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Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 70

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

Comment Re:Quality Work Can't Be Rushed (Score 1) 70

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Comment Business math (Score 1) 109

At the end of the day (or quarter), companies do the calculus to decide if a potential lawsuit will be larger than the revenue. That's it, they only model two kinds of numbera and write them in black and red ink. And even staying in the black isn't critical if the board and executives are getting paid in other ways.

Comment Atomic hype market (Score 1) 48

Back in the days the excitement around the atom bomb was huge, and the public perceive a newness of atomic technology and radioactivity. So we had not just radium on our wrist watches, but people also adding uranium, polonium, and thorium to products. With Firestone spark plugs, and Tho-Radia face cream being examples of the latter.

AI hype is the same thing. We're going to allow a lot of dangerous stuff enter into our society and when a bunch of people get hurt, we'll back off. But we can expect a lost generation when bad technology infiltrated our education system and leads millions of students astray. When they are unemployable, we'll just shrug and try to replace them with AI, and then forget that living, breathing human beings are going to steal and rob the rich if it's the only way to survive.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 41

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:It gets worse (Score 1) 109

Which is why it is a priority for Republicans to lock in long term bans on regulation of AI. Damaging society has become their highest priority, almost as if they are controlled by our primary adversary.

You can't seriously , actually believe this....can you????

If so, you might wanna quit talking to the bot(s)....go outside and get some fresh air....log off awhile, get away from the TV and your echo chamber....

Comment Re:We know exactly how this will play out (Score 1) 109

"Companies have one job in a capitalism - make money. Thatâ(TM)s their *only* societal responsibility..." This is false, it is merely a claim made by sociopaths. A companies "job" is to perform in the way its owners desire, in the past there were differing goals that companies would have (and that's still true of smaller companies). The "make money at any cost" approach comes from Wall Street, not capitalism, it is human nature.

With most any company of any decent size, the "owners" are the stockholders.

And with stockholders....pretty much the sole obligation the people working the company for the stockholders is to make money for the stockholders.

I mean, that's pretty much the ONLY reason anyone buys stock in a company.....why else would they do so if not to make a profit?

Comment Re:Why? (Score 1) 58

SpaceX can probably accelerate their flight schedule to accommodate Russian crew needs. There's the question of if Russia is able/willing to pay nearly $100m per seat. Their flights on Crew Dragon are currently paid through NASA in a seat exchange program where they provide flights from this site on Soyuz for US astronauts. They don't actually pony up the cash.

This launch site is also essential to attitude control of ISS. To refuel the ISS stabilizer thrusters and hold it steady while the gyroscopes are relieved periodically requires Progress modules launched from there. There isn't currently a backup plan for those services.

Comment Only 8 years and 12%? (Score 1) 57

Logically only 60 or so years remain before AI can take over 100% of jobs. Assuming that we're all replaceable cogs where every job and every worker are equivalent.
The other factor, a constant rate of growth in AI's capabilities, is probably less of a hand-wave than you might think because we're going to be constrained on the sizes of the models, computational power of the servers, and of course electricity to run it all. We'll probably see a very brief exponential growth of AI then a slow as physical constraints kick in, we're already see exponential money burned on the problem with a likely linear pay off. Jensen's "The more you buy, the more you save." will probably work out as "The more you buy, your more you spent." for most AI bets.

Comment Re: Linux as a kernel, yeah, it's everywhere. (Score 1) 85

/bin/bash is still installed, so people's typical shell scripts like command-line installers and whatnot still work.
I think the default being zsh is that it's less buggy and has some nice interface features.
The real question we should ask is not why Apple includes zsh by default, but why Ubuntu makes you install it before you can use it.

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