... for profitability. I believe the investors are already asking for returns and they are not materializing with generative AI sliding into the "trough of disillusionment": https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.economist.com%2Fbusi...
Also, Nadella of Microsoft not being in speaking terms with the CEO of OpenAI is not very encouraging. Microsoft is not seeing a return on the 10s of billions dumped into Energophag Eliza and the shareholders are asking questions.
To save his own skin Nadella has recently implemented massive layoffs at Microsoft, in order to recoup some of the cash.
It looks like a lot of people have bet massively on AI which is being pushed on the users at every opportunity. The potential users are not asking for it, it is being pushed on them.
If the AI bubble goes like the dot com bubble I believe a lot of politicians will be very grumpy with their personal fortunes greatly reduced.
In the meantime, what happened to the blockchain? It was all the rage only 3 years ago.

Everybody hypes the code generation ability of AI, forgetting the ages-old wisdom that code is read a lot more than it is written. Look at any large software project and you'll see that there are a few lucky bastards who got to write the code and an army of maintainers lucky if they get to write "10 lines per day".
The 10 lines per day is generous as the "1000 lines per year" is more accurate and there are about 250 working days in the year.
Right now my team has to diagnose a crash that happens on cloud machines but so far we could not reproduce it locally. Good luck getting AI to help with that one.

I had to use Java in a few places and I got to understand why it is loved so much by hiring managers and bean counters.
The very authors of Java called it "C++ --". They took C++ and cut off the sources of 90% of the bugs encountered in C++ (pointers and operator overloading), added garbage collection, effectively baby-proofing the language.
This lead to non-crashing code being written by really bad programmers that are cheap to hire. The trouble is that the pointy-haired bosses of the programming industry believe that all it takes for code to work is not to crash.
In fact, some of the pointy-haired bosses even decided to try their hand at programming in Java, ended up with non-crashing code, and concluded that "it's easy".
The end result is that large programs (systems?) written in Java have much crappier code than C++ by the time they finally start to crash. But the programmers that are maintaining these projects are much cheaper to hire than the ones for equivalent projects written in C++.

Actually, Altavista was OK for its time and Yahoo mail is quite useful.
As for Chrome, well, Firefox works just fine.

I remember that this was a surprising find by the Galaxy Zoo project

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fzoo4.galaxyzoo.org%2F

At the time there was a suspicion that humans have a tendency to notice a direction of rotation more than the other, but now it looks more and more like the asymmetry is real.

A new law must be passed that stipulates jail time for anyone who reads the paper on self-replicating AI.
Why should it be only for this ? https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fyro.slashdot.org%2Fstory...

The only good outcome is that all these rapid-fire news will have the effect of pulling the investor's attention in may directions so they won't be all focused on dumping money on OpenAI's Energophag Eliza.

By the way, that thing is valued at close to 100B$.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ftechcrunch.com%2F2025%2F02...

I though this has happened:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedailymash.co.uk...

I remember a few years ago the Mayor of London allowed data collection on tube travelers.
Did any of the money made off the travelers' data go towards improving the service ?
Since then ticket prices have doubled over Covid and the strikes and cancellations continue apace.

Looks like Intel tried to use the political connections of their CEO to force Apple and Nvidia to use their foundries:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Ft...

Another thing was to get subsidies from the government under the CHIPS act:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Ft...

Now that these have no chance of materializing, and their attempt to corner the market for EUV litography machines proved too expensive, the CEO was kicked out and they have to follow in the steps of AMD.

It may be that deep down Ding wanted to get rid of the world champion title. If you look at his ratings chart since he became world champion:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fratings.fide.com%2Fprofi...

he dropped from over 2800 to be outside of the top 20.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2F2700chess.com%2Fplayers%2F...

To get an idea of how high 2800 is, keep in mind that Karpov never crossed 2800.

There is such a thing as too much pressure to perform at a standard worthy of a world champion and the consensus among the top chess players is that Ding was playing progressively worse since he got the title. I expect he will climb quite a bit in the ratings now that he got rid of the title.

It looks like the CEO was brought in to bring cash that the government promised under the CHIPS act, but this did not materialize.
Quite a bit of news seem to revolve around manufacturers not getting the grants promised, and this is not just Intel.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Ft...

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.tomshardware.com%2Fn...

Now he's heading out the door.

One strange thing they seem to have done is to corner the market for EUV lithography machines, absorbing all the production of ASML, but not using them for commercially offered chips.

I never liked Intel's hardware offerings, starting with the Celeron of the late 90's and culminating with Itanium's "We'll sweep our dirt under your rug" approach, but I have to admit that their software offerings are second to none.
Their C++ compiler produces number-crunching code that is many times faster than that produced by other compilers.
I hope they will stay around, at least for that.

For a long time there was talk of closing down Arecibo, so letting it collapse is the safest way to stop funding it.
Closing it down would involve saving the most expensive parts, the detectors in the hub suspended above the reflector.
This will also result in the expensive parts being stored for use in a future radio telescope.
The collapse and their destruction solved that problem too.

If I remember correctly, M$ has dumped 13B$ into Energophag Eliza (that is, ChatGPT, GTP, etc, whatever) and it looks like the promised profits are not being realized. This was mostly Nadella's doing.

So, the M$ shareholders are starting to ask the M$ CEO questions and in turn he is asking the OpenAI CEO questions.

When a company cannot deliver on a promise, the classic tactic is: Forget the original promise, gimme some more cash and here is an even bigger promise.

Just as the generative AI is slipping into the " trough of disillusionment":
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.computerworld.com%2F...

Are they telling us that the error-free fraction of spreadsheets has reached 6%? In this case I have a hew-found respect for all the spreadsheeters out there.
Or just that they do contain errors, but non-critical ones?

Did anyone check the trend of the CrowdStrike stock price over the last year ?
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Ffinance.yahoo.com%2Fquot...
It went from 150$/share on 31st of July 2023 to 390$/share on July 1st 2024. More than doubled. Such stock is ripe for short-selling, and we should not discount the possibility of someone shorting their stock and the working with an insider to cause this problem, leading to a drop in the stock price.
The shareholders may not be technically clued-in, but they are fully aware of such tricks to profit from stock price shocks and short-selling will definitely be a thing they suspect.