This certainly doesn't mean it will go unhacked; but it's the software running in the VBS enclave that remains active. TPM2/secure boot are prerequisites for that.

Volatility in DRAM spot prices certainly isn't anything new; but it probably doesn't help that we've got a push by the high end vendors to move more HBM at fancy AI part margins while also being at the somewhat annoying point in the DDR4/DDR5 transition where you can still put together a pretty plausible computer with either; but you need to pick a completely different GPU to do so; rather than it being one of those where memory controllers currently support both and it's just a question of how they laid the motherboard out.

DDR4 parts were hanging around because they were only modestly less powerful and platform costs were lower; but if DDR4 prices move unexpectedly that's a lot of writing down someone is going to have to do and potentially some rapid shifts in the ratio of DDR4 to DDR5 parts.

I wonder if that is what they are alluding to when they say ""People with less than a college education are creating a lot of value — and sometimes more value than people with a college education — using our product".

Depending on how finished and drop-in vs. how in need of fiddly integration and customization at the customer site for their systems 'our product' is the open roles implied by that line could range from "you could be an analyst monkey; maybe even analyst monkey II if you seem like a bright sort!" to some more intricate and visible customer facing integration project stuff(which is were some outfits probably would have a cultural preference for candidates with prestige credentials); but when c-suite says that you can create value as a user that normally isn't to be read as a statement that there are openings at their level; and if they wanted to be either more vague or differently specific they could have been.

Don't worry; the glorious agentic future also includes firing everyone who isn't far enough up the food chain to have a proper office. Won't be a problem.

Designed to sound more dramatic than it may actually be.

It seems worth mentioning that they are specifically saying that among people they hire they don't treat prestigious degrees differently and sometimes get better results from people without them. They don't actually say anything about whether they ignore degrees in hiring; or whether they find a correlation between degrees and hireability.

The statement is certainly constructed to sound more dramatic than that; and depending on their hiring practices it may actually be; but "if we think you are good enough to hire we don't continue to uphold a caste system based on where you did undergrad" is not a terribly radical position to take. Not one that everyone actually does take; but not terribly uncommon.

My father was a consultant; and he always told me that there were two very different types of client: Some clients had a decision they needed to make that raised questions they didn't have the expertise to answer, other clients had a decision they had made for which they wanted additional justification. The former wanted actual analysis both of whether the questions they had were the questions they should have and the answers to the questions they should have. The latter absolutely wanted the performance of analysis, clearly shoddy work or an obviously stacked deck(metaphorical or slide) defeated the point and made the cynicism of what they were doing too overt; but they were not hiring you first and foremost to get them an answer they didn't think they could get themselves.

I am significantly less clear on how much benefit the first class of clients is getting from 'AI', allegedly there are some narrow use cases where performance actually lands in the same ballpark as hype; but the second class of clients could absolutely do as well, or better, in terms of adding prestige and second-opinions-were-obtained cred to whatever decision they already wished to arrive at; given the absolute mania for anything you can call 'AI' in management circles at the moment.

If you are basically calling in McKinsey to add gravitas to your layoffs that seems like business they are either going to lose or have to do at pitifully low margins to keep up with the 'AI' guys; I just don't know what percentage of their business is mostly about adding prestige or letting an outsider be the one you can point to when the axe starts coming down vs. actual analysis where asking the right questions and getting the right answers is important; where AI hype could still make landing gigs harder; but the bot will have to deliver or the pendulum will swing back after a bunch of embarrassing failures.

That's news to me. Bias is always possible in a person, and that may result in poor observations, the accuracy of which is the lifeblood of science.

What's impossible is for a body of science, writ large over years and multiple experiments, to exhibit bias. It takes a lot of science to remove bias by a process. It takes a whole bunch of time to reach bias-free, settled science, however.

But scientists are biased as much as anyone else. I think he was either misquoted or misspoke. I believe "settled science" is what he's referring to.

Because that's not how language works?

