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Top 25 Microsoft Articles on Substack

Latest Microsoft Articles


May 13

Nintendo, Microsoft, Square welcome us to the era of fewer big video games

Data shows that Nintendo was ahead of the curve on this one.
Like big-budget video games? Hope you like waiting for them. (And hope there are enough developers left in this industry to make them.) There are abundant signs that we have entered an era that will see fewer major new video games from big game publishers.
Stephen Totilo ∙ 34 LIKES

Privacy Disasters: Microsoft, Just Because You Can

... Doesn't mean you should. Here's why.
This week, Microsoft graced the world with yet another tech idea that comes straight out of a Black Mirror episode: an always-on, always-recording life-logging tool that takes screenshots of everything you do on your computer. But now with AI to find things!
Carey Lening ∙ 3 LIKES

How Apple, Google, and Microsoft Can Help Parents Protect Children

The case for device-based age verification
Introduction from Jon Haidt: Ravi Iyer first contacted me in 2007 to ask if he could take a questionnaire I had developed (the Moral Foundations Questionnaire) and put it online. Ravi was a graduate student in social psychology at the University of Southern California at the time, and he quickly became a close research collaborator and friend. He created the website
Ravi Iyer ∙ 38 LIKES
Iris
To be honest, I would like to have something like that on my device for ME (adult) as well. So I don’t get bothered by trolls and don’t see content I didn’t ask for pushed in my face regularly :)
Brian Villanueva
This is a decent proposal, but it goes so hard against the grain of Millian liberalism that I don't see it happening anytime soon. Our society divinizes maximal individual autonomy. What that means in practice is that any other definition of "the common good" (such as, children shouldn't see porn or smartphones should be regulated because they're addictive) runs up against a wall of "well, it's their choice after all".
We thought liberalism was about neutrality and tolerance, but a value-neutral society is impossible. Every society defines the sacred and the profane in some way in some way. Like it or not, until we demote maximal personal autonomy from our altar, we will have problems implementing anything like what Ravi is talking about here.

Microsoft and OpenAI’s increasingly complicated relationship

An AI Soap Opera in the making?
You might think that Microsoft owns 49% of OpenAI. But as far as I understand it doesn’t. It has a right to about 49% of a for-profit subsidiary of OpenAI’s profits, up until a very complex point that may require litigation to resolve, but the for-profit hasn’t made any profits, and the for-profit is owned by a non-profit. And I’ll be damned if I can ac…
Gary Marcus ∙ 63 LIKES
Gerben Wierda
Is "it's complicated" a civilised way to say 'clusterfuck'? Or might all of thus mean that OpenAI has handed Microsoft the means to fill whatever mini-'moat' OpenAI had? Did OpenAI give away whatever crown jewels they had in that Microsoft deal that got them the compute they needed? Definitely intriguing.
Ko
Relation"shop" haha is that deliberate?

May 8, 2024

Today, in Racine, Wisconsin, President Joe Biden announced that Microsoft is investing $3.3 billion dollars to build a new data center that will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. It is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs and employ 2,000 permanent workers.
Heather Cox Richardson ∙ 3336 LIKES
JustRaven
“We’re the United States of America,” President Biden said today, “And there’s nothing beyond our capacity when we work together.”
As Joyce Vance says, "We're in this together."
Suzette Ciancio
Thank you, Heather!
“Political philosophers studying the rise of authoritarianism note that strongmen rise by appealing to a population that has been dispossessed economically or otherwise. By bringing jobs back to those regions that have lost them over the past several decades and promising “the great comeback story all across…the entire country,” as he did today, Biden is striking at that sense of alienation.”
Let that continue!

12:42 PM

FOIA Library: The University of Washington

The raw correspondence returned in two Freedom of Information requests to one of America's biggest sponsors of "anti-disinformation" work, Kate Starbird's University of Washington
After learning in the Twitter Files that many if not most federal contracts for anti-disinformation work are not public, in some cases not even in Inspector General reports, Racket hooked up with the Substack author UndeadFOIA to find out what we could via Freedom of Information requests. A year and hundreds of requests later, the handful of researcher names we began with proved more ubiquitous than expected.
Matt Taibbi ∙ 440 LIKES
Mark Marshall
Thanks for this work! Exposing the totalitarians is vital to defeating them.
Spiderbaby
I've just started reading the documents and the emails sound like they're setting up a big family reunion picnic rather than a Constitution circumventing censorship machine.
Welcome to Fascism Martha Stewart style.

