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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 3rd, 2024

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  • They did PR campaigns against Linux and OpenOffice for quite some time – until cloud computing took off and it turned out they could earn more money by supporting Linux than by fighting it.

    In fact, Microsoft weren’t happy about FOSS in general. I can still remember when they tried to make “shared source” a thing: They made their own ersatz OSI with its own set of licenses, some of which didn’t grant proper reuse rights – like only allowing you to use the source code to write Windows applications.



  • Like every time there’s an AI bubble. And like every time changes are that in a few years public interest will wane and current generative AI will fade into the background as a technology that everyone uses but nobody cares about, just like machine translation, speech recognition, fuzzy logic, expert systems…

    Even when these technologies get better with time (and machine translation certainly got a lot better since the sixties) they fail to recapture their previous levels of excitement and funding.

    We currently overcome what popped the last AI bubbles by throwing an absurd amount of resources at the problem. But at some point we’ll have to admit that doubling the USA’s energy consumption for a year to train the next generation of LLMs in hopes of actually turning a profit this time isn’t sustainable.





  • That’s why I dropped them when my mid-2013 MBP got a bit long in the tooth. Mac OS X, I mean OS X, I mean macOS is a nice enough OS but it’s not worth the extortionate prices for hardware that’s locked down even by ultralight laptop standards. Not even the impressive energy efficiency can save the value proposition for me.

    Sometimes I wish Apple hadn’t turned all of their notebook lines into MacBook Air variants. The unibody MBP line was amazing.


  • Your comment is a good reason why these tools have no place in the courtroom: The things you describe as imagination.

    They’re image generation tools that will generate a new, unrelated image that happens to look similar to the source image. They don’t reconstruct anything and they have no understanding of what the image contains. All they know is which color the pixels in the output might probably have given the pixels in the input.

    It’s no different from giving a description of a scene to an author, asking them to come up with any event that might have happened in such a location and then trying to use the resulting short story to convict someone.