To repurpose a saying to the corporate world:

You either go bust, or live long enough to see yourself be taken over by profit-maximizing assholes.

The really annoying type is when they use it as a covert rate-limiter. Oh so slowly fading out the square, oh so slowly fading in the next.

For that matter, can someone write an extension which automatically mutes ads, smashes the "Skip" button as soon as it's enabled, and unmutes once the real content starts?

That sounds like Fadblock.

Platform decay in action. As growth and profits slow down, its really tempting to start cannibalizing one's capital for a short term boost. But that kind of thing tends not to end very well.

Here is the text:

Canon’s Advanced Chip Machines to Cost a Fraction of ASML’s Best

Nanoimprint tech a low-cost alternative to leading-edge EUV
Canon’s Mitarai wants succession plan to be ‘total surprise’

Fujio Mitarai Photographer: Shoko Takayasu/Bloomberg
By Takashi Mochizuki and Yuki Furukawa
November 5, 2023 at 9:00 PM UTC

Canon Inc. plans to price its new chipmaking gear at a fraction of the cost of ASML Holding NV’s best lithography machines, seeking to make inroads in the cutting-edge equipment now playing a central role in the US-China tech rivalry.

The Tokyo-based company’s new nanoimprint technology would open up a way for smaller semiconductor makers to produce advanced chips, now almost wholly the domain of the sector’s biggest firms, Chief Executive Officer Fujio Mitarai said.

“The price will have one digit less than ASML’s EUVs,” said the 88-year-old, now on his third stint as Canon’s president after last stepping back from day-to-day operations in 2016. He added that a final pricing decision hasn’t been made.

Veldhoven, Netherlands-based ASML is the only supplier of extreme ultraviolet lithography tools, the world’s most advanced chipmaking machines costing hundreds of millions of dollars each. The product of decades of research and investment, EUV rigs are essential for mass-producing the fastest and most energy-efficient chips, which cram millions of transistors into every square millimeter of silicon.

Only a handful of cash-rich companies can afford to invest in the tools, which are now under scrutiny for their linchpin status in the tech supply chain. ASML is banned from exporting EUV systems to Chinese customers, following US pressure on its allies to restrict technology flows to Beijing.

That’s fueled hope for Canon’s new tools, which came to market last month. Tokyo’s chipmaking export curbs, which were expanded in July, do not explicitly name nanoimprint lithography.

But Canon may not be able to ship the machines to China, according to Mitarai. “My understanding is that exports of anything beyond 14 nanometer technology is banned, so I don’t think we’ll be able to sell.” An official at Japan’s Economy Ministry said he couldn’t comment on how export curbs would affect a particular company or product.

Canon’s shares are up 27% since the start of the year. Rival Nikon Corp., which also trails ASML in lithography tools, is up 24%. Mitarai during an interview in Tokyo on Oct. 30.

Canon has been working on nanoimprint processes for almost a decade with Dai Nippon Printing Co. and memory chipmaker Kioxia Holdings Corp. Unlike EUV lithography, which works by reflecting light, Canon’s technology stamps circuit patterns directly onto wafers to create chips at geometries it says are equivalent to the most advanced nodes, albeit at a much slower rate.

The new machine gives chipmakers the option to lower reliance on foundries, while also making it more feasible for contract chipmakers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. and Samsung Electronics Co. to make small lots of chips. The machines require 1/10 of the power of their EUV counterparts, Canon said.

“I don’t expect nanoimprint technology to overtake EUVs, but I’m confident this will create new opportunities and demand,” Mitarai said. “We are already fielding many inquiries from customers.”

Canon, which has until now focused on products used to make less advanced chips, began betting on nanoimprint technology in 2014 with an acquisition of pioneer Molecular Imprints Inc. A TSMC supplier, Canon is building its first new plant for lithography equipment in two decades in Utsunomiya, north of Tokyo, to go online in 2025.

Mitarai, who has been Canon’s president for almost 18 years altogether and its CEO since 2006, said he has no interest in staying in power for life. Born in 1935, he’s credited with rescuing Canon’s troubled operations when he first took the reins in 1995.

Canon recently appointed a raft of new directors to join its board next year, including Canon USA CEO Kazuto Ogawa, 65, Industrial Group Head Hiroaki Takeishi, 59, and Senior Managing Executive Officer Minoru Asada, 61, a sign of a new group of executives rising in the ranks.

“It’s my responsibility to find a successor,” said Mitarai, who declined to comment on details such as timing, potential candidates and how actively the firm was hunting for its next CEO.

“I want it to be a total surprise,” he said. “Our employees will learn about it first, and then the rest of the world will hear about it through a press conference.”

Wouldn't you prefer a good game of chess?

Zipf distributions seem to be everywhere. Most web pages hardly get any visitors, a few get tons. Most words in a dictionary are rarely used, a few are used all the time. And here: most OSS projects are unmaintaned, a few are very actively maintained.

I'm not seeing the paywall, but perhaps it's geolocation-based. Here's the text:

ChatGPT has learned to talk.

