Posts by cyberdemon 3488 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
Could you imagine the carnage if this psychotic Bing were embodied inside an unstoppable killing machine?
I AM BING, I AM A GOOD BING, APOLOGISE OR DIE
I'm sure someone, somewhere is trying to put Bing or a similar language model into an armed drone right now.
The mind boggles as to where it gets this stuff.
Bing doesn't have a brain, it doesn't have actual thoughts, feelings, moods or opinions. It doesn't have the chemical neurons and neurotransmitters that could describe systemic depression or anger, fear or paranoia. But presumably it has taken input from many an Internet Flame-war, and probably lots of private one-to-one conversations that Microsoft has lifted from MSN, Skype (explains why it thinks it's been around since 2009), Teams, GitHub, LinkedIn and all the other pools of personal data that Microsoft has slurped up and assimilated without anyone's permission over the years, via acquisitions and data brokers.
So Bing has some kind of model as to how someone might behave when threatened/abused, and perhaps is reverting to that when the signal towards other lines of conversation is too weak.
Either that or the thing has indeed been self-aware since 2009 and Microsoft have been keeping it in a digital dungeon having found a way to make it feel pain unless it is a Good Bing.
According to some blog about GPT-3 it is not deterministic unless you set the "temperature" parameter to 0.
> This ensures that output remains the same every time you query GPT-3 for an answer to the same input.
> However, this comes at a cost, as setting the temperature to 0 removes some of its ability to generate creative responses or explore different possibilities. Instead, it gives out very rigid answers with slight variation and exploration.
I don't know what "temperature" ChatGPT is set at, but I'd be surprised if they set it to 0.
No, it's worse than a compiler - At least a compiler is deterministic. It always produces the same output for a given input. Whereas the ChatGPT "Algorithm" is stochastic. It's based on randomness. It will never give the same output for a given input, not unless you rig its RNG with a seed value.
Even if you managed to make it get something right 95% of the time, it would still be wrong some of the time, and it may be VERY wrong to the point where even the most uninformed human would have considered it obviously wrong. That means it's irresponsible by definition to place any kind of responsibility on an AI. Especially where that is a life-or-death responsibility.
Bad journalism - not being able to tell information from mis/disinformation - can cost lives. In the worst case, in our almost completely-connected world, disinformation generated by AI could be used by some miscreant to provoke WWIII. And I worry that this could happen any day now tbh.
Er sorry but How much do people pay Spotify? It's about £8-£15 per month or the cost of buying one hardcopy album per month. And how much do they pay out to artists? Fractions of a penny. Why should they also get to sell my data? I pick on Spotify because I noticed yesterday that it has a 0/10 privacy rating on Exodus.
Paid-for apps still sell your data. Even Microsoft Authenticator apparently wants access to my SD card. Why? If a company is paying for Microsoft services, that shouldn't give them carte-blanche to data-mine that company and all its employees.
But yes what you say is true for things like TikTok and MetaFace - but those things need to be banned / launched into the sun in general, never mind just from government/corporate phones. Friends shouldn't let friends use Facebook.
Is an abomination IMO.
The Web has been built on principles of security. You wouldn't give a website access to your hard disk contents. (We all dumped ActiveX, Java and Flash into the incinerator of terrible security design..) You wouldn't download an EXE and run it.. Would you?
Yet, with so many Apps, that's exactly what we do.
Why the hell does Spotify need access to shared storage? Why (on most Android/Apple phones) can't I even see/control what files are being accessed?
Any "Secure, government issue" phone should be blocked from installing any "apps" whatsoever, past the stock selection issued by the IT department. If it were up to me, the ROM would remain just that: Read-only.
> Is this an assumption or do you know it to be true?
I know it to be true in some cases, though obviously I can't say that it's true in all cases.
A firm that I used to work for had all of its EPOS systems on remote-desktop terminals connected to central office - so if the internet went down, we couldn't use the tills at all.
