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rdsubhas commented on Claude Code is suddenly everywhere inside Microsoft   theverge.com/tech/865689/... · Posted by u/Anon84
kemotep · 7 days ago
Microsoft really needs to get a better handle with the naming conventions.

There is Microsoft Copilot, which replaced Bing Chat, Cortana and uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 5 models.

There is Github Copilot, the coding autocomplete tool.

There is Microsoft 365 Copilot, what they now call Office with built in GenAI stuff.

There is also a Copilot cli that lets you use whatever agent/model backend you want too?

Everything is Copilot. Laptops sell with Copilot buttons now.

It is not immediately clear what version of Copilot someone is talking about. 99% of my experience is with the Office and it 100% fails to do the thing it was advertised to do 2 years ago when work initially got the subscription. Point it a SharePoint/OneDrive location, a handful of excel spreadsheets and pdfs/word docs and tell it to make a PowerPoint presentation based on that information.

It cannot do this. It will spit out nonsense. You have to hold it by the hand tell it everything to do step by step to the point that making the PowerPoint presentation yourself is significantly faster because you don’t have to type out a bunch of prompts and edit it’s garbage output.

And now it’s clear they aren’t even dogfooding their own LLM products so why should anyone pay for Copilot?

rdsubhas · 7 days ago
So I guess the same situation as with Google Gemini.
rdsubhas commented on Doing the thing is doing the thing   softwaredesign.ing/blog/d... · Posted by u/prakhar897
rdsubhas · 13 days ago
The article was great — for solopreneurs.

There are things that humans have to unfortunately do when working as a group of people. That's why we became the alpha predator. Not because we were the strongest ape. That includes:

- Filling in timesheets, quarterly, half yearly cycles, company meetings, team meetings is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur. But not as a member of a group.

- Writing tickets, reviewing PRs is not doing the thing — as a solopreneur.

- Commuting to work and back is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur this doesn't even matter.

- Answering technical questions, analyzing data, attending to bugs is not doing the thing — If I'm a solopreneur especially on a greenfield stuff, I have zero baggage.

- Writing test cases and putting up alerts is not doing the thing — if it's only me judging me, I have nothing to judge.

rdsubhas commented on iPhone 5s Gets New Software Update 13 Years After Launch   macrumors.com/2026/01/26/... · Posted by u/angott
augusteo · 14 days ago
tokyobreakfast is right that this is just a certificate fix, not a real software update. But it's still notable.

Lots of old devices become paperweights because of expired certs or backend shutdowns. The fact that Apple even bothered to push this to a 13-year-old device is unusual. Most companies wouldn't.

rdsubhas · 13 days ago
It's likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.

I'd assume the legal hourly costs for handling 10 cases probably equals the cost of pushing this cert, even if the cases can be successfully defended.

rdsubhas commented on iPhone 5s Gets New Software Update 13 Years After Launch   macrumors.com/2026/01/26/... · Posted by u/angott
fouc · 14 days ago
I wonder if this is because some people keep their iPhone 5s around as a backup phone or for some other reason?

My iPhone 5s is still attached to my apple account so a certificate update is probably useful security-wise? But that doesn't seem entirely likely because Apple's account automatically degrades the level of access depending on the age/model/OS version of the device.

rdsubhas · 13 days ago
More likely that, the Support Contact Rate (and potentially legal contact rate if the phone gets fully bricked and unable to make basic phone calls) is higher than the cost of just pushing the certificate.
rdsubhas commented on Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro   gamesbymason.com/blog/202... · Posted by u/AndyKelley
rdsubhas · 21 days ago
B2C Windows has no growth for year after earnings reports. No growth == It's already Dead. It's now hanging on as slightly useful guinea pigs for B2B.

There is no point trying to actively compete in a market for guinea pigs. MS has tried going down the ladder (Chromebook competition route), up the ladder (Mac competition route), side-the-ladder (Windows for Mobile), nothing worked.

I agree with the premise of this blog: A compatibility break (which equates to a new product line) with B2C Windows will definitely happen in the next 15 years.

But I disagree it will be a Windows themed Linux. It's too huge an effort and support overhead for guinea pigs.

My prediction is: A merger of Windows engineering division (which exists as a shared division now between B2C and B2B) into the Windows Enterprise workforce, laying off of the B2C workforce, and thereby making Windows B2C a severely dumbed-down version of Windows B2B where it becomes a new line that actually breaks compatibility with games and downloaded software.

rdsubhas commented on Chromium Has Merged JpegXL   chromium-review.googlesou... · Posted by u/thunderbong
jakkos · a month ago
I've been hearing about fights over JpegXL and WebP (and AVIF?) for years, but don't know much about it.

From a quick look at various "benchmarks" JpegXL seems just be flat out better than WebP in both compression speed and size, why has there been such reluctance from Chromium to adopt it? Are there WebP benefits I'm missing?

My only experience with WebP has been downloading what is nominally a `.png` file but then being told "WebP is not supported" by some software when I try to open it.

rdsubhas · a month ago
> various "benchmarks" JpegXL seems just be flat out better than WebP

The decode speed benchmarks are misleading. WebP has been hardware accelerated since 2013 in Android and 2020 in Apple devices. Due to existing hardware capabilities, real users will _always_ experience better performance and battery life with webp.

JXL is more about future-proofing. Bit depth, Wide gamut HDR, Progressive decoding, Animation, Transparency, etc.

JXL does flat out beats AVIF (the image codec, not videos) today. AVIF also pretty much doesn't have hardware decoding in modern phones yet. It makes sense to invest NOW in JXL than on AVIF.

