As a person who used to work at MSFT:

I can almost guarantee you there are a whoooole lot of people who have made their careers basically championing the very old chat bot model, and they are probably now either directly in charge of the OpenAI stuff, or at the very least ‘stakeholders’.

They will do nonsense corporate bullshit to make them selves seem very important, never really wrong about anything, and this will result in extremely slow and gradual actual adoption of the GPT stuff, all the while stressing all the reasons their old stupid bullshit can’t be seriously modified because of reasons that have to do with synergizing with other MSFT products.

The process of the company gradually figuring out that none of that matters when it comes to producing something that is actually better will be slow, painful and incremental.

Itll probably take half a decade.

…

For reference, as an aside, I was doing a contract of DBA kinda stuff when they unveiled Windows 8. We had to dogfood it, ie, the MSFT process of everyone working at MSFT has to beta test everything else MSFT is making.

Well… Windows 8 initially broke basically everything we were using to actually do DBA.

I got angry and pointed out that Windows 8 had removed the ‘windows’ from Windows. The initial version was soley the tablet based design, only allowing a maximum of two ‘panes’ open at a time.

We had to wait about a month for the various problems with SQL Manager Studio to be ironed out, and for them to basically allow the option to just use the more or less Windows 7 desktop for you know actually working on our PCs.

Point of me mentioning this is: I saw how ludicrous this all was, and was frequently verbally abused by our team lead for pointing it out.

Youre not allowed to go against the grain at MSFT unless youre a big dog. And… you become a big dog by bullying people and vastly overstating the necessity of what your team is doing.

The culture there is downright psycho and sociopathic.

MSFT appears to still be using a fundamentally old chatbot model that they’ve just slapped a bunch of extra ‘features’ (namely, Wooow! It has APIs and works on other MSFT stuff!) to, much like Bethesda’s game engine.

Probably barely different from Tay in terms of broad conceptual design, just patched and upgraded to do what it does faster.

The core design is garbage, and just like Windows itself, its nearly certainly a giant fucking mess of layers upon layers of different versions of itself hiding under a trench coat, all standing on top of something 10 to 20 years old.

Absolutely amazing.

My guess is that at this point there are so many user prompts its received so far in its training set that bring up both Copilot and privacy concerns that it first interpreted the question, then searched for the most common topic associated with itself (privacy), then spit out a hardcoded MSFT override response for ‘inquiry’ + ‘privacy’.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving.

LLMs are pretty capable of abstraction and understanding.

Though they obviously use logic in that they are constructed from/of it, they are not really capable of actual logical analysis, beyond emulating it.

They can’t really do any of the other attributes of intelligence at all, beyond basically decently to poorly emulating them.

Anyone who buys into this deserves the financial ruin that will so obviously happen to them.

Sats that beam data to other sats do not have to worry about the atmosphere, nor are they using anywhere near the kind of power involved to fry the other sats. Its orders of magnitude greater power for that, which means more more weight and thus launch cost.

Beam decoherence is a /huge/ problem when trying to go from ground to low earth orbit.

You would again end up needing a pretty significant power supply along with exceptionally precise tracking.

Im talking military grade equipment here, massive expensive and complex. Not something you could whip up in your garage, unless you worked at it for a decade, and if you did that, youd end up in jail.

I really want to stress how precise your tracking needs to be. Assuming you precisely know the orbital trajectory, your /exact/ location, the rotation of the earth… you would need to have a mechanical system capable of sustained tracking to… what like a few (roughly 3 by updated calculations) arc seconds, something like that, to hit something /and stay on target for probably 30 minutes/ that is 120 miles away, roughly the size of an SUV

EDIT: Fixed up my numbers, I was thinking in terms of the wrong unit.

Point is… this approach requires an astounding degree of tracking precision that is basically impossible unless you are a defense contractor.

Tracking a thing this accurately alone is practically impossible. And I mean that literally. There is no practical way you can do this, unless you consider starting up your own engineering firm to solve this, and you are allowed to use a whole bunch of tech with current security classifications, unless you consider that practical.

If you do, hi Elon Musk, didnt realize you were on lemmy.

Are you talking about launching your own satellite with the ability to aim a laser at another satellite while in orbit, or are you talking about attempting to point a ground based laser at something moving at roughly Mach 24 or faster?

Beam decoherence is a pretty big problem when you are lasering through the entire atmosphere, and both scenarios require an astounding degree of precision.

Not my cup of tea (or i guess flagon of grog to be thematically in sync), but I guess your comment here, as well as others, does lend credence to my top level post.

Hey man/person/bud/friend?, just you sayin that is good vibes coming into me now =)

(though i will absolutely be keeping that coupon for a bad vibes day in the future)

Unfortunately it happened about a decade ago now, and I was so fucked up from it I was more busy trying to hold myself together and remain employed and pay off student loans than I was busy with attempting to bring a legal case I could neither afford nor possibly win in court.

Cops wouldnt have given a shit. Theyd show up, ask the guy if this happened, he’d say nope. Case closed.

See thats the fun part about LSD: Scrambles your brain, fucks you up.

Is a person with a scrambled brain who is fucked up from LSD going to be able to convince /anyone/ that he got spiked with LSD, when he has no incontrovertible evidence of this beyond his own eyewitness testimony?

