I think part of what's happening lately is that chip folks are start to realize they can make margin too. Maybe it's possible thanks to consolidation but for sure folks see the crazy margins nvida, apple etc have, and I suspect they're like - we want that too!
But I mean,are the employees safe at home?
I guess if the really targeted the data center then home is safer, but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?
> But I mean,are the employees safe at home? I guess if the really targeted the data center then home is safer, but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?
My gut feeling says that they would be safer at homes than at datacenters. The only large info I have heard is attack on hotels, this datacenter etc. (atleast till right now).
> but in the fog of war maybe the data center wasn't the target?
We can't say this for sure but even if that was the case, I do think that they would see some damage was caused and then, try to double tap it for even more damage. So chances are, even if it wasn't the target previously, it might be the target now?
This is a ridiculous mindset. Llama 3.1 8B can do lots of things today and it'll still be able to do those things tomorrow.
If you baked one of these into a smart speaker that could call tools to control lights and play music, it will still be able to do that when Llama 4 or 5 or 6 comes out.
The point is that the GP's mindset is not very ridiculous if you value things by a price/utility ratio. Software and hardware advancements will lead to buyer's remorse faster than people get an ROI from local inference.
SW and HW advancements will bring this topic in the "good enough for vast majority" field, thus making GP point moot. You don't care if your LLM ASIC chip is not the latest one because it works for the use you purchased it for.
The highly dynamical nature of LLM itself will make part of the advantage of upgradable software not that interesting anymorw. [1]
[1] although security might be a big enough reason for upgrades to still be required
> Microsoft did, and Teams is by all reports a solid success.
Not sure if the author has used Teams.
But otherwise, I agree we need an actual good, adorable Slack clone. I thought Google might do this after not buying Slack, but I'm not hearing anything about their solution.
Teams is shovelware. Force bundled, with questionably reliable messaging, okay video calling (if your organization policies don't break it), and a fairly useless Phone System component that misbehaves often.
Great for organizations that believe these forms of communication should be an afterthought that has rough edges and inconsistent reliability.
The recent changes to end webhook support, kill Linux desktop support and do yet another rewrite are inane. Don't expect features you use today in Teams to work in 2 years...
My org went all in on Teams over 6 years ago. Removed all PBX systems and desk phones. Pulled out Cisco phones from 20 offices. Ported all numbers to MS. By all accounts it was unremarkable to the end users, and when WFH mandates started it was seamless. Definitely a lot less IT support for configuring and troubleshooting a phone system too. There is far less downtime because Teams will ring through to your cell phone if the office internet is down or your laptop is off. That was not possible when the Cisco routers and CallManager in the office were running the DIDs and local extensions
It was, in fact, even with existing Microsoft products (Lync/Skype for Business). It was even possible if you had paid for those features for UCM from Cisco. Teams was simply the cheaper option (although they tried to keep charging my org Lync prices, and we had to threaten to uproot MS products and go to Cisco before they gave us the new pricing).
* using more than one org (needs app restart!) although
screen sharing between 'classic' and 'web' editions works only if sender's and receiver's graphic cards share a hw-accelerated video format blessed by teams. Not, it's not easy to check what edition you are running and you can't change it without poking js variables by hand
* inconsistent read statuses between devices
* 'incoming call not shown at all' bug (but you get a missed call notification)
* can't join two video calls even in two separate windows
* random audio device switching on every morning (even if you don't close the app and computer for the night)
It's fine. Messages sometimes fail to appear unless you navigate away and back and sometimes they fail to appear at all until 30 minutes later but it's fine. This regularly slows down communication and costs company time, but it's fine. It's 2026, classrooms full of children can vibe code a chat app but a $3T company struggles with basic chat functionality. It's fine.
Whatever. I've been using it since day one and its still a broken turd. People are just used to shit software, restarting, rebooting, missing calls, missing messages. Sure you can make it work, but you can't deny its a real piece of shit.
Maybe in 2020. Teams is the defacto IM app for enterprise now. It may not be to your liking, but most workplaces don't need apps to constantly be adding new features. They need videoconferencing, chat, meeting recording and AI transcription and note-taking. All synced with everyone's Outlook calendars and authenticated by the same SSO used org-wide. Teams has had all of those for years.
