Posts by Mostly Irrelevant

Why didn't they hire someone more competent to do this?

The premise this article takes for granted is fictitious. We need a bunch more data centres because...? LLMs are limited application AI and we're using them for at least half the things they apply to now. More efficient models are being built now. Inference can be done on commodity hardware. What do we need a bunch more data centres for?

Honestly, Rust simplifies a lot of things are the needlessly complex in C++. I'd rather have a non-memory safe Rust than a memory-safe C++. C++ was great for the time, but it has a lot of legacy cruft that newer languages have done away with.

I disagree with this statement entirely "Just because its original vendor no longer supports a proprietary OS doesn't mean that you must do as instructed and cough up for an upgrade."

An unsupported OS is a ticking time bomb, keeping software up to date is not optional unless you're air-gapping your system. Information on exploits is too available these days to make that an option. Windows 7 should not be used for any network-connected applications at this point. If you don't want to pay Microsoft more money there are a lot of open source OSes you could be running.

This is exactly the sort of thing people pay Microsoft big bucks to avoid!

Are you sure Excel isn't a database. There is an Microsoft Jet provider for excel so you can use your favourite "database" in all your programs, provided you want to use a really old Windows database access system that's been replaced at least 3 times. It supports VB 6!

Are there IT departments still using backup tapes?

Can we dispense with the marketing BS terms like "hallucinations" that imply that LLMs are thinking. Facutality isn't even a thing the models are designed to test, they're just computing text output that approximates a response for the prompt.

It doesn't know anything, it doesn't think and it certainly doesn't "hallucinate" because that requires a conscious mind.

Something OpenAI doesn't want most people to know is that LLMs aren't that complicated. The only reason they weren't a thing years ago is the practicality and cost of putting together the enormous amounts of information needed to build the models. Their moat is very small and that's not good business-wise, especially since they're so unprofitable.

I predict no one will care. LLMs have limited usefulness for your average consumer at this point. Why bother running the models locally?

VMWare is doing all they can to drive away their remaining customers. I mostly use virtualization for web servers, why would I even consider their produce when lightweight container orchestrators exist?

Those models were created before the most recent debate, how would they have any information about what happened? All they're doing is stringing together likely responses to the question.

Every time I read an article like this it mostly just shows how people's expectations of the performance of LLMs is not anchored in reality.

When Windows started disabling SMB 1.0 by default I updated my old NAS device (Buffalo Linkstation) with a newer version of Samba. I did this by telnetting to it and updating the software it was running manually. I was a little shocked that this was possible, but it's stayed like that for years so it seems to have worked. I'm sure an update would set it back to stock but all we know that's not happening with a 10+ year old NAS device.

So some of these things might be fixable if you try hard enough.

VBScript is such a security risk it should have been removed in Windows 7.

"The policy, which exempts field employees, is controversial because it states that choosing remote status will hinder career advancement and increase the chance of being selected for a layoff, among other downsides."

This is true of remote work everywhere, it limits your career advancement opportunities. Dell is just being honest about it.

This is a neat story, but anyone who really cared about playing Wing Commander 3 would have booted into DOS mode because it ran a lot better that way.

This technology is more about creating slow lanes for less important traffic (whatever they consider less important), so that more important traffic will be transferred faster or with better latency. But I guess slow lanes isn't good marketing.

It's going to happen, the only companies who can afford the huge cost of training these AI models once the VC money dries up are companies that run huge public clouds because they can run them using excess resources inn less allocated periods of time. It's basically free for them.

I've used this thing a few times, I have no idea why it needs to be a component of the OS.

Get off X, stop reporting on it, eventually it'll go away.

Every time I've tried a "Windows replacement" Linux distro I've found it very deficient in many ways. I think the whole idea is not worth pursuing, the advantages of Windows are primarily familiarity and software compatibility. You can't have one of those on Linux and the other is always going to be compromised. It's better to just use a well though-out distro that does it's own thing instead. I personally like Ubuntu (Gnome), but I know there are a lot of people who prefer Cinnamon, KDE, Xfce or something else. Trying to be closer to Windows isn't a worthwhile goal in my opinion, because you get all the negatives and only a few of the positives.

I honestly don't understand why Microsoft thought people would want a AI chatbot in their OS. It makes no sense.

Even more evidence that the walled garden doesn't so anything but let Apple assert control.

Microsoft should just drop the version number entirely and make it a constant stream of updates. One major one a year. They said they would... then they just went back to their old system.