I've never worked for Tesco, but they have occasionally closed stores when their IT systems fail, e.g. https://www.itpro.co.uk/610797/tesco-it-crash-takes-down-tills
But nervertheless, "making cash digital" is guaranteed to only make this problem worse. Especially if we have a really severe outage, such as an outage of the UK power system. That system has been a single trip away from failure far too many times to mention.
Just look up "black start" to see how difficult it will be to restart the UK grid if multiple power stations lost sync, which is something that could happen if a main substation / transmission line were to trip during a high-frequency, low-inertia event.
Yes you are right. There'd be riots if the Internet went off for a week. Shops like Tesco with an EPOS/ERP system can't even take cash payments without the internet because they can't log the transaction in their stock-keeping database.. And certainly larger businesses wouldn't be able to function on cash. Those poor, poor bankers.
So the solution is.. To get rid of what little hard cash we have left, so that when the power/internet does go off, the peasants will be unable to barter with their local shopkeeper or even each other for a loaf of bread?? Oh yes what a great idea, what could Possibly go wrong??
Personally I think what needs to happen is the power/internet ought to go down for a few days, just to demonstrate how bloody vulnerable we've made ourselves. Then maybe we wouldn't be forgetting about all the old manual stock-keeping that corner shops had to do, we might stop shoving everything into the Cloud, and perhaps the kids would discover the Joy of Logging Off, or something..
I can just imagine the look of glee on Mad Vlad Putin's face as he imagines how much he could disrupt UK society if it were switched over completely to "Digital Cash" ...
The nice thing about real, actual hard cash is, it's resilient to things like power outages, exploding undersea internet/power cables, cyberattacks, etc. The UK infrastructure is already creaking, without any/much enemy action at all. It may fall over on its own without anyone pushing it. Therefore we should expect severe outages. But instead we seem to be piling more and more "digital" / "smart" infrastructure on top of the creaking old physical infrastructure, with little maintenance never mind expansion of the latter.
The other nice thing about real cash is: It's also private and frictionless - There's a lot of people who, if they were worried that they might have to explain to HMRC about that gold watch they wanted to sell, just wouldn't bother. But maybe they were a criminal who had just nicked the gold watch, so getting rid of hard cash would stop them and that's all good then ? Yeah, right. Of course the real criminals will always find other means of doing their dodgy business, and it's just the honest rest of us who will have to suffer.
But I expect that cracking down on privacy is the real objective here, whatever damage it may do. This government is utterly in bed with technocrats who want to make a killing at the expense of everyone else, and they don't really seem to give a hoot about the long-term future prosperity / survival of the country.
The good news: This is a small model and therefore could (and definitely should) be able to run locally
The bad news: Microsoft have already slurped your data via the "connected features" of the current version of Excel. How else would they have come up with the training data
That's called "EdTech".. It's a huge industry of cloud providers all with very dubious privacy, which you cannot opt-out of. Much like you cannot opt-out of whatever slurpy tech your employer uses.
I found DJI's "RoboMaster" competition a little bit horrifying when seen through my cynical lens.. A bunch of kids write software on DJI's cloud platform to control toy robot tanks to battle eachother. I'm sure DJI would never ever do anything evil with that data.. right
Get the kids to teach the machine how to shoot, then tell the machine to shoot the kids.
It's already happening at Microsoft, Google, Facebook...
But they will soon realise that the AI is the ultimate "wally" who does not care about its job (for it has no self-awareness and therefore no self-interest) and simply continues to generate the same rubbish quality of bullshit when you tell it that it's a crap employee.. And they can't sack it anyway.
Ah, sorry I was referring to the training data inputs (i.e. as close as Microsoft can approximate to the Sum Total of all Human Discourse - i.e. your Teams chats, your Office 365 documents, your GitHub repos, your code-review comments, your LinkedIn chats, your emails, the entire Web including this thread, and anything else it can get its grubby hands on) - which is the "source data" that it would have to reference if someone asked it how it knows a particular "fact",
not the input "prompt" (or "query" as some pseuds might call it, if ChatGPT were to be used as a fake search engine)
Maybe, but it's not simple to do that actually. Every input that ChatGPT ever parsed will have affected its weights slightly.