For the 1000+ headcount companies who sit outside the Silicon Valley webdev/software dev world, it doesn't. Silicon Valley looks at these as "products". Purchasing managers see these as "commodities" that need to be interoperable with the rest of their stack first.
That's fair, in my last org we used Teams for meetings despite Slack for general chat etc.
Partly I'd say that's due to MS giving it subpar experience in O365 calendar/mail/outlook - you can't join a call directly, best you can really do is link to the channel as location.
They're ending webhooks? Bummer. By the looks of it, they're going to introduce a more complex alternative. No, two, because why not. Why make something work when you can also make two things that work half, right?
We are being forced to dump slack for Teams. The only people who like Teams is Sales and Marketing for some reason. Not a single engineer likes this, and it will break every engineering convenience that exists on Slack.
As an ENG - I REALLY dislike teams - but I also dislike Slack
Slack should be emails that have been arranged into different folders - it just doesn't vibe with me for much otherwise (oo look you have 200 channels on unread - or, if you are the reverse, ooo look 200 channels with people chatting and I have to check every single one of them :(
Yeah, I mean the first thing we all do when we get one giant unified inbox is write a bunch of rules to break it back out to a set of folders so that we can triage it appropriately. Slack channels just do this from the get go.
Discord if you don't mind something proprietary, Mattermost or Rocketchat if you do, Zulip if you want something slightly different . . . and no doubt many other alternatives
Slack is easy to replace with something cheaper and better on a product or technical level. The network effects are strong of course, but they won't sustain it forever
Discord is a solid product. They just need to launch a simple business-friendly alternative UI without the teenager gamer aesthetics. I’m surprised they never tried going after the enterprise market.
Enterprise doesn't buy chat/meeting products without PSTN interop (dial-in dial-out to traditional phone line). Discord would probably need to double their dev team to add PSTN.
Building something like Slack or Teams to the level that a F500 company would make it their primary videoconferencing solution is a multi-thousand-employee project. It's not a little skunkworks project for 15-20 people in some corner of the office.
That's why TFA is hilariously flawed. When Altman says "tell us what we should build, we'll probably build it!", he's talking about driveways and backyard pools, not the Golden Gate Bridge. It's like asking mall Santa for a summer home in the Hamptons.
I know absolutely nothing about PSTN interop and I'm sure it's very complex to implement. However, at the end of the day, this is just software we're talking about right? Software is cheap and easy to produce these days and I doubt you need thousands of people to implement something that syncs your meeting's audio stream to a phone line especially given that it's a problem that has been solved before.
Hardly. You're going from analog to digital and vice-versa. You probably need specialized appliances. For every country in the world. And it's "solved" but only in proprietary contexts; I don't think there's a standard. Then you need to operate it - you need SREs, bug fixes, keeping up with downstream changes etc.
Adding PSTN to Discord is absolutely a Discord-sized problem.
I use teams at work and it's okay. Not the best, not the worst, but okay piece of software. At least I have both the calendar and the videocall things in one app and see when the call starts, so I don't accidentally ADHD myself into missing it.
Anything that accepts webhook integrations will be able to do this. I've got the Google calendar and meeting notifications on Slack, but it would be trivial to replicate with any two systems that have APIs available.
My company would never let me expose my calendar data to Slack. That's why they like M365, all the integration is there with less risk of oversharing data.
I used it for about a year with a small team. It worked well for what it does, but the functionality is definitely stripped down and barebones compared to Slack. I don't remember any performance or reliability issues.
Hard disagree. We use both in my company. Google Chat is definitely better than Teams for actual collaboration: it's easier to track unread messages in "Home" (it's the "inbox"), and channels (called "spaces") are much better designed (they are conceptually closer to Slack's channels). Also, it's not crashing all the time. What's missing: the message editor doesn't support nested bulleted lists, we can't archive a space/channel.
I guess I'm in the minority but I haven't noticed a significant variance in quality and features on any chat app I've used in the past 20 years. It seems like a thoroughly solved problem. Slack's "killer feature" was that they really streamlined onboarding which is feels neat the first time you do it. Otherwise, chat is chat. The biggest obstacle has always been getting everyone you need to talk to to agree on which platform to use.
It's by and large the slowest, jankiest, laggiest software I use regularly. And I say that as someone who swears Adobe has added a bunch of sleeps in Lightroom.
