I am not sure it is that. The job of Microsoft is to satisfy shareholders. That is the only target. They only care about users to the extend that helps the shareholders.
This is how you'll end up destroying planet earth. Shareholders have to co-exist with the rest of us, if you wreck your environment to please yourself you'll be like that guy I knew in LA that had a Ferrari that he couldn't drive on the road just outside of his mansion because the roads were so bad. But on his private grounds he had clean blacktop and zero potholes...
This is repeated ad nauseam, but do they really? Can you honestly say that Nadella's setting a hard target for conversion of local users into Microsoft ones caused their shares go up?
Exactly. Which is why we must increase the social and economic cost of these bad decisions so much that it’ll be in the shareholders’ best interest to make the platform better to get us to stop. Precisely what happened here.
Just as with politics, the only way to get them to do what’s in our best interest is to make them come to the conclusion that they’ll risk losing money (or status or power) if they don’t.
No, they disassembled German optics industry plants in 1945, moved them to the Soviet Union and started cranking out great cameras based on German designs. I've heard that some Soviet cameras had Leica labeled parts inside.
Stuff like that happened repeatedly: GAZ Chaika was a copy of Packard; SM-1 computer was a copy of PDP 11/34; Tu-144 looked just like Concorde, etc. etc.
Chaika was not a copy of a Packard. (They certainly admired the Packard bodywork, but Soviet industry was in no way ready to clone a Packard sedan)
Tu-144 was not a copy of the Concorde. (Convergent evolution is not the same as copying a design!)
The Soviets did clone a lot of DEC gear but I don't think SM-1, specifically, was a DEC clone. (In this lastmost case, the Soviets were left cloning computer equipment because it was forbidden to export to COMECON states)
Sorry, SM-4 not SM-1, was a full emulation of 11/40, with UNIBUS, and all. There were DEC copyright strings latent in some system files. It was a pretty good copy, but quite unreliable, and the reason was quite pedestrian---the connectors! It was a good lesson on how the entire technology chain needs to be high quality for the final product to work well.
Another example I forgot: the first Soviet nuke was directly copied from the stolen Fat Man design. Of course later they did novel stuff, especially the fusion designs of Sacharov et al.
It is well known that KGB got hold of the Concorde blueprints, so yeah, not a direct copy but certainly a lot of influence in that design. Again. the details like engine performance made the difference: apparently Tu144 had to continuously use afterburners to stay supersonic. It was also quite unreliable---I've heard that towards its end of life it was just flying cargo and airmail.
The Concorde and the Tupolev both relied on afterburners, because they operated under similar design constraints -- the "western" jet engines in the Concorde were not that much better than what Soviet design bureaus could produce.
The Concorde was much smaller, and lacked one of the major innovations of the Tu-144 -- forward flap canards to improve handling on a larger jet.
Probably for the better. The Tupolev killed a lot of its passengers, and it was almost immediately withdrawn from service after the first few incidents. The Concorde, a simpler and smaller design, served for decades.
The Americans "hold my beer" and then later "you know what, fuck this". Classic example of bad choice, good choice. Overall the arguable made out the best with this. Boeing instead focus on 747 and commercial planes airlines actually wanted and damn near became a global monopoly.
Soviets did not have two things the West did. Concern for quality and market forces to direct development focus. This means Soviet stuff varies amazingly between specimen and can sometimes be over-engineered in particular ways. Soviet optics had a specific visual style, but everyone ditched them as soon as alternatives became available as hunting for the ones not made on a Monday was just too tedious.
Germany would be amazed to hear that they lacked concern for quality. As would the rest of the world, which continues to hold their engineering in esteem. Leica lenses >> anything the Soviets ever made.
These Soviet lenses are copies and adaptations of classic optical formulas at the time, e.g. the Helios 44 is a Carl Zeiss' Biotar. But while Zeiss produced in limited numbers, these Soviet versions are abundant in the used market and therefore very cheap.
Due to this, these lenses developed a cult following, and even more now that some prominent cinematographers used in some high caliber productions (The Batman (2022), Dune (2021)).
This is Telegraph for you.
The cost of electricity is not driven by green levies or net zero targets, but by gas prices, as gas is a backstop when all other sources are exhausted. Therefore electricity prices are pretty much tied to gas.
Obviously, Electricity is a National Security issue.
It's naive to state that the problem is gas prices.
Germany is seeing Steel, Automotive, and other hard science companies leave for that very reason.
The strategy should have been to build an energy architecture that reduces prices while being robust against force majeure events.
The US ended most of their subsidies to Ukraine last year. Historically the defense-industrial complex is eager to stir something else up as soon as one money source gets cut off.
After Afghanistan it went to Ukraine, and after Ukraine it has to be something else. This is the unstoppable flow of the defense industry moving to a new outlet.
I don't know if this just anecdotal random impression, but in a last week or two I had mostly good experience with Google cli. While previously I constantly complained about it. I have been using it together with codex, and I would not say that one is much better than another.
It is hard to say nowadays, when things change so quickly
When I see this: "One of the longest-standing misconceptions about software development is that writing code is the difficult part of the job. It never was."
I don't think I can take this seriously.
Sure, 'writing code' is not the difficult often, but when you have time constraints, 'writing code' becomes a limiting factor. And we all do not have infinite time in our hands.
So AI not only enables something you just could not afford doing in the past, but it also allows to spend more time of 'engineering', or even try multiple approaches, which would have been impossible before.
Agree. Writing code has always been the most time-consuming part that distracts me from actual design. AI just emphasizes the fact that anyone can do the keyboard mashing while reading code is the actual skill that matters.
Give a woodcutter a chainsaw instead of an axe and he'll fell ten times more trees. He'll also likely cause more than ten times the collateral damage.
I have a similar situation and Amnezia (either in WG mode or Xray mode) works well with a self-hosted server. Also SSH tunnel as proxy so far also works.
I mean Nvidia has been naming thier chips after scientists for a while now Hopper, Blackwell etc. Names are not copyrightable, you can literally create a toaster and call it Einstein. It doesn't mean you're doing anything illegal. There are some exceptions like if the name is actually used by a brand (like Tesla now) or if the person is alive/recently dead, or if you claim they are in someway endorsing your project. Like claiming "Einstein always toasted bread with the Einstein toaster!" is not okay.
The way Nvidia does it is actually super respectful and it's honestly better to use names like these instead of ULTRA PRO MAX 5x etc.
The observatory is named in honour of Vera Rubin. That makes sense. The commercial company deciding to name their new generation of chips does not (at least to me).
Good old victim blaming. Apparently the main issue is not that the country that started the war hit the school and killed 150 people, but where the school was placed.
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