BananaTrifleViolin

I would bet on painful collapse, because the whole model is “winner takes all”, which means there is an awful lot of duplication. Even if it ends up more like a commodity with multiple players (because why pay for super powered AI for a task if there is a cheaper low powered alternatives?), the constant scale up makes no sense at all economically. We’re already well into diminishing returns with each scale up, and the models continue to be fundamentally flawed.

Lenovo are right that prices won’t go back to “normal” - I think there will be a huge crash in prices due to oversupply when the AI boom ends, and some of the big AI companies collapse.

I live in the UK. Patient confidentiality is protected by law - medical personnel cannot share personal information unless the patient gives explicit consent (with some latitude when someone is incapacitated and has a spouse/next of kin)

However there are some explicit limits. Medical professionals also have legal duties under Safeguarding laws; there is a professional and legal requirement to divulge information if it is necessary to protect the patient or other people from harm. If someone confesses to a crime it can be shared if there is a risk to other people (e.g. child or domestic abuse being sadly common examples). It’s on a case by case basis; it would be a breach of patient confidentiality to share a confession if no one is at risk of harm. But where you draw the line is difficult - there is established case law that confidentiality can be breached “in the public interest” which is very subjective.

But it’s obviously very subjective territory - if someone confesses to a murder 20 years ago, should you share it? You could argue that there is a risk that someone who has murdered may murder again, but you could also argue that there is no actual reason to suspect they would commit further crime especially if they’re dying. It’s also “in the public interest” to investigate murder and convict someone, especially if it prevents someone else from being falsely accused etc. It can be argued multiple ways, but most likely divulging that information to the police would be deemed an acceptable breach under the law.

One key part of all this is that a breach of patient confidentiality is a legal issue and the person &/or organisation (e.g hospital) can be pursued legally for the breach, including for compensation, and also via professional bodies for sanctions. So breaches can be pursued legally. So there is some recourse, but even if there is a breach, the information is still legally admissible in a trial.

It’s very complex and difficult to blanket say all information is 100% confidential. A lawyer is retained specifically to represent someone under the law, so a 100% confidentiality makes sense. A doctor or nurse is there to look after someone’s health, but also has responsibilities to the population at large, so confidentiality comes with caveats as you’re balancing the safety of the one patient against other unknown people.

Yeah, Sudo has been around for ages and is in pretty much every distro. So Doas just hasn’t really taken off due to inertia. You can install it yourself in many distros, but people tend to default to what they know. I’m not sure if any linux distros default to it. Also tutorials all over the internet use “sudo” so it kinda embeds it more as THE tool.

It’s similar with a lot of the core GNU utilities. For example “ls” lists directories and it’s everywhere, but there are actually better written newer alternatives. They just aren’t as widespread because people tend to use the GNU utilities together. I personally like eza for example.

EDIT: Just to be clear; Sudo is NOT one of the GNU Core Utilities, but Sudo originated in 1980 according to wikipedia. Doas was released in 2015.

• Su = Switch User / Substitute User; it allows you to run a full shell as another user. It can be any user, but if you don’t specify then it’ll open a shell as the root user with its elevated privileges. It allows you to do everything the root user can while that shell is still open, until you exit.

• Sudo = SuperUser Do; it allows you to run one command with elevated privileges as the root user. Once it’s done the command it usually then ends. You can actually also launch a full interactive shell with sudo -i but it’s not really used much as it’s easier to just type su and use that tool instead.

• Doas = Dedicated Openbsd Application Subexecutor (seriously). It’s an alternative to Sudo that originated in Openbsd that also allows users to run a command with elevated privileges as the root user. Doas can also be used to open a full shell like Su (e.g. doas -su Username). Its code is smaller and tighter, and is seen as more secure than Sudo. It also has much more straight forward configuration. It’s newer than Sudo, so although Doas is in theory better, Sudo is the default widely used tool across the vast majority of Linux.

I don’t think it’s bad for what they are specs wise, with the current distorted components market. I do think however that the price is higher than what the target audience will be willing/able to afford to pay which is a shame.

It won’t do as well as it should have; I hope that doesn’t put valve off the concept. The idea is right, it was just very bad timing for this particular launch.

Yeah, I had Office 2010 and used that for years - probably up to 2022. It allowed installs on 3 devices at a time, and included Word, Excel and Powerpoint. I only switched to Office 365 when my work made it freely available, and I have it set up inside a windows VM on my Linux desktop for the very rare times I need to use office at home. Work are paying for all the redundant tools no one at work uses - like copilot. Don’t see it as my problem.

But I can’t recommend Office 2024 when it costs £120 for a license with online activation and install restrictions to one PC. Not when the alternative Libre Office is free, unlimited installs on all devices, and does everything a home user would ever need. Joplin is also a superb alternative to One Note.

I personally would never buy another version of Office; I have libre office installed and use that for my personal documents (like my budget spreadsheet and occasional word processing) and Joplin for my notes. And while Libre office doesn’t have integrated cloud storage, all you need to do is add your preferred cloud storage system to your file manager in Linux or Windows.

