In short, you choose getting laid.

Yeah, booking a flight is only difficult because I make it difficult by deciding about how I feel about cost versus layovers versus time of departure/arrival.

For grocery shopping, I’m very specific in what I want, and it’s easiest just to pick them specifically. For a lot, I’d rather just go in person to the store to look over things. In fact, whenever I spend money I’m pretty specific in what I want and I don’t want something to “improve” things by letting me be more vague.

As a point of comparison, fast food ordering. Apps and Kiosks were actually a step up for me, because it was easier and quicker for me to see what the options are and select precisely what I want. AI order taking would be a huge step backwards from there. Even when ordering from waitstaff at a restauraunt, I always like to have my finger clearly pointing to the menu for what I want to order.

This is absolutely a valid concern.

There are various available solutions, but little incentive for landlords to bother. Either ev charger for every renters parking spot with some mechanism to lock it out (expensive) or a large pool of chargers that are shared, but you have to badge in and get it billed to you. The latter if too small barely helps and if too large will piss off gas vehicle tenants that hate the “wasted” space.

In three years of ownership, I have used a fast charger once. A sudden unplanned road trip when I had let my charge get low.

Charging at home is so much nicer than a gas station. It is worth the rate longer fast charging on a road trip to usually not to go to a gas station at all.

If I lived in an apartment, I think I might be pretty frustrated though.

Frankly, I feel like the media hasn’t really engaged him in tech for the last couple of decades since he stepped back. So he hasn’t been pushed for takes on tech.

There is zero reason to expect Gates to have particular credibility on this front, he hasn’t been part of “the game” in a long time. Even then his perspective was a bit indirect.

If back in his hayday you had asked Gates about the core technologies of the Web infrastructure, he would have confidently assumed Windows NT, IIS, MSSQL, and . net would be the foundation of everything. Not because of deep technical understanding and vision, but because his guys were doing it and surely his guys were the best guys.

Yeah, so far when someone shows me a concrete example of this amazingly complicated thing that GenAI helped then realize, I think “really… that’s it?”

It’s a decent reminder that a lot of people have more modest needs and a lot of the enthusiasm can come from that, and maybe that’s more understandable.

Problem is that Gates isn’t really “in the loop” and doesn’t have especially valuable insight.

His position in tech was always a bit removed from the core technologist work, and now his exposure is a telephone game with people that are as distant from the tech as he was.

It is really going around with no shortage of commentators spewing out guesswork, but Gates is given more credibility by virtue of his role 30 years ago.

Generally I’ve found that:

If the facts are painfully obvious from a simple web search, then GenAI has a decent chance of getting it right. This can be useful if you can’t recall any “key” words well and the GenAI can craft several searches and get there.

However, if it does mess up the facts, the result looks superficially the same as “correct”. So while it can give accurate data, you always have to double check. This can still be useful, as finding the right search terms can be a decent help.

In coding, sometimes in some situations, you can have requirements that are absolutely testable, and thus you can have the models retry and retry until it works. This isn’t always feasible. Even when it seems feasible, you may screw up the criteria, or the GenAI when enough freedom disables a probablematic test rather than solve it, and it likely will generate code that’s not really fit to modify. There are a lot of situations where this is useful, but it is infuriating that non technical people and even some low skill technical people assume this is always the case.

Then when you get away from facts mattering, it gets “better”. Example, someone jokingly asked for one to “make gta6”. After a while it came back with a GTA 1 clone. Lots of people were impressed, because whatever it did could be considered a success even as it obviously didn’t match the expectation. The operators also like to GenAI some webcomic, where it is a fiction. They almost always didn’t have any interesting thought going in so they tend to be crap, but “correctness” didn’t matter.

Of course, also making fakes. Supreme case where looking correct matters but being factually correct does not matter at all. GenAI above all else “seems” correct.

He repeats the “better than humans at coding” which is super situational. Executives got so used to “code is code” mentality they can’t seem to understand that just because they can prompt up straightforward apps and other folks have done stunts like “make a knock off of this compiler” does not mean it’s just better than people.

Also very bizarre to say they have perfect memory, they are pretty spotty at that.

On the matter of support, it will generally always such because it’s rigged for the company in all matters where helping the customer would go against the company’s interests. Has been a long time. Why pay warranty when you can make it so painful they will give up?

But at a matter of a drop coming out, that’s not really an aging thing either.

The metaverse twist was certainly useless and realized in the most uninsipred soulless way, but vr otherwise has some utility and can be entertaining to a niche.

AI as so far realized has some utility, but a handful of asshats are similarly supremely obnoxious about it, and in my experience way more people are being obnoxious about it than it is useful.

Have to dig into the nuance of this specific scenario.

A new memory vendor would be a huge capital expense, and investors are generally a bit apprehensive about that.

