jj4211

@jj4211@lemmy.world

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft CEO warns that we must 'do something useful' with AI or they'll lose 'social permission' to burn electricity on it⁩ ⁨⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, very good analogy actually…

  I remember back in the day people putting stuff like ‘Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’. Instead of thinking ‘oh good, they will be able to use Word competently’, the impression was ‘my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I’m inclined to believe they have no useful skills’.

  ‘Excel skills’ on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets).

  Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn’t really need learning. If anything people who overthink the ‘skill’ of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don’t work, and when they first find out that it doesn’t work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to ‘fix’ the problem.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨AI boom could falter without wider adoption, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago⁩:

  Yes, because Microsoft’s revenue growth is in fact the most important thing the folks at Davos had to think about…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't using a key file the most common way to log into self-hosted servers?⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Getting a dns name is straightforward enough, and let’s encrypt to get a tla cert…

  But for purely internal services that you didn’t otherwise want to publish extremely, the complexity goes way up (either maintain a bunch of domain names externally to renew certificates and use a private DNS to point them to the real place locally, or make your own CA and make all the client devices enroll it. Of course I’m less concerned about passkeys internally.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Micron addresses Crucial exit backlash: 'We are trying to help consumers around the world' — company warns that DRAM drought could last until at least 2028⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  That you can’t plug into a traditional computer and that has not even pads for a video connector to be soldered to.

  Folks just don’t realize how exotically different they have ultimately made the GPU packaging for datacenters. B200/B300 come in very specific packaging that is nowhere near a PCIe card.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨X down – latest: Twitter and Grok not working in another major outage⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't using a key file the most common way to log into self-hosted servers?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Broadly speaking, the private keys can be protected.

  For ssh, ssh-agent can retain the viable form for convenience while leaving the ssh key passphrase encrypted on disk. Beyond that your entire filesystem should be further encrypted for further offline protection.

  Passkeys as used in webauthn are generally very specifically protected in accordance with the browser restrictions. For example, secured in a tpm protected storage, and authenticated by pin or biometric.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Why isn't using a key file the most common way to log into self-hosted servers?⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  For ssh, ssh keys.

  For https, webauthn is the way to do it, though services are relatively rare, particularly for self hosting, partly because browsers are very picky about using a domain name with valid cert, so browsers won’t allow them by ip or if you click through a self signed cert

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that’s not “skills”. The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It’s exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it’s not a “skill”

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨"Not A Single Pixel" Of The New Ecco Game Will Be Generated By AI, Insists Series Creator⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Now you can’t win some awards…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Because if they can make for consumers, then there’s a shit ton of investor money waiting for some tech bro to turn it into ‘AI’.

  The tech industry companies are playing with nigh unlimited house money, consumers can’t compete.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Hard drive prices have surged by an average of 46% since September — iconic 24TB Seagate BarraCuda now $500 as AI claims another victim⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Though that supply will be a bit annoying.

  Oh look, super expensive GPUs… In an HGX board that is useless for even connecting to a PC, let alone have graphics.

  Memory modules, but they are HBM or otherwise soldered to a Grace board…

  SSDs, but EDSFF… Guess at least a cage for this could be some for home usage.

  HDDs, but SAS. Not too or of reach for home builds, but still not as likely to just plug into home gear as SATA.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta has discontinued its metaverse for work, too⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Yeah, they bought a modest, niche product with a likely viable business case, and then bet they could make it an everyman’s device for all their socializing and experiencing events like sports and music…

  The people that actually wanted the device got to take a back seat to them chasing non-existent markets for it… Their aspirations so impossibly high that a niche device could no longer justify itself against the money spent chasing that non-existant market… So something that should have been for some VR nerds to be happy and sustain the business while the rest of the world shrugs and say ‘I don’t get it’ becomes an ‘Obviously this is a failure of a concept and no one should bother doing this’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta has discontinued its metaverse for work, too⁩ ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  100 billion is a touch higher than I’ve read elsewhere, but evidently they actually spent $77 billion ‘real’ dollars:

  …yahoo.com/…/mark-zuckerberg-threw-77-billion-143…

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Meta has discontinued its metaverse for work, too⁩ ⁨⁨6⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago⁩:

  Also kind of bad for VR that they bought Oculus and buried it under a ton of stuff no one asked for and will likely kill it entirely for failing to be the everyman’s gateway to socialization like they strangely imagined it to be.