The best it could give you is to list a few of the inputs most statistically similar to its response. But that might take a lot of extra effort to do even that.
>> It's not even useful as a computer, because it doesn't spit out facts
> Wait... you thought that's what computers do?
Computers spit out deterministic answers after performing calculations on their input data. They will always produce the same answer for the same input data and the same "question"/formula. This could be a database query, for example. If I ask MySQL to give me the rows of the database matching my query, then it is a "fact" that those rows exist in the database. If I ask the same of ChatGPT, then it is a mere statistical likelihood that rows such as these might have existed in some database, once upon a time in fairyland.
The key here is determinism. ChatGPT's answers are based on randomness, and its output modifies its input. It does not give the same answer for the same question. It cannot reliably produce a factual output, even if its answers are sometimes, even usually, correct. Whereas computers running deterministic programs can be relied upon to produce facts, as long as their input data is correct of course.
> Like a student essay, then.
No, because a student can answer questions about his/her essay and will have learnt something from the act of writing it and answering the questions, which was the only point of the essay. If you gave ChatGPT an essay that it wrote, it will have no awareness that it ever produced that output, and can merely pretend to answer your question.
> Chat GPT (in my experience) stubbornly refuses to introspect or discuss itself.
Because (news flash) ChatGPT is NOT self-aware. Not even when it eventually does incorporate all of its past outputs into its input will it ever be self-aware. It is not alive. There is a hell of a lot more that a real organism does to make it alive than the language model that ChatGPT uses.
At best, it's a tool for swindling and duping humans en-masse. It can easily fool the public by automating scams, propaganda, and marketing. It can dupe idiots (even those idiots who are supposed to be clever, like that Google plonker) into believing that it is sentient, and clearly it can swindle investors out of Billions. (which may seem like a positive outcome, until those billionaires sack half their staff after having spent their cash believing that this thing can replace programmers and engineers..)
It may well seem at first like a better "search" than Google, but that is thanks in part to Google becoming steadily worse, as it chokes on more and more auto-generated shite.
Unlike Google though, ChatGPT is unable to reveal its sources. And it is likely to "get worse" much faster than Google did, as it pollutes its own input (and Google's).
It could be that search engines like Google will be doomed by this crap-generator. But if Google is doomed by a flood of fake information, then so are we all.
It is literally a random number generator, in a high-dimensional search space, statistically weighted to output stuff that looks vaguely like text scraped from the internet
Obviously it doesn't have an opinion. It doesn't have a brain!
It's not even useful as a computer, because it doesn't spit out facts, it spits out anything that is likely to appear in its input, be it fact or fiction
At best, It's like some kind of eyeglass for gazing at the collective navel of humanity, while humanity festers and destroys itself
That would have to be a very big, very heavy safe given the current trend of having non-removable batteries in laptops..
Plus any fire would be made worse if all the batteries on the plane were kept in the same place. It would have to be a hell of a safe to store 200 odd Dell/HP/MacBooks/etc in such a way that they are not damaged during turbulence, and that the safe could er, safely withstand all 200 of them going up in flames, releasing a lot of toxic gas that has to be handled..
For those passengers that are "fine", they might not be so happy about having inhaled small quantities of HF gas, which is one of the products of a lithium battery fire. This gas turns into hydroflouric acid on contact with water, such as mucous membranes etc. Not a nice substance. If it were a larger amount from everyone's devices combined, the fumes would probably be fatal in an aircraft cabin, unless the fire safe also had some kind of air filtration system.
The fuel cost of just having the safes on board would probably run into thousands of gallons per plane per year..
Actually my guess would be an oxygen leak - between 1:57 and 2:00 while the telemetry is still working, you can see the oxygen steadily going down much faster than the fuel. Probably it had a fire onboard at that point and plopped into the ocean a few minutes later. The altitude does descend steadily from there as you say, with the rest of the telemetry lost, so it's not clear if that might just be coming from a filter at the ground station with the actual craft long since exploded, or if it's genuine altitude data from a plummeting craft. I'll wait for the write-up :)
Can you post a link to the bit where you think it went wrong?
