From the "what took you so long?" file...Seriously, The Verge, what took you so long?

Without further do, I give you this post from The Verge:

YouTube has been pissing me off for weeks. I’m starting to feel like I should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups Google sends me almost daily. Google has decided to place pop-up ads in its own YouTube app for Premium subscriptions. This feels slightly acceptable at first, but Google has also decided these should spam you to death, sometimes full-screen, with no option to permanently dismiss them so you see them all the damn time.

It’s a classic growth hack designed to get more people to use YouTube Music or YouTube Premium because, honestly, who cares about either of those services? I already subscribe to Spotify, which is far superior to YouTube Music, and I’d never pay $11.99 just to have fewer YouTube ads and background playback of videos on my phone. It’s a pointless subscription that Google is trying to lazily ram down my throat instead of improving its offering, competing fairly with others, and, most importantly, focusing on its customer experience.

Google’s efforts here have made sure I, and I bet many others, will never touch YouTube Music or YouTube Premium. I absolutely loathe both of these services to the point where I’m left swearing at my phone like an idiot, simply because these stubborn ads keep appearing on top of the YouTube videos I’m trying to watch.

Where to start? How about with the fact that YouTube's mobile app hasn't been exhibiting this behaviour for mere weeks. YouTube has been pissing me off with this bullshit for months. Or with the fact that feeling like making users feel they "should pay $11.99 a month to subscribe to YouTube Premium just to get rid of the annoying pop-ups"is the entire fucking point of the pop-ups.

Ubuntu dethroned by Manjaro/Arch as top Linux gaming distro

It wasn't too long ago that I'd posted about how Ubuntu seemed well on its way to becoming the top choice distro for basically everything, including gaming. That was before Canonical shat their own bed, though, announcing that they were dropping support for the 32-bit libraries that PC gaming generally, and Steam particularly, depended on. Valve, which had been recommending Ubuntu as the preferred distro for Steam, withdrew that recommendation; and while Canonical apparently walked back their decision on those 32-bit libraries, Valve's recommendation was not restored.

And now, just a few months later, we're starting to get a good look at exactly how much damage Canonical/Ubuntu did to their own cause with PC gamers, thanks to a great post at Boiling Steam, which sums up the trend with this chart:

Is Half-Life: Alyx the killer app that VR has been waiting for?Spoiler Alert: No, it probably isn't. But it does look cool.

In what has to be the biggest hype/news to hit the VR scene for quite some time, Valve Software have finally released another full-blown game, for the first time in forever. But that's not even the big news -- the big news is that the game is a Half-Life game. And while it isn't Half-Life 3 (it's actually a prequel), Half-Life: Alyx is not only a new Half-Life game, it's a VR-only game.

Oh, and it looks pretty good, too.

The stakes couldn't be higher; TechRadar called Alyx, "a gambit where the very future of VR gaming is at stake." And while that might sound hyperbolic, it might not be wrong, with the announcement of Alyx prompting some VR evangelists to dub this the "killer app" that VR has long been lacking.

But, while some of the gameplay we're seeing will clearly need either Oculus Touch controllers, or the Knuckles controllers that ship with the Valve Index, I'm not convinced that the experience on offer here is different enough to convince skeptical consumers to suddenly jump onto the VR hype train; and I'm not convinced that the Half-Life IP, iconic as it is for the video game industry, is actually broadly popular enough to prompt non-gamers to buy VR headsets just to play it.

This is going to take a lot of work...Stadia's launch plagued with missing features, sparse game selection, and unplayable lag

When Google announced Stadia, their first-to-market (if you don't count Sony's PlayStation Now) video game streaming service, there were lots of questions. What would its subscription model look like? What would its game selection look like? What features would the service have? Could even Google get the thing to work? And would Google stick with Stadia for the long haul, even if it wasn't an instant hit at launch?

Well, we now have the answers to those questions, and they're... un-good. One might even call them double-plus un-good. Let's break it down.

John Carmack jumps from VR to AI

I'm calling it right now: VR is dead. It's not, as someone tried to convince me recently, five to seven years away from breaking out, once they figure out exactly what socialization and spatial computing are and how VR can make them happen. No, VR is over; this generation of VR has failed.

For proof, look no further than John Carmack, who left id Software for Oculus because he was just that excited about the possibilities of VR, and who is now jumping off the VR ship before it sinks and takes him down with it. As reported by The Verge:

John Carmack, the chief technology officer of Facebook’s VR subsidiary Oculus, is stepping down this week. Carmack posted the news on Facebook today, saying he plans to focus his time instead on artificial general intelligence. He will remain in a “consulting CTO” position at Oculus, where he will “still have a voice” in the development work at the company.

Carmack will still work on some VR projects at Facebook, a spokesperson told Variety. In addition to general advisory tasks, for example, he will keep working on projects that maximize VR visual quality on lower-powered mobile hardware. However, he says that VR will “only be consuming a modest slice of my time” while he works on AI. “I have sometimes wondered how I would fare with a problem where the solution really isn’t in sight,” he said of the subject. “I decided that I should give it a try before I get too old.”

It was unclear whether the problem with no solution in sight referred to VR, or AI, or both.

People, if John freaking Carmack can't figure out what VR is good for, or how to convince skeptical consumers to buy in, then VR is probably doomed. Palmer Luckey, who founded Oculus, couldn't solve this problem, either, and finally said that VR could be free and still not find any takers.