I'm not a native speaker. Besides dash, what is the sign that it's AI?

I can’t point the exact signs because the message got removed, but a common sign is labeled paragraphs:

“My take: so and so.”

“The key idea: so and so.”

There are also some common sentence structures, like the format “it’s not A, it’s B”. For example, “this is not important; it is essential”.

Some words also tend to appear very frequently, like the verb pretend: “this is John no longer pretending he’s dumb”.

Any of those examples could appear in legitimate human text, but when you see many of those signs in a short text it’s very obvious.

What is in it _for them_?

Where and how do they make money?

Good riddance. Unfortunately with the length of dev cycles his successor is inheriting such a mess that he’ll have target on his back from day one.

Seems like his successor does not have much of a plan either.

> In another internal email addressing staff, the new Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma gave some hints as to how the future of Xbox will look.

She outlined three commitments: "First, great games." "Second, the return of Xbox." and "Third, future of play." She went on to say that the company will continue to invest in its franchises and studios, keep Xbox spreading across platforms to reduce barriers, while also inventing "business models and new ways to play."

Reads like the standard Nadella special, they probably share the same copilot template

it's clear they are going to continue gutting the place and spin it off

Except that Satya whined about people using the term "AI slop" and Sharma specifically uses that term in her e-mail. An interesting contradiction.

Her press release and tweets sound like someone asked AI what to say to make Xbox fans like you. I tested what it would tell me to say if I was CEO and it gave me very similar talking points.

To be fair, that is a great social engineering technique to trying an win back the market.

I'll take it as a social engineering technique because that is the sector she came from and still being pushed by the CEO.

Sounds like a concept of a plan. I was always an Xbox person instead of PlayStation, I was part of the Xbox Live beta and had so many great memories from that era. After the lack of exclusives on the Xbox Series X, their game pass shenanigans, and the horrible UX decisions over the years, the Xbox brand is trash to me. Same with Halo, what a freaking waste of an IP.

> Sounds like a concept of a plan.

It's safe to assume that her first e-mail to staff is not going to include a comprehensive breakdown of every action she plans to take.

Not saying she does or doesn't know what she's doing, but it would be weird if she went into much more detail at this point before she's even ramped up.

Would be good to provide clarity to the trenches though.

Clarity would be "you're all fired" but they cant write that, can they.

That's what Xbox has already been doing. New "Xbox" games run best on PS5 Pro (for consoles at least). I don't think there's a single Xbox Series exclusive, everything is on PC or some other console now.

Yep. There are no exclusives anymore, not even timed ones. Those releases that aren't Day 1 on Playstation now is only because they were too far along in development to make that happen. This is part of their "Everything is an XBox" mantra, giving people pretty much zero incentive to buy XBox hardware right now.

> New "Xbox" games run best on PS5 Pro (for consoles at least).

I dunno, the way Windows 11 is going these days that caveat is getting a lot of scrutiny. I would say that, in many cases, they run best on PS5 Pro full stop - at least until the GabeCube releases, for those who can afford it.

The “everything is an Xbox” line they’ve been repeating is embarrassing. Did SEGA drag it out this long when they threw in the towel?

AI slop. They're winding down the business.

His successor seems to have zero experience in the industry

It feels that they’ve finally got understanding that Xbox is total mess and try? To reboot completely. Because “Xbox president” seemingly is booted too

> Alongside him, Xbox President Sarah Bond is also exiting the company, who many suspected would be Spencer's successor in leading Xbox.

Phil Spencer entered with Xbox in a total mess and he was never really able to get them out of the mess.

I like Phil as CEO of Microsoft. I think Microsoft's corporate strategy never really made sense for Microsoft and I think Microsoft has a massive and worsening culture problem. It seems like leadership fail upwards, which tells me that at the executive and junior executive level the job is internal politics.

His successor looks like a mess to the gaming section.

They promoted the person who was in charge of overseeing studios, so ostensibly not much will change on that front.

At least Phil Spencer knew something about games.

Yes.

One of very recent examples: handheld Xbox.

There are rumors about upcoming handheld Xbox. Many like the idea

It is announced, marketed as handheld Xbox (asus xbox ally x). Quite expensive, but okay.

