The article sucks. The FTC isn’t going after Microsoft’s cloud services because they’re good/bad. They’re going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

They already do this with regular Windows–you have to use AD if you’re a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems–but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

With Azure Windows servers though you’re forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can’t host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they’ll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

There’s probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that’s the one big one I know off the top of my head.

It was a tired story until OH DEER it wasn’t anymore.

After replacing writers and artists it is now replacing the entire category of, “old people”. AI has reached the, “final solution” faster than I thought possible!

That’s a lot of dough

I think this one can be attributed to, “mere poor taste” and a lack of imagination.

If I were in charge of the leading image in the article I’d replace “cloud” with “shitstorm emoji” in the prompt. Then it would make more sense and be more applicable to VMWare.

Software patents shouldn’t exist!

It will be difficult because the AI only returns short results (relatively speaking). A sentence or two does not make for copyright infringement.

Except there’s nothing illegal about scraping all the content from websites (including news sites) and putting it into your own personal database. That is–after all–how search engines work.

It’s only illegal if you then distribute said copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission. Because that’s what copyright is all about: Distribution.

The news sites distributing the content in this case freely gave it to OpenAI’s crawlers. It’s not like they broke into these organizations in order to copy their databases of news articles.

For the news sites to have a case they need to demonstrate that OpenAI is creating a “derivative work” using their copyrighted material. However, that’s going to be a tough sell to judges and/or juries since the way LLMs work is not so different from how humans do: They take in information and then produce similar information (by predicting the next word/symbol, given a series of tokens/a prompt).

If you read all of Stephen King’s books, for example, you might be better at writing horror stories. You may even start writing in a similar style! That doesn’t mean you’re violating his copyright by producing similar stories.

I have a Giant Sulcata Tortoise. She’s almost 100lbs.

Super easy to care for. She mows the lawn to eat but St Augustine grass doesn’t have all the nutrition she needs so we supplement her diet every two days with some fresh lettuce, fruit, and tortoise pellets.

Right now our yard is full of pumpkins donated by our neighbors that she enjoys very much (her poops turned a bit orange, haha). Watching her eat them is a surprisingly satisfying and relaxing experience.

Her home is an old lawnmower shed that my father-in-law had lying around and she goes into it every night (we cut a tortoise-shaped hole in the front and put some “baggage flaps” over it to keep the heat in). Interestingly, we didn’t need to “train” her to go in there she just figured it out on day 1 and settled in the very first night.

She comes when she’s called and loves to come see us when we’re out in the yard (hoping for treats!). We often get the leftover produce from Publix that’s going to be thrown away and feed her that. She doesn’t care that the lettuce has gone all wilty or about damaged fruit so it’s better than sending it into the trash 👍

Ahaha! Microsoft employees are using AI to write hallucinate their own performance reviews and managers are using that very same AI to “review” said performance reviews. Which is exactly the dystopian vision of the future that OpenAI sells!

What’s funny is that the “cult of Microsoft” is 100% bullshit so the AI is being trained in bullshit and as time goes on its being reinforced with it’s own hallucinated bullshit because everyone is using it to bullshit the bullshitters in management who are demanding this bullshit!

Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future.

No wonder Intel is in such rough shape! Gelsinger is an idiot.

Does he think that the demand for AI-accelerating hardware is just going to go away? That the requirement of fast, dedicated memory attached to a parallel processing/matrix multiplying unit (aka a discreet GPU) is just going to disappear in the next five years‽

The board needs to fire his ass ASAP and replace him with someone who has a grip on reality. Or at least someone who has a some imagination of how the future could be.

Surely they can’t all be this dumb.

After a few decades following American politics you’ll realize that yes, yes they can all be that dumb.

Just have a general conversation with your most conservative neighbors about basically anything and you’ll quickly learn that there’s nothing they don’t have an opinion on and their level of ignorance is… Impressive.

Like, dude, you’re 60+ years old and you think hurricanes are a conspiracy‽ The point where they lost their mind was long ago.

Sooner or later you can’t help but wonder if they ever had sanity or they just faked it long enough to have a career/survive until retirement.

It takes effort but you have to milk it for all its worth!

Not true! The female nipple is actually useful.

Meh. This is but a fraction of what the big media companies think the world owes them for piracy.

As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from “great” to “just hype” is when it’s expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.

For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you’re generating something it has been trained on).

Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.

It’ll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.

Depends on the family. In my family we give two shits.

Well, they put my Low-Poly Rose Twist Vase in the background so it seems legit 🤷

Building your own keyboard is supposed to be fun. You do some research to figure out what you want. Maybe order some sample switches to try out, pick out a keycap set you like, and eventually settle on a kit.

When you order your kit it’ll include a case, a top plate, and a circuit board. If you get one with hot swap sockets you will not have to solder anything. You can literally just press the switches in.

Then when you’re done you screw everything together, put your keycaps on, and you have a working keyboard. Sometimes you have to flash the firmware as a final step but that’s not rocket science. You do not have to know how to program.

You don’t have to solder if you use hot swap sockets for your switches. Even if you never plan to swap the switches the hot swap sockets mean you’ll never have to solder a thing 👍