So the update states:
"Microsoft says it still has 1.4 billion monthly active users (Updated)"

The presumption was that some off the cuff blog that probably just wanted to keep it simple to one significant figure threw out a vague number and someone went and compared it against a more precise number and found a discrepency. Given the respective contexts one should not have expected it to be a precise comparison.

Life expectancy of the top quartile in the US does not exceed the the top quartile of CA. Yes life expectancy of the top quartile in both the US and Canada exceeds the average of everybody but you seem to have deliberately lied or misled.

The top 10% of earners have a lot more than 72% of the wealth.

I know this is a joke, but waste heat is not what is causing global warming. We would have to raise the amount of energy we are using by some orders of magnitude for waste heat to make a measurable fraction of global warming.

IMHO I hope Google only paid a few hundred dollars for this.

I think it's a reasonable extrapolation.

Microsoft's historical strengths have been associated with enabling third parties.

Nokia, Surface, and xBox seemed to be them pining for a more Apple-like model where they just call all the shots up and down the stack.

Given that Nokia is dead, Surface is kind of de-emphasized, and xBox has started to see use as a brand for PC gaming, accessories, and partners... It's not a huge leap that the'll just delegate the brand to the OEMs on hardware execution as the software stack hasn't really benefitted from a locked down hardware BOM in quite some time. Microsoft played with in-house hardware and didn't seem to have particularly impressive results while sort of risking alienating their partners that have driven their strength.

Further there was a paper about how LLMs were able to beat intermediate chess playing humans.

Then I dug in and they would do things like allow an LLM several rounds to correct a mistaken move (e.g. the engine would just make up a new bishop or make a piece move in an invalid way). If they had just given the LLM one and only one shot at each move, who knows how many games would have failed.

AI is obnoxiously overused in marketing and invites skepticism immediately as it strikes people as lazy marketing trying to cache in on a blatantly hyped phrase. It starts to smell scammy when all the scammers are right in the bandwagon of using it.

Further, it doesn't talk about *what* the product does, but just says it uses AI to do it. People want to know what is good about a product, and wouldn't care if it's done by some credibly "AI" approach, or a traditional programming, or a breed of super intelligent hamsters operating the device remotely from some operation centers.

The point is 'new' and 'cutting-edge' are uselessly vague, but have long been a staple of marketing speak that people have pretty much tuned it out. They wanted a 'control' for a marketing word and those are pretty much best they could come up.

I would say the marketing issues aren't even about LLMs or any specific problematic experience, but being wary of an overused buzzword. It might have some further negative impression owing to the threat that AI is going to come for their jobs. I'd say it's a tiny fraction of people that actually have given an LLM a spin and found it less useful than everyone seems to act like it is, either they haven't bothered or they used it so lightly that it seemed vaguely credible.

Yea I thought of that as well. So for some reason Georgia ships a much larger fraction of their waste to Malaysia than California. Is there an explanation for that? Just logistically it seems like Malaysia is more convienent for California than Georgia.

Georgia produces more plastic waste than California?

Is this the state or the country? Actually either way, this seems really hard to believe. Any explanation?

Why not put links (and not just tiny icons, but Wikipedia-like links of whole words or even sentences) to wherever the AI got the information?

Then it is *both* a search engine and an AI overview.

Also quite a bit more awkward.

RH was on a trajectory to decently compete with VMware as a decent virtualization platform on technical merit, but I think they found VMware being first meant there wasn't much interest in changing.

So they ditched RHEV and chased "cloud" with open stack... Except open stack was never that great, and the demand for a fully realized on premise "cloud" didn't follow from off premise cloud anyway...

So red hat changed to openshift and kind of sort of shoehorned VMs awkwardly to provide some whiff of continuity to customers otherwise abandoned for trying to adopt RHEV or Open Stack from red hat.

Proxmox I think it's on the best position for providing the old fashioned VMware user experience now (in some ways better).

Another company whose business strategy requires customers believe they have a handle on this 'AI thing' claim they have a handle on this 'AI thing'.

Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but it's hardly a trustworthy source of truth rather than just doing their marketing work for them by relaying their marketing effort as 'news'.

You can't put your house on public land or in the middle of a road.

Cars get in the way of anybody else using a location, *including other cars!!!!*. Yet for some reason any attempt to move them out of the way causes insane illogical reactions such as yours. Very sad and maybe the underlying cause of the obesity epidemic. The fear of having to walk is unbelievable and is warping people's minds.

It does seem very likely that the amount of CO2 you produce for the rest of your life is greater than the amount produced if you dropped dead right now and decomposed. And if you always include the decomposition after death, living longer obviously generates more CO2.

I'm unsure about the rate, especially if nothing is done to slow the decomposition. Possibly you will produce CO2 and methane much quicker for a few days.

Serious note: CO2 from living sources that get all their energy from plants or animals who eat plants are not a problem, as this is a short-term closed cycle. But then you don't get to make funny jokes.