Matt BirchlerModify

2025-12-12 23:45:35

I'm not saying 2026 will be "the year of Linux on the desktop," but it will be the year that people like me pull the trigger on a Linux installation on their gaming PC.

I just think there's been a years-long bubbling up of frustration among gamers about how terrible Windows is and how misaligned Microsoft seems to be with their needs. Today there are options, and you could install basically any Linux distro and cobble together a gaming setup that works reasonably well, but it's more work and clunkiness than most people are willing to deal with. All these people need is an easy-to-use, obvious place to go.

Meanwhile, Valve has put in tons of work over the last 10 years making Windows games run pretty great on Linux, and is releasing the Steam Machine, their desktop/console device that will run a flavor of Linux. Based on my experience with the Steam Deck, it should be pretty great.

My prediction is there will be a slightly modified version of that Linux distro made available for general PCs, which will be easy to install and go some level of viral in 2026. And by viral, I mean enough people will do it that The Verge will write an article about how gamers are flocking to this Windows alternative.

I think the odds of this happening increase significantly if we can get NVIDIA drivers working much better than they do now. I haven't tried Linux on my Intel/NVIDIA system, but my understanding is that AMD GPUs work better than NVIDIA ones in the Linux distros that are out now. But NVIDIA has a much bigger portion of the gaming market, so, if we can get better support for ray tracing and DLSS in Linux, that's going to make this a more compelling thing for PC gamers.

2025-12-12 05:29:10

Founded in 2011, The Verge is an exceptionally modern publisher in the grand scheme of things, but its writing style is pretty traditional. More specifically, its policy towards putting links in in articles is old school and irks me to no end.

Take this article from today about the release of GPT 5.2:

In the blog post, OpenAI also said GPT-5.2 is better for AI agents’ workflows — part of the ever-intensifying battle between AI companies to offer the most efficient and useful AI agents.

That particular quote isn't super relevant to my post, but it helps illustrate my point. I mentioned a Verge article, I clearly linked to it, and you can read it yourself if you'd like. The Verge's post gets this reporting from OpenAI's blog post, and they reference it a few times, but they never link to it. They do have 6 links in their post, but:

• 4 of them go to other The Verge articles
• 1 goes to The Information
• 1 goes to The Wall Street Journal

Nothing in what they wrote lets you get to the OpenAI blog post they're referencing (here it is, if you wanted to read it). Why? I appreciate that if they are a primary source on a story, as in they got a statement from OpenAI for them to report on, then that makes sense. But in this case they're reporting on someone else's post. It just seems like if you're reporting on something someone else posted online, you ought to link to it.

Posted as a happy, paid subscriber to The Verge, but this gets in my craw.

2025-12-11 22:00:00

Once something becomes easy for anyone to do, it stops being interesting.

2025-12-11 08:15:11

Based on the best data I can find, last year Spotify had 602 million active users as of early 2025, with about 42% of those users being paid subscribers (less than half!). Additionally, 2/3 of the people on premium are on it with some sort of incentive that gets them access for free or at a discounted rate (usually something like bundled in with their cell service).

And according to this data, only about 12% of their revenue comes from advertising. Put another way, 58% of Spotify's users account for 12% of the revenue. Put still another way (and if my ballpark math is right), if a Spotify subscription is $10 per month:

• A third of the premium subscribers are paying $10
• Two-thirds of premium subscribers are generating some amount less than $10
• Free users are generating about $1

Now, I'm sure these metrics are somehow off a bit, but you get the idea. If a free user especially contributes about $12 to Spotify over a year and listens to thousands of songs by hundreds of artists, how exactly would you split that $12 up in a way that's fair to all those artists?

2025-12-10 22:00:10

Richard Stallman in Reasons not to use ChatGPT

I call it a "bullshit generator" because it generates output "with indifference to the truth".

We are three years into the ChatGPT era, and I feel as confident as I have at any point in those last three years that, while Large Language Models (LLMs) are a serious and notable technology advancement, they are more of a normal technology than many give them credit for.

On one end, you have people who think LLMs are truly intelligent and we're just 6 months away from becoming God. On the other end, you have people who think it's absolute fluff that nobody actually wants. I don't know the author of the post I was referencing, but it certainly sounds like they are more on the latter side of this dichotomy.

I quoted the specific line about "indifference to the truth" because it's one that I constantly see from the anti-LLM crowd: the idea that these models "don't actually know anything," and I cannot express to you enough how little I care about that critique.

