Exactly. I remember hypes like this failing back in the ATARI ST days. Yes, sure, people want it, but the tech is just not ready and still on the level of "expensive lab demo". Eventually it will be ready and affordable and there will be content, but I expect that will take another 20-50 years, maybe more.

This is, what, the 5th time some "VR Ready Now!" hype falls short? I remember this stuff getting pushed 30 years ago or so. In actual reality, this is not ready and will not be ready for quite a while. Sure, nice tech demo, but fitness for general use takes a few decades more.

That bad? Well, they seem to be a society even farther advanced in Enshittification than most of the West.

Indeed, it does. Although not all tech sucks. Often you find some graybeards behind tech that does not suck or at least sucks less though.

CGI and C++? I do you one better. Apparently, if I was interested (currently not) my ex-boss knows people that are really looking for engineers that can handle Fortran competently and the pay seems to be pretty good. Once you are actually an engineer and not a mere technician anymore, the language matters not a lot, what you do with it matters. And none of the youngsters have even heard of things like Fortran, which is actually a pretty decent language.

True that. Of course, there are a lot of "meat grinder" roles (love that term!) and not so many roles for senior experts. But here is the thing: There are _never_ enough experts (let alone senior ones) and, yes, there is indeed no shortage of mistakes.

I see the same thing. And I see that what MS has built is a crumbly house-of-cards (see recent attacks). Competitors are a bit better, but still, the cloud is a massive single-point-of-failure. Solid and resilient engineering looks different. Less tech diversity is also a big problem. It means more mono-cultures and these are easy to attack and very hard to replace. Again, solid and resilient engineering looks different.

I guess we will need to have a global IT problem that makes Covid like a small thing for people to wake up. It is getting easier and easier to cause that and, at some point, some deranged group (of which there are many) will manage to do it.

While true, you also have a moral responsibility from your choice of who to work for. The typical expectation is that if you do not agree with what your employer does, you first try to change culture there (by legal means, obviously), but then you leave. This is not a one-person-one-vote system, personal merit does count.

While I follow your argument, I do not think that is how it works. The main limiter is not model size, but training data set availability. If you want a different model "bias", you have to find a training data set in the same size that has this different bias. And you cannot use automatically generated data to skew the model. It has to be human-generated input or model collapse may well happen.

It is also pretty stupid with regard to resilience to rely on central infrastructure. Especially MS infrastructure which is known to be massively insecure.

Yep. But a brief look at the history of totalitarianism shows the police _must_ _not_ get what they want or things go to hell. People that want to work there have a selective blindness and are dangerous if unchecked.

As a side-note, if you look at history you find gems like that it was not the GeStaPo that found most people that ended up in KZs, it was the _regular_ police that was just too happy to aid in "cleaning up" society.

This is about MS and either a massive outage of their crap cloud or a massive attack on their crap desktop offering. Which is getting more and more likely. That will not be over in a day or two. "Weeks" is a more realistic time-frame.

They will. And other things that can soak power but do not need to run 24/7. It just takes a while to do.

You overlook some teeeeeny details here:
1. Power production and use varies over the day and does so in different ways
2. Grid stability is non-trivial and a bit more complicated to achieve

Details matter. I guess this makes no sense to you because you are missing the details. Here, they are reeeeeally simple: Electricity production and consumption varies in different ways over the course of a day.