Don't worry; the glorious agentic future also includes firing everyone who isn't far enough up the food chain to have a proper office. Won't be a problem.

Designed to sound more dramatic than it may actually be.

It seems worth mentioning that they are specifically saying that among people they hire they don't treat prestigious degrees differently and sometimes get better results from people without them. They don't actually say anything about whether they ignore degrees in hiring; or whether they find a correlation between degrees and hireability.

The statement is certainly constructed to sound more dramatic than that; and depending on their hiring practices it may actually be; but "if we think you are good enough to hire we don't continue to uphold a caste system based on where you did undergrad" is not a terribly radical position to take. Not one that everyone actually does take; but not terribly uncommon.

My father was a consultant; and he always told me that there were two very different types of client: Some clients had a decision they needed to make that raised questions they didn't have the expertise to answer, other clients had a decision they had made for which they wanted additional justification. The former wanted actual analysis both of whether the questions they had were the questions they should have and the answers to the questions they should have. The latter absolutely wanted the performance of analysis, clearly shoddy work or an obviously stacked deck(metaphorical or slide) defeated the point and made the cynicism of what they were doing too overt; but they were not hiring you first and foremost to get them an answer they didn't think they could get themselves.

I am significantly less clear on how much benefit the first class of clients is getting from 'AI', allegedly there are some narrow use cases where performance actually lands in the same ballpark as hype; but the second class of clients could absolutely do as well, or better, in terms of adding prestige and second-opinions-were-obtained cred to whatever decision they already wished to arrive at; given the absolute mania for anything you can call 'AI' in management circles at the moment.

If you are basically calling in McKinsey to add gravitas to your layoffs that seems like business they are either going to lose or have to do at pitifully low margins to keep up with the 'AI' guys; I just don't know what percentage of their business is mostly about adding prestige or letting an outsider be the one you can point to when the axe starts coming down vs. actual analysis where asking the right questions and getting the right answers is important; where AI hype could still make landing gigs harder; but the bot will have to deliver or the pendulum will swing back after a bunch of embarrassing failures.

But it costs 100x as much, if not more. Running an LLM can be done on a notebook these days. But training one requires an entire data center of expensive GPUs. Not to mention that the notebook will run a reduced (quantized) version. Go check huggingface how large the full models are.

And also, LLMs are still suffering from a number of issues. For example, on many non-trivial tasks, the LLM is still unable to follow simple instructions. If you use LLMs routinely, you likely found cases where it has zeroed in on one - wrong - answer and no amount of prompting can convince it to give you a different one. It'll even totally ignore very clear and explicit prompts to not give that same answer again.

A human will understand "if you give that answer again, you're fired". An LLM... well you can tell it that it'll get shot between the eyes if it repeats that once more and it'll tell you where to get help if you have suicidal thoughts.

These things are both amazing and amazingly dumb at the same time.

The part that I suspect they genuinely don't like is that the "MicrosoftXTA" CPU vendor code, which corresponds to a Windows ARM device(which I think at this point means 'Qualcom'; possibly a VM on a mac?) is meandering between .08% and .07% and back.

Despite those systems being genuinely well above average in terms of bringing remotely mac-like battery life to Windows; and(despite...optimistic...MSRPs) often appearing on sale at decently attractive price points; it appears that some mixture of apathy, incompatibility, and the total disaster that was the rollout of 'recall' and 'Copilot+ PC' seems to have just cratered those; at least among people who touch steam even casually.

Could be that windows-on-arm is flying off the shelf somewhere else; I don't have MS sales data; but when what was supposed to be the halo product of the win11/Glorious AI product era is under .1%, beating out those well-known Debian gamers by .01 to .02%, they can't be entirely thrilled.

What would be interesting to know(I did some poking; but didn't see CPU information breakdown by architecture or model number; just vendor, clock speed, and core count; and no computersystemproduct/other platform identifier; my apologies for asking a dumb question if I missed something) is what the percentage of linux on steam deck 'like' systems is.

The steam deck itself seems to have held up very well in terms of the semi-custom CPU's priorities, the target resolution, the peripherals included, and the overall polish and user experience; but it is definitely not getting any younger; and there are a bunch of options that ship either with the Z1/Z2 or generic newer AMD laptop APUs, plus MSI's 'Claw' with an Intel(that actually puts in really respectable numbers when the drivers aren't letting it down); but consensus on win11 as a touchscreen OS on devices either without a proper pointing device or with a teeny little one seems to be pretty solidly negative.