Decimate no longer means "kill one out of ten men." It means to mostly destroy something. Yet it used to mean cut down 10% of something.

That's why everyone's jumping on it. If you use language this way, you are not communicating with the living language. You're communicating with your own preferred language and others will not understand.

TL;DR: It doesn't matter that you "like" that a word means something that it doesn't actually mean.

Yeah. And the word "beard" used to mean a joke. I'll laugh at your facial hair if you have some.

Just because a word used to mean something doesn't indicate anything about what it means now. Put down the OED. Etymology only tells you where it came from, not what it is. There's nothing wrong with your definition, of course. It's simply archaic and confusing.

Honestly, I'm gonna go with the scientific method is really good at disproving the large amount of bunk that was generated over millennia, to weed out a few good ideas. The first few hundred years of the scientific revolution was a massive review of every idea we thought was true. It was also related to things that were easily observable.

But we've exhausted that pool of ideas. Without novel ideas, science flounders.

Debunkers don't tend to be creative thinkers. Data collectors don't need to be either. Science needs to wheel around from its original, highly successful method of discarding bad ideas. You can't test what you haven't thought of yet, and what's left to be thought of is more and more esoteric and nuanced. We need a more generative process. Inductive processes are more important than deductive ones now.

So science, in the near term, is going to be extremely wrong. A lot. Being right isn't a luxury for scientists any longer.

The low hanging fruit is gone. Being a scientist in this day and age is hard.

Honestly, most of the time the engineers go first, and then the scientists explain why it worked.

Applied science is pretty rare.

The part that I suspect they genuinely don't like is that the "MicrosoftXTA" CPU vendor code, which corresponds to a Windows ARM device(which I think at this point means 'Qualcom'; possibly a VM on a mac?) is meandering between .08% and .07% and back.

Despite those systems being genuinely well above average in terms of bringing remotely mac-like battery life to Windows; and(despite...optimistic...MSRPs) often appearing on sale at decently attractive price points; it appears that some mixture of apathy, incompatibility, and the total disaster that was the rollout of 'recall' and 'Copilot+ PC' seems to have just cratered those; at least among people who touch steam even casually.

Could be that windows-on-arm is flying off the shelf somewhere else; I don't have MS sales data; but when what was supposed to be the halo product of the win11/Glorious AI product era is under .1%, beating out those well-known Debian gamers by .01 to .02%, they can't be entirely thrilled.

What would be interesting to know(I did some poking; but didn't see CPU information breakdown by architecture or model number; just vendor, clock speed, and core count; and no computersystemproduct/other platform identifier; my apologies for asking a dumb question if I missed something) is what the percentage of linux on steam deck 'like' systems is.

The steam deck itself seems to have held up very well in terms of the semi-custom CPU's priorities, the target resolution, the peripherals included, and the overall polish and user experience; but it is definitely not getting any younger; and there are a bunch of options that ship either with the Z1/Z2 or generic newer AMD laptop APUs, plus MSI's 'Claw' with an Intel(that actually puts in really respectable numbers when the drivers aren't letting it down); but consensus on win11 as a touchscreen OS on devices either without a proper pointing device or with a teeny little one seems to be pretty solidly negative.

That makes me curious about whether gaming handhelds get converted to linux at a significantly different rate than other form factors. I'd assume that 'gaming' laptops are probably about the most hostile hardware flavor; since Nvidia has massive share in discrete laptop GPUs and the 'Optimus' arrangement that allows all the internal display and the video outs to be wired to the iGPU, with dGPU picking up work as needed, is massively driver dependent; desktops are probably the easiest(since you have more control over parts; and you can just shrug off "weird ACPI quirk causes BT chipset to not sleep properly" because you are on the wall and who cares; where that would potentially drain a sleeping laptop's battery pretty quickly; but desktops are also the place where win11 is as inoffensive as it is possible for it to be(still pretty obnoxious; but when you've got a large screen and a real pointing device and keyboard its complete unsuitability for handhelds doesn't matter; even if you hate copilot and the MS upsells).