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Comment Re:Just for clarity (Score 1) 86

"Past performance is no guarantee of future returns" applies to any recorded dataset. Modelling a fictional being's mental states is fun, but stating that it is useful is premature.

The observed fictional being might be always sleepy in your dataset (because it's easier to record him when he's not moving much). And identifying the being's favourite colour (orange) may be irrelevant and wasteful in your model.

Comment Re:Just for clarity (Score 2) 86

If you observe yourself in the mirror, and see your reflection eating spaghetti, is it a useful framework to pretend that the spaghetti is real? If you're still hungry, will you reach through the glass to steal the plate from the other you? And should you first make a plan how to defend the loot, in case the reflection becomes angry and punches you in the face?

Comment Re:everything has to rust (Score 2) 30

Python isn't a glue language. It's the lingua franca of most programmers in the workforce at this point in history.

Try hiring some expert C++ programmers, or even competent Java programmers. They're in the minority. What you get instead is barely competent grads who only know Python. What do you do with those grads after you've hired them?

1) teach the grads a strongly typed industrial strength language so they can contribute.... eventually

2) develop your new projects in Python because the grads can be productive straightaway, and the long term issues with Python can be pushed off to a future manager.

Which brings me to my point: Python should be frozen as is. No more development. Tinkering with it just because some people want to contribute and get visibility in open source is not a good cost/benefit outcome for humanity.

Freeze Python. It's the modern BASIC. Move all the existing developers to a new, unrelated programming language project. Give them free reign to do whatever they want there.

Comment Not the important metric (Score 1) 37

That's not the important metric. It only tells you the percentage of users, not the percentage of people who play games on Linux (or buy games).

For instance, I have a Steam account. I've got the client installed on my phone and Mac. I don't really play games anymore. I'm sure this counts towards something.

What's meaningful to those who might target a platform is what percentage of those people buy games. It might just be that Linux users are the only ones who play dungeon crawlers, for instance - which could be meaningful information.

Comment Re:its bad (Score 3, Informative) 67

I'm still impressed that the Teams web client can't edit a message with an emoji in it without messing up the keyboard controls and often corrupting the message and losing data. It's had this bug for years. It's literally a messaging app where you can't reliably send messages.

Comment Re:Element Pro is not Open Source (Score 5, Interesting) 67

I call article shenanigans.

Element is a UK company. Which is not part of the EU. Why should the EU choose to use a non-European company, headquartered in a non-European country, with a non-European, non-compliant legal system?

The UK is already barred from offering unrestricted financial services in the EU, I expect communications services to be an area of concern.

Brexit is Brexit. The UK is out, and simply cannot be trusted with European communications backbones.

I may be willing to believe that there's been a tender process and their product is currently being evaluated, but on privacy grounds alone I doubt their product passes the bar unless they reincorporate in an EU country with 51% EU ownership, all other things being equal.

Comment Re:Its a trap! (Score 1) 40

Warnings about its dangers need to be stated in a way that they will understand. Like maybe "All AI models already have a kill switch: the computer's power cord.

That's literally not a kill switch. How do you kill an AI if you're not in the room where the power cord is plugged in?

"Your honour, I tried killing my AI but it runs in the cloud and I don't know where. Also my AI service supplier refused to turn it off for me when I called them"

Kill switches are a very good thing. When you need them you need them to work. Like any good tool, they are complex to implement correctly. And like any good tool, they should be implemented early. Not as an afterthought, like these AI companies want to do.

A world without kill switches is a world where the kill switch is an EMP.

Comment Re:No concept of the Golden Rule (Score 1) 90

And rightly so. The senator is not Trump. He is not immune from prosecution like Trump is. So it makes perfect sense that if someone doxxed Trump it should be treated differently than if Trump doxxed a regular American. Trump is a special case with special rights.

I(f you don't like it, maybe don't elect a king?)

Comment Re:Uh oh! (Score 1) 66

The value I see in Xbox:

1) Their vendor agreements re: distribution and sales for games.
2) The OEM hardware channel profits/relationship.

Frankly? I see 2 options.

AMD is doing great. They're the only big players in the market I can see that understands how to grow a business instead of simply loot it. Xbox would potentially give AMD a big market leg up in their other product lines (namely, low power CPU/GPU). Xbox itself has always heavily depended on AMD hardware integration to run well. AMD excels at buying things and making them feed their entire pipeline - and that model works extremely well for Xbox.

It would just depend on what kind of deal they could get on the company, and Windows use (if they'd even want it).

Failing that... maybe Valve.They're already trying to turn SteamDeck and SteamOS into something that runs and works on everything. They've got obscene amounts of money. Xbox could be a great already-installed base as well as give them additional studios to make games for their platform. Though this seems less likely than AMD.

Comment Re:Loss leader? (Score 1) 66

Considering how easy it is to port or support a game on Linux or Mac these days with WINE (with vibe coding), even Windows support seems a diminished quality for gaming.

I've personally taken 2 old games and made them playable on MacOS just vibing them. One was Homeworld, and the other was an indie game (the name of which I can't remember, but it was in the theme of Thief).

There was a time not that distant from now when Microsoft was getting a significant percentage of their revenue from gaming. This seems like they're slaughtering their sacred cow.

I can't see much upside for Microsoft in the future. They're basically moving cloud-only for most products, except for Windows itself. I understand how that works on the books, but I don't see how well that works for their customers. They're shrinking their market substantially to cater to larger and larger enterprises.

(THeir GPU investments have largely been a loss leader for their other cloud services... "data has inertia" or however that saying goes: storage, compute, and network activity on their cloud which wouldn't have gotten used if not for people moving data to the cloud to process it, subsidizes the discounted GPUs. All the cloud providers are doing this.)

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