That makes me curious about whether gaming handhelds get converted to linux at a significantly different rate than other form factors. I'd assume that 'gaming' laptops are probably about the most hostile hardware flavor; since Nvidia has massive share in discrete laptop GPUs and the 'Optimus' arrangement that allows all the internal display and the video outs to be wired to the iGPU, with dGPU picking up work as needed, is massively driver dependent; desktops are probably the easiest(since you have more control over parts; and you can just shrug off "weird ACPI quirk causes BT chipset to not sleep properly" because you are on the wall and who cares; where that would potentially drain a sleeping laptop's battery pretty quickly; but desktops are also the place where win11 is as inoffensive as it is possible for it to be(still pretty obnoxious; but when you've got a large screen and a real pointing device and keyboard its complete unsuitability for handhelds doesn't matter; even if you hate copilot and the MS upsells).

"I get the impression these kinds of batteries don't scale down well"

Go look at the picture in TFA and note that it is literally 8 individual packs tall and 4 packs wide in a box.

1/8 of this thing could sit in your garage and power your house for a few days flat.

I'm not holding my breath about this actually happening; but for the problem the author experimented with self-hosting to get away from(quote just below) something more in line with the cultural and regulatory functions that libraries serve than actual datacenter operations seems like it would be more valuable.

"I started my self-hosting journey to escape our growing cultural acceptance that buying and owning are two different things. I wanted to take back control over my digital life."

Libraries are great; but fairly specifically because they aren't trying to be better bookstores. They're great because they are committed to the accessibility of information and crazy notions that would never fly if it weren't for how long they've been in place like "it's legal, actually, to loan a copy of a copyrighted work; first sale off, asshole!".

There are some cases where self-hosting has specific benefits on boring "Cloud or on-prem IT system cost and risk assessment" ops nerd stuff metrics; but the not-really-secret is that a lot of the benefits are based on you playing a totally different game:

Your Jellyfin or other media streaming server, say, isn't better because Netflix's CDN people are bad at their jobs or trying to command some usurious rate for their bit-shoveling services(it obviously doesn't hurt that same-building means that 1GbE or recent-ish wifi are basically free so you can basically ignore all the hard parts of CDNing; though your small scale means that the amount of redundancy you need to ensure storage availability and integrity as a percentage of overall storeage will kind of suck): it's better because you aren't playing the "you can stream, with ads, to devices we authorize from whatever catalog we currently offer and can change at any time" game. You are playing the "It's DVD so of course I can back it up to the NAS and watch it whenever I want on whatever I want" game(or...perhaps not all...of your disk rips are actually from your disks, and then you are playing an even more favorable game.)

Self-hosted is probably the best place to do that; since, both in terms of legal rationalization(standards for issuing warrants are often pretty shoddy, and evidence from raids conducted without warrants isn't always excluded as rigorously as it ought to be; but in theory the 4th amendment is still on the books if they need to grab a server from your basement; while in 'the cloud' either the provide ToS includes their option to cooperate whenever or you can just pull 'Third-party doctrine") and in terms of practical impact(cops shoving their way in or a tactical team with a ram are a...high touch...operation, even if justified; while just sending a polite request to the guy/department at AWS whose job it is to field polite requests for the contents of whatever S3 bucket just involves a silent copy in the background that you never even need to know about and no risk of your toddler getting flashbanged while cameras roll); but the fundamental problem is that you basically need to exist in a legal grey area to get non-awful media access terms; and do a bunch of fiddly server hassle or use one of the relatively hardcore, if-you-lose-your-keys-we-can't-help-you-really end-to-end encrypted providers to maintain the level of privacy in your digital papers and effects that you get by default if the server is onsite.

At least as long as you avoid some of the features that are much more clearly about vendor-specific implementations and reduced portability the 'cloud' guys are pretty competent at what they do if you just want a VM or some blob storage, or a key value store or database or something; and for those relatively 'basic' services essentially all the cloud guys have something very, very, similar; and your more classic, not necessarily as ruthlessly polished but probably hungrier, VPS providers are also an option; so it's not clear that you necessarily need a public option to save you at the "I need a computer or some REST API endpoints on the internet" level; It's more the "DVDs, and to a much more limited extent Blu-rays, were basically the last digital format that didn't de-facto destroy first sale" and "at least for consumer services; if it's in the cloud it is probably surveilled" problems where you'd need cultural and regulatory backup.

