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.

Because axolotl sounds really cool. Like an alien... from space!

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.

Why do we even consider it a story when there are a couple of CEO quotes to mash together?

Even leaving aside the notrivial odds that what a CEO says is flat out wrong and the near certainty that what the CEO says is less well informed than what someone at least a layer or two closer to the technology or the product rather than to vague, abstract, 'management'; unless a C-level is being cleverly ambushed when away from their PR handlers with a few drinks in them or actively going off script in the throes of some personal upset, why would you expect their pronouncements to be anything but their company's perceived interests restated as personal insights?

Surprise, surprise, the AI-company guy is here to tell us that the very large, high barrier to entry, models are like spooky scary and revolutionary real soon now; even if you wouldn't know it from the quality of the product they can actually offer at the present time; while the AI-hardware guy is here to tell you that AI is friendly and doesn't bite but everyone needs even more than they thought they did, ideally deployed yesterday; because the AI-company people need to hype up the future value of throwing more cash and more patience at money-losing LLMs; and the AI-hardware people need to juice the total addressable market by any means necessary.

This seems like it radically increases the (historically quite low) risk of steroid abuse within network engineering. We don't ask how "Tank Coreswitch" is preparing for the move from 100Kg/E to 400Kg/E; but apparently it involves more endocrinology and dodgy sports medicine than most other networking standards.

I suspect that finding out the hard way would suck; but I'd honestly be a little curious what the breakdown would be between "it's been decades since we sold this stuff with the expectation of more than toy use; it's bad for margins to have more than bare minimum service techs and spares" where you'd basically be screwed; and "we jerk you around because we can; but if you just conscripted our contractors and Defense Production Act-ed our production priorities it would actually work fine".

If the problem is basically just 'because we can' contract fuckery a real war would probably sort it out; because the DoD can also 'because we can' in a pinch. It's if the system looks rotten because, deep down, it's been at least two generations of people selling cool toys that we all know are just going to be used against pitifully inferior non-state or pariah-state actors to people buying cool toys who know how to talk about 'peer adversaries' but can't forget that their entire career has been more or less discretionary and recreational uses of force that we barely bother to call wars.

There are definitely upsides to not having spent prolonged periods of time in hot wars with existential threats recently; but I suspect that it's hard to keep deep cynicism from creeping into the supply chain when it's so hard to pretend that you aren't just going through the motions.