From my talking with someone who grew up under a nation with a corrupt regime, self respect is a luxury that people under such a regime cannot afford when dealing with the government.
Small, petty, corrupt government personnel are a way of life and people just accept this sort of stuff as mundane fact of life.
So such folks are uniquely emotionally prepared for this sort of interaction.
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’.
So I heard an interview with one of her associates and they seemed pretty pragmatic about whatever sucking up they need to do to make Trump change things the way they think needs to be changed. And it didn’t sound like they were disappointed or shocked or anything, just that’s the way things go.
Reminds me of speaking with a colleague that was an immigrant from a country with a well known corrupt government. He just couldn’t get as shocked as the rest of us over Trump’s behavior. He recognized it as bad, but as far as he was concerned, that was just life and he was used to it. Disappointed for things to start feeling a bit too much like his home country to be sure, but overt corruption was just the way things were. I could imagine being in the thick of such a government and just being boringly normal about this level of petty corruption.
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
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.
He used the general maga as a baseline and then said the approval for this is under 10%, not even popular among the people who are rude or die with Trump
Because using a gui is easier for novices
To the extent that is true, then the novice doesn’t end up asking for help. The goal is that the capability is discoverable. Or if it’s really a bit harder, there are hopefully tutorial youtube videos that cover the use case.
But when a user asks for specific help on a task they couldn’t figure out for themselves, or are asking for help with a ‘something went wrong’ dialog box, well helping with CLI is much more feasible than the involved mess of trying to basically make video tutorials ad-hoc, or screen share, or try to help them find the obscure log file an application wrote somewhere with the real error.
It’s relevant. From about 1995 to 2006, Microsoft was pretty much hard set on ‘cli is dumb, do nothing cli wise, cmd is a concession, but a crappy one’. As an artifact of that, you got regedit, a godawful ‘GUI’ that took a messy datastore model and just kept it ugly, in a way that would have been pretty much better as a CLI interface.
Microsoft started getting the idea again, but in true Microsoft fashion, had to reinvent the wheel and did PowerShell to try to create a CLI ecosystem from scratch rather than trying to build anything vaguely familiar. To their credit, for first party stuff they did a fine job enabling it, though third party applications remain a mess to this day. It does highlight that even Microsoft figured out that CLI actually does make sense a lot of the time.
Hey, and PowerShell commands aren’t GUI, bringing us back to the point of this post…
If it’s “oh, you can open up [application X] and it’s easy to figure it out, and there’s videos out there to cover your use case”, then ok.
But if it’s to help a user with a very specific task and they want their hand held, well from a GUI perspective I’m either making a bunch of screenshots or maybe even a tutorial video or a screen share session… Or I shoot them a relatively short CLI command that does it and move on to other things.
It is usually much shorter to tell someone the CLI to do something than it is to try to train them on a GUI for the same thing. If it’s well-trodden subject matter, well they probably already found a youtube tutorial and didn’t even have to ask.
Exception for helping someone who sshed into something and doesn’t understand what they are doing.
It happens that someone without knowledge has no idea how to interactively edit a file on a system they can only ssh into. ‘run nano’ is easier than ‘ok, now I’ll show you how to WinSCP the file down edit it, and put it back, but make sure you don’t screw up the CRLF or permissions in the process…’
To do this setting, you have to open up regedit, and…
That part of Windows isn’t so pretty. A quick copy-paste of a CLI is so much better than opening up regedit. Powershell has improved this, but for a long time this was the approach for settings microsoft couldn’t be bothered to make intuitive UI for.
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.
There was some experiment they did in the mid 2000a that was also going to be completely incompatible. It went nowhere.
A month from now:
I’m working on this horrible Venezuela situation that BIDEN left me with. Such a waste of American resources but I’m going to pull that back to make America great again.
Ok, so you weren’t countering that ML wasn’t AI, just contending that ML wasn’t “the” AI in the AI field, that’s fine. Keep in mind this thread kicked off from an assertion that ML wasn’t AI. Fine, ML wasn’t all of AI, but definitely was AI and in the popular understanding, it was pretty much “the” AI in the same way LLM is “the” AI now.
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.