Whether it's interesting or not is irrelevant to whether it produces usable output that could be economically valuable.

Yeah, still waiting for something to ship before I form a judgement on that

good thing that it would be a chinese copy, and thus, not subject to switzerland law. So i wonder if chinese law recognize this patent/trademark for a screw?

IANAL, but as fas as I know when you're importing it from China, you are subject to local laws (and may pay the fine for importing a ccopy of a trademarked product).

Their point is that there's a possibility that Swiss customs fines them and confiscates the "counterfeit."

Maybe, the problem is that customs are not opening every package and as long as manufacturer won't name the copy as "screwdriver for patented BMW screw" but something more like screwdriver SN-2249 then how customs would know what that screwdriver is for?

Customs could just ask you for a declaration, where if you lied and they found out later, you'd suffer a heavier penalty. I dont know if they do that right now (not familiar with it).

What's the reality of that happening though? I feel like they have bigger fish to fry than going after people for buying one screwdriver bit.

if at first you don't see anything, try making it full screen!

And then you should notice some movement/rotations. Look around, and find out where that rotation is!

I had to edit the code and change scale from 90 to 300 to see it easily in full screen landscape on my phone. I have presbyopia and often need reading glasses to see small things.

> Management drastically underappreciates the value of tribal knowledge.

they may, but i think it's that they prefer if there were no tribal knowledge - because it means having irreplaceable people, which makes for weak business continuation should accidents/issues arise with those people.

You are being downvoted, but I absolutely agree. Tribal knowledge (institutional knowledge) is a bug not a feature. It is lack of standardized processes and it is ultimately a failure of management to extract this knowledge from employees, any means necessary.

Thank you for doing the thankless work, sensei!

Why wouldn't those also become a target, if they would grow to be sizable?

And if they have prevention mechanisms, why can't existing supply chains be secured with similar prevention mechanisms, instead of funneling to a single package manager provider?

The supply chain for Notepad++ updates was a PHP script on a shared hosting account pointing to the URL of an executable file.

Surely someone with more resources and more sets of eyes could do better than that? AFAIK nobody has compromised Debian's APT repositories and Red Hat's RPM repositories yet.

> It remains to be seen how China fares in the next few decades.

it is easy to continue on momentum alone.

They have the numbers on their side - IIRC they have more STEM grads than the US has workforce, and they graduate a lot more every year. Apple alone spends about a Marshal Plan per year in high-tech manufacturing, for what the know-how remains in China to manufacture other high-tech products. I think Tim Cook mentioned that no company outside China could make their MacBook shells up to the specs they need. The product is "designed in Cupertino", but the machine that builds it is designed, made, and operated in China.

Multiply that by the number of companies who spend heavily in China for manufacturing, indirectly causing their advanced manufacturing industry to grow beyond anyone else's and it seems inevitable.

And the idea of the percentage make up is a bit misleading, because while some things could've been 100% manufactured in america, the machines doing that manufacturing comes from china.

Good point. And also the materials.

> But history is littered with self-obsessed autocrats ruining a good thing.

i actually dont believe that china is heading towards autocratic rule. At least, the trajectory isn't indicative of such tbh. It's dictatorial - ala, the party's needs supersedes the needs of the population, but it doesn't make it autocratic imho.

On the other hand, the behaviour of trump and his goons, have shown more signs of autocratic behaviour than any in recent history in american gov't.

> The PMs are completely asleep at the wheel

or, everyone has career aspirations for which they need to demonstrate impact, relevance and in shipping products. Since the current hype is AI, making and being part of the AI hype means career advancement (at the time).

If they want AI hype they should be building up .NET to be completely versatile for AI, not just ONNX, but the full pipeline. Make your strengths a key indicator that Windows is the place for AI, stop using up 50% of my RAM for no reason, I need it for real work. Till then Linux has been my new permanent home for about 5 years now or so.

Have you lost sight of how much AI is being shoved down .NET tooling?

See AI components for Blazor, Aspire AI dashboards, Aspire CLI with AI, Powershell AI, aspire.dev web site proudly written with AI, .NET Upgrade tool is now AI driven,....?

None of those sound like the tooling I'm talking about. I'm thinking of libraries like ML.NET, training and inference, compared to Python its nowhere near, a lot of .NET projects wind up calling out to Python itself. I don't see why Microsoft couldn't do more in this area, if they're truly betting on AI they're betting on it the wrong way.