  The true target market for Oculus is relatively niche, but probably could have sustained a more modest oculus. Meta’s demands exceed what that market can give them.

  Biggest hope for VR future right now is Steam Frame.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today

  This is hilarious, because every single facility of note, and especially datacenters has local, grid independent generators. Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for ‘off-grid’ power plants to give them more control over their power and costs. In the more reachable territory, residential solar promises value by mitigating your exposure to eletrical rate changes, and in some cases combined with home energy storage, people are going off-grid. A lot of commercial interests also pad out their facilities with solar panels, because it is cheaper than sourcing entirely from the grid, and this was before the recent rate hikes inflicted by datacenter buildouts.

  His analogy is bogus because he implies off-grid energy generation is a thing of the past while AWS itself is a huge driver of off-grid energy generation in a world where off-grid energy generation is actually increasing.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft may soon allow IT admins to uninstall Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  You can’t to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.

  Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.

  I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft may soon allow IT admins to uninstall Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  There have been devices that forbid disabling SecureBoot or enrolling your own keys, and only boot loaders that microsoft signed are allowed to boot.

  Further, I’ve seen systems that have a setting to not allow the non-microsoft stuff to boot, even if signed by the usual secureboot authority. So there may be a device out there hard set to only allow microsoft software to boot.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Microsoft may soon allow IT admins to uninstall Copilot⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  Issue is that there’s one thing that organizations love about Windows that isn’t really catered to in any Linux distribution: Nannying the users and not letting them do their own things with their own systems.

  For example, no Linux distribution out there will help you prevent the end-users from changing their own desktop wallpaper, or what to show when the user locks their screen. When my company hands out laptops, the users are blocked from changing out the ugly propaganda slides they make our systems display. Just the tip of the iceburg for how much the enduser can be screwed with by a microsoft admin that just isn’t possible in any significant Linux desktop environment.

  So user may love Linux, but their employer still wants to make sure they are running Windows.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨rest in pepperoni⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I’ve heard that people think he tried a variety of quack treatments alongside doctor prescribed treatments. Basically generally desperate and ready to try everything all at once. Which is a common theme among terminal patients.

  But he did say antivax stuff, after having been vaccinated. So at least when his own personal stakes are low, he was willing to roll with the MAGA rhetoric, but he wasn’t about to let his own life be at additional risk for it.

  Because he and Biden had the same cancer. He actually explicitly said Trump was wrong for being mean to Biden over it. If Adams didn’t have the same disease, he probably would have piled on.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s not a subjective thing. Cold medicines treat symptoms, not the disease. Cold and allergies have common symptoms.

  If your concern is that cold medicines don’t work for your allergies, thwn those tend not to work for colds either.

  If the medicine is trying to use phenylephrine in a pill, that doesn’t do anything. You might also want to skip the acetaminophen usually included and you have zero need for that, but not every co of d medicine has that.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How we get to 1 nanometer chips and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  As I said. It’s an extrapolation of the rules from once upon a time to a totally different approach. It’s marketing and increasingly subjective. Any number can “make sense” in that context. The number isn’t based on anything you could actually measure for a long time now, it’s already a fiction, so it can go wherever.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How we get to 1 nanometer chips and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  To be fair, the industry spent decades measuring a distance, so when they started doing features that had equivalent effects, the easiest way for people to understand was to say something akin to equivalent size.

  Of course, then we have things like Intel releasing their "10 nm* process, then after TSMC’s 7nm process was doing well and Intel fab hit some bumps, they declared their 10 to be more like a 7 after all… it’s firmly all marketing number…

  Problem being no one is suggesting a more objective measure.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨How we get to 1 nanometer chips and beyond⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  For a while now the “nm” has been a bit of a marketing description aiming for what the size would be if you extrapolated the way things used to be to today. The industry spent so long measuring that when the measurement broke down they just kind of had to fudge it to keep the basis of comparison going, for lack of a better idea . If we had some fully volumetric approach building these things equally up in three dimensions, we’d probably have less than “100 pm” process easily, despite it being absurd.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Yale Posting It's Ls⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  This is a perspective that the leadership in general should keep in mind.

  They are relishing in ignoring laws and treaties and just opting out of consequences. Generally people understand that honoring laws and elections leaves the populace broadly with a sense of justice even with misdeeds and the punishments are, generally, pretty light. Even the light punishments satisfy people.

