on the FCU to make computers leak various pungent fluids during the use of online services, with obvious benefits for the end user.

[aishavass]

The top players of the End User Computing Market are Genpact, Tech Mahindra, Mindtree, HCL Infosystems, and many more players....

[mitigatedchaos]

[ tumblr user ]

It's also a funny criticism. Like yeah, marxism has actual substance and can't be boiled down to a quick soundbyte or a handful of phrases. I'm sorry that y'all can't fucking read.

Leftist wall-of-text meme discourse is circulating.

We could talk about substantive problems with Communism. The labor theory of value and the economic calculation problem would be two key subjects. Either could be handled at great length, or boiled down into a pithy right-wing meme.

But I think it'd be more novel to discuss the mechanics at play for art and the meme game.

I'll discuss several of my own images below, and considerations, including this Tumblr favorite below. I'll also take a longer lefty meme and fix it up. The post is a bit rambly, but not too bad (~2,300 words).

My art hasn't traveled that far, but I do post images that have a lot of text in the images sometimes, and I've never caught flak for it. In fact, I accidentally did "left-wing memes vs. right-wing memes" as a comic back in 2017, and it got reblogged by Argumate, who is not known for making long posts. It wasn't super popular, but the third panel is a personal favorite of mine.

The benign violation theory of humor seems to have pretty good explanatory power. The first panel does contain a wall of text. That it's a wall of text is part of the joke, but you can't have the joke always be that it's a wall of text - it then stops being a violation, because it's expected. The more important part is that if you read it carefully, it's clearly describing a market-based system, which Comrade A here catches on to after a moment.

If we wanted to boil down the long text here, it could be summarized with something more like, "Money can be exchanged for goods and services."

The second panel is the unmasking. If we had the right character, we could end it here. A highly-recognizable, prominent economist or capitalist-aligned politician would be appropriate, but we could also replace the head with a book such as The Wealth of Nations, which would certainly be unexpected, but consistent with market-based position advocated in the first panel.

However, the character used is actually the avatar of the blog Mitigated Chaos, which most outside readers would not be familiar with, so we need a third panel to explain.

In retrospect, only showing half the head here is unfortunate; comics are a visual medium, and if it were done again, there might be another way to arrange it.

While left-wing memes are often described as too long, right-wing memes are often described as quite a bit shorter. The irony is that fully explaining this panel would take quite a bit longer than the first one!

This panel is a reference to the immense productive capacity, largely through technology, that humanity has gained under capitalism, which simulates evolution-like dynamics at the firm level.

Rather than Adam Smith's more benign "invisible hand," this panel treats the competition under capitalism as fierce, not market aid, but market discipline - an invisible fist. At the same, "The Way of the Invisible Fist" suggests that it's like a martial art, and can be taught and learned. This is not an attack, but an invitation ("Can you feel it, brother?") to learn.

"I can feel all the old limitations starting to fall away, now," refers partly to the immense rise in production capacity changing the nature of humanity's environment, such as reducing the burden of infectious disease and famine, which had been with humanity essentially for as long as we've been humanity (more so under early agriculturalism).

...but, along with the computer chip integrated into the forehead, it also refers to the likely condition of capital being directly integrated into or influencing the human body sometime later this century.

However, it also refers to the way that humanity have now tightly integrated capital into our lives, living in such a way that our very survival depends on the capital system within which we live, and which surrounds us at all times. It is very far away from the jungles or even the low-energy farming of the medieval era.

If you learn economics and make projections of the future, you can see "forever," which is clearly exaggerated both to accentuate the frightening nature of this apparently Nick-Land-like view, but also describes the elements of current society that might not be visible to Comrade A due to their lack of knowledge of this system.

However, ending it on the third panel would have looked a little too, "I'm cool; you're not," so on the fourth panel we zoom out, which reduces the resolution of the more "serious" style from panel three, and provides some contrast with Comrade A.

Here, Comrade A is presented as lacking the advanced techniques our Invisible Fist practitioner has, but as overall more reasonable than we might expect.