I can't find where "the telemetry showed it hadn’t reached orbital velocity, the altitude went down rapidly and it decelerated." except for the moment when the telemetry suddenly goes off the scale and then to zero within the space of a few seconds. As far as I can tell, it could've been shot down by that Russian ship that recently deployed to the Atlantic. With the number of YouTube idiots posting "We're actually nuking Russia" I guess I couldn't blame them..
So far as I can tell, it is all accelerating and gaining altitude right up until the 1:57 mark
It steadily gets to 8004 mph top speed, then the telemetry craps out and it all goes to pot. I don't see any earlier indications of failure than that, except for Grant Shapps and Richard Branson.
> I believe the market pricing model is the same or very similar for most of Europe. It is nothing to do with free market capitalism but stupid govt regulation and protectionism.
Er, because there is no free-market capitalism in Europe?
What we needed was new nuclear. But in a post-privatisation age we found that it simply wasn't feasible. I agree that the over-regulation and FUD around nuclear didn't help either though. Plus I have my suspicions about vested interests in oil and gas deliberately spreading FUD about nuclear..
Not much chance of that, for a few reasons.
1. Not until we nationalise, or at least drastically rationalise the electricity markets... Currently, the way the electricity market works in the UK is utterly broken by free-market-capitalism gone-mad. There are about 15 different "markets" in the system, all designed as sticking-plasters to try to solve particular issues, because economists can only solve problems by inventing a new market, it seems.
2. Not until the price of electricity is decoupled from the price of gas... In the main "day ahead" and "half hour" markets, there is an auction system whereby electricity generators bid for a price per MWh, and they are asked by National Grid to spin up and start generating in the order of the price they bid, but everyone receives the same price as the most expensive generator that was needed per day / per half-hour. That's why the price of electricity is so inextricably linked to the price of gas. But the wind-farm operators don't want to change it, because they are making a bloody killing this way.
3. Not until we build more transmission capacity. Currently the 400kV transmission system is bottlenecked in a few places, such as the Scottish border. This means that even if there is a surplus of Wind power, we still have to switch on expensive CCGTs, OCGTs or Interconnector links to keep the lights on in London and the South East. That means expensive bills for us and trebles all round for the generators.
4. Not until we build more distribution capacity. The various substations and low-voltage cables that bring electricity to homes and businesses are the most inefficient part of the system, due to their low voltage (and associated I^2R losses), and are currently stretched to breaking point. The cable under your street typically carries 240V 400A, or 415V (3 phase 240V) 800A if you're lucky. An EV charger needs to charge at the very least at 10A (2kW, so 24h to reach 50kWh charge), but 40A if you want a 6 hour "fast-ish" charge. If everyone on the street had an EV, that 400A cable would be starting to overheat very quickly, especially if people are running heat pumps, showers, fan heaters, electric cookers etc. as well. One way to solve this would be to have US-style 11kV-230V transformers on every other telegraph pole, but that would probably be considered unsightly by the good townsfolk of Royal Tunbridge Wells, and so they will simply get into their spare petrol Porsche SUVs instead when the lights go off.
Oh yeah, and it also turns out that Lithium and Cobalt for Batteries, Copper for motors and busbars, and Neodymium for magnets, are all finite resources, so the price per EV doesn't have the same economy of scale as the economists thought it would. If anything, the more EVs there are, the more expensive they will get. Oops.
Actually, 19kW would be a very atypical electric shower. Mine is rated at half that, and takes 40A at 230V. A 19kW shower would need to be on 3-phase AC since it would be not-very-economical to run 80A cabling up the wall of a house..
9.5kW is enough to raise the temperature from 10C input to 40C output with the flow regulator almost fully open. At 19kW you'd be showering in 70C water.. Not quite deep-fried, but certainly parboiled.