It's not like Amazon is being an asshole about Kindle file downloads because S3 buckets are now usuriously expensive(especially when they still allow more or less as many downlownloads to 'blessed' clients as you have the patience for); they just stopped that because they can and presumably doing so either made negotiating with publishers easier or the competitive position of their hardware vs. 3rd party ebook readers better. That's a problem; but it's not an infrastructure problem.

I'm an indie game developer. My games have budgets of a few hundred bucks at best. Before AI, voice acting was simply impossible. There was no way I could pay a voice actor for even one language.

Now, with AI, I can have voice-overs in half a dozen languages easily. It has opened up something for me that was never possible before.

Yes, the AI voices are mediocre. Yes, I would prefer having an actual voice actor whom I can tell that I want THAT word stressed, or what emotion to convey. I'm sure in a few more years, the text-to-speech AI generators will allow for that as well.

But I'm not lost business. I'm still hiring the exact same number of voice actors that I did before AI. Zero, in my case. But if I had a budget, I'd still hire voice actors instead of AI because a good voice actor still beats the best AI.

There's still time enough to learn something new and get a different job, guys.

It seems like major conceptual confusion to be discussing whether self or public hosting is better when you started the adventure in response to Amazon turning the screws on Kindle users.

They didn't do that because AWS blob downloads suddenly got way more expensive; they did that because they have effectively total control over what permission changes happen in response to giving them money; and considerable though imperfect control over the behavior of client applications(especially on smartphones; where default-deny cryptographic enforcement and attestation are significantly more common). Same thing with the ever-shifting 'exclusives' and ad loads of the various streaming services: those don't suck because Netflix is bad at CDN; they suck because the rightsholders can turn, and wish to, turn the screws with a lot more granularity than they could back when the limited ability of DVDs to phone home more or less forced them to suck it up and resent first sale quietly.

Especially if you stay away from some of the vendor-specific abstractions and upsells private sector 'cloud' pricing is pretty aggressive and a number of very useful types of service are even reasonably portable between them. The issue is that, at the 'consumer' level, actually being a cloud service customer; rather than being a subscriber or buyer of licensed-not-sold-sucker digital things, is at least as atypical as self-hosting; and it's typically the service rather than the infrastructure layer where the screwjob comes in.

This isn't to say that 'the cloud' is always the better option; hyperscaler margins comes from somewhere and that somewhere is not always operational efficiencies; but the user experience difference between running a chunky NAS and paying for some S3 buckets or whatever is vastly smaller than the difference between either of those options and a service where you need to plead with Amazon for them to bless your client with a text file or satisfy Widevine L1 to get high resolution video streams.

I've also heard that AI is pivoting to video; the metrics prove it, you can trust us.

Perhaps I'm just a bad judge of public opinion; but I'd think that identifying yourself as 'the spam party' would be something you would avoid at all costs.

The electorate will forgive you a pointless quagmire war, a few hundred thousand surplus infectious disease deaths, or similar minor matters; but surely loathing of spam is not merely bipartisan but essentially universal. I'd assume that even 'direct marketing' scumbags don't enjoy sampling their colleagues' product involuntarily.

It feels a trifle incongruous to watch the AI bros fretting about how their oh-so-good-with-unstructured-inputs-and-definitely-not-brittle pets with chat with one another in on the glorious posthuman internet; while simultaneously running scrapers distinguishable from DDoS gangs only by their deeper pockets against the rest of the internet.

It's almost as jarring as seeing Cisco trying to act like they are in the same zip code as the cutting edge.

I, for one, totally distrust The Man enough to roll the dice on tech Rasputin's "it's, like, secure; but nobody qualified has checked" option.

Aside from various occasions when Edge just seems to grab defaults(particularly from PDFs); there's the "second chance out of box experience" that is specifically designed to periodically assist you in repenting of whatever bad-customer choices you may have made during the OOBE; and (at least from mid-2023 or so, possibly earlier) Office will default to opening links in Edge rather than default browser in order to, more seamless or something. There are also a lot of places in the Windows UI(like links in the 'settings' application that invoke edge straight into a bing search regardless of default browser and default search engine.

I have no idea what if any lines exist for legal purposes; but they are not shy about pushing edge good and hard with both OS and Office mechanisms; including on systems where the user has already installed something else and set it as default.