  Continually flaunting these mechanisms and denying people a civilized path to feelings of justice and being heard is a dangerous thing.

  It’s why the control bounces back and forth between two sinilar political parties, most people get a sense of “my team won” or “my team will probably win next time” and this placates people. To decide to nope out of these conventions is to invite great risk.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  My general point is that discussing the intricacies of potential local AI model usage is way over the head of the people that would even in theory care about the facile “AI PC” marketing message. Since no one is making it trivial for the casual user to actually do anything with those NPUs, then it’s all a moot point for this sort of marketing. Even if there were an enthusiast market that would use those embedded NPUs without a distinct more capable infrastructure, they wouldn’t be swayed/satisfied with just ‘AI PC’ or ‘Copilot+’, they’d want to know specs rather than a boolean yes/no for ‘AI’.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  The issue is that to the extent that might even make sense, no major player is actually doing anything to help that happen. Every big player is exclusively focused on taking AI use cases into their datacenters, because that’s the way to maintain control and demand subscriptions.

  If you did do it, then the users would complain that the ‘AI feature’ as executed on their puny NPU is really slow compared to what the online alternative does.

  So that scenario is a hypothetical, and they are trying to make sales based on now. ‘AI PC’ doesn’t make any sense because people imagine what you describe, but in reality just cannot tell a difference because nothing works any differently for their ‘AI experience’. Their experience is going to be a few niche Windows features work that most people don’t even know about or would want.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  Well, first Dell’s use of ‘confused’ is mainly a way to walk “away” from AI as a marketing strategy without having to walk it “back” (they can’t walk it back: Microsoft will keep Copiloting it up, the processor comparies will keep bundling NPUs, and the consumer exposure to AI will continue to have nothing to do with any of the ‘AI PC’ or not). So ‘confused’ is a way to rationalize the absence of ‘AI PC’ in their marketing strategy without having to actually change what they are doing.

  But to the extent ‘confusing’ may apply, it’s less about ‘AI’ and more about ‘AI PC’. What about this ‘AI PC’ would impact your usage with AI, for most people the answer is ‘not at all’, since mostly it’s over the internet. So for the layperson, an ‘AI PC’ just enables a few niche Windows features no one cares about. Everything pushing around the ‘AI’ craze is well away from actually running on the end user devices.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  More to the point, the casual consumer isn’t going to dig into the nitty gritty of running models locally and not a single major player is eager to help them do it (they all want to lock the users into their datacenters and subscription opportunities).

  On the Dell keeping NPUs in their laptops, they don’t really have much of a choice if they want modern processors, Intel and AMD are all-in on it still.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Dell says the quiet part out loud: Consumers don't actually care about AI PCs — "AI probably confuses them more than it helps them"⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  It’s just a softer thing to say than ‘a lot of people hate AI and it’s alienating potential customers’. They can’t come out and say that out loud, they don’t want to piss off Microsoft too much and they aren’t going to try to do NPU-free systems (it’s not really possible). They aren’t going to do anything to ‘fight back’ against the AI that people hate (they can’t), so their best explanation as to why they pull back from a toxic brand strategy is that ‘people just don’t care’ rather than ‘people hate this thing that we are going to keep feeding’.

  But if they need to rationalize the perspective, an “AI” PC does nothing to change the common users experience with the AI things they know, does not change ChatGPT or Opus or anything similar, that stuff is entirely online. So for the common user, all ‘AI’ PC means is a few Windows gimmicks that people either don’t care about or actively complained about (Recall providing yet another way for sensitive data to get compromised).

  In terms of “AI” as a brand value, the ones most bullish about AI are executives that like the idea of firing a punch of people and incidently they actually want to buy fewer PCs as a result. So even as you can find AI enthusiastic people, they still don’t want AI PCs.

  For most people, their AI experience has been:

  • News stories talking about companies laying off thousands or planning to lay off thousands for AI, AI is the enemy
  • News stories talking about some of those companies having to rehire those people because AI fell over, AI is crap
  • Their feeds being flooded with AI slop and deepfakes, AI is annoying
  • Their google searches now having a result up top that, at best, is about the same as clicking the top non-sponsored link, except that it frequently totally botches information, AI is kind of pointless

  For those that have actually positive AI experience, they already know it has nothing to do with whether the PC is ‘AI’ or not. So it’s just a brand liability, not a value.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨genius⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  UNTIL IT IS DONE