After some time (!) they reveal that this handheld Xbox actually won’t play your Xbox games/subscription. It will play your pc subscription and pc games. Wtf

Literally about time when the sales of the device actually start, Microsoft racks up the price of Xbox ultimate from $20 to $30 per month. They unsubscribe page is overloaded.

How any coherent management would allow this?

You need subscription for multiplayer

I don't think that's right. A Realms sub gives you a private server to play on but you don't need that. You can host your own for free.

On Xbox

This is an annoying and recent change; you used to be able to do local LAN multiplayer (even cross device!) before they changed something entirely.

At least split screen still works for free.

Nah, only if you're not willing to self host.

I run a 6 person server on an Intel NUC, without major issue.

This is the weirdest section, and is just unnecessary virtue signaling.

Women don’t buy their real size because it makes them feel bad -> market pressures companies to address that by doing vanity sizing -> brands bad

I cannot comprehend that jump in the logic.

Not quite “brands bad”.

It’s more that buying clothes across brands becomes confusing for women. That’s a worse outcome for women.

The villain isn’t the brands, it’s the vanity sizing.

> Cultural narratives around vanity sizing often square the blame on female shoppers, not brands. Newsweek once called it “self-delusion on a mass scale” because women were more likely to buy items that were labeled as sizes smaller than reality. But there’s more to the story.

> Vanity sizing provides a powerful marketing strategy for brands. Companies found that whenever women needed a size larger than expected, they were less likely to follow through on their purchases. Some could even develop negative associations with the brand and never shop there again. But when manufacturers manipulated sizing labels, leading to a more positive customer experience, brands could maintain a slight competitive edge.

How one can seriously write the same thing twice in form of contradiction and make different conclusion?

Well, the first description puts it as "self delusion", while the other describes it as a rather natural reaction and puts the initiative for the change on the brands.

Old good tragedy of the commons.

I briefly went thought the list - a lot of hosted systems (probably kubernetes underneath etc). This is not unique or anything.

The list is quite sus ;) did you know that cockroachdb is a German company? :) it’s in the list. And this is like 3rd company in the category that I was checking

https://eutechmap.com/company/cockroachdb

——

On more sad note.

Europe still loves their old money, (hidden) class system and deeply entrenched bureaucracy way too much to allow some plebs to get rich that quickly.

European way of doing things to me feels like fundamentally incompatible with high pace way of doing things in software area.

Personally, I don’t believe that anything significant can come up from places other than US or China. About 10 years ago Russians were doing a lot of “own” stuff (clickhouse comes to mind first), but I suspect that isolation and brain drain will eventually capture them.

Asml is a European company. Arm (was) a European company. Novo Nordisk is a European company.

It’s ludicrous to pretend important ideas only come from the US and China.

Most of the interesting programming languages come from Europe (OCaml, Haskell, Idris, Gleam these days). We're not short on ideas.

Yes we're not that good at creating mega-businesses. And when we manage, said businesses quickly run to the US.

> And when we manage, said businesses quickly run to the US.

See Linus/Linux. But I think we still have Minix in EU.

I mentioned software, but didn’t said that I specifically focus on it.

Asml, arm, novo - neither of them are software companies. From what I’ve seen asml wouldn’t work without zeiss, another European company.

This still doesn’t invalidate my premise that software landscape is completely and totally dominated by us/Chinese companies, except probably gaming, where couple of hits can make a studio from any country a world class player, like CD Project Red

The fact is that Europe is a lot of things. You have the British class system (not that hidden), you have French and German bureaucracy, but you also have the unique combination of egalitarianism and mercantilism in Scandinavia and the Netherlands, and the zeal of Polish progressivism, shared by a number of their former east block neighbors.

There are places in Europe where you can easily achieve a higher standard of living (on average) than the US, and there are places where you can't.

I believe the reason that Europe is behind on commercial software is just economic: Solid, standardized solutions were available coming from US companies, and they were seen as low-risk for decades, so why would any company try to compete? Network effects apply to things like office suites and e-mail clients just as much as social media. Microsoft doesn't have any serious US or Chinese competitors in this space either.