There's a sort of natural tension between the economic optimization in third panel, and the needs of humanity more broadly. Comrade A's plan is less efficient, but lacks that terrifying edge.

His last statement is his personal opinion, but it's left to the reader whether they agree with it - though it is clearly communist.

Tumblr user oligo* once reblogged a fantastic meme regarding Landian Acceleration. I went looking for it, and as it happens, I found it.

Is this a leftist meme? I think it is! It also appears to be a reference to this much more common meme image, but much less annoying.

Let's talk about it for a little bit!

There are two key things to understand about this, mechanically. First, the thing about internet memes in this sense is that they're significantly a visual art form. Second, they're not supposed to appear to be high-effort.

This meme uses screenshots from the very popular and well-known 1999 movie The Matrix, which provides it appropriate visuals while, because it's so well-known, establishing that the author didn't put in the effort to draw this all themself.

You could draw something like this scene, but then you would need to aim for a different format.

In the second frame, we then get the "crudely"-photoshopped Nick Land head as a visual part of the punchline. (In fact, the author has been careful in trimming it, but simply hasn't integrated the head back into the scene at all.)

Spider-robot-Land doesn't even say the criticism is bad, per se, he just says it's "ironic" - which it is. Nature is brutal, and yet humanity evolved from within nature until we were able to establish civilization.

Also note that you're unlikely to see a lot of criticism for the amount of text here. It's more than a typical image macro, but it's appropriate, so it gets a pass.

Let's try something of mine that's a little more popular.

The Rock Island Willerbean post has 5,600 notes. As some of you are probably guessing, yes, it's about the illegal trafficking of slow lorises, which apparently have venom glands in their armpits removed by smugglers. (Supposedly, when they raise their arms, it means they're terrified.)

As you can see, almost half the image is a textbox!

The use of text in internet memes or images generally very much depends on the context. Here, the image presents itself as a picture from a book. The text works due to presenting itself as a something like a wildlife narrator, but is clearly absurd by referring to a non-existent animal.

The content is both political and ideological - it's in favor, although it doesn't state this directly, of animal conservation.

But this particular approach isn't something you can do very often. You might be able to frame, e.g., a particular variety of car as a wild animal in order to express car opinions about it. But this would fall flat for most political attacks.

Let's talk about a leftist wall-of-text meme flop. Bing has helpfully provided me with an example, which I assume is real because it hits just the right range.

This is less text than is used in the Rock Island Willerbean example above.

The problem is not the number of words, but the combination of this number of words with this particular template. When Rick is showing us the torn hole in the wall, the contents should be direct and immediate, as this is what the visual language of the template is about.

Obviously, a lot of political conflict involves shaping the social terrain in order to determine what counts as "obvious" and what needs 500 words of explanation, giving relative advantage to different factions in on-the-ground social encounters. We aren't going to cover all that here.

This appears to be an argument about the Chromanticore vending machine and advertisements from Cyberpunk 2077. If you've played Cyberpunk 2077, you know the one I'm talking about. (It's a bit lewd.)

Cyberpunk 2077 is about a high-energy society with a breakdown of societal norms. As such, hyperstimulus that previously would not have been possible is made possible by technology, and active state intervention to regulate it does not occur. It's filled with lurid advertisements that are basically soft core, substituting the simulation of what people crave for the substance, a splitting of human desires from an evolutionarily more cohesive whole.

A lot of it's also about somatic capital technology and the increasing changeability of the body under transhumanism. I could really go on all day about this.

But basically, the chromanticore ad is shocking to contemporary viewers, but in Cyberpunk 2077's society, it's just mildly unusual - that particular body configuration would be uncommon, but Night City's residents wouldn't see it as unheard-of, and would instead have rather different gender war opinions about it than we would. Presumably you can just buy a ---- from a megacorp if you want one. (It seems the player can.)

The game's developers arbitrage this to create an environment that has a high hit or impact and feels very different or alien, providing the player with a unique experience.

Let's redo Raider's meme above to fit the template better.

