Apparently a *lot* of people on Slashdot are completely fooled by the CCP propaganda.

And some of them are CCP propaganda, using multiple "sockpuppets" to both post and moderate.

Decades earlier — during Vietnam war — USSR was financing all of "peace" movements in the West in particular, while attacking the "Capitalist way of life" in general. It'd be quite foolish for China to not be doing the same now. Even more foolish would be for us to not realize, that they do.

The company-wide margin is a very important metric for investors and the stock price generally. When Amy Hood says to Asha, "you need to increase your margins" that means either you increase your business unit's margins by whatever means necessary, or you're out on the street looking for a new job.

There were three big problems at MSFT - first that they wildly overpaid for Activision, they paid $95 per share (peak was $104* from Covid) at a time when it was worth barely half that. There are companies that when acquired unlock more value (say a small company acquired by Oracle, now Oracle's sales team can sell it -- or it can be bundled into a bigger product) but Activision was not such a company -- there was nothing MSFT could do that would generate more revenue or have less cost than Activision alone. If anything, the politics at Microsoft were inevitably going to drag down Activision's performance. (I am really understating this last point but I don't want to get bogged down here.)

Two, Gamepass. When Gamepass first came out, the third party publishers freaked because they predicted it would suck all the oxygen out of the room. Like, a gamer might have $100 a year to spend on games, and if it all gets spent on Gamepass then it's not being spent on third-party games. That in turn means that Xbox is less appealing for publishers and for casual gamers -- if you're the kind of gamer who only plays one game like Animal Crossing, you don't want to spend $100 a year on a Gamepass subscription and/or you probably want a game that now isn't being made on Xbox, now Xbox isn't the platform for you. I can tell you that MSFT was excited that Activision would turbocharge the Gamepass offering, because the Gamepass subscriptions had stalled below expectations -- but common sense would tell you that there was no way this was going to work from a revenue standpoint. I.e., you can't increase overall revenue by putting Call of Duty on Gamepass.

Third, the Series S. The Series S is far less capable than the Series X, and is the least powerful console in the market (after Switch 1), but it sells a lot more units than the Series X. Having to target the Series S makes the Xbox unappealing as a platform to target, on top of the fact that, as mentioned above, gamers won't buy many copies of the game because all their money is going to Gamepass already. That's coming off of the Xbox One which MSFT wildly mismarketed as a set-top box so MSFT was already starting from behind in the PS5/XSX generation.

* Yes yes I'm handwaving over debt but Activision didn't have a lot of debt.

You mean like all those US voters that elected Trump in large part because of his "no wars" promises?

I don't know, what voters you're talking about. I voted for exactly the kind of aggressive stance Trump is showing, thank you very much. If anything, I'd like him to be still more aggressive — long years of appeasing foreign assholes have made them too confident, America's "red lines" can be ignored with impunity.

Looks like they lost control pretty quickly.

Do you seriously think, Chinese citizens have better control of their foreign policy? Or are you going to claim, America is "the same" or "just as bad"?..

How many American companies have ties to the U.S. military-industrial complex?

US military is controlled by American voters, such as myself. The rest of the world, make a choice already!

Apple's iMessages are E2E encrypted. Only the sender and recipient have they keys to decrypt the messages on device; Apple does not. The new Siri search is run on device also.

Did you look at the black hole simulation software? That is the craziest fucking thing I have ever seen. Like, I know I'm a better C programmer than 90% of programmers out there but this guy just grinds me into dust with his boot.

Why did you not list their lack of profits? Nobody cares about revenue growth, it looks impressive but is made up nonsense full of circle jerk deals among AI companies. Investors care about ROI and don't like capex unless there's a big payday coming very soon.

Here's a better number: Anthropic announced their first ever operating profit just ten days ago for Q2. Very suspicious timing given the IPO. And interestingly the profit claim happens to coincide with a compute discount for said Q2 from Elon. No discount for Q3+Q4. Elon has to make his profit claims.

Like I said: Circle jerk all around.

I stand by what I said. The *hype* IS dying. Investors are getting impatient.

double rot13 is the way to go!

Google and Anthropic are perfectly able to build their own compute-centers, but it may not be economically a good idea at this point. Remember, the AI hype is dying and the investors are starting to smell a rat. Leasing GPUs from Elon means Google and Anthropic are not stuck with tons of hardware they can't monetize in the future. If things go bad, they just stop paying for access and Elon is left holding the bag.

It's important to distinguish the model from the generated sequence dynamics. The "model" (in the traditional scientific sense) is a fixed function of the input data. It cannot improve itself, except when the scientist replaces it. But that's not improvement, that's revision.

Most regular people don't understand the word model, and think it refers to their interaction with the tool. That can indeed evolve, in the same way that if you repeatedly run an input output loop with a given transformation, and add some random perturbations (aka user control), you will get a trajectory that evolves. It will probably converge to some fixed point, but that could take a long time to detect by users, who think it's evolving before their eyes.

Ask yourself what AI models actually do? They *mimick* what humans have been doing themselves. Things like writing sentences, drawing pictures, collaging photographs, collaging movies. But without ever having built-in attribution mechanisms. So it looks novel but never is. It's just a compression model of real life data artefacts, generating short random samples.

And now ask yourself what the obvious killer app is for a human output mimicking system? A system that allows the owner to pretend some human did something. There was never any other plausible outcome.

Models don't come up with anything useful on their own. That's why they invented RAG in the first place.

This is by design. Remember, Google has a deal to read and train on Reddit. It makes their AI slop seem legitimate.

It doesn't matter. What matters is the politicians "did something" and the companies followed the law, so everyone is blameless.