What pure C# inference tooling is out there? I know they have a solid ONNX engine, but not everything runs on ONNX.

I say this as both a Python and .NET developer mind you, but if Microsoft actually built up .NET more seriously to power AI infrastructure, I could see it making a big difference for them. Look at how many game engines use C# as opposed to literally any other programming language. C# could have been a #2 language for AI by now.

You have the great Windows ML experience. :)

Guess why Microsoft hired Guido and other Python devs, who gets the whole Python experience on VSCode, or introduced Python as better option to Excel, in detriment of .NET addins.

People forget that nowadays .NET is only yet another language on DevDiv, check the developer blogs for all languages.

That was F# failure as well, trying to cater to data science for its relevance, while other Microsoft departments double down on Python.

I'm never touching Windows again to be fair. They'd have to decouple it from their marketing departments sins. I see way more AI libraries in Rust that are as capable as Python libraries than I see for .NET for example. The diffusers library has a Rust equivalent, is there a true .NET equivalent?

Come to Windows and you will see.

Jokes aside, not really, however people have to accept to be polyglot, there isn't one language to solve all problems.

Regardless of whatever is in Rust, all AI key frameworks are in C++ and Python.

NVidia, Intel, AMD, Khronos aren't going to start publishing tools in .NET, Rust, Zig, or whatever is our liking.

So anything outside those stacks will always be a second class experience in IDE tooling, debugging, and libraries.

Well if its done in a dumb-as-a-fuck hostile style that whole world complaints for years, such effort and PM is utter failure and their CV should be tarnished with this for next 2 decades. And its up to us as a IT community to make it happen.

They harmed massively their own company, and failed at the most core reason why they were hired - add long term value to the company.

Its a bit the equivalent of architect building huge bridge that then falls, no souls harmed. Such person would have issue finding any other work. Lets do the same, name and shame shouldnt be that hard.

I saw a presentation awhile back which included the slide (roughly):

"Give a PM a numerical goal, and they will burn the company down to hit it."

As someone who has worked in big tech and seen decision-making in action, I 100% believe it. This is how incentives are structured.

The mandate/goal went pretty far up the chain, too. Windows got moved from being under Azure to under "CoreAI" in the org structure. Incentive structures usually reflect org structure. In this case the fingers can point pretty far up on why incentives shifted the way that they did.

That's a dramatic but fitting characterization of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Human paperclip optimizers...

Their shareholders did not want them to add long term value to the company.

Their shareholders wanted AI.

Thinking hard about how CoPilot fits into the MS ecosystem (Power BI, SharePoint, Dynamics, Office entrenchment, etc), and how their consultant mills work, I’m convinced there’s a meaningful space for unnecessary, unpopular, or suboptimal LLM solutions that can still be wildly profitable for MS.

Like, just because the outcome sucks and the solutions are user-hostile, let’s not assume the decision makers are dummies. I see profit motives as the likely delta between their decisions and our userland expectations.

Let me run the MS LLM department and I could easily explain to the board why we’re about to see a big upsurge Azure, office 365 integrated, and MCP-based solution spending… hint: it’s because the machine god will tell the consultants AND the customer those solutions are what’s SmartGood. We’ll sell ‘em a box that tells ‘em what to buy (lul, subscribe to!), the profitability part kinda writes itself.

Their shareholders never wanted AI.

Their shareholders wanted MSFT stock price to go up.

You shouldn’t name and shame for following corporate policy. Your suggestion is ridiculous. If the decision has come down from the product leadership you are expected to follow it.

Knowing who the windows product leadership is should be easy. Find them on linked in. But even they may not be responsible if the direction came from the ceo or the cto. We know who those are.

Quit calling for naming and shaming of individuals just trying to make a living.

Thats ridiculous. Shielding folks that do amoral work that harms us all (while well aware of this) - why, because 'they are just following the orders' ? Thats pretty weak argument. Why are you so afraid that folks are to be held accountable for amoral work they do? Its pretty fair approach in these greedy times.

And I mentioned PMs but realistically its whatever decision makers that decide these, PM can be a middle manager cog with no real power or somebody adequately high. I know I myself won't affect some hiring of some CTO but somebody here eventually might. Thats a good start.

I am fed up with uncritical celebration of people who make this world a worse place and harm us all. Perfect execution of amoral goal is still purely a shit in negative sphere (this goes straight to worship of mr musk but thats another topic)