Further, it would be years before they could theoretically roll out product, a delay that investors would need to be awfully patient for under the best of circumstances. Further, we went through this dance in recent history, people thinking that the chip industry needed huge advancement and expansion of supply, only for demand to subside to normal before any of that expansion could even start.

And the stated payoff? Lower margin product than competition. Not exactly exciting to tell your investors your whole game plan is to make less money than your competition.

Then there’s the reality that this is not an innate direct demand of memory for the sake of memory, it is intrinsically linked to these big AI companies, leading to the big question: Is this a bubble that has a risk of popping? If so, then the market will go poof before you have a single item shipped.

Even if broadly, you think the AI is viable, if any one company, especially OpenAI, gets left behind, the memory market could collapse. If not for Sam Altman’s very specific purchasing commitments, the memory pressure would probably be much more modest.

Ok, fine, you are a ride or die believer in the durability of the AI boom and that every company is going to win. However, even if the AI companies do very well, what’s to say they will still have the same appetite for hardware by the time this new enterprise gets going? A pivot from aggressive training to exploiting more what they have done, or some breakthrough that dramatically takes down their bloated memory requirements. If you believe in the AI boom, then just directly investing in the AI companies is the safer bet.

At the end of the day, an investor has a choice between being confident in the AI boom and investing directly in the AI companies, or being a bit less confident and investing in the memory vendors that are making bank now with a weaker, but still viable post-pop story. If you aren’t comfortable directly investing in the AI companies now, then you almost certainly aren’t comfortable with a long shot that only benefits if the AI boom keeps going exactly the way it has been going.

Yes, effort is underway to do this in China, but it’s more about supply chain sovereignty than free market interests. It may have similar benefits, but here the free market is unlikely to be the impetus for increased supply in this scenario.

SemVer isn’t bad, but it’s kind of pointless in the browsers. The value in SemVer is if you realistically promise to take bumping that first number seriously. Implying you take backwards compatibility seriously, and bugfixes seriously enough to keep patching an ‘old’ version. If you just maniacally bump the ‘backwards incompatible change’ number and never bother to revisit old releases, then I don’t really care about the SemVer.

Of course, I also don’t necessarily care about the CalVer either if there’s update notification in play, the browsers will aggressively let you know you need an update. However if update notification isn’t working or otherwise isn’t in play, then CalVer can at least make you think “24.7… that seems like it might be old, maybe I should look for updates”. In Windows world the CalVer has been informative as the system or corporate IT screw up has frozen a device at 22H2 and trigger some manual effort to figure out/fix whyever the hell the system won’t go to new functional levels.

By definition, SemVer is supposed to have meaning to end users. If you see the third number increase, no worries, it’s just bugfixes.

If you see the second number increase, well, in theory no worries, it’s just cool new features but doesn’t break anything you were doing, whatever you were doing should keep on working as always, and you can explore the new features at your leisure.

The first number changes: beware, something you may be used to can change/go away so it’s not necessarily a slam dunk to update that.

The problem is that many projects just call it SemVer when they just play with arbitrary numbers. I’ll call it “Marketing Versioning”.

I saw a headline where one of the big AI people said AI could do everything better than a human… Except make decisions. So the “executive” class is the only class that is “fine” by the logic.

I don’t think they half the self awareness to realize they are in fact frequently pretty pointless even ignoring AI.

I presume longer retention policies apply to specific data rather than arbitrary communications. The place I worked with a 90 day deletion was maniacal about adhering to the letter of the law and they didn’t seem broadly concerned about any data that was solely in email.

Well until they went to sue someone else, then they’d grab and freeze all email boxes that ever communicated with the defendant and instruct all parties to immediately forward any email from that party to legal and ignore it.

Then you find yourself remembering that you accepted what feels like it was an important meeting yesterday, but want to remember when and have a hard time finding it because you can’t quite recall enough searchable detail, but you know it came up yesterday.

Ah yes, the “it’s not evidence tampering if we just delete the stuff as a matter of course” policy.

The content on Internet will invariably biased towards the novelty. Between that bias and enormous marketing spin and the most self important people gravitating towards it, it’s an expected reality. One that will be applicable to some scenarios.

Content saying that for some situations, the existing methods remain best isn’t going to light the world on fire. Also, tech folks tend to be more shy about “not getting” a seemingly great new tech.

In terms of how much it applies to an individual situation, it’s too nuanced to really make a universal judgement. But in my local circle where I can grasp the nuance, the teams that have gone all in on deeply agentic are teams that already were kind of crappy.

Well, in general, AI techniques can be used to further lock down scenarios that are tricky to detect in traditional cases, but the traditional access controls are more reliable at preventing access when applied, so absolutely both techniques is the practical answer.