Category Archives: News

Article note: That's probably not good.

Article note: Voice Assistants/Voice Control are an attractive nuisance for tech companies, and have been into at least the 80s. They have quite limited application, and they can only be monetized by making them horrible for the user. I've been hoping the "useful subset" of simple tools that are basically handsfree basic control (dialer, calculator, media player type things) and TTS tool that can read notifications will get eaten by simple local features, and it will squeeze out the fancy "Hey, wiretap, what's a recipe for pancakes?" shit. This is a promising development in that direction.

Enlarge / The fourth-generation Echo device is a cloth-covered sphere with a halo at the base, contrasting with the squat plastic cylinders of earlier-generation Echoes. (credit: Amazon)

Amazon is going through the biggest layoffs in the company's history right now, with a plan to eliminate some 10,000 jobs. One of the areas hit hardest is the Amazon Alexa voice assistant unit, which is apparently falling out of favor at the e-commerce giant. That's according to a report from Business Insider, which details "the swift downfall of the voice assistant and Amazon's larger hardware division."

Alexa has been around for 10 years and has been a trailblazing voice assistant that was copied quite a bit by Google and Apple. Alexa never managed to create an ongoing revenue stream, though, so Alexa doesn't really make any money. The Alexa division is part of the "Worldwide Digital" group along with Amazon Prime video, and Business Insider says that division lost $3 billion in just the first quarter of 2022, with "the vast majority" of the losses blamed on Alexa. That is apparently double the losses of any other division, and the report says the hardware team is on pace to lose $10 billion this year. It sounds like Amazon is tired of burning through all that cash.

A division in crisis

The BI report spoke with "a dozen current and former employees on the company's hardware team," who described "a division in crisis." Just about every plan to monetize Alexa has failed, with one former employee calling Alexa "a colossal failure of imagination," and "a wasted opportunity." This month's layoffs are the end result of years of trying to turn things around. Alexa was given a huge runway at the company, back when it was reportedly the "pet project" of former CEO Jeff Bezos. An all-hands crisis meeting took place in 2019 to try to turn the monetization problem around, but that was fruitless. By late 2019, Alexa saw a hiring freeze, and Bezos started to lose interest in the project around 2020. Of course, Amazon now has an entirely new CEO, Andy Jassy, who apparently isn't as interested in protecting Alexa.

Article note: This has been Hank Dietz's (My advisor through grad school, one of the first-causes of commodity clusters) argument for years: when clusters took over riding on economies of scale, they sucked all the air out of the field for other innovation, and we've been getting stupid making commodity clusters bigger and denser instead of investing in architectural innovation for years. Ideas about disrupting that paradigm had more traction at SC22 than I've seen in recent years, it's nice to see reporters picked up on it.

Article note: They aren't kidding, easily over 1/3 of the show floor was cooling vendors, cooling parts (tubing, fittings, etc.) vendors, and OEMs showing off their cooling systems. The quest for bigger denser clusters of commodity components has eaten the entire field. Money is not a limiting factor. Power in is not a limiting factor. Alternative designs are pushed to the fringes. It's all about extracting heat from machines that are only a hair different than gaming rigs, so they can be built denser for their networks.

Article note: This is pretty cool, Apple has a mode to automatically compute the two 8080 arithmetic flags that ARMs don't. A setting enables computing the “adjust flag” (AF) and the “parity flag” (PF) exactly as an 8080-family part in bits 26 and 27 of the flags register. In combination with a setting to switch to x86 style memory ordering, it's suddenly much less surprising that Rosetta2 does such a good job compared to other x86-on-ARM schemes.

Article note: I went to the RISC-V BoF at SC22 this week and ... lost most of my interest in RISC-V. Aside from the unusual vector extension style they chose being ...likely not an effective choice for efficiently extracting parallelism... quite some time ago now, the big problem I (and apparently half the room there) see coming is the _enormous_ enthusiasm for a combinitoric explosion of bespoke ISA extensions with no coherent plan for compiler and library support. If every RISC-V "HPC" feature is gated behind some mutually-exclusive bullshit proprietary LLVM fork or spray of pragmas, no one is going to use them, because the compiler and library writers won't use them, and all software will be compiled against the not-very-inspiring base profile, making it more-or-less interchangeable with any other general purpose CPU design, but less mature.

Article note: As proven by the fact that the FOSS "Slinger" client works independent of the servers as long as you extract your device ID before the cloud bullshit shuts down, there is a more graceful solution than "lock in to brick." I assume someone will find a hardware method after, but not many folks will be willing to screw around with that. Sling did, to their credit, give years of advance warning, but did not push an update to tether devices so it's in the middle of the "Internet of shit shutdown assholery" scale.

Enlarge / The original Slingbox, on display at the 2006 Consumer Electronics Show. Key indicators this was a long time ago include the Toshiba Satellite laptop used for the demonstration (and the giant glossy UI buttons). (credit: Getty Images)

Slingbox, the device and service that was into streaming digital television long before the world was ready for it, will die a cloud-based server death Wednesday, November 9. The service was nearly 17 years old.

Sling Media announced two years ago that the Slingbox would be discontinued, noting that "all Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable." The reason given was decreased demand. Being able to watch the video that would normally be on your television on a non-television screen was a novel—and legally contentious—thing back when Sling started in 2005. Today, there is more content than you can possibly watch in a lifetime, available on devices that can connect from almost anywhere, willingly offered by every major media company and sports league.

Sling was born out of two rich fields: General Magic, the Apple spinoff company where founder Blake Krikorian worked in the early 1990s, and San Francisco Giants baseball in 2002. Krikorian and his brother, Jason, traveled frequently back then while building their own consulting firm. The Giants were headed to the World Series that year, and the Krikorian brothers wanted to watch, or at least listen. They found that they were either blacked out by local broadcast agreements or asked to pay additional fees to stream the games on top of the cable and Internet they already paid for at home.

Article note: Microsoft has been experimenting with turning their OS into an ad delivery platform for years, I think they're just trying to wear everyone down with little incursions until the fatigue suppresses the outrage.

Article note: Holy _shit_ what a find. An LGP30 with the matching terminal. TWO PDP8e s.

Article note: Oh cool, "fuser" for NT. That's... actually surprising there wasn't a good integrated tool. The NT process/file tooling is generally quite nice, if historically hard to script. It made me look at the history of fuser, and that resulted in an hour digging down a dumb rabbit hole to conclude: fuser's history is ...special. Thread that got me started looking: https://www.mail-archive.com/austin-group-l%40opengroup.org/msg08606.html It is present in POSIX.1 (IEEE Std 1003.1-2001) ... but the POSIX compliant output is a ludicrous fucking disaster of intermixed stderr and stdout. https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799.2013edition/utilities/fuser.html : "The fuser utility shall write to standard output the process IDs of processes running on the local system that have one or more named files open. For block special devices, all processes using any file on that device are listed. The fuser utility shall write to standard error additional information about the named files indicating how the file is being used." It is not in IEEE Std 1003.2-1992. It was added to the single UNIX specification in SUSv2 Issue 5 (1997) which is how it ended up in POSIX. It was in the SVID from the beginning in 1985 ( http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/att/unix/System_V_Release_1/301-926_UNIX_System_V_Release_1_Administators_Manual_Jun82.pdf ). The BSD lineage mostly seems to have declared it fugly and ignored it, FreeBSD didn't spring it until 9.0 in 2012 and NetBSD still doesn't have one - they suggest the "fstat" utility instead. MacOS sprung one in ~2007 to get UNIX03 certified. And the one shipped with most Linux systems is from psmisc not part of coreutils.