Yeah did they test any of this? Did they run a pilot and ask 1000 users did you use it? Did you like it? Is it better with this than without it?
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
I don't see a future in which we play at 4K at top settings either without AI upscaling/interpolation. Even if it were theoretically possible to do so, the performance budget the developers have going forward will be assuming that frame generation and upscaling is used.
So anyone who wants only "real frames" (Non upscaled, non generated) will need to lower their settings or only play games a few years old. But I think this will be something that becomes so natural that no one even thinks about it. Disabling it will belike someone lowering AA settings or whatever. Something only done by very niche players, like the CS community does today where some are playing 4:3 screens, lowering AA settings for maximum visibility not fidelity and so on.
The worst thing about this isn't that it makes no sense. It's that it doesn't even _try_ to make sense.
These companies wanted to merge for financial reasons and the invented reason is nonsensical. We shouldn't even give the nonsensical reason the benefit of trying to make sense of it.
That seems like the way to go about it. Address when people are _selling_ guns. The fact that they were printed and not imported from Yugoslavia in 1990 doesn't really matter. Trying to stop people with 3D printers (Or metal tubes) from creating guns seems almost impossible.
I could see why "people are making guns" would be at the top of the list of politicians' worries in places where there are almost no guns, and people want to keep it that way. But in the US?
Indeed. Don't want people making guns? Ban the making of guns. Banning the production of guns using a 3D printer makes zero sense, should ban CNC machines too then.
Even then it makes little sense... 3d printers are just tools. They can be used to print dangerous items, or parts of dangerous items in the same way a saw or hammer could be used to make something dangerous. To some degree this is just a problem with human nature – some people are going to want to harm people and will create or acquire items which do that.
Perhaps if it was literally as simple as downloading a model and pressing print, then in 20 minutes you had a fully working automatic rifle this would be an issue, but that technology simply doesn't exist today.
In reality if your goal is to acquire a weapon which can do lethal harm to someone you just wouldn't print a gun. Even if you wanted to kill multiple people in a place like the UK where guns are illegal you still wouldn't print a gun because you'd probably be better off just getting knife than printing a crappy gun and trying to source an effective propellant, etc.
I disagree. It's like the lumberjack working from home watching an enormous robotic forestry machine cut trees on a set of tv-screens. If he enjoyed producing lumber, then what he sees on those screens will fill him with joy. He's producing lots of lumber. He's much more efficient than with both axe and chainsaw.
But if he enjoyed being in the forest, and _doesn't really care about lumber at all_ (Because it turns out, he never used or liked lumber, he merely produced it for his employer) then these screens won't give him any joy at all.
That's how I feel. I don't care about code, but I also don't really care about products. I mostly care about the craft. It's like solving sudokus. I don't collect solved sudokus. Once solved I don't care about them. Having a robot solve sudokus for me would be completely pointless.
> I sense a pattern that many developers care more about doing what they want instead of providing value to others.
And you'd be 100% right. I do this work because my employer provides me with enough sudokus. And I provide value back which is more than I'm compensated with. That is: I'm compensated with two things: intellectual challenge, and money. That's the relationship I have with my employer. If I could produce 10x more but I don't get the intellectual challenge? The employer isn't giving me what I want - and I'd stop doing the work.
I think "You do what the employer wants, produce what needs to be produced, and in return you get money" is a simplification that misses the literal forest for all the forestry.
But now you are conflating solving problems with a personal preference of how the problem should be solved. This never bodes well (unless you always prefer picking the method best suited to solve the problem.)
Well as I said, I consider myself compensated with intellectual challenge/stimulus as part of my compensation. It's _why_ I do the work to begin with. Or to put it another way: it's either done in a way I like, or it's probably not done at all.
I'm replaceable after all. If there is someone who is better and more effective at solving problems in some objectively good way - they should have my job. The only reason I still have it is because it seems this is hard to find. Employers are stuck with people who solve problems in the way they like for varying personal reasons and not the objectively best way of solving problems.
The hard part in keeping employees happy is that you can't just throw more money at them to make them effective. Keeping them stimulated is the difficult part. Some times you must accept that you must perhaps solve a problem that isn't the most critical one to address, or perhaps a bad call business wise, to keep employees happy, or keep them at all. I think a lot of the "Big rewrites" are in this category, for example. Not really a good idea compared to maintenance/improvement, but if the alternative is maintaining the old one _and_ lose the staff who could do that?
Anyone else get the feeling that Microsoft has been driven "top down" by various weird metrics like "We need to drive users adopt service X" (OneDrive, Copilot, whatever)?
And then every single decision for every single product, at least outside of dev tools, is tainted by this?
Like I understand you always want to have a vision and direction and that needs to be set out by management. But it feels like they just dug down every other vision like "We want users, especially power users, to like using our product"? How does an organization let that happen? Who says "we should make people sign into ms paint" without getting laughed out of the room? Microsoft has great engineers on all levels of the organization. What's going on?
100%. MSDN is the definition of saying nothing with as many words as possible. I guess if you wanted a case for why LLMs are helpful, MSDN is a good one haha
That seems likely. Someone got a directive to "increase Copilot adoption" so they rebranded Office to Copilot and now they can show their boss a graph for Copilot adoption that goes to the right and up and get a promotion for it and everyone's happy.
If you were given the choice of buying a fridge for $0 and paying $10/mo for using it, or paying $1k and $0/mo those are both entirely valid pricing models. If you are a homeowner you probably don't want the hassle of managing subscriptions but if you are starting a business where you need fridges but don't have a lot of capital it might be worth looking into. It's basically just financing + service etc.
> I don't condone piracy, but I also don't condone SaaS.
What's wrong with SaaS?
If we didn't sell our desktop software to ~1000 companies as a SaaS then few would afford it. We could sell one-off/perpetual licenses for maybe $1M but only our biggest customers would manage that expense, while smaller competitors would not. And if that means we sold only 300 licenses, then the price would be even higher because the number of licenses sold would be even smaller. The SaaS is basically what the customers ask for. They can cancel and switch to competing software when they want to. In fact, customers who use the software rarely feel the SaaS yearly cost is too high so ask for even more SaaS-y functionality such as paying by minute of use or per specific action like "run simulation", instead of having a yearly subscription. Because they might just use it a few days per year so they feel that (say) $10/yr is too much.
It's as though they think some "AI revolution" will come, and all they need to do is just make sure that by the time it does, they will have sprinkled enough AI pixie dust on their products and services. And then they added some KPI's in the organization and called it a day.
Most of all the whole strategy feels extremely faceless. Who is the visionary here? Where are the proud product launches and visionary blog posts about how all this happens?
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