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Comment Re:Meaningless statements? (Score 1) 163

He's not lying, he's simply stating that you can give automation super human senses, and it would just be a complete idiot that would be so against those senses even in principle that hehwould remove common radar sensors from his car, just to prove a point.

He's not talking about worst human case or maybe even typical human. He's saying that confining the solution to cameras makes it only as safe as the safest human, which is fair.

Radar is pretty cheap for cars. LIDAR has similarly gotten pretty cheap. Being anti-LIDAR had at least some justification when LIDAR could only be had for thousands of dollars and saying we can't afford it. Being anti-RADAR was stupid from the moment that sentiment was expressed.

Comment Car companies are run by morons... (Score 1) 169

This is a stupid waste of time that could not have *possibly* earned them that much, a single ad in a very narrow context to a fairly small demographic. They risk their reputation on what has to be a relative pittance. Same on when they toyed with 'heated seats as a service'. A demographic that was probably happy to pay, but the annoyance was enough..

Similarly, GM has decided to move toward no support for phone interoperability. They are de-featuring cars that might be over $90,000 in the hopes that *maybe* people will accede to $10/month for the features their phone gives them already. Risking over $10k profit on a unit to have a somewhat higher chance at an additional $10/month.

Comment Re:Optane (Score 1) 19

Even if open, it just wasn't going to happen.

Problem was that it was awkwardly slower than DRAM and more expensive than NAND. Was it cheaper per GB than DRAM? Sure. Was it faster than NAND? Sure. Problem is there wasn't really space in the market for a tier between NAND and DRAM. Embarrassingly obvious as Intel ran around doing things like trying to force a whole different paradigm for application developers to do things awkwardly special to try to take advantage of this tier.

Now we have a scenario where one would think Optane could shine, an industry obsessed with feeding AI models as fast as possible. Except the answer is simply "more NAND in parallel" rather than fundamentally distinct technology.

Comment Re:Good (Score 1) 146

People didn't like phone trees, and phone trees have endured. AI might finally kill the phone tree.

The decrease in Indian call centers were mostly due to broadening offshoring destinations and increased emphasis on skill at sounding American. Some places did proudly declare their domestic call center status, but lots more anonymous but credible sounding call centers exist.

Here, the accent is whatever they want, the cost is closer to an automated phone tree than a human.... I think this one is persistent, though I will penalize companies that fob me off to LLM even if I have to pay a little more for the ones with actual human assistance. Of course, I almost never contact a company so I may be none the wiser. The only times I contact a company are almost always because I need their authority to make something happens rather than 'help', and the companies are not having the LLMs do anything but try to spew crap out of the knowledge base, and when nothing is there make up something instead, like the ability in the online self-help to do things that aren't allowed to the client.

Comment Re:Now you'll never get a straight answer (Score 4, Interesting) 146

To an extent, but recently had an exchange with one of these AI chatbots, and the difference is that the chatbot will confidently declare things that are actively incorrect. They will tell you to do things that simply don't exist. E.g. to transfer the case, go online and perform a very verbose set up steps starting with a button that doesn't exist). Note that we had asked to transfer because it misrouted us, and a human would have done it, but the chatbot had some weird imagined procedure for this.

But yes, human support has been pretty bad too, often deliberately prevented from being able to correct an issue. But at least they don't go off on weird tangents made up entirely from nothing.

Comment Re:WTF did they do? (Score 3) 44

No one can hear the failure of their consumer platform business over the massive flow of money for their cloud and office businesses.

If they shrugged and canned the entire Xbox and Windows things entirely, that's less than 9% of their revenue, and likely an even tinier portion of their profit. They would probably also lose all their consumer Microsoft 365 except people who never check and cancel subscription services, but that's probably similarly tiny in the scheme of the business.

You basically have a story of robust cloud revenue and also as I understand some 'rotation' in the market as investors decide that the AI darlings are probably going to be already as high as they can get for a while, and it's time to cash in and switch to other companies that either seem plausible for share price growth or at *least* actually profitable today with dividends and/or stock buybacks. So the viable quarter came at just the right time to catch investors looking to cash out of their big AI investments for the short term.

Comment Re:Post Windows valuation? (Score 3) 44

But maybe they have?

Windows+Xbox was less than 10% of their revenue. They note it is in decline and looking at the bulk of the revenue, not much of it seems vulnerable to people just not caring about Windows. Their cloud business is the bulk of their business and it is not particularly sensitive to OS selection on desktops.

One might argue that Microsoft 365 is at least in part tied to the Windows platform, but in my experience non-Windows businesses still buy into it, even if their users are largely relegated to browser based access only. At this point they have businesses so scared of not having it, they would have it even if they were just phones and ipads. You *never* want to risk a customer or partner sending you some office document that can't be read, and whether or not other options are actually capable hardly matters in the face of the *impression* that anything less than Microsoft is a risk.

The biggest unknown that I think would be sensitive would be the 'consumer cloud' portion of Microsoft 365. That's going to be mostly people who clicked through the Windows built-in advertising for using Microsoft 365 as storage and backup for their laptop and add-on software from device sales that prod users to up-sell to Office. The release doesn't make it clear what the absolute number there is, but I seem to recall hearing that's actually a pretty small number too.

Microsoft is primarily a cloud and Office company now, and I'm wagering the markets have largely already accepted that.

Comment Re:"given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" (Score 1) 121

Code analysis is a bit more unambiguous in terms of value, as long as the findings aren't taken *too* seriously. It has impossible attention span and can spot real issues, or failing that a mistaken issue can highlight something 'off' and inspire a true finding. It will also indicate lots of false positives, but at least the consequences can be limited to wasting your time so long as you take care to analyze.

The code gen is a bit more harrowing since it requires human vigilance to correct the problems in ways that humans are just not good at (the AI makes output that *looks* right, and you have to be really used to people lying about what they think they know to not give such output the benefit of the doubt.

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