The article sucks. The FTC isn’t going after Microsoft’s cloud services because they’re good/bad. They’re going after Microsoft because of forced bundling. Same abuse of monopoly power they were found guilty of when they started forcing everyone to use Internet Explorer.

Microsoft is forcing customers to use their cloud services under all sorts of scenarios. Many of which have no logical reason other than to force customers into Azure.

For example, if you have a lot of Windows servers in Azure they will stop supporting you once you reach a certain threshold unless you also sign up to use their enterprise cloud AD service.

They already do this with regular Windows–you have to use AD if you’re a business customer and you go past a certain threshold of systems–but in that case you can just get some Domain Controllers and call it a day. You can put them wherever you want (locally, in AWS, in Azure, wherever).

With Azure Windows servers though you’re forced to use Azure AD (or you lose support and possibly access to other bundled services). You can’t host Domain Controllers anywhere else. I mean, they’ll let you have as many off-Azure DCs as you want but they must still be joined/synchronizing to Azure AD.

There’s probably many other anticompetitive tactics in place within the world of Azure but that’s the one big one I know off the top of my head.

After replacing writers and artists it is now replacing the entire category of, “old people”. AI has reached the, “final solution” faster than I thought possible!

That’s a lot of dough

I think this one can be attributed to, “mere poor taste” and a lack of imagination.

If I were in charge of the leading image in the article I’d replace “cloud” with “shitstorm emoji” in the prompt. Then it would make more sense and be more applicable to VMWare.

It will be difficult because the AI only returns short results (relatively speaking). A sentence or two does not make for copyright infringement.

Except there’s nothing illegal about scraping all the content from websites (including news sites) and putting it into your own personal database. That is–after all–how search engines work.

It’s only illegal if you then distribute said copyrighted material without the copyright owner’s permission. Because that’s what copyright is all about: Distribution.

The news sites distributing the content in this case freely gave it to OpenAI’s crawlers. It’s not like they broke into these organizations in order to copy their databases of news articles.

For the news sites to have a case they need to demonstrate that OpenAI is creating a “derivative work” using their copyrighted material. However, that’s going to be a tough sell to judges and/or juries since the way LLMs work is not so different from how humans do: They take in information and then produce similar information (by predicting the next word/symbol, given a series of tokens/a prompt).

If you read all of Stephen King’s books, for example, you might be better at writing horror stories. You may even start writing in a similar style! That doesn’t mean you’re violating his copyright by producing similar stories.

Ahaha! Microsoft employees are using AI to write hallucinate their own performance reviews and managers are using that very same AI to “review” said performance reviews. Which is exactly the dystopian vision of the future that OpenAI sells!

What’s funny is that the “cult of Microsoft” is 100% bullshit so the AI is being trained in bullshit and as time goes on its being reinforced with it’s own hallucinated bullshit because everyone is using it to bullshit the bullshitters in management who are demanding this bullshit!

Gelsinger said the market will have less demand for dedicated graphics cards in the future.

No wonder Intel is in such rough shape! Gelsinger is an idiot.

Does he think that the demand for AI-accelerating hardware is just going to go away? That the requirement of fast, dedicated memory attached to a parallel processing/matrix multiplying unit (aka a discreet GPU) is just going to disappear in the next five years‽

The board needs to fire his ass ASAP and replace him with someone who has a grip on reality. Or at least someone who has a some imagination of how the future could be.

It takes effort but you have to milk it for all its worth!

Not true! The female nipple is actually useful.

Meh. This is but a fraction of what the big media companies think the world owes them for piracy.

As another (local) AI enthusiast I think the point where AI goes from “great” to “just hype” is when it’s expected to generate the correct response, image, etc on the first try.

For example, telling an AI to generate a dozen images from a prompt then picking a good one or re-working the prompt a few times to get what you want. That works fantastically well 90% of the time (assuming you’re generating something it has been trained on).

Expecting AI to respond with the correct answer when given a query > 50% of the time or expecting it not to get it dangerously wrong? Hype. 100% hype.

It’ll be a number of years before AI is trustworthy enough not to hallucinate bullshit or generate the exact image you want on the first try.

As expected, nobody cares about “reader mode”. Only once in my life has it ever come in handy… It was a website that was so badly designed I swore never to go back to it ever again.

I forget what it was but apparently I wasn’t the only one and thus, it must’ve died a fast death as I haven’t seen it ever again (otherwise I’d remember).

