Scott Williams

Remember that this is a company that's outlived several bubbles and boom-bust cycles in the tech industry now, while witnessing the fall of previous giants. They now have a solid strategy for survival they've repeated several times over, which is what we're seeing here.

I'm not endorsing any of this - but in their defence, I don't think MS actively want to replace anyone, they're just making sure that if the market ends up going this direction long-term, they're ahead of the curve and not made irrelevant.

The various roles they're impacting along the way are necessary stepping stones on that pathway - the bigger systems they're trying to build need to be able to analyse various types of work product to do their jobs correctly, and the fastest way to get there is by training it to produce that work.

Copilot/Designer are just toys in comparison to where their real efforts are focused. Artists and programmers aren't the real target. The real target are the expensive and highly-specialised analysts, consultants and other senior professionals who's jobs involve identifying and solving problems.

The bit everyone is missing with them is that the bulk of their investment in AI actually predates the LLM craze and the bulk of their current efforts are focused on finding ways to make various different types of AI model integrate together better with each other and legacy systems.

MS are doing what they always do and hedging their bets. If it takes off, they'll be in pole position. If not, they can kill it off slowly. Their investment is a drop in the ocean of their overall finances.

I thought it was just universally acknowledged these days that unless you're trying to sail across an ocean, the Mercator projection isn't useful. Is this a US/Can/Aus thing?

I've never understood this... I don't think I've ever seen the Mercator projection on any physical map I've owned or used here in the UK. Its always been equirectangular, Mollweide or polar. The only Mercator projection maps I've seen or interacted with on a regular basis are online or in media.

Wish this were so but unfortunately the trends in inactivity data are backed up by DWP figures, based on increases in the number of people they're paying. Mistakes for most economic indices can go undetected for longer as there's few or no other source of official statistics to cross-reference with.

To be fair, OFWAT are pretty hamstrung by the ridiculous way water infrastructure is handled in England. It's a state-licensed private monopoly, and the costs of any fines are effectively just handed off to either the customer or the public purse, so they don't actually have any power to regulate.

Rule 2 - Spend other people's money if you don't have any. And thus we invented banking.

To be fair, 'tax credits' is a pretty misleading name for it. Makes it sound like a rebate. Which is the entire point, of course, to make it sound more paletable to anti-benefits folks.

Many years ago, yes. As the refrain goes, though, like all works of dystopian fiction, it's supposed to be a warning, not an instruction manual. If I'd been told ten years ago that fascism would be tolerated in mainstream Western politics within my lifetime, I'd have laughed.

I honestly can't believe that our government can consider a nation led by these people an ally. This was utterly shocking treatment for a man who's led his people through three years of hell, on the front line between the west and our 2nd Cold War adversaries.

If something even worse happens, this time line is still the worst. If reality wants to win a bet, stuff had better start improving around here pretty damn fast!

Most of the remaining staff work in the Teams product group now anyway. All the real-time comms stuff in MS Teams basically uses a blend of Skype consumer and Skype for Business tech under the hood.

I'm a little confused as to why folks in the US think delaying their Amazon/Target/whatever purchases by 24h will have any impact? Just stop buying from big corporations and shop locally where possible ALL THE TIME if you want to actually make an impact. 24h though? Who cares?

Again, it's a de facto ability juries have, but de jure, their rulings are supposed to be guided solely by the evidence presented in the case and the law. No judge is ever going to advise a jury to make a decision on any other basis, regardless of whether they technically have that power.

Jury equity isn't recognised or endorsed by the judiciary, for what should be obvious reasons. It's just an inevitable consequence of jury trials, a technicality, not an intentional feature. The judge's instruction to the jury was de facto wrong, but de jure correct, as you'd probably expect?

That bubble is already beginning to burst, thankfully. Key players are already starting to quietly back out of the space, or at least tap the brakes on further spending in that area. Tech stocks are already starting to wobble in response, roughly proportionate to their exposure to AI hype.

Worth a read if this is your kind of thing. Although from that ticket title, you may already have an article in here...

Good luck. The EU, for instance, is still trying to get them to pay taxes owed on sales they illegally attributed to their Irish subsidiary. It's deeply unhelpful too that the Trump administration is reportedly considering abandoning the OECD framework designed to tackle these tax-haven shell games.

AI has been used in VFX for over a decade now without killing any jobs. It still needs people who know what they're doing to actually operate it. This is unfortunately just another case of bad management and questionable financial decisions that left them needing new investment to shore things up.

The problem law-enforcement agencies have with this, though, is that it leaves them unable to go fishing, and still requires them to actually investigate crimes, rather than just trawl the web for evidence. That's the real nub of all this. Investigations take time, money and skills.

Let's face it - the only tweak needed to make existing laws work in the face of hard encryption is to allow the courts discretion to not only charge someone with contempt in such situations, but to also grant them the power to sentence up to the penalty for the crime under investigation.

Wish more people could grasp this. Privacy is binary - you have it, or you don't. The solution here is to target the accused individual by making obstruction of an investigation by failure to cooperate with court-ordered instructions a criminal offence. Maybe call it something like 'contempt'?

There's actually 10 types of people in the world... Those who understand binary, those who don't, and those who understand trinary too.

This would be a valid argument, if it weren't for the fact that the perceived value is being massively distorted by the huge sums of VC money being pumped into these companies, allowing them to make the service available at subsidised prices, or even for free. When it dries up, then we'll see.

They mistake brand managers for the influencers they sometimes employ.

Just for context - the Express is one of the UK's most rabidly right-wing rags and tends to have an even looser relationship with the truth than the Daily Mail. So to see them run with such an anti-Trump headline is quite the statement.