I'm curious how you peel off marketing at a company that is really playing two, perhaps three, entirely different games of it in parallel; some of which are actually closely aligned with real techical work.

There's the consumer facing stuff; 'intel inside' stickers and sponsoring overclocking influencers and whatnot. Probably aligns with some poking at engine and middleware vendors to make sure that the characteristics Intel adds to their chips are catered to, whether that be new instructions or not behaving pathologically on heterogeneous cores; but it's not obvious that terribly close coordination would be needed; and (while I sincerely doubt that Accenture will end up being good value) it's easiest to imagine a more weakly coupled consumer marketing effort off doing its thing.

The marketing to low-information institutional buyers (like the now-infamous slide deck about "hey howdy purchasing managers; did you know that sometimes Core i3 is newer and better even though Ryzen 5 has bigger number; which seem unpossible?) is presumably also viable to farm out in its most basic form; but presumably requires some fairly detailed(and potentially contentious, since those have their own interests to look after) coordination with the PC OEMs unless they just want it to be some slightly goofy talking points for dealing with people who buy computers the same way they buy commodity reagents and paper towels.

The marketing to higher-information institutional customers seems like it would lean heavily technical pretty quickly. There's some lightweight stuff aimed at IT director Bob who remembers when he 'knew computers' hands on 30 years ago and continues to read about it at a high-ish level in industry trade magazines and whitepapers; but it fairly quickly gets somewhat meatier in terms of the OEM and ISV assisting/cajoling required to ensure that the vague sense that nobody ever got fired for specifying Intel, the compatible and validated high performance solution for your critical business requirements, remains at least reasonably true; and gets straight into inserting real engineers to talk to other people's real engineers in order to get what you want from emerging OCP specs; ensure that QAT and AES-NI and such are considered relevant to networking performance, that telcos with vRAN problems actually consider AVX to be a part of the solution; and so on. Maybe you can peel off the part that's just faff and vibes for IT Director Bob; but it seems like people would notice if Intel's OCP people were replaced by random Accenture dudes.

Finally you've got the relationship with the OEMs; which definitely has some pure marketing stuff(like the various 'incentives' for advertising OEM systems if they were intel based); but in large part(especially if Intel actually wants to make money, not just discount their way into volume) relies on some largely technical things being true: "we can supply the complete, mature, solution for a thin-and-light from consumer to enterprise; while AMD is busy trying to munge shit together with Mediatek and ASMedia and Realtek" is a simple enough marketing message; but its continued viability can only be sustained by charisma for so long: it has to actually bet true that your CPU/iGPU is at least acceptable enough to not scuttle sales; that your CNVio2 wifi saves money, or is at least a wash, vs. the competitor's m.2 PCIe while being as good or better; that an intel i219 or i225 will be dead reliable and allow AMT enablement for the corporate buyers while AMD is messing around with Realtek's DASH firmware; that the OEM will get actual engineering support if Intel Smart Sound Technology isn't or if they need to deal with some ACPI fuckery that is ruining battery life. It's not like there would be no marketing people involved in spreading the message; but that seems like something more or less wholly inseparable(without drastic damage) from internal, relatively core, technical teams.

Obviously, in a trivial sense, you can always farm something out in the sense of paying someone else to pay people to do things rather than just paying those same people to do those same things directly; but unless your payroll and HR departments are fucked up beyond words you are unlikely to save money by just adding that sort of intermediary; so presumably they have something more in mind. I'm just not sure how it is supposed to work.

If you are just doing low-information vibes marketing that seems pretty readily farmed out; but that's also the sort of thing that is(or ought to be) comparatively cheap; while the more valuable and compelling marketing messages pretty quickly move to being direct technical commitments in a way that seems like it would be an awkward jump if your marketing is external but your engineering remains internal.

At least half the fun of being a 'disruptive innovator' is being able to treat your abject ignorance of history as a strength rather than a deficiency.