It's tempting to jam preloaded counter-arguments into the image macro, but that isn't really the right place for them. The Internet is loaded with text, and most of it isn't of much interest to most people. The image macro is the hook. You want to get your central idea across, while convincing potential readers that it's worth listening to the rest of your ideas.

Thus in the updated version, we move text out of the image, and into the surrounding posts.

I get the motivation - the image is seen as a complete unit, so therefore, if the reader has seen the image, they've read the argument. And well, if they've read the argument, then they don't have the excuse of not having read the argument, so they know they're wrong, and should just shut up and do what they're told.

Problem is, you can't jam enough text into an image macro to cover all the counter-arguments. The position of the people who don't think the Chromanticore ad is a big deal is generally that they don't think it has all that much of an effect. The initial image macro does nothing to address this.

They might be persuaded if Cyberpunk 2077 depicted transgender people as uniquely evil, or if it presented someone who is transgender because they are evil, but instead the two most prominent transgender characters in the game are one character that briefly whines about the effort put in to pass, and a bartender... who joins the main character in an illegal underground street race, which is roughly the normal level of criminal activity for Cyberpunk 2077.

We could also talk about coalition membership where the goal of Raider's original post is to communicate to swarm CDPR by signalling to like-minded members of their coalition about what they're 'supposed' to do, using that kind of language to establish group membership. But that's a bit beyond the scope of this post.

Anyhow.

Another use for image macros is in an attempt to pithily shut down arguments. These tend to get pretty annoying, and a lot of times it means that the poster is trying to pretend that the debate is over and lay still and be slippery like a dead fish, to deny leverage and show coalitional loyalty. (They'd rather be thought an idiot than be thought disloyal.) I'll discuss the dead fish tactic some other time, probably. (Already wrote a big draft on it.)

The following is not exactly that kind of image macro.

A communist tumblr user misremembered a stat about container shipping, and made this post:

If you extoll the virtues of modern shipping logistics and think the only problem with it is that it isn’t used to distribute things fairly, you’re an idiot. This isn’t even an anti-civ or pro-civ primmie discourse thing. Just 15 freight ships produce more CO2 than the entirety of the world’s automobiles, and there are thousands of them in service. The efficiency you fetishize has a horrible environmental cost, and the best thing I can assume about you when you act like everything will be solved once it’s The People’s Railway is that you just don’t know what you’re talking about.

Usually this kind of person doesn't have good math and production sense. To grab the first link off the shelf,

Maritime shipping causes about 3% of global greenhouse gas emissions – even more than airplanes.

Ocean-bound freight is extremely cheap on an energy per unit weight basis, even cheaper than rail freight. So it was more fun to respond with a little art as bait, even though of course we know that tumblr user isn't going to take it.

This is not a conventional finisher-dunk.

However, for reasons I'm not going to go into, finisher dunks should not be much longer than this.

[commodorez]

VCFed: The History of The Gui – Ian Litchfield, Thomas Gilinsky, CJ Reha, Douglas Crawford

"Since the dawn of technology, the interaction between mankind and machine had been limited to rudimentary mechanical or electronic interfaces, oftentimes designed more to the limits of technology than to the capabilities of people. This fundamentally changed with the introduction of the Graphical User Interface – though it took time for its true potential to be realized. The GUI’s original killer app – WYSIWIG text editing, as delivered to the masses by the Macintosh – is demonstrated next to its mechanical ancestor in the form of a 1950’s vintage ‘Vari-Typer’ cold typesetting machine.

The GUI’s history did not begin with the Macintosh, of course – another major contributor to GUI computing were the LISP machines, represented here by a Texas Instruments MicroExplorer, an example of an attempt to wed the pioneering principles of LISP machines with the market success of the Macintosh. And the history did not end with the Macintosh, either – also demonstrated are early GUI systems for the nascent IBM PC-Compatibles and the then-emerging UNIX Workstations. Sit down and use these primordial GUIs, from an era before the near-universal acceptance of Windows and X11. Were they more limited? Were they less refined?

Or were they ahead of their time?"

VCF East XIX