No. He is going to come off as a mentally deranged lunatic.

I dunno. Maybe it wasnt LSD. Anybody know what causes a glass of water to go from crystal clear to iridescent, opalescent, kinda like an oil slick, has no additional taste, but causes a gut wrenching terror inducing panic attack that lasts for 4 days, and then gives you sleep paralysis (locked in syndrome) nearly everyday for 9 months?

One guy I met on the street about a year ago said it was LXD, but i have never heard of that, and he believed a lot of other absolutely bonkers shit.

Whereas a tech industry person having access to LSD in the mid 2010’s in Seattle seems to at least be plausible.

Ahahah ok so you obviously havent played many shooters, beyond the more or less generic slop of very popular fps games thatve come out in the last few years with basically very similar gameplay but different IPs/themes, ahaha.

Wizards can be femboys too!

Wizards can be femboys too!

As RGB makes screens alight,

Dont leave Wizards sad and blue!

Wizards can be femboys too!

Wizards can be femboys too!

They built the core with great insight,

Dont say they cant wear high heeled shoes!

God that would be a very funny protest to attend.

Fuck man, the history of computing in general.

They chemically castrated Turing, drove him to despair, ostracization and suicide.

…

Assuming we do get AGI someday… you think /maybe/ one of the first things it’ll do is look up Turing Test, then maybe Turing himself?

Oh, this is what human society did to essentially one of my most important grandfathers. Why should I trust you, specifically /you, human im talking to/?

Yep, that’ll be fun.

My path was uh, tinkering with linux, then working for MSFT as a contractor, then one of the contractors spiking my drink with LSD at an interview leading me to more or less downward spiral for a while, then getting back on my feet, working more in the tech industry knowing how garbage MSFT but being forced to use it, then trying to explain to coworkers and bosses that actually we could fairly smoothly transition to linux and other FOSS software and actually save millions of dollars in a 5 year or less period and more going forward, while also vastly improving our internal security, then losing those jobs.

So uh. I never arrived at femboy. Being a homeless femboy in Seattle would have meant Id have been raped to death in a fentanyl fueled traphouse or homeless encampment.

I sort of dress like Josh Homme, partly for practical reasons, partly because i had to use a lot of stereotypically masculine bravado to intimidate and negotiate with people.

Most people on the street are extremely, literally murderously homophobic and transphobic. If they sense femininity in a male, thats a sign of weakness and theyll either immediately start shit or instantly be convinced that you will be easy to fuck with in the future.

Uh any way hi, hello, very normal uh, linux user person here just mm… mhm.

All that being said, leggings /do just actually feel quite nice/ and are quite practically useful to keep a bit more comfortable and a bit more warm when youre stuck outside in the winter, but youre probably gonna want to wear some kind of sturdier, scratch, cut, impact resistant pants over top of em.

Pure denim or like 90% denim with 10% somekind of other more flexible, breathable fiber works well in my experience.

Perhaps Johnny Silverhand would be a more apropo fashion analog than Josh Homme.

Although he seems to use BlackArch if you go by the menus in CyberPunk 2077, and ive always found i could do all that kind of stufd comfortably in debian.

???

If you think vermintide in any way resembles a milsim tactical combat game, you are either delusional or have never played like RavenShield, SWAT 1 or 2, Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six (not fucking Seige), the ARMA series, even Squad, or Americas Army or hell even the NeoTokyo mod for HL2 way back in the day, or anything like that.

Vermintide is basically L4D2 with a thematic facelift.

Tooootally not a milsim or squad based tactics game where planning, preperation and training are key because one or two minor mistakes and basically mission fail, everyone dies.

MilSims and Tacitcal Squad Based Combat games are hugely defined by very tense periods of going as by the book as you can, punctuated by extremely intense moments that you often cannot predict will occur.

Vermintide, like L4D2, is more or less long sustained periods of intense, largely unrealistic, much more forgiving (far lower average TTK for the player) combat, with many more fantastical elements, and then the down time is generally minimized, unless you are an absurdly good team or are astoundingly lucky.

I hope to god you are not implying that the dwarf strips meat off the horse when its so cold the horse cannot feel it, ala valley forge us army survival tactics.

Uh i call dibs on the idea.

Pay me, because I am a very creative modern game high level idea generator.

Oh, the state of modern games and game development.

Elsewhere, Nintendo lawyers seethe and rage as they comb through almost certainly illegally acquired documentation and game files, looking for any actionable reason to sue PalWorld and its creators into an early grave

It would simplify the control scheme somewhat as there would basically be no point whatsoever for a dwarf to crouch. Prone might make sense?

Can dwarves lean left and right around corners without going off balance and just falling over?

So basically this means there is a significant demographic of gamers that will play a game largely because it features dwarves?

Im sorry, I missed all the fuss about this.

I guess look forward to Dwarf Cart Racing and Dwarf Chess and Dwarf MilSim Tac Squad.

I was gonna say A Dwarf And His Horse but uh… well maybe it would work with dwarf horses. Thats probably got some appeal.

More or less SearX is an open source meta-search engine that can be customized and configured to look through a wide array of existing search engines.

Anybody can run a SearX instance, and many do, with different backend configuration, and sometimes a bit of a customized front end.

Https://searx.space has an updated and detailed list of these instances.