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Comment Great (Score 1) 52

"which today is an end user tools business, will become, essentially an infrastructure business in support of agents doing work."

It sure sounds like he's saying he doesn't want the desktop anymore. I think everyone should help them with that and drop Windows today.

Comment Welcome back Do Not Track header (Score 0) 122

People can set their privacy preferences centrally -- for example via the browser

DNT was proposed in 2009, implemented by most browser within a couple iterations. Microsoft famously poisoned-pilled their implementation to kill it by making it the default, which gave advertisers an excuse to claim people didn't really mean to set it, and ignore it.

It always needed the force of law to work.

Note that I am fully confident that the fine professionals in the EC will find some way to make this stupidly intrusive and annoying as well as cost a crazy amount of money to implement. I believe in them.

Comment Re:What is a 'token'? (Score 3, Informative) 32

A "token" is a substring. They're usually parts of words or whole short words.

"Processing" "tokens" is fundamentally what an LLM does.

Simplified, It takes input text, tokenizes it (splits it up according to the same rules as the corpus), maps that to a huge sparse network of vectors that serve as a lossy represention the tokenized training corpus, and then plays "pick the next most likely token" to respond.

If you choose to pay money to one of the robot timeshares, you are effectively buying the right to feed it this many tokens and expect back to get back that many tokens per month.

Comment Bluehat (Score 5, Insightful) 13

I know a couple long-time Redhatters who left at various points during the digestion process.

I heard both unhappiness about how the company changed and unhappiness about IBM shafting the open source world from both of them.

I assume anything RH-branded is simply demoware now, and am leery of projects with too many redhat.com email addresses in the repo.

It was an excellent example of doing well by doing good for a long time.

Comment Re:BNPL groceries = groceries on credit cards (Score 5, Informative) 97

People buying essentials on credit has been around for a very long time.

Longer than most think.


You load sixteen tons, what do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt
Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go
I owe my soul to the company store

-Sixteen Tons, Tennessee Ernie Ford

Comment Some people are hopeless, yes (Score 3, Insightful) 97

And those are used to excuse hating on many others who are just in a bad place.

I'm doing fine now, but grew up in a poor family. We were constantly judged for it. I recall hearing from a classmate that we couldn't be friends because his parents told him I would steal from him.

And yes, if you're seen having anything even vaguely inessential or middle-class coded, you're judged for that, too. Taking your kids to get ice cream once in a while demonstrates how wasteful you are. Or my absolute favorite was someone trying to shame me for wearing nice clothes one day. I was on my way to a job interview. So which is it, am I too stupid and lazy to lift myself up by my bootstraps, or am I to only get work at places that will hire someone in rags?

All of which probably helps explain why I can be extremely contemptuous about this sort of thing. People are complex, and the finances of many people at the edge of poverty are largely based on interpersonal relations. Without a fair amount of personal detail you simply won't have a lot of the time, you really just don't know how responsible they're being.

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