NaibofTabr

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Must_Be_Crazy

I am talking about if all agents connect globally

What agents?

all information can be accessed instantly at once

In the 80s there were AI researchers who believed that once all of human knowledge was stored on a computer system, it would spontaneously become intelligent. This, of course, was magical thinking, and no such thing happened.

It still won’t happen.

Listen to what the actual experts are saying

I do, and the actual experts all understand that the current generation of machine learning models are optimization algorithms that have been refined to locate specific areas of large datasets based on input prompts. They’re fancy search query tools, nothing more. There’s no “intelligence” at work.

When you have a “conversation” with an LLM, and it gives you a seemingly-intelligent response, what you’re getting is a dump of some copied text that is related to the input you’ve been feeding the text entry field. The “intelligence” that you perceive in the response is actually that of the human who made the original writing that was scraped for training data.

Keep your credulity in check. The algorithm has no understanding of what it regurgitates, no comprehension of the information it handles. It does keyword association really really well, and it can sift through lots and lots of data impressively fast. It’s a great, big, environmentally destructive Chinese room.

“…A.I. it could very possibly become a powerful God that is visible and tangible to people…”
“…an A.I super being will be…”

My brother in machine-Christ, you need to take a deep breath, go outside, and touch some grass.

Some people chose to not see America.

We’re all trying to find who could’ve done this…

This is basically how Elon responded to advertisers not buying ads on X.

What about the Americans threatened and killed by ICE?

Rebuilding what it’s doing though wouldn’t take 30 years, they’ve figured out the requirements

Heh, I don’t know about that… AD is the way that it is because nobody has actually figured out what the operational requirements of any given organization are. Certainly not Microsoft, not even after 2.5 decades of trying.

which means a startup can start fresh and build something even cleaner that works full on premise but seamlessly leverages cloud services

Do you work in marketing? did you get that phrase out of a brochure?

There’s nothing seamless about anything cloud. Start taking apart any cloud platform and it will spill a bunch of ugly spaghetti and Swiss cheese.

There are no green fields, especially when you’re talking about replacing an existing, operationally critical piece of technology. This is what you get:

https://xkcd.com/927/

in the event that your on premise systems have a failure.

If the on-prem systems have a failure there won’t be any outbound network connectivity, there won’t be anything capable of connecting externally.

The value prop is high for companies, if they could save a huge amount of money on licensing and get improved operational cost

That “if” is load-bearing. The “potential savings” are imaginary, theoretical at best. It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “switching costs” when there’s nothing to switch to. It’s a big pile of “what-ifs” and “could-bes”.

AD is a security nightmare.

True, but so are all of the cloud platforms, so that doesn’t really set it apart. Being legacy tech at this point without a lot of new code being added regularly, most of the weaknesses are pretty well understood.

EntraID requires internet but at least allows zero trust

Yeah I’m not convinced that Microsoft as an entity actually grasps the concept of zero trust. I think they likely have their own internal definition of it, just like they had their own definition of web standards back in the Internet Exploder days.

Look at what happened recently with Edge, where they claimed that storing user credentials in cleartext was “intended behavior”:

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/microsoft-edge-to-stop-loading-cleartext-passwords-in-memory-on-startup/

OK, maybe no cloud is a bit extreme, I’ll grant that. Maybe your business needs some clunky, minimum-effort, rent-seeking SaaS crapware like Salesforce… fine

IaaS? No. Nope. Not for anything we actually need.

No cloud for anything required to manage and maintain the local network or user accounts. If the external network goes down, we’re still operational internally, we have our own domain and authentication servers, everyone can still login and run any locally deployed applications (which we prefer, so most of our business needs are served that way). We’re not going to lose corporate data to the latest AWS leak, we’re not going to be dead in the water because AWS East went down again, we aren’t going to have to reasess our budget because AWS raised their monthly fee again.

It’s not about “feelings”, it’s about proper risk assessment and mitigation.

You can outsource labor, you can outsource storage, you can outsource compute, you can’t outsource risk.

living in a cloud-first, Microsoft-free future

Oh really, whose cloud? Oracle?

We don’t even maintain on-premises servers

Ah, you’re dependent on someone else’s computers, someone else’s network architecture.

That sounds awful.

Nope nope nope, need on-prem only data, on-prem user account control, on-prem domain, absolute positive control of all outbound network connections with as few of those as possible, and no dependence on someone else’s monthly compute fees.

Local always, remote only when absolutely unavoidable, and then stripped to the bare minimum. I’ll run my own NTP server so that only it has to reach outside for time updates, and every other local device can get time from it.

NO. CLOUD.

EntraID is just a rebranding of Azure AD

Azure AD, the cloud version, still isn’t as feature-complete (or possibly feature-bloated) as the original on-prem AD, which is a big reason large organizations won’t switch away from it.

