It's like visual coding or RAD all over again. Whenever suits and PHBs are told there's a magic wand that'll allow them to do without paying people for the nitty-gritty bits, they get all excited and convince each other in their echo chamber that their dream of a company of all managers and no workers is just around the corner.

Then reality says "hi", the hype dies down, a few scam artists got rich and the world continues as it was, with a couple new cool tools in the toolbox of those who know how to use them correctly - which is generally the same people that were supposedly being replaced.

That's how I see AI. I've been writing software for the better part of 40 years. What I see from AI is sometimes astonishing and sometimes pathetic. I would never, ever, ever put AI generated code into production software without carefull checking and refactoring, and I would fire anyone who does.

Code completion is mostly in the "astonishing" part. If I write a couple lines of near-identical stuff, like assigning values from an input to a structured format for processing, the AI most of the time gets right the next line I want to write. Anything more complex than that is hit-and-miss.

Mostly, I use AI the way I would use an intern. "Can you look up how to use this function correctly? What are the parameters and their defaults?" or "Write me some code that's tedious to write (like lots of transformation operations) but not rocket science by far.
Essentially, it does faster and a little bit better what previously I'd have done with Google and Stackoverflow.

I have no fear it'll replace developers anytime soon. Half of the time the code is outright wrong, most of the time it has glaring security issues or isn't half as fault-tolerant as it should be, and for any case where I know how to do it without any research, I'd be faster writing the code myself then going through several iterations with an AI to get it done.

Exploration may be worthwhile, but it is a totally separate thing and won't provide relief for climate issues. The only possible way it could help anyone on that front is that the select few that go are hard for the desperate starving people to follow. But you'd never be able to build a civilization at any scale there without also figuring out ways to make Earth way better. Any habitat you make that can survive on Mars you could make on Earth, any CO2 scrubbing you can do in a small environment you can also scrub that environment on Earth (problem is the scale is useless for atmospheric CO2).

Plants may be happy to have CO2, but the resultant weather may not be so good for the plants.

If we could "fix" the moon or Mars, then we could fix the Earth easily. Moon/Mars colonization is insanely harder than dealing with even the harshest likely Earth climate changes.

With a more energetic atmosphere, who *knows* what the weather patterns will be, what crops will be feasible, and how much plant life and animal life we can cultivate for food. There is some non-zero chance it somehow pans out with less drama than feared, but significant chance that humanity will suffer starvation and violence that dramatically harms our population. Seems like a bet we shouldn't be taking if we can help it.

On the system requirements angle, PC gamers generally don't care anymore, however, MS can certify a few standard tiers, say, 'xbox 2026', 'xbox 2026 premium', 'xbox 2026 ultra' and the software and hardware ecosystem follows those.

Microsoft can curate a store of games regardless of the nature of the hardware. The app stores choosing to let developers run wild has nothing to do with in-house hardware.

For the software modding and third party applications, they can have their software platform do this. Windows being open is a choice (and in fact one they wanted to roll back with 'S', but to no success. They could release/license out 'xBox OS' for this experience.

On the game discs, the consoles are largely killing this anyway, famously Switch 2 game cartridges are likely to be nothing more than a dongle and Sony selling variants with no optical media at all. Online entitlement is their direction, and the industry seems content to screw over second hand market (that's a bonus for them) and anyone with zero internet.

A GPU only costs as much as a console if you go for a GPU more potent than what goes into a game console. An xBox Series X equivalent GPU is like $250.

Most games that release for xBox release on Steam for PC as well. It's generally considered an easy port for bigger market reach. That's why pairing a game controller with a PC is so popular, and steam big picture mode.

I would not at all be surprised for the near future for 'xBox' to be Asus, Dell, Lenovo, etc devices under a licensing deal with perhaps restrictions around particular TPM endorsement keys and certified specification levels for performance and portability use cases.

From a business perspective, those haven't given them the results they would have wanted.

Paradoxically, their worst products make the most money.

So the update states:
"Microsoft says it still has 1.4 billion monthly active users (Updated)"

The presumption was that some off the cuff blog that probably just wanted to keep it simple to one significant figure threw out a vague number and someone went and compared it against a more precise number and found a discrepency. Given the respective contexts one should not have expected it to be a precise comparison.

I think it's a reasonable extrapolation.

Microsoft's historical strengths have been associated with enabling third parties.

Nokia, Surface, and xBox seemed to be them pining for a more Apple-like model where they just call all the shots up and down the stack.

Given that Nokia is dead, Surface is kind of de-emphasized, and xBox has started to see use as a brand for PC gaming, accessories, and partners... It's not a huge leap that the'll just delegate the brand to the OEMs on hardware execution as the software stack hasn't really benefitted from a locked down hardware BOM in quite some time. Microsoft played with in-house hardware and didn't seem to have particularly impressive results while sort of risking alienating their partners that have driven their strength.

Further there was a paper about how LLMs were able to beat intermediate chess playing humans.

Then I dug in and they would do things like allow an LLM several rounds to correct a mistaken move (e.g. the engine would just make up a new bishop or make a piece move in an invalid way). If they had just given the LLM one and only one shot at each move, who knows how many games would have failed.

AI is obnoxiously overused in marketing and invites skepticism immediately as it strikes people as lazy marketing trying to cache in on a blatantly hyped phrase. It starts to smell scammy when all the scammers are right in the bandwagon of using it.

Further, it doesn't talk about *what* the product does, but just says it uses AI to do it. People want to know what is good about a product, and wouldn't care if it's done by some credibly "AI" approach, or a traditional programming, or a breed of super intelligent hamsters operating the device remotely from some operation centers.

The point is 'new' and 'cutting-edge' are uselessly vague, but have long been a staple of marketing speak that people have pretty much tuned it out. They wanted a 'control' for a marketing word and those are pretty much best they could come up.

I would say the marketing issues aren't even about LLMs or any specific problematic experience, but being wary of an overused buzzword. It might have some further negative impression owing to the threat that AI is going to come for their jobs. I'd say it's a tiny fraction of people that actually have given an LLM a spin and found it less useful than everyone seems to act like it is, either they haven't bothered or they used it so lightly that it seemed vaguely credible.

Diminished maybe, but not all that much.

I think we can reasonably assume that if there's a huge blackout, it won't last forever. A lot of smart people will work hard on getting things up and running again. A few years ago in the USA it lasted for a bit longer, what was it, a week or two? Recently in Spain it lasted a few days. But all those power stations and power grid operators don't just shrug and go home. So getting through those days is probably all it takes for any reasonably realistic scenario.

And you can build things up piecewise. I've got my solar now. The next thing will be a battery. Once I have that, I can think about an electric car.

Also quite a bit more awkward.

RH was on a trajectory to decently compete with VMware as a decent virtualization platform on technical merit, but I think they found VMware being first meant there wasn't much interest in changing.

So they ditched RHEV and chased "cloud" with open stack... Except open stack was never that great, and the demand for a fully realized on premise "cloud" didn't follow from off premise cloud anyway...

So red hat changed to openshift and kind of sort of shoehorned VMs awkwardly to provide some whiff of continuity to customers otherwise abandoned for trying to adopt RHEV or Open Stack from red hat.

Proxmox I think it's on the best position for providing the old fashioned VMware user experience now (in some ways better).

Another company whose business strategy requires customers believe they have a handle on this 'AI thing' claim they have a handle on this 'AI thing'.

Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but it's hardly a trustworthy source of truth rather than just doing their marketing work for them by relaying their marketing effort as 'news'.