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

Or the most obvious answer of all: Macs have a power button on the keyboard

Such a stupid thing to write about. Must be a really slow news day if they are writing about the location of the power button.

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.

Now that Trump doesn’t need to get reelected I think conservative Christians are in for a very big surprise: He actually doesn’t give AF about them. In fact, he thinks they’re idiots (he’s said so in the past).

I seriously doubt he’s going to attempt to appease them much at all during his next administration because he doesn’t need them anymore. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if he completely throws them under the bus in any number of fashions.

I guarantee we’re going to get a lot of headlines next year similar to the woman who said, “he’s not hurting the right people!” This will include a whole lot of conservative Christians who thought Trump was going to institute their agenda but will instead totally screw them over.

I wouldn’t be surprised if he demands the taxation of churches so he can further line his pockets with more grift. He’ll say it’s necessary to pay off the debt or something like that then we’ll find out that the money is directly going into his and his allies pockets.

It seems RFK Jr is walking back some of his previous statements about vaccines. Notably, that he doesn’t seem to want to ban them all anymore. From just two days ago:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/nov/04/election-trump-rfk-jr-vaccines-fluoride

He’s still planning on making everyone’s teeth rot though.

Nope. They instituted serious anti-immigrant laws here in Florida that severely hurt many businesses. For example, enormous construction projects just stopped. Just Google, “Florida immigrant law halts construction” and you’ll get all sort of fantastic examples.

So yes: Right wingers did shoot themselves in the foot in order to hurt immigrants (which is what their base truly wants in their heart of hearts). The Republican legislature knew it would be horrible for the economy. They knew it was going to hurt innocent people and loads of small businesses.

They didn’t care. That’s what the Republican party is all about, after all: Not caring. They will actively seek to hurt their perceived enemies no matter what! Consequences be damned!

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.

Surely they can’t all be this dumb.

After a few decades following American politics you’ll realize that yes, yes they can all be that dumb.

Just have a general conversation with your most conservative neighbors about basically anything and you’ll quickly learn that there’s nothing they don’t have an opinion on and their level of ignorance is… Impressive.

Like, dude, you’re 60+ years old and you think hurricanes are a conspiracy‽ The point where they lost their mind was long ago.

Sooner or later you can’t help but wonder if they ever had sanity or they just faked it long enough to have a career/survive until retirement.

Yeah that’s the part I don’t get: The law is literally telling doctors to kill their patients and the doctors are just going along with it? WTF!

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.

No. That’s if he’s Arab. Chinese get interned.

Or if China doesn’t like them either, “returned to the homeland” where they’ll be disappeared forever in one of their, “put them here until trial” black holes where people go in but they don’t come out (without the right bribes/political influence).

Yeah! Deliver Big Ben and maybe a few other famous UK monuments to Washington, DC and we’ll call it even 👍