Plasmoid2000ad

It looks like it's a fair implementation of guessing. Giving it digits of pi gives a very high (low) score - most times. To get a lower score I think you would have to be adversarial and/or get a lucky run. Based on the house doing better/worse on some runs I guess it not deterministic.

Lot's of enterprises are enabling whitelisting of apps launching using some sort of tooling - I think Microsoft provides one, and CrowdStrike etc. It's likely the delay involves a call to a backend application or even sometimes a web server. This would be on top of real-time scanning of every file before it's opened.

I'm having a tough time wrapping my head around how this could work for PCs today.

I'm guessing Intel/AMD could integrate a single SSD controller that OEMs could use for a specially socketed SSD?

I'm not familiar enough with SSD controllers - but what limits would this introduce. I'm thinking they can't be totally generic - with any NAND chips, any layout, 1-4 chips and TLC or QLC NAND - any capacity etc. It strikes me it would be limiting - you would become restricted to a a small subset of SSDs, maybe not forwards compatible with newer NAND chips etc.

I'd think only the minority of PC Laptops would make sense to have this - ones with soldered SSDs - and I don't know many of these. So Intel/AMD would need a big push to integrate any controller. Maybe Windows ARM laptops, if the controller makes a big enough difference, will do this. I'm curious now if any Snapdragon devices are doing this already.

Absolutely agree on the dumbing down. I'm guessing it's getting heavy use, for many it's probably the default thing to go to - so an easy target for cost optimization.

Mine will randomly go "Here's some driving tunes" while I'm sitting still, or introduce to me to "The Kings of Leon" when I have some of their songs liked and in my playlists. It's pretty clear there's not a lot of my data in the the input context, or it's not been improved over time.

Why would they? It's basic privacy no? Just because I want to pay money to carrier to provide me with data and phone service, I shouldn't have to give up my location from my device. I expect them to know my approximate location from cell tower data.

Generally I'd not expect them actively triangulate my exact location, but I'd realise that's at least possible - but GPS data, wake my phone up, switch on the GPS radio, drain it's battery, send that data back... no. That wouldn't be legal where I live either, let alone expected.

Yes - but perpetual purchases have an interesting gotcha that Microsoft didn't realise at first. To encourage subscription over perpetual, ongoing or evergreen updates are limited to subscription version.

Office 2024 has every feature that was added since Office 2021 to the subscription version - while a chunk of loyal customers are unaware of them. Back when Google was competing hard with Google Suite, a big perception problem formed with the perpetual customers believing and convincing others that Google were far ahead, with collab editing and other features - after Office had added equivalent.

So for me, If there's a subscription and one-time option - I wonder if the one-time gets all updates going forward. If it doesn't, I realise that they'll regret that if competition picks up, and try to fix it later. If it does include updates... I worry it will be like many other lifetime updates one-time purchases - when competition is low they'll renege on that promise.

Can't comment on quality - but I think it's more nuanced than adjusted too high.

Was getting a lift from a friend in a less than 1 year old Yaris cross. Noticed many cars flashing us on a short flat drive home - assumed it was headlights adjusted wrong. But no - headlight were in the lowest position. Driver had asked the garage twice to check the headlight adjustment.

Went out the front and headlight looked normal - but squatted and as soon I hit the sweet spot got blinded worse than high beams on my own car. This Yaris cross, which is going to be a very common car, has dips more powerful than my full beams - it will only take a small bump in the road to shine those adjustment or not - that's a problem all by itself.

I've seen some theories or maybe more like guesses as to how the paywall bypass works - I don't think anyone (or at least no one posting places like here) seems to know.

One I saw suggested they've a set of subscriptions to the paywalled sites and some minimal custom work to hide the signed in account used - which seems plausible. That makes the defense most likely used to catch the account used and ban them - which would be a right pain.

Yes - I'm running a LM Studio on windows on a 6800xt, and everything works more-or-less out of the box using always using Vulkan llama.cpp on the gpu I believe.

There's also ROCm. That's not working for me in LM Studio at the moment. I used that early last year to get some LLMs and stable diffusion running. As far as I can tell, it was faster before, but Vulkan implementations have caught up or something - so much the mucking about isn't often worth it. I believe ROCm is hit or miss for a lot of people, especially on windows.

Microsoft.com and Office.com used to be entirely built upon SharePoint, as SharePoint solutions. It was to prove it out as possible, eat your own dogfood.

I think the shift away started in 2013 or 2014, but you can imagine the throw away effort spent on it.

Not sure about microsoft.com, but office.com frontend "rendering" SharePoint instances were read-only, not plain SharePoint exposed as-is.

Something not touched on by others. The standard Microsoft contract outlawed any moonlighting for years, any code you created was potentially going to be claimed by Microsoft - so you didn't feel safe working on side projects or contributing to open source. Open source code was a pariah - you were warned unless you had an exception to never look at any open source code even vaguely related to your projects, including in personal time, for fear of opening up Microsoft to legal trouble.

In the context of this, when and why would the average dev get time to properly use git - no just get a shallow understanding, but use it at the complexity level needed for an large internal mono-repo ported to it.

I've used git Microsoft for years, but using git with Office client is totally different. I believe it's used differently, with very different expecations in Windows.

This wasn't my first impression of this, but the more I heard this dicussed the more I'm forming an opinion that there might be some intentional parts of this that while maybe not being good, make sense from a certain narrow perspective.

My assumption is, if tax folks in the US were looking Jealously at US companies with large Multinational presence declaring a lot of their profits abroad. They might have noticed that some of them have large dev presence in US, but through complex accounting, IP transfers, licensing and other actions are able to claim that majority of the value is generated outside of the US.

If a company had, say, 100k software devs, 50k in the US, and 50k scattered across other countries, but claimed the value of it's software was primarily in Puerto Rico and Ireland... In that case, I'd expect questions around the 50k devs in the US.

Is software dev the only activity where this is possible - no, but is currently by the far the largest and the largest growth industry.