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> I think Microsoft delegated all marketing decisions to AI. Not even joking.

I actually think AI would have done a better job of this. And Microsoft being atrocious at branding predates AI mass adoption by about 2 decades, arguably more.


Microsoft used to just name a lot of things for what they did... to a point where it was almost confusing by itself. "Microsoft SQL Server" being a prominent example.

Though, the everything .Net around 2000 was nearly as bad as this CoPilot rename.


.net, dynamics, power, 365, azure, fabric, copilot.

There's always some pointless name change going on.


COM, OLE, ActiveX

And then they left the overclocking back door wide open by giving the celerons a 66mhz FSB.

IIRC Celeron cache being on die was actually faster as it was on die, this was mitigated on the Pentiums by there being more of it. It seemed like in games the faster cache performed better.

Another thing that helped the Celeron overclocking craze is Intel seemed to damage the brand badly out of the gate. The original Celerons had no cache at all, performed terribly and took a beating in PC reviews. So even though the A variants were much better this still had a stink on them.

The thing that probably helped the Celeron the most with overclocking though was they gimped them by only giving them a 66mhz front side bus speed. Since you had to increase this number to push the locked multiplier CPU speed up this was an advantage if you were going to overclock as you could buy a capable motherboard and run it at stable 100mhz. Whereas you'd have a lot more system wide problems trying to push a Pentium's 100mhz bus higher.


The wildest dropped Arc were the absolutely horrifying mind control parasites. But like that the warp core speed limit I see why, you'd have to change the whole tone of the show if you wanted to keep them as a consistent threat.

> Should they have cameras in every room of your home just in case?

Given that most children are abused by some one they know that might actually be a more effective way to prevent it than whatever they're doing here. I'm sure they'll get to that eventually.


I'm having trouble finding it now but I recall a mostly dead physics forum using LLMs to make new posts under the names of their once prolific users. So this has already happened at least on a small scale.

It seems nuts to me shareholders would be happy about a bunch of fake users, at least ones that don't have any money.


So I worked on a comparison shopping website.

We crawled the Internet, identified stores, found item listings, extracted prices and product details, consolidated results for the same item together, and made the whole thing searchable.

And this was the pre-LLM days, so that was all a lot of work, and not "hey magic oracle, please use an amount of compute previously reserved for cancer research to find these fields in this HTML and put them in this JSON format".

We never really found a user base, and neither did most of our competitors (one or two of them lasted longer, but I'm not sure any survived to this day). Users basically always just went to Google or Amazon and searched there instead.

However, shortly after we ran out of money and laid off most of the company, one of our engineers mastered the basics of SEO, and we discovered that users would click through Google to our site to an item listing, then through to make a purchase at a merchant site, and we became profitable.

I suppose we were providing some value in the exchange, since the users were visiting our item listings which displayed the prices from all the various stores selling the item, and not just a naked redirect to Amazon or whatever, but we never turned any significant number of these click-throughs into actual users, and boy howdy was that demoralizing as the person working on the search functionality.

Our shareholders had mostly written us off by that point, since comparison shopping had proven itself to not be the explosive growth area they'd hoped it was when investing, but they did get their money back through a modest sale a few years later.


PhysicsForums and the Dead Internet Theory -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42816284


[flagged]


> Before you ask: this quote was made with ChatGPT (GPT-5.2), unmodified, first attempt.

Just a heads up in case you didn't know, but generated comments are not allowed on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077654


I think dang's intention here is to prohibit undisclosed comments posted by either bots or lazy humans, not topical, attributed comments that were generated by models and posted as part of a good-faith discussion by actual users.

Can't speak for dang, obviously, but that's the rule I'd make in his shoes.



The people he's addressing were either actively trying to fool other users, or lazily using AI to engage as superficially as they could.

The comment here was a borderline case of the latter, but I think it was on the worthwhile side of the border, personally.

In any case, a blanket prohibition is pointless, because it won't be long before there's simply no way to tell.


A blanket prohibition may be futile but it's anything but pointless.

Once Hacker News becomes nothing but bots posting stories written by bots for other bots to comment on - which is the inevitable end point of a permissive attitude towards this stuff - what even is the fucking point to any of this? SEO juice?


Thanks, I wasn't aware.


I'll understand if dang takes it down, but the heavy (and intentional, I assume) irony makes it one I'd personally keep up. Thanks for posting that.


The whole plot of Blade Runner is to detect AI so indeed, it is intentional, also I'm surprised ChatGPT managed to create something nice given the difficulty, but I understand HN would become awful in a matter of days if we let AI comments stay.

Remember Twitter a few years ago?

Users are $$$. Nobody wants to talk about which are human and which aren’t. It’s all a game of hot potato.


I don’t think advertisers want to spend money for bot clicks.


That's why the social networks don't want to talk about the bots, but they are happy to have them.


Or maybe they do, because the big open secret in advertising is that they do spend quite a bit of money on exactly that


I don't even think it's a secret anymore, open or otherwise. As long as Vanity Metric Goes Up, it doesn't seem like anyone, anywhere, actually cares how much "economic activity" is fake.


I suspect it’s the “nobody got fired for buying IBM” mentality.

Who in marketing doesn’t want to champion the success of “we got 25% more views this month!”


They don’t know (and don’t ask questions enough to know!) about the fake users - it’s no one look down.

As long as no one figures out it’s all fake, the line can keep going up and to the right and everyone is happy.

Anyone who starts asking hard questions may be up first on the chopping block.

Unless the line breaks, then bam. Everyone rushes to be the first for the door as the bubble pops.


You can search sold auctions to get an idea for what things actually sell for. I saw the majority of 5800x3d selling for ~$500 so this looks to be mostly true to me.


ProtonDB is a great resource for tweaks like you suggested and I find proton works OOTB quite often. But I agree, they seem to be operating under an alternate definition of what "platinum" means which is setting everyone's expectations to high.


I'm happy to edit to correct, but my own experience on Steam Deck has been that anything that's platinum (or native, but that goes without saying) basically just works, minor UI issues and the like notwithstanding. Considering that even Windows versions can have those kinds of issues depending on drivers and hardware, I figured it was a fair comparison.


I feel like this was more in support of their new VR headset which has an ARM processor. I actually doubt we'll see a Steam Phone even if the idea is interesting to me (since it would be a linux phone). At least, I don't think we'll see it any time soon.


> since it would be a linux phone

It doesn't have to be. Proton runs fine on Android.


On the other hand, Valve has built a compatibility layer for ARM Linux to run Android APKs, so if anyone could make a jank-free Linux phone it would be them


Sure, but so did Jolla and Waydroid. I think the consensus is that AOSP > Linux for the average Joe's mobile handset.


Will be a nightmare. If they really didn't want this they wouldn't have put the tool to do it right in the spec.


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