Maybe not what the OP or article is talking about, but it's super frustrating recently dealing with non/less technical mgrs, PMs, etc who now think they have this Uno card to bypass technical discussion just because they vibe coded some UI demo. Like no shit, that wasn't the hard part. But since they don't see the real/less visible past like data/auth/security, etc they act like engineers "aren't trying", less innovative, anti-AI or whatever when you bring up objections to their "whole app" they made with their AI snoopy snow cone machine.

What a title...

I still remember when it was the norm for features like this to be entirely implemented in the EC and behaved sanely in any OS, even one that doesn't know about ACPI. For example, on old Thinkpads you can adjust the screen brightness, audio volume, and turn on/off the keyboard backlight in DOS. No drivers needed at all. The outliers were the stupid designs that would overheat and shut down if you left the laptop sitting in the BIOS setup screen for too long, because the fans would stay off. Several decades later, ECs have gotten much bigger flash and RAM, and BIOSes have bloated several times, yet modern laptops need an OS and a massively complex driver loaded just to do something trivial. I recently discovered on a new Thinkpad that the screen brightness was not adjustable in the bootloader, or even early in the OS boot, and that GPU drivers were necessary for that function. A regression which by any other name would just be by design. IMHO this is the increasing fragility leading to the closing of the PC ecosystem that MS ultimately wants.

What puzzles me about the reported birth of coffee is that I wouldn't expect that just eating the cherries would give you that much of a caffeine kick to be noticeable. Yes, there's a little bit of caffeine in them, but far more in the "beans" (seeds).

AGI currently is an intentionally vague and undefined goal. This allows businesses to operate towards a goal, define the parameters, and relish in the “rocket launches”-esque hype without leaving the vague umbrella of AI. It allows businesses to claim a double pursuit. Not only are they building AGI but all their work will surely benefit AI as well. How noble. Right?

It’s vagueness is intentional and allows you to ignore the blind truth and fill in the gaps yourself. You just have to believe it’s right around the corner.

You may or may not be aware that Andy Warhol famously quipped that, "in the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes," back in the late 1960s. As media has gotten to be ever more ubiquitous and the cost of entry lower, he was clearly onto something decades before the internet!

In particular:

"There is, however, one enormous difference that I didn’t think about: You can’t build a cloud vendor overnight. Azure doesn’t have to worry about a few executives leaving and building a worldwide network of data centers in 18 months."

This isn't true at all. There are like 8 of these companies stood up in the last three or four years fueled by massive investment of sovereign funds - mostly the saudi, dubai, northern europe, etc. oil-derived funds - all spending billions of dollars doing exactly that and getting something done.

The real problem is the ROI on AI spending is.. pretty much zero. The commonly asserted use cases are the following:

Chatbots Developer tools RAG/search

Not a one of these is going to generate $10 of additional revenue per sollar spent, nor likely even $2. Optimizing your customer services representatives from 8 conversations at once to an average of 12 or 16 is going to save you a whopping $2 per hour per CSR. It just isn't huge money. And RAG has many, many issues with document permissions that make the current approaches bad for enterprises - where the money is - who as a group haven't spent much of anything to even make basic search work.

What is it ?

I saw a bookshelf but not much else happened.