OpenAI Wants To Get Big Fast, And Four More Takeaways From a Wild Week in AI News

Ignore the flirty bot, OpenAI’s big strategic play became clearer this week.
In a season of big AI news, few weeks have felt more significant than this one. OpenAI introduced its new GPT-4o model, Google unveiled a deeper AI vision, and Apple dropped more hints ahead of a massive AI-themed WWDC event. At Big Technology, we also hosted our first public event with Box CEO Aaron Levie, well-timed with the AI news. Our live podcast s…
Alex Kantrowitz ∙ 39 LIKES
Afonso Salcedo (Fonzie)
I’m personally really excited to see where this potential OpenAI/Apple partnership will lead us.
D R
I wouldn’t read too much into Satya Nadella not appearing at the OpenAI event. Sam Altman didn’t appear either so this was positioned as a smaller event than the DevDay one. Also, with Mustafa Suleyman being hired to lead the consumer-focused Microsoft AI unit, I suspect we will see him more at OpenAI stuff. Completely agree it was a big week for GenAI and Microsoft Build is on the 21st so more to come.

AI has become Sauron’s Ring

Another of AI’s bitter lessons
The other big recent news, aside from Sam nonconsensually making a Scarlett Johansson-like character, even after #ScarlettSaidNo, was that Satya unveiled an Orwellian new Microsoft feature called Recall that will (not making this up) take and record locally screenshots of everything you do. (“F^ck that. I don’t want my computer to spy on everything I do…
Gary Marcus ∙ 132 LIKES
Diego Pineda
In 2010, the best engineers in the world focused on getting more likes and get kids addicted to social media.
Today, AI engineers are focused on replacing human creativity and setting the foundation for surveillance.
🤮
Eric Platt
I like the double entendre of "nonconsensually". :)
Yes, they want "more, more, more"... until they own it all. The old dynamic of the Buddhist "hungry ghost" figure, with the tiny mouth and big belly. It's never enough.

OpenAI fluffs its lines as model collapse makes a mockery of its flagship

Leadership in AI is back up for grabs as Chat GPT-4o fails to advance, sending Microsoft, Google, and Apple, scrambling to gain ground...
Before I get to the big news of the day out of OpenAI, I have a favour to ask. I publish most of my insights for free, because I believe the facts in them are important enough to need as large an audience as possible, but my work isn’t free. Future Media is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free…
Ricky Sutton ∙ 3 LIKES

Tech giants' self-made AI energy crisis

For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity. Now the grid they've helped gut cannot possibly supply their growing AI needs.
For years tech giants have been helping climate catastrophists shut down reliable fossil fuel electricity, falsely claiming they can be replaced by solar/wind. Now the grid they've helped gut can't supply their growing AI needs. For the last decade, tech giants
Alex Epstein ∙ 125 LIKES
BD
These jerks will never come clean with the damage they have done.
TMacro06
Lest us not forget was and still about $$$. Blackrock loves ESG because...if you take to like-for-like portfolios but labeled one "ESG" you can charge up to 50% higher fees just to hold that same money. Sadly, the real goal is more like a watermelon - all "green" on the outside, but "red, Communists red" on the inside. Don't be fooled about the real endgame is for them.

☕️ STORMY WEATHER ☙ Saturday, May 18, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

2024 is shattering weather records, both on Earth and in Space - why?; another barge-bridge meetup; unexpected pardon for justice seekers; China makes sanctions moves; Congress reigns in FAA; more.
Jeff Childers ∙ 950 LIKES
Tom Haviland
The only problem with the law that Congress just passed telling the FAA that none of us are required to wear a mask or get the jab in order to fly on an airplane is that the law is SPECIFIC to COVID-19 ONLY! If the Bird Flu or "Disease X" strikes next, I can see the tyrants requiring us wear masks and get jabs again in order to fly.
Janice - Words Beyond Me
Surely wait in silence for God, O my soul,
For my hope is from Him.
Surely He is my rock and my salvation,
My stronghold; I shall not be shaken.
On God my salvation and my glory rest;
The rock of my strength, my refuge is in God.
Trust in Him at all times, O people;
Pour out your heart before Him;
God is a refuge for us. Selah.
— Psalm 62:5-8 LSB

Biden Up In New WI Poll, "Great American Comeback Story," Careful W/Polling Averages

Our Next Hopium-Wide Gathering Is May 22nd - Register Today!
Happy Thursday all. Sorry I’m a little late today. I am traveling and my plane’s WiFi was out for a while. Let’s get to it: Biden Announces Huge New Tech Investment in Wisconsin, New Poll Has Him Up 6 In This Critical Battleground - Here’s Heather Cox Richardson
Simon Rosenberg ∙ 296 LIKES
Janie Frank
Start my day with Hopium before I go to write postcards and run my postcarding hub. Thank you for the always brilliant interpretation and consolidation of relevant FACTS.
Cathy Murphree
There’s a little piece of me that wonders if the recent judicial system failures to hold Trump accountable in a timely and competent manner (e.g., Aileen Cannon) is resulting in more voters paying attention and realizing it really is going to be up to them to stop Trump.

