I always end up ship-of-theseusing the hell out of my computer. Even if I replace my mainboard, CPU, GPU, RAM, and PSU, the old storage is still good, as are the case, the fans etc.

I phase out old components as they lose relevance, although my DVD burner has lasted forever and will probably keep doing so.

Those are typically early joiners who got special conditions. The idea is for everyone to adopt the Euro at some point. (The UK wouldn’t have but that’s moot since they left. If they rejoin they most likely won’t get that special treatment anymore.)

Entra isn’t Azure. Entra ID is what they renamed Azure Active Directory to. But not always; there’s also Azure Active Directory B2C (yes, that’s the fully expanded name). And various other Azure-branded things that may or may not belong together.

Microsoft are spectacularly bad at naming things.

It’s a miracle they haven’t renamed Windows 11 to “360 365” or “Live 6.5” or “Active-DOS Series X” or something.

It’s an old term for the sexual organs that’s only used as part of terms these days. I tried to kinda match that. My translation wasn’t great, though.

Let me step in for a moment. I’m this man’s attorney. He can’t possibly say stupid shit on the internet because he doesn’t use computers. He wouldn’t have time to use one in the first place as he’s too busy being a wildly successful Path of Exile streamer.

Note that these, too, have a German name, which translates to “inner taint-lips”. Just calling them “labia” in English is not just defaulting to Latin but also imprecise.

Yeah, I can’t see how pissing off Raytheon, Lockmart, etc. is a good idea. That’s how your political opponent ends up with billion-dollar election funds.

“Legally required”, so they’re seeing it in the local laws. Some countries require websites to disclose who operates them.

For example, in Germany, websites are subject to the DDG (Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz, “digital services law”). Under this law they are subject to the same disclosure requirements as print media. At a minimum, this includes the full name, address, and email address. Websites updated operated by companies or for certain purposes can need much more stuff in there.

Your website must have a complete imprint that can easily and obviously be reached from any part of the website and is explicitly called “imprint”.

These rules are meaningless to someone hosting a website in Kenya, Australia, or Canada. But if you run a website in Germany you’d better familiarize yourself with them.

I work for a publicly traded company.

We couldn’t switch away from Microsoft if we wanted to because integrating everything with Azure and O365 is the cheapest solution in the short term, ergo has the best quarterly ROI.

I don’t think the shareholders give a rat’s ass about data sovereignty if it means a lower profit forecast. It’d take legislative action for us to move away from an all-Azure stack.

And yes, that sucks big time. If Microsoft stops playing nice with the EU we’re going to have to pivot most of our tech stack on a moment’s notice.

There’s a reason why oldschool X-Com players kept coming back to the games despite technical issues like the Groundhog Day bug. (Thank all applicable deities for OpenXcom solving those issues, though.)

They’re probably not pivoting but in FY2023 Azure made up 38% of their revenue, followed by Office 365 at 23%. That’s a lot of cloud service revenue.

Is it sustainable? Honestly, it might. They sell a lot of stuff under the Azure umbrella and corporations lap that shit up. (Seriously; my employer is about ready to hire consultants to come up with additional eggs they can put in that particular basket.)

Here’s my source; I couldn’t be arsed to look it up in MSFT’s statements directly.

My most used features so far are vertical splitters, vertical nudging, and the new placement modes for conveyors and pipes. With an honorable mention going to conveyor wall holes, which also free up a lot of design options.

Honestly, though, just about everything in this update has been a godsend. Priority splitters are the only thing I haven’t really used yet. Even the elevators rock; being able to zoop up to 200 meters up or down in one go can make them useful even as a temporary yardstick for tall structures. (Also, I did end up needing to go 150 meters straight down to get at some resources and can confirm that elevators handle their intended purpose very well.)

They did; the Z at the end denotes UTC.

I got tired of it in 2013. While it does work in some places (Android does it reasonably well), I haven’t yet seen a good flat design on the desktop.

Windows 8 and 10 looked garish and hard to read, especially since everything is a rectangle with a one-pixel outline. Is it a button? Is it a text field? Maybe a thick progress bar? Who knows, they all look extremely similar.

While Apple did overdo it in the later big-cat OS X releases, I’ll take a felt-textured widget panel and a calendar bound in leather over an endless sea of hairline rectangles.

Is actually have a good answer but in my case it’d be “I wanted to know what that one plant I saw was”. AI-based pattern matching to identify plant or animal species is pretty handy.

It’s also way more sensible than trying to use text generation for anything useful.

Apparently we got our floppies for cheap because we just had a whole bunch of pirated floppies.

Admittedly, some did have multiple games on them. That’s what LOAD"$",8 was for.

LOAD"*",8,1

SEARCHING FOR *  
LOADING  
READY.  
RUN

I wouldn’t have gotten that far. That utter savage can’t even tell the difference between MT/s and MB/s.

AI isn’t taking off because it took off in the 60s. Heck, they were even working on neural nets back then. Same as in the 90s when they actually got them to be useful in a production environment.

We got a deep learning craze in the 2010s and then bolted that onto neural nets to get the current wave of “transformers/diffusion models will solve all problems”. They’re really just today’s LISP machines; expected to take over everything but unlikely to actually succeed.

Notably, deep learning assumes that better results come from a bigger dataset but we already trained our existing models on the sum total of all of humanity’s writings. In fact, current training is hampered by the fact that a substantial amount of all new content is already AI-generated.

Despite how much the current approach is hyped by the tech companies, I can’t see it delivering further substantial improvements by just throwing more data (which doesn’t exist) or processing power at the problem.

We need a systemically different approach and while it seems like there’s all the money in the world to fund the necessary research, the same seemed true in the 50s, the 60s, the 80s, the 90s, the 10s… In the end, a new AI winter will come as people realize that the current approach won’t live up to their unrealistic expectations. Ten to fifteen years later some new approach will come out of underfunded basic research.

And it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.

Fair enough. The dumb ones were just loud enough to sound like 90%. But I sure did talk to some panicked dumbasses online back then.