The two aren't actually so different. You do get to make economic arguments a lot more openly about copyright(while, when it comes to killing, we normally make them relatively quietly and circumspectly when the unpleasant matter of what risks to the public are just part of The March of Progress and which ones are negligent or reckless comes up. We prefer not to talk about it; and have some proxies like 'VSL/ICAF' to help; but we do it); but the classifications are ultimately a policy thing and open to amendment as needed.

"Murder" superficially resembles a stable category just because of a true-by-definition trick: we call it 'murder' if a killing is unlawful and forbidden(or, rhetorically, if we think it ought to be unlawful and forbidden); so there's always a strong anti-murder consensus because everyone is against killings that are forbidden, except a few Raskolnikov-type edgelords. What there is not is actually a consensus on what killings we are or aren't against. The people who think that every other defensive option must be exhausted and the ones who are just itching to castle-doctrine the next fool who steps over the property line are both anti-murder; but not entirely in agreement on what that means; same with the current dispute over whether euthanasia is a legitimate exercise of self determination or nihilistic hyper-sin; or any of the wartime arguments over where 'collateral damage' stops being unfortunate-but-proportionate and just goes into being bulk murder.

It is somewhat more common to find(in public, not so much remotely in the vicinity of legislative power) people who will outright claim to be against copyright; because they do not consider any derivative works to be legitimately unauthorized; but here it's a more or less straightforward fight between two entities that would both claim to be in favor of copyright; but who differ on whether setting up a data mine in the BBC's backyard is copyright infringement or not.

He's the founder and CEO of one of the companies HP bought during Apotheker's...impressive...string of failures. That was in 2011; but it remained in the news first when HP wrote down their 10.3 billion dollar buy by 8.8 billion dollars; then when the litigation began by HP against previous management on the theory that they must have been cooking the books a bit for things to go so wrong so fast under HP's illustrious management.

The charges stuck against the CFO; but the CEO and VP of finance were acquitted. Then the VP of finance got hit by a car; and the CEO's celebratory yacht outing took a literal turn when the ship capsized and he died; then the VP of finance finished succumbing to his head injuries and died less than 48 hours later.

I'm not sure anyone thinks well enough of HP's ability to execute to seriously suspect them; but the background probably didn't reduce interest in getting a nice decisive root cause for the boat issue.

Obviously the only computer experience worth having is on a Copilot+ AI PC; so microsoft is doing us a favor by helping us avoid legacy experiences.

What they are not saying, but what I suspect is part of the plan, is that the numbers only work out if you actively move toward being more locked in to their products.

If you just want the basic vsphere-managing-a-few-ESXi-hosts setup the bundle is stupidly expensive; but if you try to justify the cost of the bundle by using other parts of it you end up with a system that is significantly harder to migrate away when Broadcom decides to alter the deal further.

That's not how that kind of Thunderbolt device works:

TB handles the PCIe tunneling; but the PCIe device still acts more or less as an ordinary PCIe device would. On the plus side that means that TB can support basically arbitrary PCIe peripherals(barring some very fiddly assumptions most commonly found in GPUs, especially if the firmware or OS expects a GPU to be available very early in boot); but on the minus side it's still up to the OS to know what to do with the PCIe device.

USB was a slightly wierd one because it was very much an Intel pet project. Not sure if there was any arm twisting involved in terms of chipset pricing or similar; but they quite deliberately made the then-ubiquitous '2 USB 1 ports forlornly doing nothing' a cheap to implement default chipset feature; rather than USB being a 'premium' chipset upsell or a discrete controller(obviously those existed as well; but only really became relevant once people actually wanted USB ports).

As a result the standard for typical new PCs picked up a couple of USB ports almost overnight, well before the drivers were ready or there was much of anything worthwhile to plug into them, and before Apple went all-in on USB with the imacs.

Serious PC adoption was far more meandering; "legacy free" PCs were a Microsoft aspirational project/limited volume specialty option for certain cheap corporate bulk PCs for some years after the imacs went USB; and the PC OEMs were, justifiably, cautious about being too pushy about killing legacy ports before customers were good and ready; but USB ports themselves actually appeared and spread extremely rapidly once Intel decided to make it so.