That's not to say there aren't problems: The pipeline from startup to big tech firm is extremely difficult in Europe, largely because capital is much more conservative, stemming from the fact that European capital tends to be concentrated in things like pension funds. For years, successful European tech startups have at some point or another hooked into the US Bay Area ecosystem (capital, talent pool, etc.), because the local environment was way too risk-averse.

But I think you, like many, have succumbed to anti-European propaganda, which comes in a couple of forms: pro-corporatist, pro-Putinist, orientalist/sinophile, etc.

we live in an age where manufacturing of any kind, software, ai rule the world, and EUs output there is shrinking.

I think that in current day and age EU feels entitled to disproportionately higher standards of living to its output.

And given that, EUs awakening will be the rudest. US’s is going to be too, but different

I don’t want to share some personal grievances, but my negative perspective on EU (esp Germany) is from personal experience. I don’t think that I succumbed to propaganda and I’m certainly not a fan of P or X

If you think AI rules the world you've certainly succumbed to propaganda.

I am not thinking about ChatGPT but robotics now advances with crazy speed

The capital situation is especially dumb. There's been a lot of debate recently in Denmark about why our pension funds invest a lot of money in US venture capital funds that then invest in Danish startups that have moved to the Bay Area. The same money could have been invested in the same startups here in Europe.

Unfortunately, for isbns even if you know how the key works in theory and should be used by standard, reality will break you very soon. It’s quite loose. At least it was 10 years ago when I worked in the area of book catalogs matching, per different online stores.

I worked a little bit in the area. (it was 10 years ago in the area of book catalogs matching, per different stores/countries/bestseller lists)

ISBN is a an attribute/key, but not primary key, in database terms :)

ISBNs are messy and in real world you’ll see crazy amount of broken/edge cases that shouldn’t happen by the letter of the standard, but happen all the time in reality.

* For example, isbn can be reused by publisher for completely different book.

* 2nd edition, while very different, may have same isbn.

* Reissue of the same book could have different isbn.

* Textbook of same author for 6th and 7th grade could have same isbn.

* As soon as you’ll get in translations all bets are off.

* I already mentioned textbooks. How anbout about college books where each year there was slightly revised edition of same book.

If you ask yourself - wtf? You’re not alone.

—-

In my youth I heard horror stories about people who suddenly found multiple duplicate guids (uuidv1) in their databases because cheap Chinese knockoff network cards were using same MAC addresses. Think that with isbn that could Happen to you any time.

I did some data collection on my cookbooks. Figured out Lidl had used same ISBN for same book. In entirely different languages.

You feel my pain :)

Honestly, right now I probably wouldn’t even try to code complex algorithm of book matching but fed all of books metadata, including book covers etc to llm and it would do better than what we had.

Our algorithm had tons of special cases coded and in results ui there was a button “needs manual review”, that was launching review workflow (not a joke, business people has special support team in India, because we were matching not only books) for cases when confidence score was low.

But covers also lie. They are mass-uploaded to various services by the similar automated matching systems with cheap human agents used for decision making. Everyone just grabs and re-uploads the existing images from the image search results if they are “similar enough”. Because if it works for instant noodles, it works for books, too. Many publishers don't even bother to provide anything but a single image that is cut from the source file for the printed cover, which might be quite different from the way the book really looks.

For my language, I know I can only rely on just a couple of shops that make a photo of an actual book under regular lights for catalogues and announcements as a matter of principle. Others just add the same image file everyone else used. For the older books that had multiple revisions, it's still strictly manual interaction with second-hand book sites and old listings to figure out the exact version.

On the other hand, most services here do care about providing table of contents, even if its crowd-sourced phone snapshots of the page. International market is insane in that regard. Not only sellers on Amazon and the like ignore them (sure, they were never going to do so much manual work for all the uploaded items anyway), the publishers don't even mention what's inside on their official pages. “Selected stories. New translation by X”. Are those the same stories that were published 5 or 10 years ago under a different name or cover? Has X translated a new set of stories and (partially) refreshed the collection? Both of these things happen. It is ironic that I need to download the full scan from the pirate library to find out what is available in print. Unless, of course, some anonymous worker in some library hasn't diligently typed the whole list of works into the description, hooray for those.