Sure, but they’ll have to catch up on almost 30 years of feature development (and feature creep). Active Directory is entrenched, by virtue of being the only game in town for decades.

Not that they’re necessarily irreplaceable, but… a half-competent Windows Server admin can go from cold iron to running HyperV with a local domain (AD forest) with a SAN supporting 200 endpoints (assuming the hardware is already in place) pre-configured with end-user applications and all relevant network & security settings (via group policy), with a print server supporting local network printers, and be ready to enroll new users, in less than a day.

I’ve seen it done, I’ve helped get it done. And all of that can be done with point-and-click GUIs, and not a dozen different ones, just like 3 (one for server/HyperV deployment, one for HyperV config post-install, and then basically everything else can be done through Active Directory).

When you’re a sysadmin for a large organization, that kind of operation at scale is non-negotiable. When I say that AD really has no competition, that’s what I mean. You could accomplish all of the same things on Linux, but it would take you a week of punching through terminal commands just to get the server and the domain up and running, and once you were done the user management still wouldn’t be as flexible or feature-complete as it is on AD (especially if you need things like auditing, or physical access token integration like badges for authentication, or remote desktop support, or video conferencing that is linked to corporate email accounts).

All of that said, if you happen to know of a group that’s actually working on a competitor for on-prem AD (not Azure AD/EntraID, the cloud system is very different and not really comparable) I would be very interested. It’s a problem that’s been on my mind for awhile now, and I’d love to get paid to actually work on it.

Windows as a home user desktop is definitely coasting on momentum, though it is also the OS deployed on most new PCs which keeps it going.

I think the only thing really keeping Microsoft relevant is Active Directory (and Azure by extension) because a lot of organizations are dependent on AD internally, and there still aren’t really any good alternatives that check all the same boxes. You could probably cobble together a working solution for ~90% of it with open source software, but it would be clunky, fragmented and feature-poor compared to an on-prem AD system. It would require a lot more administrative overhead to configure and maintain it, and user management would be a mess.

what could possibly be more American

I don’t actually know, I never had a Saturn myself. The early generation consoles didn’t need batteries because they were basically just static systems flashed to ROM chips (nothing dynamic to worry about, it executes the exact same process every time it powers on), but the cartridges had batteries to keep saved game files alive. If you have old cartridges that you’re trying to keep alive, check/replace their batteries:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Super+Nintendo+Game+Cartridge+Battery+Replacement/162002

Note that if the game doesn’t keep save files but instead uses level codes or something like that, it probably doesn’t have a battery in it (no need for dynamic memory).

The more a device is like a computer, the more likely it is to need essentially a CMOS battery, especially if it has an onboard clock that keeps date/time information when the device is powered off (something has to keep the clock ticking while there’s no power). In PCs, if the CMOS battery is dead you will get POST when you turn it on, but no video output, just a black screen. The computer will typically appear to be working otherwise (fans, LEDs, etc). People will replaced monitors, graphics cards, even entire computers to fix a problem caused by a $2 coin cell, because they don’t know and nobody ever teaches this. I try to spread the knowledge whenever it seems relevant. You might be able to resurrect old devices with a simple battery swap.

Before you do anything destructive or spend more money, have you already checked the battery?

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/Sega+Saturn+Battery+Replacement/127970

You might get lucky and find out it’s that simple.

I also recommend checking the rest of the troubleshooting guides on IFixIt:

https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Sega_Saturn_Troubleshooting

It’s very cool that you’re trying to keep this old console alive and not let it become waste!

This.

An appliance should turn on when I turn it on, turn off when I turn it off, do the task I instruct it to when I instruct it to, and do nothing that I do not instruct it to. Its status should be clearly indicated to the user with a few LEDs, or a numerical display if needed. Its behavior should be entirely predictable at all times, until eventual mechanical failure due to wear.

If an appliance design fails any of these checks, it is a bad design.

If any function of the appliance is dependent on a network connection, it fails the checks because:

• it will do things that I did not instruct it to
• it might fail to do things that I instruct it to
• it might not fully turn off even though I’ve pushed the power button
• it might not fully turn on if it can’t find a network connection
• its status may be shown on a garbage-quality failure-prone LCD, in a UI designed by a CS intern with 3 months of classroom experience in Java (or worse, an LLM)
• it may behave unpredictably due to bad software design by said intern, and will typically be exposed by poorly designed network security, leading to behaviors controlled by malicious third parties
• it will fail early, if not because of the shoddy bottom-of-the-barrel electronics, then because the manufacturer decided they weren’t going to support the companion app anymore (6 months post-purchase) so fuck you, buy our new product that doesn’t actually have a complete companion app yet! (the intern is still working on it)

Don’t buy “smart” appliances. Ever.

Bye, Felicia

Er, isn’t this a pretty straightforward lawsuit?