0 To $100 Million In 9 Months 🚀, AI for social good🌍, Governments are the biggest source of VC funds🏛️

Welcome to The VC Corner, your weekly dose of Venture Capital and Startups to keep you up and running! 🚀 Thanks to your support, we’ve reached 26,000 subscribers in the 6 first months of The VC Corner, and we're just getting started 🎉 To celebrate, we're offering the first 100 users who redeem the offer a 20% lifetime discount to become a premium subscr…
Ruben Dominguez Ibar ∙ 15 LIKES
Burak Buyukdemir
great weekend read


OpenAI's GPT-4o and Partnership with Apple 🍎

Mira Murati was magical, not sure about all of these accessibility upgrades.
Audio Introduction 🎧 0:54 Hello Everyone, OpenAI had a Spring Update event the day before Google I/O begins, today as I write this on May 13th, 2024. It comes at an awkward time for Google, that lost market share as Apple’s talks with OpenAI have gone well to bring GPT-4o’s Voice to presumably, the upcoming iOS 18 and iPhones of 2025.
Michael Spencer ∙ 45 LIKES
Riley Tom
Definitely waiting for Siris new update, as well as integration into some big time video games and VR software. Then this takes off to a new level, albeit more niche than these general purpose model, but way more immersive
Oguz Erkan
That’s a very comprehensive take on the Michael. As you said I am not sure whether OpenAI will get the voice assistant right but I am satisfied for one reason: Ability to solve easy math problems.
This is significant because basically what differs AGI from the current models is next-token-prediction.
Current models lack this, if the question wasn’t included in their training data they simply can’t solve it. I am not telling it can’t provide an answer, it will and these answers will sometimes be true, but it won’t get that answer by applying logic predicting the outcome.
The questions illustrated were too basic so they could already be included in the training data. But if they were not included in the data as a block and the mode can solve a basic math problem like 1+2+7+3+5+12+33+17=? then AGI is basically just building on this.

☁️ Amazon: Wild Margin Expansion

AI requires billions in Capex but it looks like money well spent
Welcome to the Friday edition of How They Make Money. Over 100,000 subscribers turn to us for business and investment insights. In case you missed it: 🚖 Tesla: Robotaxi Pivot ♾ Meta: The Anti-Apple 🔎 Google: "A Positive Moment" 🍿 Netflix: Engagement Machine
App Economy Insights ∙ 59 LIKES


A Catalog of Wonderful Companies: State of the Project

Over the years, I've evaluated companies, one by one, every week, to determine their potential for long-term investment. Here's the current lineup of companies that I deem exceptional.
A truly great business must have an enduring “moat” that protects excellent returns on invested capital. The dynamics of capitalism guarantee that competitors will repeated…
Value Stock Geek ∙ 28 LIKES

UX careers in climate guide #1: job boards

Get a jorb
Last updated May 20th 2024 Climate careers series introduction 70% of the readers of this newsletter want a climate job . This short series summarizes the research I’m doing while looking for my own role. Job boards! There are several climate-related boards with names like Climatetechjobs.jobbies or GreenJobs.wow — but which ones are worth …
James Christie ∙ 3 LIKES


Does AI have a gross margin problem?

Can AI overcome the gross margin doubters?
Financial operations are needlessly complex. You have to cobble together a patchwork of tools that aren’t integrated with each other, cost you time, and lead to errors. Mercury simplifies this with banking* and software that powers all your critical
CJ Gustafson ∙ 23 LIKES
Francesca Krihely
Great overview CJ. I do think the gross margins will grow over time with optimizations but I think competition amongst these vendors will require them to make big investments outside of R&D to keep up. So as Moore’s law reduces the COGS there might be less differentiation requiring each to put more cash into S & M spend. I don’t know if that will be at the same scale as the R&D costs.
Dartz
Looks like we have two competing forces. Moore's law says the cost of computing will go down (# of transistors double, computing power doubles). That can also apply to power usage dropping per MIPS. On the other side we have demand increasing, being users demanding more complex requests and operations, which require more MIPS. The gross profit is where the race is measured.
The other race is how you charge a customer. What business model works and both takes market shared and improves gross profit?

