Knowledge is hard won in science. And it takes quite a bit of intellectual honesty to admin we don't know what something is. Dark matter is the label for phenomenon we can measure but we don't understand. It will be renamed when we do understand its nature.
I am in favor of Microsoft releasing Linux distributions, donating code for Linux distributions and for the Linux kernel, supporting Linux on their cloud infrastructure, et cetera. I am not in favor of anything which involves Redhat even peripherally as long as they (IBM, really) continue to mount an attack on the GPL by continuously violating the clause about additional restrictions not being allowed, hiding behind the corrupt US court system, and exploiting the fact that approximately no one can afford to sue IBM.
To return to my point, I remain unsurprised.
I can tell you've never used Microsoft hardware.
The issue is that I use Microsoft software every work day, and it is shit all day every time.
I just want a way to write a scheduled task with one line instead of an entire config file.
cron daemons still exist. Some of them are fairly fancy. I am running the default one for debian (as in, I installed "cron") and even that conveniently creates cron.{daily,hourly,monthly,weekly,yearly} where I can just dump scripts instead of editing crontab, if one will suit anyway. And then there's also at.
Another thing I would like is to be able to just put startup scripts in one directory and have them run instead of doing all kinds of configuration
That's
Windows 8 was the single biggest change in all of Microsoft UI history, and even then they didn't actually change any of the most important parts. All windowing operations are still based on IBM CUA and... work like dogshit.
Every single Windows version has the same problem, some things just won't multitask. If you try to drag an Edge window while the browser is opening a tab, you can't. That's because the application is responsible for that. On Unix systems this isn't a thing because the Window Manager is responsible.
What's especially frustrating about this is that Windows actually has some cool UI features like detecting when you're connecting to some displays you've connected to before, and arranging them logically the way you had them arranged before. But then the process fails as Windows forgets which windows were maximized, or the application doesn't restore to the same size window it had before because of some weird interaction. So Windows has this awesome feature... which doesn't actually work. I still have to rearrange my windows every time because they do actually do it, but they do it incorrectly.
But with that said Windows has never, ever, EVER changed the basic way Window management has functioned since Windows 3.0. It is still basically the same, the only significant difference is where minimized windows go.
Employees, personnel, workers, labor. But the later two would be admitting who does the actual work around here.
I did a google search, then I wanted to do another related search, google figured out accurately what I wanted on the second one based on the first, and offered as a suggestion exactly the search I had in mind. Could they do this without AI? Maybe, they were doing it before, but rarely did it actually give the suggestion I wanted. I might not have thought anything of it but there were interface appearance changes at the same time.
Problem is, lawmakers are too often on the teat. A proper response to this would be to not only force them to restore literally all of these domains but also allow people to use them for commercial use after this, just to remind Google that they don't run the world.
door-to-door public transport is a great way to have traffic jams and make personal transportation an expensive privilege that makes some key people a lot of money. Worse for individuals than leasing a vehicle in terms of cost and control.
I brought two of my neglected fruit trees back to production. I'll be doing some grafts for the others next next.
I found out that I need a lot more deer proof fence to make a go at growing tomatoes and kale. Very little survived these hoofed vermin.
That was the last great windows, for windows values of great. I refuse to go find out, but I bet someone has even figured out how to get it past the 2GB limit and implement USB.
The problem is largely the generality. You're right you can't replace a workforce with ML/AI. Management however doesn't understand that AI is a tool, and a tool is used for a specific purpose. AI is not general enough to simply replace an employee, it needs to be used by someone to improve efficiency. The downside is no one discusses this for general LLMs.
100% agree with you. And I think the companies that figure out that you could take the same number of employees but have them using better tools are going to be the winners in the long wrong. Using AI to be more productive, shortening development cycles, etc is kind of the point, but real metrics and cost-benefit analysis needs to be done continually in any company adopting new technology. If it's not paying off, then don't do it. And I firmly believe that cutting large number of staff is the wrong optimization, being smaller is the opposite of growth. And in this industry, growth is success (in multiple dimensions)
The features are of course slowly developing, but the biggest problem is that it gets thrown at staff without a use case and without training on what to do with it. I shit you not someone in our training session suggest we use CoPilot to start software by hitting WIN+C and typing the name of the software we want AI to launch. Try it, it's so frigging slow that you can probably locate the exe file manually on your computer faster than that (to say nothing of the fact the start menu has a search feature).
Yea, there is a huge lack of understanding of what it's for. It's not a search engine or a program launcher. But on the other hand you can ask it (Glean, copilot, whatever) something like "Look for internal docs on XYZ and summarize. Note any discrepancies between sources. And cite your sources."
I find LLMs useful to make a workflow for doing some task. Like instead of asking it to generate tables, I have it generate a script that generates tables. Because I have on MANY occasions seen Claude Opus and others spit out tables of data with subtle errors in it. And while I usually have success when I ask it to review the tables it just generated, it has been much better at reviewing a small script's correctness than large tables of data.
Show me this software that you consider usable enough to replace more than about 5% of what a software engineer does.
Luckily I didn't claim it was replacing software engineers. Although it is a huge force multiplier for us. Docs, execution roadmaps, code reviews, security audits, benchmarking, trouble shooting, and writing boiler plate code. I think a good portion of my peers have been already using this tech for the last 2 years. We would have stopped using it if it didn't work at all, and it seems to be improving all the time.
For non software engineering jobs, which I think is where we're near the break even point on full employee replacement. Getting a system that can usefully answer help desk does exist, but it is expensive to run. Offering a inferior experience with a much cheaper AI is already possible and being done today.
Practically speaking. Getting one experience QA engineer to direct an army of agents at directed and ad hoc testing is already happening. So those entry level QA jobs that many of us used to get our foot in the door into the software industry are not going to be available (sending those jobs over seas already made them an unreliable route for most of us in the West)
Just to be clear are you suggesting the people who design hardware should be working on coding in Windows,
Seems like it would be an improvement.
10 to the 12th power microphones = 1 Megaphone