Yes, I will agree with you that neither ChatGPT, nor Claude, nor Gemini, nor anything currently available knows anything in a conscious sense, but that doesn't mean I don't find them useful. Does a spreadsheet "know" anything? No. Does HTTP "know" things? Absolutely not. That doesn't mean those technologies are useless either.

As ever, I feel like the people on either end of me are looking at LLMs as if they're magic, and some think that magic is good and others think it's bad. It's just normal technology, people. Computers haven't had to understand what they were doing before and they don't have to now.

2025-12-10 07:29:02

Earlier today I wrote about why I think the pay-per-stream metric is a bad singular reference point, and doubly so when it's used as a cudgel in the fanboy wars to show why your brand is better than someone else's brand. Jason Dettbarn, who is closer to the music industry than me, wrote up a reply at his Crucial Tracks blog:

I get that bands currently make more money on Spotify in total, but if bands/fans/etc. keep advocating and the listening behavior switches to better paying services (or forces Spotify to pay more), then that's a good thing.

This is a fair retort. Putting pressure on Spotify to increase the payout pool and reduce their profits is worth doing. My intention was more to point out that when people pay in so little for access to all the music in the world, and when many millions more pay zero for access to that music, there's simply not enough money to pay all the artists all they deserve.

What I especially liked in their post was a link to this from Los Campesinos! (a band I love) where they shared their streaming music revenue as well.

It being Streaming Stat Season, I thought now would be a good time to offer a detailed breakdown of how much money we make from our music being streamed.

Hell yeah, transparency like this helps demystify the world and lets people set more realistic expectations for how much money is being made out there. I was doubly happy when I saw they shared raw totals from each platform as well as the per-stream rates. Here's how their revenue broke down for streams of their newest album:

As I suspected from my last post, Spotify may have had the lowest per-stream rate, but they contributed 75% of the total listens and 64% of the total revenue. So yes, Spotify had more people listening to Los Campesinos! music and it paid them the most, but the per-stream rate was lower. Again, I think the much lower revenue Spotify makes from their free users is a notable detail here, as Apple, Tidal, and Amazon don't have these users in the mix, and I maintain that if they did, their per-stream payouts would drop closer to Spotify and YouTube's numbers.

This data also brings up something important that I didn't really touch on in the first piece: Spotify doesn't have a set per-stream payout, it fluctuates. Doing some quick math on their overall revenue numbers, you can see there's a 20% swing from month to month as all sorts of variables shift.

I think some people think that when you stream a song on Spotify, that increments a counter that adds $0.004 to the artist's payout, but that's not the case. Based largely on the company's overall income, they have a "pot" of money (for lack of a better word) set aside to pay out everyone on the platform every month.

For simplicity's sake, let's say that pot is $100 and there are 2 artists on the service, you and another band. Last month, you got 20 streams and they got 30 streams. That meant you accounted for 40% of the streams on the platform, and therefore you got $40, or $2/stream.

But then the next month, the other band's music goes viral and while you got the same 20 streams you did last month, the other artist got 100 streams. Now you account for 16.7% of the streams and those same 20 streams only got you $16.67, or $0.83%/stream.

These numbers are extreme examples, but they should illustrate the point that artists in this sort of system are fundamentally competing with each other for a fixed amount of money. Ideally, the pot that gets paid out will scale with subscriber revenue, and my understanding is that it does for these music streamers (it doesn’t always, though…looking at you, TikTok). The reasonable push back is that they should add a bit more to the pot so that a higher share of their revenue is going to the artists.

My contention, and what I tried to communicate in that last piece, although I may have implied it too subtly, is that even if Spotify bumped up the pot to the point where they were just breaking even as a business, there simply isn't enough money coming in from consumers to pay artists well in this system. I personally paid about $120 for streaming music last year and I listened to over 400 artists, 1,600 songs, and probably like 5,000 streams. How is that $120 going to pay out a fair amount to all those artists as well as pay to keep the music service itself running? I'm totally willing to bet there is more margin to be had, but I can't help but keep coming back to the fact I simply think streaming music is a business model at the prices we pay today that fundamentally does not value music.

I was feeling kind of down after writing these two posts today, so I took the opportunity to put my money where my mouth is and bought Los Campesinos! latest album direct from them. By my quick math, this one act did as much good as 8,205 streams would have done them.

I'll close this post with the same thing I said in that first one:

If you want to actually support your favorite artists, buy their music outright. Bandcamp is a good option here, and direct from the artist is even better