Basically, any website that gets users so frustrated that they resort to reader/simplified mode isn’t going to last very long. If I had my way I would change the messages:

“This website appears to be total shit. Do you want Firefox to try to fix it so your eyes don’t bleed trying to get through it?”

I want an extension that does this, actually! It doesn’t need to actually modify the page. Just give me a virtual assistant to comiserate with…

“The people who made this website should have their browser’s back button removed entirely as punishment for erecting this horror!”

Just a point of clarification: Copyright is about the right of distribution. So yes, a company can just “download the Internet”, store it, and do whatever TF they want with it as long as they don’t distribute it.

That the key: Distribution. That’s why no one gets sued for downloading. They only ever get sued for uploading. Furthermore, the damages (if found guilty) are based on the number of copies that get distributed. It’s because copyright law hasn’t been updated in decades and 99% of it predates computers (especially all the important case law).

What these lawsuits against OpenAI are claiming is that OpenAI is making a derivative work of the authors/owners works. Which is kinda what’s going on but also not really. Let’s say that someone asks ChatGPT to write a few paragraphs of something in the style of Stephen King… His “style” isn’t even cooyrightable so as long as it didn’t copy his works word-for-word is it even a derivative? No one knows. It’s never been litigated before.

My guess: No. It’s not going to count as a derivative work. Because it’s no different than a human reading all his books and performing the same, perfectly legal function.

For this comment your social credit score has been reduced. Please report to the nearest six-month detention facility to await your trial… If you last that long in there.

Oh my, what a crime: Insulting dead people 🙄

This is why the rest of the world thinks China:

• Obviously doesn’t have freedom of speech
• Is super authoritarian; in the dumbest ways

They officially don’t care about running .NET applications on Linux anymore. They never really did before but so few people fell for that trap Microsoft is finally ready to turn in the towel

You had corruption with btrfs? Was this with a spinning disk or an SSD?

I’ve been using btrfs for over a decade on several filesystems/machines and I’ve had my share of problems (mostly due to ignorance) but I’ve never encountered corruption. Mostly I just run out of disk space because I forgot to balance or the disk itself had an issue and I lost whatever it was that was stored in those blocks.

I’ve had to repair a btrfs partition before due to who-knows-what back when it was new but it’s been over a decade since I’ve had an issue like that. I remember btrfs check --repair being totally useless back then haha. My memory on that event is fuzzy but I think I fixed whatever it was bitching about by remounting the filesystem with an extra option that forced it to recreate a cache of some sort. It ran for many years after that until the disk spun itself into oblivion.

I wouldn’t say, “repairing XFS is much easier.” Yeah, fsck -y with XFS is really all you have to do 99% of the time but also you’re much more likely to get corrupted stuff when you’re in that situation compared to say, btrfs which supports snapshotting and redundancy.

Another problem with XFS is its lack of flexibility. By that I don’t mean, “you can configure it across any number of partitions on-the-fly in any number of (extreme) ways” (like you can with btrfs and zfs). I mean it doesn’t have very many options as to how it should deal with things like inodes (e.g. tail allocation). You can increase the total amount of space allowed for inode allocation but only when you create the filesystem and even then it has a (kind of absurdly) limited number that would surprise most folks here.

As an example, with an XFS filesystem, in order to store 2 billion symlimks (each one takes an inode) you would need 1TiB of storage just for the inodes. Contrast that with something like btrfs with max_inline set to 2048 (the default) and 2 billion symlimks will take up a little less than 1GB (assuming a simplistic setup on at least a 50GB single partition).

Learn more about btrfs inlining: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Inline-files.html

One point: ext4 has a maximum file size of 16TiB. To a regular user that is stupidly huge and of no concern but it’s exactly the type of thing you overlook if you “just use ext4” on anything and everything then end up with your database broken at work because of said bad advice.

Use the filesystem that makes the most sense for your use case. Consider it every single time you format a disk. Don’t become complacent! Also fuck around with the new shit from time to time! I decided to format my Linux desktop partitions with btrfs over a decade ago and as a result I’m an excellent user of that filesystem but you know what? I’m thinking I’ll try bcachefs soon and fiddle around more with my zfs partition on my HTPC.

BTW: If you’re thinking about trying out btrfs I would encourage you to learn about it’s non-trivial maintenance tasks. btrfs needs you to fuck with it from time to time or you’ll run out of disk space “for no reason”. You can schedule cron jobs to take care of everything (as I have done) but you still need to learn how it all works. It’s not a “set it and forget it” FS like ext4.