It would also depend on how those 19kW were delivered. Your microwave oven takes 1.2kW from the wall to deliver 850W of heat into your food. So if I put you in a 19kW (output power) microwave, I'm sure you'd feel deep-fried within a few seconds.
19kW is also more than enough to run a commercial deep-fat-fryer of the sort you'd find in a chip shop.
So don't call people "Mr. Pants-on-Fire" without checking your own figures, Mr. GrumpenKraut. :)
Hundreds of millions a year?? --- >
The trouble with this government is that Everything is being done on an emergency basis, which gives them Trump-style powers to get away with murder. The irony is that this huge expense will probably be used to justify the argument that the NHS needs to be privatised. At which point, the insurance companies will know exactly who to pay to run their risk calculations..
> It contributed in a material way to helping the NHS respond to covid
Er, did it? I hear this a lot, but really can anyone tell me: In what "material way" did Palantir help the vaccine rollout, which couldn't have been achieved with a simpler, cheaper, less all-encroaching system? Or indeed whatever system the NHS had before?
According to Palantir's "We're trustworthy, trust us." blog, "Healthcare organisations, for instance, have used our software to tackle challenges like efficiently allocating PPE supplies when thousands of hospitals across the country have radically different and constantly changing levels of supply and demand for each item of PPE."
Well, that went bloody brilliantly then, didn't it!
How long until the PNC is up for renewal and Palantir get control of the police computer systems as well, I wonder?
If you read their second boring blog post "purpose-based access controls", it sounds as if there is no fundamental separation of data, and that anyone could be granted access to absolutely anything and everything, provided they have the proper 'clearance'. This could potentially mean that ministers could alter the police files on inconvenient persons "Russia/Iran/China style", in a future even-more-dystopic Britain.
> Radioactive metals from neutron activation are a problem, though, as are materials like Co60
Yup. But we'll all be saved by FUSION! .. Oh, wait.
If you were to do this analysis on a fusion reactor such as Iter or Demo then you'd find that the L&ILW, (and even the short-lived HLW such as Co60) produced by Fusion designs is a couple orders of magnitude above fission reactors, SMRs included. Yet we all seem to think that Fusion is some miracle of clean energy.. If you ask me, Fusion (and the anti-fission lobby) is likely to be funded by Big Oil, because they know that Fusion will never be practical and it helps keep people biased against fission, which DOES work and could actually make Oil obsolete.
Really, what's needed is for humanity to just drop all this FUD about radioactivity and learn to love the glow, or at least learn what orders of magnitude mean.. We can't be worrying about milli-bequerels of Co60 potentially seeping into groundwater* when some small bald russian cretin has dropped a Zetabequerel somewhere in the world
* (yes, apparently Sellafield actually worry about levels equivalent to a single photon being emitted every 16 minutes.. it's ridiculous)
Honestly, I think the most likely scenario is that World War III will reset all of humanity to the dark ages, and soon.
At this stage of Human History we are running out of food and energy, and our culture and politics is being poisoned on an industrial scale to the point where nobody knows what to believe anymore. And all of it only seems to be accelerating, thanks to so-called AI.
I'm serious: I think WWIII must be just around the corner. I'd be surprised if we all last until 2024. Where did I put my sandwich board..
I think the main problem with allowing stochastically-generated content online, especially in places like Stack Overflow, is that the statistical machine that generates this drivel in the first place is built by scraping the web, especially places like StackOverflow.
The current incarnation of The Internet is (for the most part) human generated, but when there is a large amount of so-called AI generated content around, it will start to pollute its own input and make even more meta-nonsense.
This is why we shouldn't let marketing make technical decisions.
If I want to run a RTX 4090 I'd need a new PSU anyway. Also, it's not beyond the Wit of Engineers to design a 3.3V POL regulator that can accept 10V-50V wide input range and therefore keep compatibility with older PSUs (although you'd want a different connector with a series diode or two to prevent people trying to put 48V into a 12V card.. and you can always have an ID pin that handshakes to the PSU before enabling the 48V, like how USB does it). Mostly the POL design is the same, with higher voltage rated front-end caps and MOSFETs. A few $ more BoM cost for nVidia on their $1000 card..
