paxys (u/paxys) - Readit News

paxys commented on Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union rockpapershotgun.com/id-s... · Posted by u/simjue

websiteapi · 2 days ago

Didn’t twitter get 3/4 people laid off? Seems to still work as of time of writing (x.com).

paxys · 2 days ago

Looking at Twitter's valuation, revenue, user count, uptime, new feature launches and really any other metric since the big layoff I wouldn't exactly consider the company thriving.

paxys commented on Id Software devs form "wall-to-wall" union rockpapershotgun.com/id-s... · Posted by u/simjue

thinkingemote · 2 days ago

I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this?

Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?

paxys · 2 days ago

While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gaming.

paxys commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan

testing22321 · 3 days ago

Because it’s not convenient enough, and too expensive.

Fix those two and personal car ownership will plummet in many places.

Many people don’t want to own a car, pay for insurance, gas, tires, oil changes, parking, washing etc.

Car ownership sucks horribly for most people, it’s just currently the best option. That will change.

paxys · 3 days ago

And why do you think Waymo will fix all of this?

paxys commented on Rivian Unveils Custom Silicon, R2 Lidar Roadmap, and Universal Hands Free riviantrackr.com/news/riv... · Posted by u/doctoboggan

stavros · 3 days ago

Why would I own a car when I can Waymo one?

paxys · 3 days ago

Why do people own cars when they can just Uber?

paxys commented on Apple Services Experiencing Outage apple.com/support/systems... · Posted by u/rock_artist

cr125rider · 4 days ago

iCloud is the backend for basically any settings/file sync for normal apps.

paxys · 4 days ago

But it is mostly used for periodic backup/sync. So you aren't going to really notice unless it is a very long outage.

paxys commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

estimator7292 · 4 days ago

We're already on the fast track to becoming an authoritarian state. It's not too much of a stretch to imagine the next step is dissolving congress and installing a new constitution. Or just throwing it out entirely and defining the law of the land on the whims of a senile man

paxys · 4 days ago

There's no need to dissolve congress. You instead make sure that (1) a single party stays in power (through gerrymandering, voter suppression and more), (2) the courts are stacked with loyalists and (3) the legislature and courts rubber stamp all decisions of the executive regardless of legality or anything else.

paxys commented on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban reuters.com/legal/litigat... · Posted by u/chirau

paxys · 4 days ago

Putting "teens" in the title is misleading. The ban is for ages 15 and below.

paxys commented on Microsoft has a problem: lack of demand for its AI products windowscentral.com/artifi... · Posted by u/mohi-kalantari

sylens · 6 days ago

I think the biggest revelation of the last 3 years or so is that Microsoft does not have either the will or the talent (or both) to effectively execute anymore. Everything it currently stands on is a legacy product with roots in the Ballmer or Gates eras. They owe their Azure footprint and "success" today to Ballmer.

Their inability to produce anything useful with Copilot is the largest example of this, but there are others. They are getting lapped by a ~300 person software company in the race to consumer-ize an x86 PC a into turnkey gaming platform, even with $100 billion in game studios and owning the API that every major game is developed against. Their footprint in education is gone, completely replaced by Google who not only produced an operating system that could be effectively run and managed on commodity hardware, but also developed the centralized functions for school administrations to use to manage classrooms at scale.

The consumer situation for Microsoft right now might be even worse than it was when Nadella took over.

paxys · 6 days ago

Three years? Try 20.

paxys commented on IBM to acquire Confluent confluent.io/blog/ibm-to-... · Posted by u/abd12

ericol · 6 days ago

> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house

I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it. It was 90 minutes of hot air. They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.

Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.

paxys · 6 days ago

Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.

paxys commented on IBM to acquire Confluent confluent.io/blog/ibm-to-... · Posted by u/abd12

notepad0x90 · 6 days ago

This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?

Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.

I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.

paxys · 6 days ago

Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.