They're brilliant at making games. They have their suite of exclusives that people love and will buy the console for. And they keep a consistently high quality bar for those games. Even the worst Mario game was still good. Same for Zelda. Same for Metroid. As long as they keep that the case, and their consoles are reasonably priced they'll sell. Which, combined with cheaper parts, is why they generally made a profit per console rather than a loss.

Xbox and PS don't have that. They used to each have some exclusives- but they've gone away from that road due to the high cost of creating them (Nintendo's focus on gameplay over high end graphics also reduced the cost of making a game). Even the exclusives they do have don't have the reputation for quality- they tend to run hot and cold. And MS in particular has waffled between wanting to push xbox vs PC gaming, reducing the number of exclusives as they launch on PC. It leaves them in a place where there's no driver for their new product other than better graphics quality. And with the economy tightening, that's something that will be dropped first.

It was probably the other O'Neil, with one L. He has no sense of humour at all.

I could understand bots and mailing lists. The thing I never understood with LinkedIn was how many real people (usually recruitment agents) had apparently spent the time to read my profile and send me a personalised message, yet still thought I'd be interested in a job paying half the market rate for someone with my skills and experience.

I don't know what you mean. Look at the improvement in hiring when you can advertise an open position on LinkedIn and get maybe 100x as many applicants as before! OK, probably 99% of them will be completely unqualified for the role and barely capable of pushing the instant application button, but how is that a problem, really? Surely hiring managers can easily filter them out and no qualified applicant will ever get lost in the noise?

It's like a video I saw on YouTube the other week. Someone was talking all about "skills" for their AI agents and how they'd automated so much of their workflow using them. They started the video by kicking off four different tasks for separate agents to show how productive it was to have all this stuff happening in parallel and how it was so quick and easy to organise.

One of the tasks involved producing an infographic about a certain topic, and the AI duly produced one based on a one-liner prompt, taking only a few seconds of the presenter's time and with no further input from them about the content. The infographic had exactly the level of quality you'd expect from this: a load of boxes and arrows (with some of those arrows starting or finishing floating in space without connecting anything) and some words (a few of which might have been related to the topic mentioned in the prompt).

That infographic was the only substantial output from the whole exercise. It was the worst kind of AI slop imaginable, generated with literally no thought or oversight from the presenter beyond a couple of words about the topic as part of that one-liner prompt. This was probably about the average level of the LinkedIn posts I used to see before I left as well. As you said, I'm not sure you can be a "thought leader" without doing any thinking.

I stopped using LinkedIn when they seemingly decided my account wasn't about me (despite having obvious and publicly verifiable details right there in the description) and wanted me to verify my ID using one of the US-based services with a questionable reputation to get my access back. That's not going to happen, so I just don't use the site any longer.

As far as I can tell, that has made zero difference to my career, and it's one fewer drain on my time. The only thing I have missed is seeing the occasional good news story where a past colleague has been promoted or the like, but I'm not giving up my government-issued credentials to the US-based data harvesting industry for that.

I'm still impressed that the Teams web client can't edit a message with an emoji in it without messing up the keyboard controls and often corrupting the message and losing data. It's had this bug for years. It's literally a messaging app where you can't reliably send messages.

That would require him considering women as human beings rather than objects to fuck. He isn't capable of that.

Sometimes that choice is the right one. Not all parents are good parents. Some are downright toxic.

Training these models is incredibly expensive. In fact it's so expensive that there is no viable economic model to do so. As such, their options are either to drastically slow down the amount of new models trained or to go bankrupt. This is just a nice whitewashing of that. It remains to be seen if even using their models can be profitable, but we know that with the cost of training the next one they can't be.

The problem with this argument, from the shop's point of view, is that the UK is in the middle of a shoplifting epidemic. The policing resources simply aren't there to deal with small scale (or even flagrant and much larger scale) shoplifting. It now seems to be rare for police officers to attend reports of shoplifting at all. And so effectively shoplifting becomes legalised, which is obviously hurting the big chain stores financially and potentially devastating for smaller shops.

Shops are trying to find some way to respond to this to protect themselves. They typically tell staff, even security staff, not to get physical with shoplifters as they walk out, not least because the risk of something worse happening and the business becoming liable for it is significant. But then the shoplifters know this and some of them will just walk in and openly empty a shelf into a bag and walk out again without paying because they know no-one will try to stop them.

Shops also know that our court system is completely overwhelmed at the moment and there is little chance of bringing any successful civil action to recover damages from shoplifters who aren't even being arrested by the police and put through the criminal justice system.

So what do they have left? Basically, they're trying to spot the "usual suspects" and refuse them entry in the first place, which is a less risky proposition in terms of potential for physical violence and quite effective because a lot of shoplifting is done by the same people, or they're trying to make it more physically difficult to steal goods, for example by using locking systems or keeping high value items behind counters where customers can't just pick them up. But these systems aren't perfect, far from it, and what we're discussing here today is one of the significant problems.

Obviously this kind of technology can have very bad consequences, as we see here. I don't think it should be used if it's not highly reliable, given the potential harm done in cases where it gets something wrong. But I do have some sympathy with the shops who are looking for something -- anything -- to reduce the threat they're facing because the rule of law has failed in retail settings.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?