On basic chat: it will sometimes scroll up when I get a new message, while I'm actively participating in that chat, so I need to scroll back down to read the new messages. Occasionally it flickers, for bonus points. It will not mark the chat as read if I'm on it without clicking on a different chat and coming back. It's the only software I use that, for some reason, has an effect on my typing accuracy. Don't even get me started on its handling of copy/paste. I'm also pretty sure there's some joke I just don't get around the search function.
For calls: it refuses to pick the correct microphone, and will sometimes mute it completely somehow (I lose the feedback in the headphones – I have a jabra headset that does this). This will even happen when I hang up a call and start another one right away. Other times it works well. My default mic is always my wired, always connected, headset mic. I don't use BT headsets that switch from music to communications or whatever depending on what I do, which could confuse the available / selected mics.
It drains my laptop's and iphone's battery like no tomorrow, even if I turn off video and only do voice chat, even if nobody has the camera on or shares a screen. Also, on Windows, for some reason it doesn't use the native notifications, but implements its own crappy ones – but this isn't that big of an issue, since I mostly disable them anyway.
All this is happening on both the "heavy" (heh) Windows client, and on chrome on Linux, both running on a fairly beefy new PC with gobs of RAM. Fun fact: the experience was exactly the same on my 5-year-old laptop with a U-series Intel CPU, so I don't think it's a resources problem.
> Use Teams in Firefox with ublock for battery issues, somehow it consumes much less.
I've tried it multiple times in Firefox, since it's the browser I normally use for everything else, and it was somehow even wonkier than in Chromium. I didn't stick with it long enough to notice the difference in battery use, especially since I don't often run the laptop unplugged.
> That's because the typed letters appear with a large (often even ~1 s) delay. Close your eyes while typing and you'll be back on you track.
I do notice the delay, but I swear they sometimes come out in the wrong order. The most common occurrence is it registering the enter key and sending the message before the last 2-3 letters. Sometimes it doesn't register the enter at all and the message just sits there, while I wait for a reply, which obviously never comes.
I'm not saying I'm some kind of god of dactylography, I do make mistakes, but, somehow, I only have issues of this magnitude and frequency in Teams...
Also if you are using language with more than 24 letters - like you know, most of the world... You can't do {left alt}+n in teams while {right alt}+n works perfectly fine, and I haven't found a way to disable this awful behavior.
Like mate - I'm on Mac, I use CMD+n for new tabs, not windows-like shortcuts...
If you are having perf issues in calls, see if you can buy the hevc codec from the Microsoft store. Windows does not come with it by default, and supposedly teams needs this to offload video processing to the gpu. I think it made a difference to me. But who knows.
I have that installed for watching Prime Video and stuff while away with only my work laptop. Watching Prime Video in its app or YouTube in the browser doesn't heat the laptop (fan stays quiet), but I've never done this on battery, so I don't know how those fare on that front.
Now, I don't have performance issues per se, by which I mean that I don't have video or voice skipping or whatever. The interface lags, but it does that all the time, even without a call happening. If I only looked at the PC during a call, I'd think everything was fine. But I notice the fan ramping up and the battery draining if I'm unplugged. And this happens even when there is absolutely no video whatsoever on the call. I'm not even sure that not having video on makes that much of a difference battery- and heat-wise. Switching the Windows power profile to battery saver doesn't seem to affect Teams in any noticeable way, nor does it help with battery drain.
I have this problem with Microsoft software in general lately. Last time I had the Office suite installed on a Mac, it was constantly popping up focus-stealing (literally and figuratively) notifications that it was updating PowerPoint or whatever, even when I didn’t have any Microsoft apps open.
I really try to stick to the web-based Office suite and Apple Pages/Numbers/etc. to avoid dealing with this.
What do you mean lately? I remember Office apps always looking and behaving a bit off ever since, like, Office 2000. For some reason, they seem to have never quite embraced the design language of the current Windows version, even though they're in-house apps.
Now, the latest version of whatever the suite is called this second is a web page in some weird browser window, which has some rather funny failure modes [0]. What makes this all the more ridiculous is that running them in actual full-blown browsers is a better experience.