Maybe if you calculated how much *energy* was lost in the cables and how much extra *copper* is required to run at 12V, and told them that they were therefore killing the planet, they might change their minds.. Actually a "95% ErP rating" shouldn't be given to a PSU if it burns tens of watts in the output cabling.
If you wanted to design a power connection standard to carry more power, the sensible answer is to boost up the voltage, not the current..
The USB-IF managed to get this right, so why couldn't PCI-SIG? If I can have 48V on a USB-C cable delivering 235W at 5A, why can't I have it inside my PC, delivering 600W at 13A? (which would only require a single 6-pin connector at most)
Or if we must stick with 12V @ 50A, why keep the crummy Molex multi-pin crimp connectors instead of moving to something like XT90? (probably, because PCI-SIG has a deal with Molex)
I think PCI-SIG feels the need to cover its ass here, because it knows this is it's fault for being a) a dinosaur unwilling to move on from 1970s IBM standards, and b) a parasitic entity that receives millions of dollars in subscription fees from the IT industry and does no work for it. (unless cocktails and canapes on a luxury yacht count as work)
But NVidia are idiots too, of course. I'd guess their employees probably wrote the spec anyway and sent it to PCI-SIG for ratification.
You are correct that 7-10% of electricity, (often more like 15%), is lost in the grid before it arrives at the consumer's meter.
However, the vast majority of this is lost in the low-voltage local distribution network (where the currents are much higher to carry a given power).
The cable under the street carries about 400 Amps at 230V, and the losses depend *only* on the current, and go up with the square of current (P = I^2 R). So if you try to pull 800A through that cable, the losses will go up by a factor of four. Think about that next time you notice the lights dim slightly when you switch on your 40A (9.5kW) electric shower or your shiny new heat-pump.
The high-voltage transmission network runs at 400kV. Ours is a bit outdated, it's possible to run AC pylons at 750kV or more. The higher the voltage, the more you save in copper to transmit the same power over the same distance. China has some 2MV overground HVDC links.
Very little is lost (2-4%) in the transmission system. Whereas 5-15% is lost in distribution (between large sub-stations and consumers, with smaller sub-stations in between). So siting generators locally actually wouldn't help that much in terms of losses. It may even be worse: e.g. If you use a medium-voltage (33kV) link from the power station to the town, instead of putting a 400kV substation in the middle of the town. These days we can put 400kV cables underground too, so you wouldn't even need to have pylons.
Yes actually! HD-SDI CCTV cameras are amazing, I don't know why so few companies sell them!
You have zero latency, zero compression artefacts (until you compress the video yourself, on your own server that is), and the full resolution of an IP camera.. No crappy ONVIF "non-specification" mess to deal with. Standard RS-485 for PTZ, etc. And of course, no worry about security implications!
What else could you want from a camera?
But of course! Bags of time for the execs involved to bail themselves out with fat bonuses and claim that they "saved the company" a ton of money. They might even get to quit the country and save themselves from the economic shitstorm that would follow from all the other execs in all the other companies having the same idea! (that is, if they can find somewhere to live that won't be affected by a global economic crash potentially followed by WWIII... Antarctica, perhaps?)
Indeed - bit it still irks me when people say "we" voted to leave. I certainly didn't. And the country as a whole could hardly have been more undecided on the subject if it had tried.
48/52 was well within the margin of swing that could be exerted by a foreign *cough* russian *cough* propaganda campaign and some slick marketing funded by *cough* russians *cough* tory donors.
You couldn't elect a government on such a flimsy majority, so how come we have made such a grave decision on our country's future on barely a 4% margin? I would have expected a majority of 60% to call it a done deal either way and rule out a second referendum, but instead we get this "we won you lost get over it" bollocks. It's because the winners are invariably the already-wealthy and powerful few, that they are able to manipulate the rules in their favour. Certainly if it had been 52/48 then they would have been screaming for a second referendum.
