I'm not sure that their bean counters trust LLMs quite enough to let them issue quotes; but they could honestly use an expert system of some kind to cut through their SKU nonsense.

I had just the worst meeting some time back where, despite there being a total of 6 'licensing people' between MS and the VAR, there were a number of points where they were unable to determine(or came to different determinations) of what license you needed to do certain things and how much it would cost(and not 'different' in the 'MS thinks we can do X% off list, VAR thinks we can do Y% of list; totally different alleged list prices, different SKUs in different quantities, and different alleged discounts).

For a company that sells both ERP and CRM software it seems like a bad look to not be able to; y'know, tell a customer who is asking about one of your product lines which model he needs and how much it will run him; and from a bean-counting perspective it seemed wild that at least tens of man hours worth of confusion were actually cost effective.

Maybe I just don't understand the psychology; and some 80k/yr sales person is totally worth it if the customer is in 'fuck it, I want this to be over' mode rather than 'hard nosed negotiator' mode when a premier licensing deal is signed; but it's always kind of a weird experience how the guys who sell consumer widgets can just give me a spec sheet and a price; but 'enterprise' means a couple of chirpy reps, a mandatory reseller, and a huge amount of manual attention.

A lot of the 'headline' announcements, pro and con, are basically useless; but this sort of thing does seem like a useful cautionary tale in the current environment where we've got hype-driven ramming of largely unspecialized LLMs as 'AI features' into basically everything with a sales team; along with a steady drumbeat of reports of things like legal filings with hallucinated references; despite a post-processing layer that just slams your references into a conventional legal search engine to see if they return a result seeming like a pretty trivial step to either automate or make the intern do.

Having a computer system that can do an at least mediocre job, a decent percentage of the time, when you throw whatever unhelpfully structured inputs at it is something of an interesting departure from what most classically designed systems can do; but for an actually useful implementation one of the vital elements is ensuring that the right tool is actually being used for the job(which, at least in principle, you can often do since you have full control of which system will process the inputs; and, if you are building the system for a specific purpose, often at least some control over the inputs).

Even if LLMs were good at chess they'd be stupid expensive compared to ordinary chess engines. I'm sure that someone is interested in making LLMs good at chess to vindicate some 'AGI' benchmark; but, from an actual system implementation perspective, this is the situation where the preferred behavior would be 'Oh, you're trying to play chess; would you like me to set "uci_elo" or just have Stockfish kick your ass?" followed by a handoff to the tool that's actually good at the job.

Why do we even consider it a story when there are a couple of CEO quotes to mash together?

Even leaving aside the notrivial odds that what a CEO says is flat out wrong and the near certainty that what the CEO says is less well informed than what someone at least a layer or two closer to the technology or the product rather than to vague, abstract, 'management'; unless a C-level is being cleverly ambushed when away from their PR handlers with a few drinks in them or actively going off script in the throes of some personal upset, why would you expect their pronouncements to be anything but their company's perceived interests restated as personal insights?

Surprise, surprise, the AI-company guy is here to tell us that the very large, high barrier to entry, models are like spooky scary and revolutionary real soon now; even if you wouldn't know it from the quality of the product they can actually offer at the present time; while the AI-hardware guy is here to tell you that AI is friendly and doesn't bite but everyone needs even more than they thought they did, ideally deployed yesterday; because the AI-company people need to hype up the future value of throwing more cash and more patience at money-losing LLMs; and the AI-hardware people need to juice the total addressable market by any means necessary.

This seems like it radically increases the (historically quite low) risk of steroid abuse within network engineering. We don't ask how "Tank Coreswitch" is preparing for the move from 100Kg/E to 400Kg/E; but apparently it involves more endocrinology and dodgy sports medicine than most other networking standards.

I suspect that finding out the hard way would suck; but I'd honestly be a little curious what the breakdown would be between "it's been decades since we sold this stuff with the expectation of more than toy use; it's bad for margins to have more than bare minimum service techs and spares" where you'd basically be screwed; and "we jerk you around because we can; but if you just conscripted our contractors and Defense Production Act-ed our production priorities it would actually work fine".

If the problem is basically just 'because we can' contract fuckery a real war would probably sort it out; because the DoD can also 'because we can' in a pinch. It's if the system looks rotten because, deep down, it's been at least two generations of people selling cool toys that we all know are just going to be used against pitifully inferior non-state or pariah-state actors to people buying cool toys who know how to talk about 'peer adversaries' but can't forget that their entire career has been more or less discretionary and recreational uses of force that we barely bother to call wars.

There are definitely upsides to not having spent prolonged periods of time in hot wars with existential threats recently; but I suspect that it's hard to keep deep cynicism from creeping into the supply chain when it's so hard to pretend that you aren't just going through the motions.

"They 'trust' me. Dumb fucks."

There's an important thing to keep in mind about 'cultural diversity' in this context.

Under typical circumstances valuing cultural diversity gets to be more than enthusiasm for novelty because it's also a desire to protect (at least some, you don't have to deem them all equally desirable) people from being leaned on more or less aggressively to stop doing what they are doing. That changes if you get too close to the line of advocating more hosts be thrown at the problem in order to keep the show going so it remains available. Goes from being a matter of treating people as ends to treating them as means fairly sharply.

As best I can tell Scale mostly does landing military contracts and underpaying the cheapest possible expendable gig workers to do image classification; so I can see the culture fit with Zuckerberg's attempt at a broligarch makeover.

This handheld not Microsoft hardware, though, it's an Asus.

I recall a comment by a programmer saying: "I asked AI to refactor my code. Now it's clean, elegant, and nothing works."

Yet, consider this -- consoles used to get price cuts quickly. The SNES launched for $199, but the next year it was selling for $149, and then $99. Meaning, most people paid much less than launch price. On the other hand, the Switch never got a price cut, so in practice it was more expensive; expect the same for the Switch 2.

Heard it's more like a 1050Ti.

I realize that the herd animals of finance and the illustrious thought leadership of linkedin essentially assume that you are making coal-powered buggy whips by banging rocks together if you aren't doing nation-state levels of capex on chatbots; but is there any evidence that Apple is actually suffering from their alleged deficiencies?

The most angry reaction I've heard, though I'm only privy to anecdotes rather than significant amounts of buying information, is from people who were pissed that Apple went down the hypebeast route by pre-announcing a bunch of AI faff that wasn't ready to ship; and that cut against their historical behavior of saying nothing or rubbishing a category until they decided to enter it; plus the ongoing acknowledgement that siri is useless.

But is there a reason to, other than you want to use a DE that doesn't support Wayland?

And what a tragic mistake that was.