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[0] I'm specifically thinking of New Outlook, which, sometimes, kinda hangs, but not completely. It will fail to either fetch new mail or update the view with the new mails (can't tell which it is), but the view isn't actually broken! You can click around, select different mails and it will show the contents, move around folders—everything looks fine! Except no new mail comes in. And then, you want to, say, maximize or minimize the window. But you can't! The window controls don't react at all to the mouse! You obviously need to "end task" and restart that crap to get it working again.
Teams suffers from one giant problem. There is a totally odd, but understandable from tech debt perspective, segregation between “chats” and “teams” which makes it practically impossible to find everything. It’s a fatal flaw. Slack is beautifully simple and effective in comparison. Also, the reminder feature on slack is extremely useful to me personally and I miss it dearly in teams.
Let me clear my cache after logging in twice to get the OOM fixed so I can finally login to show you what’s wrong with it over a teams call and hope it doesn’t logout and reload randomly during the call.
The fundamental design choice of Teams teams channels makes channels unusable vs Slack channels.
The chat part (outside channels) is OK. I've seen the metrics for our instance (10k users), the teams channel part is basically unused.
Does this matter?
Yes, I think so for a chat first culture.
Teams is definitely a solid success. It is by no means a good app. Those two things aren't the same.
Slack started with an aggressive "bottom up" approach, they made something actually good and got to worrying about the sales part later. You don't need sales as much when companies come to you, begging you for an actual contract that fulfills their enterprise requirements, knowing that rooting you out is almost impossible.
Teams went the other way, in typical Microsoft style. Microsoft sells it bundled with all the other Microsoft things it sells. Most companies want a Microsoft contract anyway, and have an established sales relationship with MS, so adopting Teams is a lot less compliance, integration and procurement work than adopting anything else. You don't need good UI if your sales strategy isn't predicated on users choosing you for UI.
And then there's Discord, which really isn't a bad work comms app if you're small enough not to need the compliance stuff. It gives you almost everything the big apps do for free, including unlimited calls, an advanced RBAC system, as many channels / messages as you want, a decent bot API (including media streaming), good notification management, multi-server / cross-organization support etc. They're actively disinterested in selling to businesses (which is what makes them so good, the features they paywall are the features needed by gamers, not serious professionals), but that also means you'll need to eventually migrate off of it when compliance requirements set in.
I thought Slack started as a failed game and they only pivoted when their in game chat proved popular. They still have game assets around like their 404 page iirc.
Not quite, they built Slack as an internal communication tool while building the game Glitch (RIP) and after the game failed they decided to productize Slack.
Lol it aas an admirable attempt at something new. I loved the interesting blend of messaging and document creation. It the code still lives on as an archived open project btw.
China doesn't have flip-flopping like this with its attendant massive waste. Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
> perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
> Instead it has endemic corruption which siphons off funds all over the place, perhaps with the exception of the big projects that command the full attention of central leadership.
We also have endemic corruption siphoning off funds all over the place, ESPECIALLY in the big projects that have the attention of the current administration.
From the business perspective, endemic corruption is preferable. Generally speaking, on societies like that, you know exactly how much you need to pay to which people to get things moving, so it can be budgeted for predictably.
Yet somehow they've managed to eliminate extreme poverty and challenge the U.S. in GDP. Sounds like cope to me. They couldn't do that with extreme corruption like we tolerate in U.S. allies.
China is literally going through an "anticorruption" purge of the PLA right now. Zhang Youxia et al. The corruption in China has a very different shape than in the US.
(not sure what you mean by "corruption we tolerate in US allies"?)
Do you know who the U.S. allies with and funds? Every right wing dictator and criminal gang on the planet. We just don't like independent nations and left wing factions.
There is extreme corruption in the U.S. as well, but we've legalized it so it disappears in statistics.
They "eliminated" extreme poverty caused by communist control in the first place, by going to a capitalist system.
There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
China benefited greatly from the US-led globalism order that's been going on since WWII.
Another way of saying it is China took the most advantage. And it has gone way overboard in taking advantage. So the backlash is expected and necessary.
Part of fixing things involve doing things that seem like it's destroying the order that the US created itself.
By racking up debt of epic proportions, with no return on investment in sight.
All the while going into a demographic death spiral. Partly cause by the draconian 1-child policy, which attempted to fix the pronatalist policies of Mao.
"debt"? You mean the balancing item from money creation? Question: To which bank does the government owe the liabilities created when it creates the money? (clue: the government owns it).