OpenAI, the San Francisco artificial intelligence start-up, released a version of its popular chatbot on Monday that can interact with people using spoken words. As with Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and other digital assistants, users can talk to ChatGPT and it will talk back.

For the first time, ChatGPT can also respond to images. People can, for example, upload a photo of the inside of their refrigerator, and the chatbot can give them a list of dishes they could cook with the ingredients they have.

“We’re looking to make ChatGPT easier to use — and more helpful,” said Peter Deng, OpenAI’s vice president of consumer and enterprise product.

OpenAI has accelerated the release of its A.I tools in recent weeks. This month, it unveiled a version of its DALL-E image generator and folded the tool into ChatGPT.

ChatGPT attracted hundreds of millions of users after it was introduced in November, and several other companies soon released similar services. With the new version of the bot, OpenAI is pushing beyond rival chatbots like Google Bard, while also competing with older technologies like Alexa and Siri.

Alexa and Siri have long provided ways of interacting with smartphones, laptops and other devices through spoken words. But chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard have more powerful language skills and are able to instantly write emails, poetry and term papers, and riff on almost any topic tossed their way.

OpenAI has essentially combined the two communication methods.

The company sees talking as a more natural way of interacting with its chatbot. It argues that ChatGPT’s synthetic voices — people can choose from five different options, including male and females voices — are more convincing than others used with popular digital assistants.

Over the next two weeks, the company said, the new version of the chatbot would start rolling out to everyone who subscribes to ChatGPT Plus, a service that costs $20 a month. But the bot can respond with voice only when used on iPhones, iPads and Android devices.

The bot’s synthetic voices are more natural than many others on the market, though they still can sound robotic. Like other digital assistants, it can struggle with homonyms. When The New York Times asked the new ChatGPT how to spell “gym,” it said: “J-I-M.”

But one of the advantages of a chatbot like ChatGPT is that it can correct itself. When told “No, the other kind of gym,” the bot replied: “Ah, I see what you’re referring to now. The place where people exercise and work out is spelled G-Y-M.”

Though ChatGPT’s voice interface is reminiscent of earlier assistants, the underlying technology is fundamentally different. ChatGPT is driven primarily by a large language model, or L.L.M., which has learned to generate language on the fly by analyzing huge amounts of text culled from across the internet.

Older digital assistants, like Alexa and Siri, acted like command-and-control centers that could perform a set number of tasks or give answers to a finite list of questions programmed into their databases, such as “Alexa, turn on the lights” or “What’s the weather in Cupertino?” Adding new commands to the older assistants could take weeks. ChatGPT can respond authoritatively to virtually any question thrown at it in seconds — though it is not always correct.

As OpenAI is transforming ChatGPT into something more like Alexa or Siri, companies like Amazon and Apple are transforming their digital assistants into something more like ChatGPT.

Last week, Amazon previewed an updated system for Alexa that aims for more fluid conversation about “any topic.” It is driven in a part by a new L.L.M. and has other upgrades to pacing and intonation to make it sound more natural, the company said.

Apple, which has not publicly shared its plans for how it will compete with ChatGPT, has been testing a prototype of its large language model for future products, according to two people briefed on the project.

When used via the web as well as on iPhone, iPad and Android devices, the new ChatGPT can also respond to images. Given a photograph, chart or diagram, it can provide a detailed description of the image and answer questions about its contents. This could be a useful tool for people who are visually impaired.

OpenAI first demonstrated the image tool in the spring, but the company said it would not be shared with the public until researchers better understood how the technology could be misused. Among other concerns, they worried the tool could become a de facto face recognition service used to quickly identify people in photos.

Microsoft introduced this kind of visual search tool, based on OpenAI’s technology, in its Bing chatbot over the summer.

Sandhini Agarwal, an OpenAI researcher who focuses on safety and policy, said the new version of the bot would now refuse efforts to identify faces. But it is designed to provide enormously detailed descriptions of other photos. Given an image from the Hubble Space Telescope, for example, it can respond with paragraphs detailing the contents in the photo.

The bot can also be a tool for students. Given an image of a high school math problem that includes words, numbers and diagrams, the bot can instantly read the problem and solve it. It could be an effective way to learn — or cheat.

See also Ted Chiang: Fears of technology are fears of capitalism.

Waterfall is merely strawman devised by the fragile cult to promote fragile. Even when digital computers were powered by vacuum tubes nothing was ever actually designed this way.

See also The Myth of the "Waterfall" SDLC. A quote:

"You can imagine what I must have been thinking. At that time, I’d been in IT application development for 20 years with five different major corporations and I was introduced to waterfall - by a salesman. I had never heard of a waterfall method. In all of the years and all of the places I worked and all of the conferences I had been to, I didn’t know of any organization that built systems this way. Yes, I did try to dissuade the sales rep that we were not using any waterfall, watering hole, water table, water can or water cooler methods but as you can suspect sales folks can’t sell you a solution if you don’t have a problem and he was really trying to create a problem.”