Det. Eng. Weekly #70 - It's hot detection summer

Good vibes and low false positives 🏄‍♂️🏄‍♂️
Welcome to Issue #70 of Detection Engineering Weekly! I’m in the greatest city in the world this week hanging out with the research and detection engineering teams here at Datadog. It’s so cool to see how much this field has grown, and how as an org, we’ve adopted (and led) so many different efforts to bring threat detection into our internal security an…
Zack 'techy' Allen ∙ 2 LIKES

Why Does the Biden White House Hate Its Own Agenda?

It's not a mystery why voters don't know what Biden has done. The White House communications team systematically refuses to talk about the Biden agenda to reorient big business.
Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. A few weeks ago, the Federal Trade Commission revealed evidence of oil sector price-fixing, showing that domestic shale corporations had colluded with foreign producers in 2021 and 2022 to withhold oil from the market…
Matt Stoller ∙ 145 LIKES
Connie Dyer
This is pretty depressing. I thought they just weren’t very good at getting the word out. Now I see it’s very deliberate. And rather old school. Like pushing the principle that a president (at least the Democratic one)is president for Everyone, serving ALL interests and not taking sides, and appearing to encourage balance and cooperation when interests are obviously opposed and power is clearly one-sided and increasingly predatory.
The Biden folk are apparently uncomfortable saying anything that might be perceived as negative by the voters and contributors in the demographic of big business. With the exception of appearing to support *some * of the interests of other voters that traditionally vote Democratic—like boosting labor unions and forgiving some of what have become clearly predatory student loans and Investing in infrastructure that creates local jobs.
But it seems pretty risky, and stupid to keep avoiding the appearance of taking sides (against global corporations). When their ongoing agenda shows they know just as ordinary people do that these businesses are gradually destroying the planet and the health and wellbeing of their “customers” and that government would be reckless not to try to do something about that. *sigh* Honestly this is scary. And I hope you and others can persuade this administration’s “marketing arm” to change their strategy.
Rob Rains
The poor messaging of this administration has been a great source of frustration for this nervous progressive voter.

What happens when an app goes down? All about outages

Death, taxes, and outages: why being a software engineer isn't always so cushy.
A wise engineer once said that only 3 things are for sure: death, taxes, and outages. And when an app goes down, it’s a colloquial Titanic event for a company – all hands on deck, engineers getting paged at odd hours of the night, and frantic Slack Huddles until they find the culprit (it’s usually DNS). But what exactly
Justin ∙ 39 LIKES
Drew Meister
Such a fun read. My app went down from a memory leak and a database migration. Watching its last attempts at recovering, flagging errors everywhere, trying to restart itself, was a wild ride. It was beautiful in a way.

Your privacy is important to us

so we told everyone about your embarrassing medical conditions!
Hi there, situation normies! And also, aloha, situation normies! I wasn’t sure how last week’s story about looking for a late night dinner in San Rafael was going to play. My concern was it might not be relatable— a comedy writer word that means, “will anyone give a rat’s-tuchis about this story?” Turns out, it was relatable! I heard from more than a dozen situation normies who had also been let down by San Rafael’s late night dining options. Based on this statistically insignificant sample size, I can only conclude that San Rafael needs to get its shit together.
Michael Estrin ∙ 57 LIKES
Michael Jensen
Dear MR. ESTRIN, We have obtained information about your uncontrollable farting. Unless you want the entire world to learn about this horrible embarassing information donate $10,000 to the herein-named GoFundMe. Sincerely, Kaiser Per, er, Some Bad Dudes in Gambia.
Jessica Sitton
Have to say that the fourth thing I do now every Sunday morning (after pee, Wordle and Connections) is read your latest post.
1. Not sayin’. I told you I have to pee first thing, that’s all you get.
2. This actually came up on a doctors’ chat , low long ago before I retired (!!!!) two weeks ago. At least one other physician also swore by my (and apparently her) mom’s tried and true treatment: drink a glass of water upside down (drink from the opposite side of the glass. This works best when done over a sink, so as not to scare the dog with your antics.)
3. Pick a random yet memorable song and use the first letters of the first line as a password. Throw in random numbers and symbols but forget exactly where they go, so write it all down in a notebook and put that in a Safe Place .
4. What was the question?
5. Trader Joe’s ginger snap.