For what people use today - unfortunately there is no significant case to beat WebP with the existing momentum. The size vs perceptive quality tradeoffs are not significantly different. For users, things will get worse (worser decode speeds & battery life due to lack of hardware decode) before it gets better. That can take many years – because hey, more features in JXL also means translating that to hardware die space will take more time. Just the software side of things is only now picking up.

But for what we all need – it's really necessary to start the JXL journey now.

rdsubhas commented on We replaced H.264 streaming with JPEG screenshots (and it worked better)   blog.helix.ml/p/we-mass-d... · Posted by u/quesobob
qbow883 · 2 months ago
Setting aside the various formatting problems and the LLM writing style, this just seems all kinds of wrong throughout.

> “Just lower the bitrate,” you say. Great idea. Now it’s 10Mbps of blocky garbage that’s still 30 seconds behind.

10Mbps should be way more than enough for a mostly static image with some scrolling text. (And 40Mbps are ridiculous.) This is very likely to be caused by bad encoding settings and/or a bad encoder.

> “What if we only send keyframes?” The post goes on to explain how this does not work because some other component needs to see P-frames. If that is the case, just configure your encoder to have very short keyframe intervals.

> And the size! A 70% quality JPEG of a 1080p desktop is like 100-150KB. A single H.264 keyframe is 200-500KB.

A single H.264 keyframe can be whatever size you want, *depending on how you configure your encoder*, which was apparently never seriously attempted. Why are we badly reinventing MJPEG instead of configuring the tools we already have? Lower the bitrate and keyint, use a better encoder for higher quality, lower the frame rate if you need to. (If 10 fps JPEGs are acceptable, surely you should try 10 fps H.264 too?)

But all in all the main problem seems to be squeezing an entire video stream through a single TCP connection. There are plenty of existing solutions for this. For example, this article never mentions DASH, which is made for these exact purposes.

rdsubhas · 2 months ago
Huh? This is the least LLM writing style I've encountered. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
rdsubhas commented on SoundCloud has banned VPN access   old.reddit.com/r/SoundClo... · Posted by u/empressplay
tallytarik · 2 months ago
There are plenty of VPN and proxy detection services, either as a service (API) or downloadable database, which are surprisingly comprehensive. Disclaimer: I’ve run one since 2017. Years on, our primary data source is literally holding dozens of subscriptions to every commercial provider we can find, and enumerating the exit node IP addresses they use.

There are also other methods, like using zmap/zgrab to probe for servers that respond to VPN software handshakes, which can in theory be run against the entire IP space. (this also highlights non-commercial VPNs which are not generally the target of our detection, so we use this sparingly)

It will never cover every VPN or proxy in existence, but it gets pretty close.

rdsubhas · 2 months ago
Interesting. I assumed all VPNs switched to IPv6 by now, making detection much harder.
rdsubhas commented on YouTube's CEO limits his kids' social media use – other tech bosses do the same   cnbc.com/2025/12/13/youtu... · Posted by u/pseudolus
rdsubhas · 2 months ago
The way this article is written, saying "tech boss" implies de-facto boss of the home and the child's behavior, is flat and silly.

Both parents are bosses of the home.

If one parent does not co-operate to limit social media — it's unlimited by default for the kid.

rdsubhas commented on 'Source available' is not open source, and that's okay   dri.es/source-available-i... · Posted by u/geerlingguy
jillesvangurp · 2 months ago
I always wonder why people bother with providing source under a source available license. It makes outside contributions a lot less likely. Your active community of people working on the code base effectively becomes your employees.

There's little to no benefit to outside users. Any work they do on the code is effectively free work they do for you that entitles them to nothing. Including free usage and distribution of the work they did. It's not likely to be helpful.

My attitude to source available products is the same as to proprietary products. I tend to limit my dependency on those. Companies have short life spans. Many OSS projects I use have a history of surviving the implosion of companies that once actively contributed to them. Developer communities are much more resilient than companies. Source unavailable effectively becomes source unavailable when companies fail. Especially VC funded companies are kind of engineered (by VCs) to fail fast. So, it's just not a great basis for making a long term commitment.

If something like Bun (recently acquired by anthropic) becomes orphaned, we'd still have the git source code and a permissive license. Somebody could take over the project or fork it or even create a new company around it. Some of the original developers would probably show up. A project like that is resilient against that. And projects like that have active contributors outside of the corporate context that provide lots of contributions. Because of the license. You don't get that without a good OSS license. I judge software projects by the quality of their development communities. It needs to have diversity, a good mix of people that know what they are doing, and a broad enough user community that the project is likely to be supported in perpetuity.

Shared source provides only the illusion of that. Depending on them is risky. And that risk is rarely offset by quality. Of course people use proprietary software for some things. And that's fine. I'm no different. But most of the stuff I care about is OSS.

rdsubhas · 2 months ago
20 years ago, I used to consult with Fortune 500 companies that run Oracle and IBM products (web servers and Java frameworks).

These are distributed as enterprise binaries. It's common to face _at least_ one or two weird errors in production. Then you have to raise a ticket to support.

Would you like to know how it is discussing a binary-obfuscated error with Customer support? And then after few weeks being assigned to a newly joined fresher? And so on and on, where every person or layer every week says "you're doing it wrong" and you have to restart your proofing and explanation process from scratch?

Hint: After few weeks/months of this (or after 4 times of restarting your proofing process), you start questioning your sanity and life choices.

In those days, all I wished for is just "source-available", so that I can just debug myself what is going on and provide a concise bug report, instead of talking to support.

The weird part is, I'm pretty sure, on the other side, Oracle/IBM also LOST money in that same process. They had to hire an army of people. It was lose-lose on both sides.

Source-available means customers of that software can perform debugging themselves and file pretty good support tickets.

If you are an enterprise today, you would absolutely consider make it source-available to save on your own costs.

u/rdsubhas

KarmaCake day2265March 26, 2011View Original