This is a very stupid comment. If you want to create deepfake pr0n, or create an AI to scam vulnerable people en masse, or flood social media with astroturfing, you're not doing it on MS's infrastructure. That does include, but is not limited to, racist or discriminatory content. If you can't see the reason for *any* restrictions then you are not thinking hard enough. Go build your own model if you like, you don't have to use MS compute, there are other options although I'd be amazed if most of the big players didn't have similar acceptable usage terms.

https://blogs.microsoft.com/on... Microsoft has a duty of care to customers (in terms of privacy of your data, e.g. your data isn't used to train models for others) and to the world (MS don't allow people to weaponise AI, or use it in ways that have negative impact (e.g. if you're using facial recognition and you've used a shitty model that unfairly disadvantages people with a darker skin colour with poorer recognition, for example) - all of which are spelt out in the contracts. You don't have to use MS to host your AI, but if you do, MS gets to put some guardrails in place. This seems entirely sensible, unlike many posts in this thread...

This was a really interesting article. I'd suspect that the use of multiple listening device jammers in US embassies is probably not uncommon. You might, for example have one in each room interacting with each other in this way. The other thing to bear in mind is that "Russian secret weapon" makes a great headline that doesn't really need proof to go viral.

Quite. There are many companies that are cloud agnostic. Walmart, for example. They can run their stuff on anything and simply use the best tech/pricepoint at any given time. It gives the large cloud vendors competition which is a good thing. It may not be that easy, but it's certainly possible. I'd love to know what "lockin" means bar "it's hard to migrate our production systems without downtime"...

It's still not a real word and I've not heard it in five years but it's NOT "proformant"...

I mean, within MS promotions happen all the time. Not that it's particularly easy, you have to demonstrate something over all the other smart people around you, but it definitely happens, it's encouraged and managers who have staff successfully promoted are rewarded for career development and staff retention. Admittedly, past a certain point, getting promoted puts a bit of a target on your back as expectations are higher, and those that don't exceed expectations don't tend to stay employed for long, but it certainly happens and if you don't have career opportunities for skilled workers in demand, they're going to go elsewhere...

I haven't come across any MS colleagues who are a particular fan of this. Most of us old curmudgeons are quite wedded to OG Notepad, and those that aren't are using Notepad+ or VisualCode. I'd imagine this got a junior PM in the org a bonus this year as showing impact in shipping a product but not much more...

Dave's a good guy and an awesome geek. His "Dave's Garage" YT channel has a load of MS history as well as his tinkering with gadgets, in particular individually addressable LEDs, writing his own firmware for stuff etc. https://www.youtube.com/channe...

...I'd imagine most nation states are using microtargeting on social media to drive their own agenda. The UK had a Russian-backed Brexit campaign and isolating countries like the UK suits many other nations too...

they offer "private" AI where all your data (which is likely already in MS cloud if you use O365/Azure/Dynamics) is private and not accessible for training models for others. It's a major time saver - I've been betaing it for a while. Eg you can in Teams start asking things like "summarise all most popular topics in this thread" or "give me a list of open items from the last meeting". In PPT you can say "import this word doc and convert it to a 5 page powerpoint with a summary of the most important points" You can get it to create live PowerBI reports using natural language, which is a massive time saver. If this saves a user an hour of work a month, it's worth it.

...this is about giving devs tools to reduce the energy consumption of software - writing efficient code that reduces consumption, both at the Xbox client end and also within DCs for online gaming. For example, https://github.com/ormikopo198... is a simple (non-Xbox) demo where you can use an SDK to do things like have your code run automatically in cloud regions that are lower carbon impact, e.g. if a region has a period where there's a high input to the national grid from renewables for a period of time, if you know that via an SDK you can spin up your cloud resources there temporarily.

I'm sick of this getting parroted in every article about it. What they are doing is getting cheap edge node locations at sites that already have high capacity electricity supplies i.e. public swimming pools. They've only done one, and they are a 7 person company. Good luck running this with one ops person and one tech BTW and achieving 5 9s of uptime! https://deepgreen.energy/heat Simple maths says that if it's an Olympic pool with 2500000 liters of water you'd need around 3MW/h to raise the temp by 1 degree. An average rack in a DC 60x60cm unit consumes 5Kw/h and even if this has increased recently, it's nowhere near that figure. Actually reading their website tells us: "In exchange for hosting our kit and connectivity, *we install free digital boilers alongside existing heating systems* (and pay for the energy they use)." So they get free rent on locations that have low latency potential to host small DCs, they get free cooling, and they pay for the electricity to run the kit AND THE NEW ELECTRIC BOILERS they fit.

Fun fact: Unilever in fact own tens of thousands of freezers - you know when you go past a shop selling their product when you're on holiday and a shop has a freezer that's branded with their products in? Those are owned and operated by Unilever. I'm sure they are slowly upgrading their fleet with more efficient ones...

gov devices should be managed: just like any normal company, why aren't they applying mobile device management policies to control what's installed on them?

FB may be about to find out that consumers love their iPhones more than they do FB. FB's demographic is losing younger users who see it as an old-person's medium, and FB works adequately in a browser. Apple has the upper hand here...