Yeah, very good analogy actually…

I remember back in the day people putting stuff like ‘Microsoft Word’ under ‘skills’. Instead of thinking ‘oh good, they will be able to use Word competently’, the impression was ‘my god, they think Word is a skill worth bragging about, I’m inclined to believe they have no useful skills’.

‘Excel skills’ on a resume is just so vague, people put it down when they just figured out they can click and put things into a table, some people will be able to quickly roll some complicated formula, which is at least more of a skill (I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets).

Using an LLM is not a skill with a significant acquisition cost. To the extent that it does or does not work, it doesn’t really need learning. If anything people who overthink the ‘skill’ of writing a prompt just end up with stupid superstitions that don’t work, and when they first find out that it doesn’t work, they just grow new prompt superstitions to add to it to ‘fix’ the problem.

Yes, because Microsoft’s revenue growth is in fact the most important thing the folks at Davos had to think about…

I’ll agree to disagree, but surprised as I thought strange new worlds was pretty consistent with a traditional Star Trek…

Getting a dns name is straightforward enough, and let’s encrypt to get a tla cert…

But for purely internal services that you didn’t otherwise want to publish extremely, the complexity goes way up (either maintain a bunch of domain names externally to renew certificates and use a private DNS to point them to the real place locally, or make your own CA and make all the client devices enroll it. Of course I’m less concerned about passkeys internally.

Given how much they hate being “woke”, does that mean “sleepy Joe” was actually a compliment?

That you can’t plug into a traditional computer and that has not even pads for a video connector to be soldered to.

Folks just don’t realize how exotically different they have ultimately made the GPU packaging for datacenters. B200/B300 come in very specific packaging that is nowhere near a PCIe card.

Nuke it from orbit, it’s the only way to be sure

Broadly speaking, the private keys can be protected.

For ssh, ssh-agent can retain the viable form for convenience while leaving the ssh key passphrase encrypted on disk. Beyond that your entire filesystem should be further encrypted for further offline protection.

Passkeys as used in webauthn are generally very specifically protected in accordance with the browser restrictions. For example, secured in a tpm protected storage, and authenticated by pin or biometric.

For ssh, ssh keys.

For https, webauthn is the way to do it, though services are relatively rare, particularly for self hosting, partly because browsers are very picky about using a domain name with valid cert, so browsers won’t allow them by ip or if you click through a self signed cert

I could see a refusal to use codegen as a potential liability, but that’s not “skills”. The biggest thing about codegen is you have to review it and just lower your expectations that the code comes from a technique dumber than the dumbest human intern you have ever seen and approach it with supremely thorough skepticism. It’s exhausting how dumb it can be and how you have to be paranoid for every single piece of output. But it’s not a “skill”

Now you can’t win some awards…

Because if they can make for consumers, then there’s a shit ton of investor money waiting for some tech bro to turn it into ‘AI’.

The tech industry companies are playing with nigh unlimited house money, consumers can’t compete.

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.

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’.

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.

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.