What I'd like to see (and MS doesn't have; though so far as I know nobody else, at least not anyone of even remotely comparable scale) is a way for admins to 'shim' certain Oauth grant permissions.

Right now the user experience is basically "Do you want the shiny thing? Give it what it wants." The admin UI gets an actual breakdown(at least to the level of granularity that MS applies to msgraph permissions); but each one is still take it or leave it(with some specific exceptions based on backend; like "Calendars.Read" quietly being further scopable with Exchange RBAC; both most other Things.Read permissions not being). If an application has the appropriate permissions; an msgraph API query will return 'The Truth', same one the user would see, the admin would see, and any other appropriately permissioned application would see.

Compare to something like what they have for constructing SAML assertions(and what someone like Okta has a massively more intricate version of; since their whole business is being able to mash more or less any horrible combination of IdPs and relying parties together into a login flow that will work): you can just pass the AAD UPN across as the username; but you can also use other user properties and some limited text munging options; most commonly to support cases where usernames in that awful webapp are firstname_lastname or firstname.lastname@secondarydomainnamenotUPNone.org or whatever it happnes to be.

I'd like to see something similar for permission grants that gives you the ability to lie rather than deny ('lie' is an ugly word; so, um, 'enables integrated business logic flows'). Lets say some application wants user calendar access. It's for scheduling or the like so Calendars.Read is legit, it might even need Calendars.ReadWrite; but Calendars.Read also lets it grab attachments from calendar events and scrape text out of calendar event bodies: Do I really want the random SaaSholes at FindAMeetingRoom.biz to be grabbing agendas and shared documents for discussions and dial-in access passwords? No, I really don't. But I also don't want the app to break because it gets a torrent of 403s when it does some boilerplate iterating across a user's calendar events.

That's where I want to lie: there's room for potentially arbitrary levels of complexity in what you might want; do you want to have "GET /users/{id | userPrincipalName}/events/{id}/attachments" just return no attachments? Do you want any attachment that has a sensitivity label to not get returned; or to be silently replaced with a syntactically valid but uninteresting boilerplate document that's just a CSV of the meeting attendees?

I'm not expecting this to be the 'basic' application approval experience; and it would absolutely be an 'enough rope to hang yourself' kind of tool; but it's really very limiting to have a vendor-provided API that 3rd party applications are targeting that the same vendor will provide unfiltered answers to assuming the permissions are set to allow it. There's no ability to map an application's requests for information to filtered or processed versions of the data in your environment.

Obviously the API is saner than having to write some custom SQL-munging integration for even the most trivial of 3rd party applications; that would suck; but because MS answers API queries honestly; and because 3rd party devs obviously target the standard m365/0365 stuff; not a bunch of arbitrary per-customer APIs, there's no way to insert any sort of filtering(whether for information denial or for information enrichment); and all these 'applications' are somebody else's server just merrily doing its thing; so it's not even like the old days of plugins and 3rd party utilities where it is pretty challenging to know what a big binary is doing; but you can at least control its filesystem permissions and its access to the internet.

This is obviously much harder to do under controlled experimental conditions; probably more of a cohort study; but I'd be curious if the result is more of a 'you learn significantly less' or 'your existing skill degrades'.

Either way it will at least be a problem; since the current reliability of bots basically requires knowledgeable and experienced people to supervise them and know when to just give their output a look and pass it along, when to prod them on errors to try to get them fixed, and when to just do it themselves; and you only get knowledgeable and experienced people through learning and experience; which are going to be done few favors by enhanced cheating tools and automation of entry level jobs where people historically gained experience under the supervision of senior people; but it will be a shade uglier if it turns out that using senior people to herd bots actually degrades them over time rather than just causing them to not learn nearly as much as they otherwise might.

