We can bust on Microsoft all day and all night, and they deserve it, but the fact that their ability to find and fix these problems has greatly increased is a good thing. Software is incredibly complex, and no software more complicated than "10 GOTO 10" is free from the potential of security problems. Microsoft's QA has gone downhill in recent years, but now it's getting better apparently (even if it's after the fact). They are not going away, so this makes all our lives better.

I wrote a file searching utility in C++ about 30 years ago. About 15 years ago I ported it to Python and found it to be faster than using the Windows directory enumeration APIs, and I've been using that ever since. It just searches filenames, but that's all I need.

"NOTE: Experiences vary by region." says to me that Microsoft doesn't even know what their changes will do.

And people making predictions about those booms and busts have been wrong pretty much forever.

DeepSeek is doing exactly that.

DeepSeek is 30 times cheaper than OpenAI and delivers better results.

The reasons DeepSeek is cheaper are its use of less energy and the smart use of prompt caching.

Cuba gets slammed by a lot of hurricanes, which are bad for both solar panels and wind turbines.

How much in additional taxes or airport fees are you willing to pay for that?

DeepSeek is designing a tensor processor. The instruction set is very simple. Mostly just lots and lots of parallelized low-precision multiply-and-accumulate.

LLMs and humans are both unreliable, but make different mistakes.

Use one to check the other.

Disclaimer: I have used Mechanical Turk many times, but not recently.

Except the summary says that earlier acquisition is more effective than learning "recently".

Most children don't learn a second language by choice, but because they are in a multilingual environment. My daughter is bilingual because from birth to age 10 she shared a bedroom with her monolingual Mandarin-speaking grandmother.

I had an RPN calculator in high school, so that made learning Japanese much easier.

When I was in the military, I was deployed to the Western Pacific. I learned Japanese and Tagalog so I could talk to girls.

Of course they will.

Clients need to do their research, choose the tool they want, and then choose the consultant to help them implement it.

That's the way it works. Microsoft isn't the right partner to help you implement a solution based on Google Gemini. Duh.

Or this could be an example of Jevons Paradox .

As AI makes employees more productive, and thus more profitable, would you fire them or hire more?

(Note: I'm against the profligate financial support the US is providing Israel, for a variety of reason)

The problem with the idea of "stop sending billions to Israel" is that it's not actually that we send, you know, truckloads of cash to Israel for it to spend wherever it wants. Most of our aid to Israel is in the form of arms and equipment that is specifically to be purchased from US companies -- so most of that money actually ends up staying in the US, and if you were to take that money off the table, then several large US contractors -- and thousands of employees -- would then feel that pinch.

(Not that that makes it a bad idea, mind you)