As you increase the size of the bulk licenses' box, the amount of expensive cardboard increases as a square, but the number of licenses that fit inside the box increases as a cube. This results in a reduction of the amortized cardboard cost per license.

If a cost reduction isn't happening, then I would suggest people look into the shape of their bulk licenses. It may be that a same-sized box holds fewer licenses than it did ten years ago, due to the addition of "AI features" being tacked onto everything, resulting in irregular, difficult-to-efficiently-pack licenses.

But this is a good thing. Meta patenting this means there's only one company we need to worry about pulling this shit.

Read his comment again. His objection has nothing to do with what's being patented; it's just a super-generic anti-recording complaint. This patent does not prohibit anyone else from pissing him off by recording things.

It doesn't help that the Facebook angle (that these are Meta's glasses rather than merely "smart glasses") injects all sorts of weirdness into the imagined application.

Facial recognition to identify people: has applications, such as the obvious "crap, I always forget names. Who is this guy, again?"

Highlight reels: WTF?! You call that an application? Extremely niche at best.

There's useful technology being discussed here, but apparently Meta doesn't want that to be the focus.

It's much worse than that; you would end up preventing anyone else from doing it for 20 years, until the patent expired. Of course that would make Slashdot!

Investors are chasing a company that achieves some kind of AI singularity. Let's set aside the fact that there's no reason to believe there is anything but diminishing marginal returns by making marginal refinements to current frontier models. Let's imagine someone hits the jackpot and gets, not even AGI, but a system that's as far ahead of today's frontier model are ahead of 2020's GPT 2.0 in performance.

Globally AI revenues are 150 billion, against a cumulative burn rate of 450 billion. A model that is a generation ahead of others would almost certainly capture the lion's share of that revenue.

If AGI magically appears as a Sam Altman has promised investors it will, a hundred million is way too low. Add, maybe, another zero to the revenues.

Conservatively, a safer assumption is that frontier models will get marginally better based on refinements in training and reinforcement and the other bits and bobs that go into these systems. The nobody is winning the lion's share of anything, at least overnight. But you have to define "safe". By "safe" I mean unlikely to lose money. But some investors are clearly defining "safe" as "having the greatest chance of owning a piece of the biggest thing ever."

I'm not following this super-closely, but if Anthropic is pursuing adding multi-step model based reasoning to their system, that could be the basis of a generational leap in capability. But if that is an approach that looks like it has a chance of working, then their competitors are no doubt pursuing the same thing. In that case you'd expect the revenue pie to grow as the scope of model utilty increases, but that growth to be split among several competitors. This could credibly result in a revenue stream for some of them that is as big as the entire industry's revenue stream today. But there's going to be hell to pay on the data center impacts end of things.

Is this something you do often?

No, it's pretty much one day a year (but usually several times on that day): spring cleanup (though my smizmar and I call it "truck day" (*)).

It's uncompostable/tainted yard waste, even furniture (if it's in truly horrible shape), and all sorts of other random trashy shit. When it happens, the amount of resulting trash is many times the size of our trash bin or what can even be put on on the curb for "large item pickup." The usual weekly process is overwhelmed and can't handle it; there simply isn't room. So we haul it.

* "Truck day" because I decided paying $72 to rent U-haul's big pickup truck for a few hours is preferable to paying $72k to buy a big pickup truck. And it usually gets used for more than just dumping trash; it's often a large-item shopping day too. (To be next decade's trash? Don't ask!)

Goddamn it! What's with this ticket about the CSV import being broken?!

We need to force these computers to join Psi Corps and obey their rules!

D'oh, but DarkOx, I actually do agree with you on something: the license plates are there and they're visible in public. We don't need Flock to have our privacy compromised; everyone can do it.

We haven't denied our adversaries the capability; we're just trying to regulate their good intentions. That strategy doesn't work.

Flock is the symptom not the disease. People either need to demand anonymity and insist we stop displaying things like plates at all, and actually limit public photography, or just accept we will be tracked everywhere. There is no middle ground to be had.

Indeed. We seem pretty conflicted about that, so we're getting the worst of both worlds.

A lot of people are intentionally commiting crimes of various severity and they don't actually want police to have a more effective enforcement tool

This set of people is dwarfed into insignificance be non-criminals who are also being caught on camera. And the problem with that isn't false positives, it's true positives: non-criminal John Doe's car was spotted at a certain place at a certain time, so let's make that fact available on the market. That way, we can target him with ads, increase his insurance premiums, let his wife's PI know what neighborhood he had lunch in, let assassins when he's home, and let burglars (or his wife's rapist) know when he's not home.

The sheer amount of not-quite-what-consumers-need RAM that is going to be auctioned after the AI companies' bankruptcies will be unprecedented. Remember we're literally talking about an amount equal to what the entire consumer market was using. It's going to be a few years worth of the entire RAM manufacturing industry!

The scale of not-quite-right RAM we're going to see, makes me imagine (warning: red flag for talking out my ass) consumer motherboards specifically made for the mountains of weirdly-packaged cheap-but-fast-as-fuck RAM at hyperscale data center auctions. We'd end up calling them "AI bankruptcy rigs" or something like that. Yes, they'll perform differently (more throughput than you need, more latency than you want), but it still ought to be usable. IGPs usually included, I suspect.

And they will just be a product of the times; ten years later no one would want one and bankruptcy rigs would be seen as odd late-2020s relics; the lemonade from Sam Altman's lemon industry. It would be a dead-end tech. But during those late 2020s? Could be a neat-o opportunity.

If you are treating Windows devices as much like chromebooks as possible (autopilot deploy into S-mode; fairly draconian setup) you can get away with not too much IT; but at that point you really have to ask yourself why you are using Windows devices.

Most of the things you actually need windows for don't play all that well with that level of lockdown; and between chromebooks being cheap and defaulting to that level of lockdown without additional effort and the low end Apple stuff being nicer than wintel hardware that costs the same it's a bit tricky to make a strong case for running Windows systems as 'edgebooks'. You can; but it's not a super compelling option.

That's exactly why it's sort of disappointing to see him promoted away from actually doing stuff; and showing off a one of the less interesting "do Doom in a technically weird way" demos around.

Plenty of c-suite are just "meh, nothing of value was lost" when the suit fully engulfs the human; either they never seem to have done anything of interest or were popped directly out of some viscous spawning pool at McKinsey or whatever; but Russinovich was really good for nasty NT crevices work, so it seems a real shame for him to be vague CTO of cloud stuff. I don't begrudge him the money the promotion presumably involved; but going from actually interesting things to sending copilot to double booked meetings is kind of grim.

Is the person who ignored Pelosi in the room with you right now?

It would be interesting to know what the numbers look like in terms of schools that are actually doing something at least modestly Apple-specific vs. ones basically reusing chromebook-focused plans on Apple hardware.

Anything you hand out is going to be 'a platform' and normalize it for the students(not necessarily a point in its favor; people tend to resent the deliberate limitations of hardware that IT has been told to at least try to make less useful for porn and cheating); but there is a potential difference in versatility and vendor flexibility between people actually adopting some macOS stuff and people concluding that chromebooks have been getting more expensive at an alarming clip, without feeling any less cheap, so Apple is now genuinely competitive even if you are just going to slap managed chrome on there and reuse your existing, chromebook focused, IT and curriculum stuff.