It's not like every task is a learning experience; some are already pretty well inside your skillset and that's fine at least in moderation; but if the impact of bots is to make something like writing or programming an exercise that does to your brain what heavy construction work does to your knees and spine the future of the 40+ 'knowledge worker' looks brighter than ever!

That's why I was proposing it as one of the embarrassing failure modes. If someone at the State Department gets the wrong idea about the sincerity and consistency of the policy there will hardly be anybody for Turning Point USA to invite across the Atlantic to tell us about European race suicide without getting flagged. Awkward.

Obviously a solvable problem if you've got someone who knows how to carry out the quiet part without saying it and can do some cross referencing; but even if your social media text-munging/sentiment analysis bot is actually fit for purpose, and that's an if, it's going to be a lot of fiddly corrections both for jews who aren't frothing hard right lunatics and sufficiently pale non-jews who are.

This seems like a fantastic setup for a joke about reinforcement learning in neural networks; albeit possibly one that is on us.

Depending on how many competent people they've got left post-purges; and how ill-explained the criteria are, I suspect that there will be some room for embarrassing mistakes. Ethnicy-looking muslims are a nope by design, of course; but not being suitably careful about jewish Yesh Atid voters risks making it obvious that it's about being so far up Netanyahu's ass you are asking Mike Huckabee to make room; not about jews particularly; while being too sincere about looking for antisemitism could really complicate our beautiful friendship with Reform UK and and AfD; some members of which may have made enthusiastic and somewhat intemperate observations about international Jewry; but in the good, honest, Anglo-Saxon and/or Teutonic fashion that certainly doesn't suggest backing the wrong semites.

I'm not sure that their bean counters trust LLMs quite enough to let them issue quotes; but they could honestly use an expert system of some kind to cut through their SKU nonsense.

I had just the worst meeting some time back where, despite there being a total of 6 'licensing people' between MS and the VAR, there were a number of points where they were unable to determine(or came to different determinations) of what license you needed to do certain things and how much it would cost(and not 'different' in the 'MS thinks we can do X% off list, VAR thinks we can do Y% of list; totally different alleged list prices, different SKUs in different quantities, and different alleged discounts).

For a company that sells both ERP and CRM software it seems like a bad look to not be able to; y'know, tell a customer who is asking about one of your product lines which model he needs and how much it will run him; and from a bean-counting perspective it seemed wild that at least tens of man hours worth of confusion were actually cost effective.

Maybe I just don't understand the psychology; and some 80k/yr sales person is totally worth it if the customer is in 'fuck it, I want this to be over' mode rather than 'hard nosed negotiator' mode when a premier licensing deal is signed; but it's always kind of a weird experience how the guys who sell consumer widgets can just give me a spec sheet and a price; but 'enterprise' means a couple of chirpy reps, a mandatory reseller, and a huge amount of manual attention.

A lot of the 'headline' announcements, pro and con, are basically useless; but this sort of thing does seem like a useful cautionary tale in the current environment where we've got hype-driven ramming of largely unspecialized LLMs as 'AI features' into basically everything with a sales team; along with a steady drumbeat of reports of things like legal filings with hallucinated references; despite a post-processing layer that just slams your references into a conventional legal search engine to see if they return a result seeming like a pretty trivial step to either automate or make the intern do.

Having a computer system that can do an at least mediocre job, a decent percentage of the time, when you throw whatever unhelpfully structured inputs at it is something of an interesting departure from what most classically designed systems can do; but for an actually useful implementation one of the vital elements is ensuring that the right tool is actually being used for the job(which, at least in principle, you can often do since you have full control of which system will process the inputs; and, if you are building the system for a specific purpose, often at least some control over the inputs).

Even if LLMs were good at chess they'd be stupid expensive compared to ordinary chess engines. I'm sure that someone is interested in making LLMs good at chess to vindicate some 'AGI' benchmark; but, from an actual system implementation perspective, this is the situation where the preferred behavior would be 'Oh, you're trying to play chess; would you like me to set "uci_elo" or just have Stockfish kick your ass?" followed by a handoff to the tool that's actually good at the job.