Honestly, a minimum viable product is entirely what Pokemon Go was designed to be. It exists to extract behavioral surplus from users and convert it into valuable action by inviting users to go to certain places in a community through placement of Pokestops and Gyms. Basically a tool to drive foot traffic, which Niantic can (and does) sell to businesses that want to drive that foot traffic. It worked brilliantly for years and still is a somewhat effective method of driving advertising and sales for real world businesses.

Mine is the Affinity suite of image manip software. I don’t use it often, but I do use it often enough that I maintain a Windows box to be able to do so. That and I play a few games occasionally (at this point pretty rarely) that just work better/at all under Windows rather than Linux. Like 90% of what I do with my computers is great under Linux, but those last few elements make me not want to dump Windows entirely.

So 2025 is the year I finally move my desktop to Linux and run windows in a VM I guess. I still have a few apps that just do not play nicely in Wine that would make transitioning fully more difficult, but I’ve been full Linux on my laptop for years. Maybe I can finally make the jump on PC.

Another notch in the portfolio of “public companies” being made worse due to shareholder supremacy. Public companies aren’t even really public anymore given the advent of a million tools to limit the role the public has in governance.

I wonder if it would be possible to develop a federated model for sales. You’d like still need a platform like shopify between the consumer and the manufacturer, but the point of Etsy wasn’t just the commerce side, it was also the discoverability and searching side. I wonder if a federated approach to searching for products utilizing independent websites or marketplaces, but with a unified search and sales platform would even make sense as a means to offer a decentralized marketplace. On some level that’d be just a digital swap meet/flea market, but with less oversight and commerce protection of a centralized platform like Etsy or Ebay.