Not a damned thing in that article had anything at all to do with “chatbots”.

Folks here jest, but this business model is coming to PCs next. Bookmark my words!

(Literally, you can right-click the perma-link to this message and have quick access to it later so you can reply, “Damn, you were right!” And post the link to big PC vendors suddenly offering a similar services because DRAM and GPUs have become so expensive, normal people can’t afford to buy PCs anymore)

Forbidden chopsticks

Wow! BeOS mentioned. Hello, fellow old person. While you read this comment, imagine two towers of green LEDs, gently rising and falling, based on the complexity of each word while we just Be, together.

Now let’s remember why BeOS actually failed: Illegal contracts from Microsoft to prevent PC vendors from selling PCs preloaded with BeOS. Be, Inc sued Microsoft and settled out of court for $23 million and I remember that moment, thinking, “That’s not enough!”

Microsoft destroyed BeOS. Not any sort of market condition or natural state of economics. The whole, “let’s turn it into an appliance OS” thing was a last ditch pivot in an attempt to save the company. It was doomed from the start.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2003/sep/07/microsoftpays

Aside: Just like Palm’s WebOS which also tried to pivot into an appliance OS. Except in that case, that OS was destroyed by sheer incompetence on the part of HP’s brain dead CEO: Carly Fiorina. To this day, she’s still tarnishing her image by associating with the Trump administration. Very pro-Nazi.

If you ever want to point out an obvious example of how CEOs aren’t any smarter than anyone else and normally only get the job based on nepotism and industry incest, she’s the perfect go-to!

This is why web browsers like Firefox need their own AI. Local AI for not only creating summaries but for detecting bullshit like this.

Yes, creating summaries is kinda lame but without local AI you’re at the mercy of big corporations. It’s a new arms race. Not some bullshit feature that no one needs.

…and burns people’s homes down due to lack of safety features.

…and children choke to death from easily removable small parts.

…and people get electrocuted because of a lack of warning label telling them not to use it in the bath.

Vegan Linux users can compile their own protein from source.

Their purity level is so high that they can kill -9 anyone wearing a leather belt with just a glance.

It’s called dogfooding and it’s what you’re supposed to do to improve your product.

Total market share is irrelevant. What matters more is total users.

If you make a product and there’s a million people on a platform who could buy it, the costs to port that product (and support it) need to be low for it to be worthwhile.

If the total number of people on that platform increases to 10 million, now the cost to port/support becomes more like a minuscule expense rather than a difficult decision.

When you reach 100 million there’s no excuse. There’s a lot of money to be made!

For reference, the current estimated amount of desktop Linux users globally is somewhere between 60-80 million. In English-speaking countries, the total is around 19-20 million.

It’s actually a lot more complicated than this, but you get the general idea: There’s a threshold where any given software company (including games) is throwing money away by not supporting Linux.

Also keep in mind that even if Linux had 50% market share, globally, Tim Sweeney would still not allow Epic to support it. I bet he’d rather start selling their own consoles that run Windows instead!

One thing for certain, Microsoft will not stop using Copilot to develop their software in house.

You’re wrong, but I think you’ll be OK with that because the reality of the situation is actually hilarious:

https://www.theverge.com/tech/865689/microsoft-claude-code-anthropic-partnership-notepad

“Turns out Copilot sucks so let’s just use our competitor’s superior product but that’s no reason we can’t keep foisting the inferior garbage on the masses!”

Wait until you see Gen Alpha’s spending on alcohol!

Comcast—in the top ten of the shittiest companies of all time that no one wants to have to deal with—is surprised that their “new” deal of, “be slightly less villainous, and expect all our problems to go away” isn’t working.

Bismuth oxyselenide? You mean it can cure both indigestion and get rid of dandruff‽

The Void already has claims to all of us. The Void actually enjoys and needs the screaming, so it’ll be patient and wait until your warranty runs out; when your particular version stops getting patches and reaches EOL.

When that happens, it’ll welcome you, and you’ll get sent to /dev/random instead of the recycle bin or the trash can.

Note: You’ll have to wait for enough entropy in order to get to your next destination. How long that takes depends on how many people are screaming into the void at that time 🤷

This is super interesting. I think academia is going to need to clearly divide “learning” into two categories:

• What you need to memorize.
• What you need to understand.

If you’re being tested on how well you memorized something, using AI to answer questions is cheating.

If you’re being tested on how well you understand something, using AI during an exam isn’t going to help you much unless it’s something that could be understood very quickly. In which case, why are you bothering to test for that knowledge?

If a student has an hour to answer ten questions about a complex topic, and they can somehow understand it well enough by asking AI about it, it either wasn’t worthy of teaching or that student is wasting their time in school; they clearly learn better on their own.

I used to live down the street from a great big data center. It wasn’t a big deal. It’s basically just a building full of servers with extra AC units.

Inside? Loud AF (think: Jet engine. Wear hearing protection).

Outside: The hum of lots of industrial air conditioning units. Only marginally louder than a big office building.

A data center this big is going to have a lot more AC units than normal but they’ll be spread all around the building. It’s not like living next to an airport or busy train tracks (that’s like 100x worse).

Now show us “the stick” method.

No, it could be true. AI—especially with .NET—tends to generate exceptionally verbose code. Especially if you use “AI best practices” such as telling the AI to ensure 100% code coverage. Then there’s the, “let’s not use any 3rd party libraries, because we are Microsoft” angle.

.NET is already one of the most absurdly verbose languages (only other widely-used language that’s worse is Java). Copilot could easily push it over the top 🤣

All it would take would be for Microsoft to have AI rewrite some of the core libraries.

Note that there’s more than one model to do pixel art and there’s pixel art LoRAs that do a decent job. There’s loads of flexibility when generating this kind of thing.

Also, you can just tell it to generate a thousand over like 10 minutes and pick the best one and use that as a base to improve upon. AI is just a single tool in the workflow.

I also want to point out that not everyone can just pay someone. Don’t be paternalistic: If people want to use AI in their workflow for any reason that’s their concern. To angrily throw your hands in the air and say, “I’m not touching it because AI!” is like giving free money to the big publishers.

You’re setting a completely unnecessary high bar, “you must be this rich to ride.”

This is my take at well, but not just for gaming… AI is changing the landscape for all sorts of things. For example, if you wanted a serious, professional grammar, consistency, and similar checks of your novel you had to pay thousands of dollars for a professional editor to go over it.

Now you can just paste a single chapter at a time into a FREE AI tool and get all that and more.

Yet here we are: Still seeing grammatical mistakes, copy & paste oversights, and similar in brand new books. It costs nothing! Just use the AI FFS.

Checking a book with an AI chat bot uses up as much power/water as like 1/100th of streaming a YouTube Short. It’s not a big deal.

The Nebula Awards recently banned books that used AI for grammar checking. My take: “OK, so only books from big publishers are allowed, then?”