Nothing is really stopping other countries from doing the same, to be honest. People are just scared to give legitimacy to what China has done for their citizens in a very short amount of time, because that would be against their own beliefs and morals.
I'm not saying China is the best and whatever, just saying they've proven every "China is about to fall" headline that has been circulating around for the past 15 years. Maybe we should learn some things from them.
Debt is not fundamentally bad. But the financing has to be justified by positive return, be it in the service itself that makes money back to pay off the debt, or as a public good, returns in the form societal benefit as a result of the service.
When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.
The disadvantage in their system, is if the the leadership makes a wrong decision, it will stick for much longer than 4 years, and it won't be challenged.
Now, recently, they had a very good run. This must be admitted and even celebrated.
But the aforementioned flaw is still very much present.
It depends what you mean by work. Technology - among a myriad of other things - enables the worst dictators to stay in power, even if the country as a whole doesn't work.
You can have a functional democracy and still do long term planning, the problem is the current US government. Its not a fundamental flaw in democracy.
>You can have a functional democracy and still do long term planning
Sure, but that's contingent on
1) the voters being well educated and not easily brainwashed by various types of propaganda pushing them to vote against their own interests (see the Germans being anti-nuclear and pro-Russian gas since the 80s) and >
2) the voters being trusted and having an actual ownership in the country so that their votes affect them directly and also having a say in how their country is run, because if whoever gets voted into power just does the opposite of what the voters want "for their own good", then you're not a democracy anymore, you're just a well functioning state (if that).
Other than Switzerland, and maybe Denmark, I don't know any democracies that constantly function well and aren't plagued with issues.
Populism is always a danger, but the current US administration is all about spite, no matter the cost. It is uniquely, outstandingly bad. Lots of places have working democracies that have managed to do long term planning.
Also, China can lobby indirectly through media manipulation, and relatively cheaply disrupt our already clunky-feeling Democratic governmental processes.
It's a double edge sword. If the Boss has decided that the country should do X, it's much harder to make him reverse course if it's a bad direction. Zero covid and return to good old communism are two recent examples. For all their flaws and ineffectiveness, democracies are self correcting.
I mostly don't blame Amazon.
If the mob boss demands $10M in protection money in order to allow your $2.5T business to operate, you pay, especially if that mob boss happens to be the head of federal law enforcement.
Maybe we shift a bit of focus towards Congress, supreme courts and frankly voters who are apparently OK with this.
Speaking of the Supreme Court, Justice Robert’s wife earned $10 million as a “consultant.” The compensation made her one of the highest-paid legal recruiters. That's another "Melania movie".
I agree that we should be blaming the voters who decided that naked bribery and corruption is an American value (moreso than, say, their bleating about gun rights), but…
The people most capable of fighting back, and who ultimately have the most to lose in a kleptocratic, authoritarian state, apparently to be cowards and losers. Bezos and Jassy could tell the administration to pound sand, given how critical AWS is, and that Amazon is part of the like, 4 companies propping up the teetering stack of cards holding up the thing this administration (and its weaponized voters) think represents “the economy”. But they won’t, because they’re a bunch of feckless children, desperate for scraps.
Yeah I think this is a good way to think about it.
I mean Google, MSFT for example have effectively unlimited developers, and their products still suck in some areas (Teams is my number one worst) so maybe AI will allow them to upgrade their features and compete
At large companies, UI/UX is done by UI/UX designers and features are chosen and prioritized by product management and customer research teams. Developers don't get much input.
As Steve Jobs said long ago "The only problem with Microsoft is they just have no taste." but you can apply the same to Google and anyone else trying to compete with them. Having infinite AI developers doesn't help those who have UI designers and product managers that have no taste.
MSFT, GOOG et al have an enormous army of engineers. And yet, they dont seem to be continually releasing one hit product after another. Why is that? Because writing lines of code is not the bottleneck of continually producing and bringing new products to market.
Its crazy to me how people are missing the point with all this.
From outside as consumer. The end problem is that these product do not compete on price. A chat app on enterprise at the scale of customers they have should probably be 1€ a month. Not 10 or 20€.
That might not be multi billions a year business, but maybe chat app should not be one.
I think a big factor is generational. Bigcos are led mlby generations that are phone or email first. Chat is an afterthought. For orgs like that, Teams is great if chat is your least important collaboration method.
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