Matisyahu's Blog

I’ve watched a video and it makes me wondering whether the Trump administration has any sort of clue regarding what they want to achieve or are the 4 years going to be nothing more than grifting. I say this because there was a video recently where president Trump was asked regarding the value of the American dollar declining and what he thought of it, the only answer he could give was some incoherent rambling about being the ‘hottest economy’ etc. etc. If he just came out and said, “the America dollar is over valued for many decades which has hurt our manufacturing and other export related sectors, it is a much needed correction” it would at least imply there is some sort of policy at play.

If the long term goal of the Trump administration is to rebalance the economy away from a heavily consumption lead growth model to one that is balanced between investment, exports and consumption then at leas there would be an message to he market that there is some sort of plan. So far what we’ve seen is the wild oscillations which gives the impression that there is no plan, that the only plan is to have no plan other than seeing it as an opportunity to use the presidency to enrich himself and those around him. Now, I have to admit, I generally subscribe to the maxim of ‘never attribute to malice that can be explained as incompetence’ but given what is happening with those connected directly or indirectly to the Trump administration it is difficult to ignore the fact that this is a case where incompetence is the distraction to hide the malice.

Regarding the new Panther Lake series that Intel announced, it’ll be interesting to see whether the damage Microsoft is doing with Windows 11 is going to have a backlash on Intel sales. I say that because I’ve even seen normies push back against this tsunami of AI slop appearing in the operating system to the point that there are discussions online asking “how do I get rid of this crap”. This is the risk that Intel have played by failing to invest into Linux and making it a drop in replacement for Windows – getting Linux to the point that can install it on an Intel computer without having to deal with downing extra files such as firmware for Wi-FI or if you’re unfortunate enough to have an nVidia card the fact that you have to jump through firey hoops just to get support working.

As so long as Microsoft know there is no viable alternative to Windows on the x86-64 platform then don’t be surprised if the enshittification continues. What Intel ideally needs to do is assemble 100 engineers to work with OEMs such as Dell and HP so that a big distro, Fedora being one that coms to mind, can work out of the box on Intel based laptops and desktops, that they work with nVidia and Fedora developers so that when the kernel is updated that the nVidia driver stack is updated at the same time to ensure that the installation doesn’t break and the end user is left with a computer that isn’t working.

Then there is the bigger focus which is the development of Wayland – again, get another 100 developers and then get them to write up a list of features that exist in macOS and Windows display server, compare it to what is in Wayland, triage the missing features then start implementing. If your whole business of selling hardware is dependent on a single software vendor not screwing up then it doesn’t exactly give you much control over the future. There is an opportunity to at least setup a viable alternative, let’s hope that Intel make such an investment to hedge their bets.