Their copilot stuff is such a mess. Over promising, dressed with marketing slop on top of an under-performing product.
However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well.
I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
See WinUI after Project Reunion announcement 5 years ago, unfortunately fits exactly the same description, and we are way past COVID to use that as an excuse.
Dmitry is a mad genius. He has been doing stuff like this for 20 years, he was fixing palm’s issues for years. All his hardware projects are phenomenal, and so is his writing.
I've found myself reading a bit of the rePalm posts for the last few night. Funny thing is that I find myself to have read and re-read that stuff for hours now, a bit at a time, re-reading some of the most interesting bits, and doing cursory research on the (many) things that are over my head.
That is hours reading. D must have spent so much more time writing, and doing it so very clearly and in such an organized, and even entertaining way.
And then there is the time figuring this crap out and making it work. I just... D is on league of his own, he is like a one-man hardware company. Having that level of skill must be so gratifying. He is a virtuoso of his craft.
Dude casually mentions stuff like... (paraphrasing) Palm OS expect this and that behavior that most kernels don't implement. So I wrote my own.
It has a rather poor max resolution. Higher resolution images get tiled up to a point. 512 x 512, I think is the max tile size, 2048 x 2048 the max canvas.
I would think so too. There is something else going though. It a system that relies partly on trust. A sort of moral asset with herd effects. It’s a system that can tolerate a certain amount of gaming, but when the threshold is surpassed, it becomes a failed system. It has to change, to the detriment of the justly entitled.
And that is the sad part, when that unstated assumption, that one may not lie, is broken past a threshold, it increases the transaction cost for everyone.
Some people take find their life meaning through craft and work. When that craft is suddenly less scarce, less special, so does that craft-tied meaning.
I wonder if these feelings are what scribes and amanuenses felt when the printing press arrived.
I do enjoy programming, I like my job and take pride on it, but I actively try for it not to be the life-mean giving activity. I'm a just mercenary of my trade.
The craft isn't any less scarce. If anything, only more. The craft of building wooden furniture is just as scarce as ever, despite the existence of Ikea.
Which is the only woodworkers that survive are the ones with enough customers willing to pay premium prices for furniture, or lucky to live in countries where Ikea like shops aren't yet a thing.
They are also the people who are able to see the most clearly how subpar generative-AI output is. When you can't find a single spot without AI slop to rest your eyes on and see it get so much praise, it's natural to take it as a direct insult to your work.
I mean, I would still hate to be replaced by some chat bot (without being fairly compensated because, societally, it's kind of a dick move for every company to just fire thousands of people and then nobody can find a job elsewhere), but I wouldn't be as mad if the damn tools actually worked. They don't. It's one thing to be laid off, it's another to be laid off, ostensibly, to be replaced by some tool that isn't even actually thinking or reasoning, just crapping out garbage.
And I will not be replying to anyone who trots out their personal AI success story. I'm not interested.
The tech works well enough to function as an excuse for massive layoffs. When all that is over, companies can start hiring again. Probably with a preference for employees that can demonstrate affinity with the new tools.
All of this is consistent with expectations of a slowdown or recession.
The only exception is the stock market but I believe there’s a lot of literature that if you remove the AI stocks from that there isn’t much S&P growth either.
Additionally with the dollar dropping over 10% the stock market real increase isn’t as high as it appears either.
for the past century, the global economy has been a machine for turning fossil fuel into money. carbon output was very directly correlated with growth. that hasn't really changed yet but the writing is on the wall.
also, manufacturing and shipping just fell off a cliff.
Renewables are a quarter of electricity generation now, and in some states are the majority of generation. They're also a decent chunk of all energy though that number's harder to pin down.
GDP is no longer tied to fuel consumption. You can't fight near-free "fuel" and near-zero opex, the renewables slice is only going to increase. I wouldn't trust any metric or rule of thumb tied to coal/oil/gas prices any longer.
However; their azure offerings are somewhat decent. AI Search is getting quite decent, access to Open AI models served through foundry is quite the differentiator (although the rate limits are an issue), their reference architectures are very helpful and their ancillary services, like document intelligence integrate well.
I'm a bit worried that their marketing dept has gotten their crappifying and obfuscating eyes set on those services though, given the recent rebranding of Foundry and what not, but the underlying services are decent.
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