Office 2024 doesn’t really offer a good value proposition. And if you’re really in the market for Office, then ebay to get valid licenses for Office Professional Plus 2019 or 2021is better value; £40 for the full suite (inc Access, Outlook, Publisher) is far better value than a direct license from MS for 2024. But it’s just a product key card, so there is always the risk a license and access to downloads gets revoked eventually.

It’s a gold rush which will have consequences a few years down the line. The data centre market will get saturated, and with a probable collapse in the AI market thats driving this (particularly given the “winner takes all” approach all the players are following) and associated massive duplication of data centres running different AI models for different companies, it’s likely to be a collapse, not a soft landing.

Hardware companies investing in expanding their output to service the data centres demand will be over producing once the market swings the other way. Expect prices to collapse and some of these memory producing companies to go bankrupt. This is another classic sign of a bubble: everyone thinks this will keep going and going, so they invest hard in having a chunk of it. But it will inevitably hit a wall - some AI companies will fail and their data centres become redundant, and the market overall will eventually swing away from endless expansion to consolidation. And thats best case scenario; more likely it a catastrophic collapse in which case the market is getting flooded with unneeded 2nd had product from data centres sold off during bankruptcy proceedings.

It’s not a question of if the party will end, it’s just a question of when. Even if people don’t think the AI market will pop, the economics of building more and more data centres by unprofitable competitors in this market is unsustainable and has to end at some point. And the evidence is we’re already well beyond the point of diminishing returns with current AI models in terms of scaling up.

So while times are hard right now for home PC users, I’d expect there to be period in the near future of oversupply and cheap components. This year? Next year? Hard to say exactly when but the writing is on the wall for the AI bubble imo.

Some excellent answers here.

I would add that it’s not always fear necessarily but also disgust. Cockroaches are associated with filth, so the presence of a cockroach makes people feel disgusted and uncomfortable. For me, if I see a cockroach it means the place I am in is dirty and unhygienic, and that is enough to cause revulsion.

A lot of the examples you give bar spiders are not things you’d find in your own home. Cockroaches are usually something you’d find in a dwelling where you’d naturally feel safe and separated from nature. Seeing a cockroach in your home or a place you’re staying / eating is different because it’s an invasion of your space, and by a creature we associate with filth.

Yeah and in reality people are lazy and go for the easiest route (not a criticism; it’s just human nature). The AUR is popular because it’s easy to download from; the problem is that it was based on the assumption that “someone” is keeping it secure. As it was so popular people assumed that it must be secure because everyone else is using it, and particularly with reassuring voices on tech forums who make a it a badge of honour to use the AUR with Arch. So the AUR has been normalised for lots of users.

It’s a bit like how Wikipedia is trusted by lots of people but in reality there are huge issues with bias and factual errors. People seem to forget/?ignore the warnings that Wikipedia should never be treated as a primary source - because it’s quick and convenient to just look at what’s on Wikipedia and believe it.

I saw someone saying they use Arch because Arch + AUR is the closest you can get to a Windows-like experience on Linux; the AUR provides a huge range of software. The problem is that the Windows-like experience is the ultimate open trust based network. You can download software from anyone anywhere and launch it on your computer. Windows is also a hotbed of malware and viruses as a result, even with the restrictions that Microsoft has put on users over the years.

Securing the AUR is nigh on impossible I think; it’s hard enough for distros and OSS projects to find enough people to maintain close trust-based systems in popular projects let alone the people needed to do the code audits and package checks for 100k+ user submitted packages. Maybe they can change their model a bit though - have a curated section of popular packages that do undergo some kind of audit and “certification”. I think it’ll survive this as it’s a popular resource for all it’s issues, but trust has rightly been dented. And in fairness that was a false trust as the AUR has never pretended to be anything other than what it is: people have chosen to accept the warnings that they use it at their own risk.

The headline is a little misleading: the feature has disappeared from consumer chips but AMD is not responding when asked why. As the article itself says: it’s not clear if this is a deliberate decision, or a bug that has caused this issue.

The headline implies it was a deliberate action. Maybe it was, but at the moment we don’t really know. But it is good that Toms Hardware is writing about this and drawing attention to this issue. It’s concerning regardless of the reason, and it’s also concerning how cagey AMD is being about addressing this issue.

That’s not correct - the BBC announced iPlayer in 2003, tested 2004 onwards and finally launched in 2007 after being delayed by lobbying. The iPlayer was held back from full launch due to concerns from commercial competitors - in particular broadband providers lobbied against the iPlayer service because they feared the “pressure” it would put on the broadband infrastructure.

Netflix launched their streaming service in 2007.

Netflix did not originate the idea of streaming (nor did the BBC to be clear), much like Apple didn’t originate the smart phone. Netfiix did however do it better than it’s competitors, particularly the incumbents in the commercial sector.