antome

This is a Minecraft server, so it's going to be running 24/7.

I do enjoy how reviewers are now using software rendering of Crysis as a benchmark, even if it's just a joke. It would be pretty interesting to see what kind of game engine you could make if it was hyper-optimized around software rendering for modern, massively parallel CPUs.

As someone who has used both PyTorch and TensorFlow for a couple years now, I can can attest to the faster research iteration times for PyTorch. TensorFlow has always felt like it was designed for some mythical researcher that could come up with a complete architecture ahead of time, based on off-the-shelf parts.

This doesn't have much to do with the algorithms, and is more to do with the engineering decisions that went into AlphaGo and AlphaZero. They are designed to play one combinatorial game really well. With a bit of additional efffort and a lot of additional compute, you could expand the model to account for multiple rule / scale variations, maybe even different combinatorial games.

Key part of the article: " According to these upcoming updates, npm will ban:

Packages that display ads at runtime, on installation, or at other stages of the software development lifecycle, such as via npm scripts.

Packages with code that can be used to display ads are fine. Packages that themselves display ads are not.

Packages that themselves function primarily as ads, with only placeholder or negligible code, data, and other technical content. "

I wonder where they will draw the line with the last point.

One thing Microsoft has really nailed, is the location diversity of Azure datacenters. They have multiple locations in South Africa and UAE, while also having regions in multiple cities across Australia, Japan and India. If I wanted to launch a worldwide product, why would I want to go with AWS, Google or IBM?

It's just a matter of following the money. A bigger and bigger slice of Microsoft's income is coming from Azure, and an increasing proportion of Azure users are running Linux. This gives them strong incentive to be the business leaders in open source software.

The other increasing slice is services, where they get you to buy stuff from their storefront, or subscribe to their game pass, or office 365, or make personal interactions with Bing and Windows (so they can sell targeted ads). This naturally gives Microsoft the incentive to know everything about you.