My guess is that they have email hooks into LLM and call each entry point into LLM invocation an ‘agent’ and I have seen in a lot of companies the easiest way for them to have an email is to just add them to the directory.

It’s still dumb as hell, but I am no stranger to non-human’s in an ‘employee directory’, though usually it is supremely obvious that it is a non-person so if it’s at all confusing it means they are being ‘cute’ about their accounts.

Yeah, very good analogy actually…

I remember back in the day people putting stuff like ‘Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’. Instead of thinking ‘oh good, they will be able to use Word competently’, the impression was ‘my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I’m inclined to believe they have no useful skills’.

‘Excel skills’ on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets).

Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn’t really need learning. If anything people who overthink the ‘skill’ of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don’t work, and when they first find out that it doesn’t work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to ‘fix’ the problem.

Yes, because Microsoft’s revenue growth is in fact the most important thing the folks at Davos had to think about…

That you can’t plug into a traditional computer and that has not even pads for a video connector to be soldered to.

Folks just don’t realize how exotically different they have ultimately made the GPU packaging for datacenters. B200/B300 come in very specific packaging that is nowhere near a PCIe card.

Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure

Because if they can make for consumers, then there’s a shit ton of investor money waiting for some tech bro to turn it into ‘AI’.

The tech industry companies are playing with nigh unlimited house money, consumers can’t compete.

Though that supply will be a bit annoying.

Oh look, super expensive GPUs… In an HGX board that is useless for even connecting to a PC, let alone have graphics.

Memory modules, but they are HBM or otherwise soldered to a Grace board…

SSDs, but EDSFF… Guess at least a cage for this could be some for home usage.

HDDs, but SAS. Not too or of reach for home builds, but still not as likely to just plug into home gear as SATA.

Yeah, they bought a modest, niche product with a likely viable business case, and then bet they could make it an everyman’s device for all their socializing and experiencing events like sports and music…

The people that actually wanted the device got to take a back seat to them chasing non-existent markets for it… Their aspirations so impossibly high that a niche device could no longer justify itself against the money spent chasing that non-existant market… So something that should have been for some VR nerds to be happy and sustain the business while the rest of the world shrugs and say ‘I don’t get it’ becomes an ‘Obviously this is a failure of a concept and no one should bother doing this’.

100 billion is a touch higher than I’ve read elsewhere, but evidently they actually spent $77 billion ‘real’ dollars:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/mark-zuckerberg-threw-77-billion-143014208.html

Of the things that would trigger a Civil War, I think Greenland is low on the list. Wildly unpopular but not the existential domestic threat that would trigger the people to go hot. ICE and domestic military deployment, particularly if he declares no elections, that has potential, but no foreign event is going to sway the domestic population that much, only domestic events have that strong an effect. That sort of thing can matter at the ballot box, but isn’t enough to make people go to the ammo box.

Maybe you get some European powers to conduct clandestine operations against key US leadership, maybe someone like Stephen Miller gets assassinated by a foreign power, I don’t know. More likely, they make moves that royally screw the US over economically. But I don’t think a civil war or direct military conflict with a foreign power is in the cards over Greenland.

Well, ‘NATO’ as defined today can’t exist if any NATO member attacked another one, just from how the organization is defined as it is, that wasn’t a possibility it was defined to be capable of handling.

A “just like NATO, but not specifically NATO” that excludes the US I could imagine forming soon enough for it to be essentially an equivalent thing.

But knowing politicians, they had better have drafts of what that specifically should be ready to go, because politicians might just take forever to settle details of what should be a straightforward arrangement. For example, reworking it so that removing a member is actually defined, and that accepting a new member does not require perfectly unanimous agreement.

Also kind of bad for VR that they bought Oculus and buried it under a ton of stuff no one asked for and will likely kill it entirely for failing to be the everyman’s gateway to socialization like they strangely imagined it to be.

The true target market for Oculus is relatively niche, but probably could have sustained a more modest oculus. Meta’s demands exceed what that market can give them.

Biggest hope for VR future right now is Steam Frame.

Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today

This is hilarious, because every single facility of note, and especially datacenters has local, grid independent generators. Datacenters in particular have been noteworthy for pushing for ‘off-grid’ power plants to give them more control over their power and costs. In the more reachable territory, residential solar promises value by mitigating your exposure to eletrical rate changes, and in some cases combined with home energy storage, people are going off-grid. A lot of commercial interests also pad out their facilities with solar panels, because it is cheaper than sourcing entirely from the grid, and this was before the recent rate hikes inflicted by datacenter buildouts.

His analogy is bogus because he implies off-grid energy generation is a thing of the past while AWS itself is a huge driver of off-grid energy generation in a world where off-grid energy generation is actually increasing.

You can’t to the same degree. If you let the user use a typical desktop environment like gnome or plasma., then they can set their wallpaper.

Now if you want to make a kiosk thing, so much easier in Linux. But if you want to have a general purpose desktop experience but restrict stupid stuff like wallpaper, windows has got you.

I would rather use and administer Linux systems at scale any day, but if you hated your users and wanted to lock personalization, then Windows has done the work to enable that.

There have been devices that forbid disabling SecureBoot or enrolling your own keys, and only boot loaders that microsoft signed are allowed to boot.

Further, I’ve seen systems that have a setting to not allow the non-microsoft stuff to boot, even if signed by the usual secureboot authority. So there may be a device out there hard set to only allow microsoft software to boot.

Issue is that there’s one thing that organizations love about Windows that isn’t really catered to in any Linux distribution: Nannying the users and not letting them do their own things with their own systems.

For example, no Linux distribution out there will help you prevent the end-users from changing their own desktop wallpaper, or what to show when the user locks their screen. When my company hands out laptops, the users are blocked from changing out the ugly propaganda slides they make our systems display. Just the tip of the iceburg for how much the enduser can be screwed with by a microsoft admin that just isn’t possible in any significant Linux desktop environment.

So user may love Linux, but their employer still wants to make sure they are running Windows.

Note that 5th grade papers are always just horrible to read. This is why I don’t like LLM output, because it sounds just like 5th grade papers. Not a soul wants to read middle school papers.

So I think broadly speaking the LLMs can generate middle school papers generally fine, at least they fit in.

As I said. It’s an extrapolation of the rules from once upon a time to a totally different approach. It’s marketing and increasingly subjective. Any number can “make sense” in that context. The number isn’t based on anything you could actually measure for a long time now, it’s already a fiction, so it can go wherever.

To be fair, the industry spent decades measuring a distance, so when they started doing features that had equivalent effects, the easiest way for people to understand was to say something akin to equivalent size.

Of course, then we have things like Intel releasing their "10 nm* process, then after TSMC’s 7nm process was doing well and Intel fab hit some bumps, they declared their 10 to be more like a 7 after all… it’s firmly all marketing number…

Problem being no one is suggesting a more objective measure.

For a while now the “nm” has been a bit of a marketing description aiming for what the size would be if you extrapolated the way things used to be to today. The industry spent so long measuring that when the measurement broke down they just kind of had to fudge it to keep the basis of comparison going, for lack of a better idea . If we had some fully volumetric approach building these things equally up in three dimensions, we’d probably have less than “100 pm” process easily, despite it being absurd.