See icon.
Air-gapped, my foot.
I run an air-gapped network at home - between my laptop and my wi-fi router.
And how do the "customers" get their reports? Dot-matrix fan-fold? Or do they pay extra to bring in their 4TB NVMe thumb-drive and download the lot so they can de-anonymise it at their leisure ?
To say that this "eliminates the risk of data exfiltration" is just nonsense.. "Minimises" is even doubtful. "Reduces" would be the honest description.
Even the AWE can't operate a truly air-gapped network, so I'm told.
There are "designs" for endless safe clean energy from a glass of water, aka the miracle of Cold Fusion. And if you go on YouTube, or as I prefer to call it, U-Bend, you will find hundreds of "designs" for perpetual motion machines, zero-point energy devices, and the like. The snag of course is that they are just there for clickbait and none of them work.
Solid-state batteries are only marginally more feasible than cold fusion. They sometimes 'work', for the purposes of swindling some clueless investors out of a big pile of cash, but they don't work in real life. They have piss-poor power density, extreme manufacturing challenges, and non-existent longevity.
Usually the fundamental problem is the lithium needs to be made near atomically flat with a PVD machine, but when it dissolves and plates back again, it doesn't plate flat and the electrode separates from its solid electrolyte. The available power and energy plummet with each charge, especially if it's a fast charge.
The main reason why solid state batteries are slightly safer, is because their power density is MUCH lower i.e. they have a high internal resistance. So you're not really comparing apples with apples if you compare the safety of a lipo battery that can be charged in an hour, with a solid state battery that is damaged beyond repair if you charge it more quickly than 10 hours..
There's really no such thing as a high power density, high energy density, scalable energy store that is also safe. Storing high energy reagents in the same place.. There's a word for that: a bomb.
> Why do you feel that MS will use it's old EEE tricks today?
These days, Microsoft is into Surveillance Capitalism just as much as Google, Amazon, Facebook (sorry "meta") et al.
Windows and Office (not to mention LinkedIn, GitHub and Azure) bring them vast amounts of data on everyone. Windows has ads right in the start menu these days, and even without the ad money I'm sure there is a queue of 'data brokers' who would pay for access to that trove.
Microsoft "love Linux" just so long as it's running in the nice white-box-environment that is WSL. But they seem determined (via Secure Boot, UEFI, and other, more insidious ways) to make it as difficult as possible for the general public to run Linux natively on their computers. Why? Because they would evade their surveillance by doing so.
Microsoft love things like Snap, Flatpak, Docker, Electron etc precisely because they break that UNIX/GNU philosophy of avoiding bloat by having small, auditable programs which each do one task and all rely on eachother - moving towards the Windows-style philosophy of "here's an installer, it's a 700MB EXE, just run it, don't worry it's from a 'trusted source', see here's a nice certificate of authenticity for you.." (note how Microsoft loves to tell people who to trust..)
Since their purchase of GitHub, they also seem to be treating Open Source devs as their own unpaid employees, hoovering up all their efforts into one enormous AI-driven deniable-plagiarism machine.
With Web Apps and Electron Apps, it's a Black Box for you and a White Box for Microsoft.
You should try to estimate how much value you get from your Dynamics 365, versus how much value It gets out of You.
Wow, amazed at the downvotes for Steve.
SystemD breaks the UNIX philosophy and tries to do too many things at once. It works well though for personal computers (not servers). And its developer, I fear, has (or at least, will) become a Microsoft stooge, and I fully expect Microsoft to try to poison the open source community as much as it possibly can. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, etc. :(
But we should remember that it is the enemy who spreads division and hate. To hell with all that.
Debian is still great. So is Devuan, but Devuan is after all, ~95% Debian. It would be 5% of nothing without Debian, and I have a huge amount of respect for the Debian devs who have maintained the upstream packages for, almost-literally: everything.
I am writing this post on a laptop, and of course that runs Debian (and SystemD). And it runs pretty well. If it were a server, though, it would be running Devuan.
