This feels like trying to rewrite history. Those of us who lived through that time know that it was real - Microsoft was extremely anti-Linux. That famous Ballmer quote wasn't taken out of context, it was one of many. Ballmer and Gates were vehemently anti-Linux for years, and Microsoft engaged in deliberate marketing campaigns to smear Linux. They saw it as real competition, and they fought dirty, as they did with all of their competitors.
Here are just a few examples I found of evidence in just a few minutes of searching:
The legal questions were always overblown. The concern Ballmer was raising was that if you incorporate a bit of GPL software into your own, then it could "infect" the rest of your code and force you to release more. But that's ridiculous because nobody is forcing you to incorporate GPL software into your own. There was no serious legal concern about simply using Linux - Microsoft was just trying to scare people.
Is Microsoft a different company today? Yes, in many ways. They're much better about open-source software, for sure.
I still think they're anticompetitive in many ways. Their marketing team still prefers to try to spread lies about their competition (e.g. Chrome) rather than promote their own product on its own merits.
My initial thought there is that you'd have an imbalance. Many token patterns would almost never come up with the assistant tag on them, for example words with typos in them.
Save As works fine for simple websites with static content.
Let's say you have a site that fetches content from a database. If you Save As, then at best you'll get a local copy of an HTML page with JS that loads the content from the same remote database. It might not work (since the local copy has a different origin), or if it does, it requires you to be online, which defeats half of the purpose.
What this project, and SingleFile, both do is save a snapshot of what the rendered page actually looks like at that moment in time. The scripts are stripped out so it runs locally and has no external dependencies.
Why is that better than just requiring the SAT, which while imperfect does a great job at weeding out students who have A’s in math but can’t solve 8th grade algebra problems.
I remember at Google at around 2007 - 2009, as Google was massively expanding its data centers, there was a lot of unused capacity, especially during off-hours. Any engineer could run as many jobs as they wanted at zero priority, which means the job would be first in line to be killed if a more important task needed the resource.
I did so many interesting experiments with MapReduces that would run overnight.
For a while, I would even build internal services that were basically "free" because I'd just run them all at priority 0.
Over time those services got less and less reliable as overall usage started to increase, so I was forced to either justify the resources or scale back - but that was a good thing.
I feel like something similar would be a good model for AI token use: big tech companies ought to have their own self-hosted LLM data centers to power their own needs, then let employees use off-hours capacity to experiment.
Outside of experimentation, we should be encouraging token efficiency for everyday tasks. Rather than having a certain number of tokens, engineers should be evaluated based on how much they actually get done.
Using a lot of tokens to automate a process that used to require hours of human labor every week? Good use of tokens, should be encouraged.
Using a lot of tokens to debug an easy frontend bug that could have been fixed by hand, and still took you 4 hours to complete? Waste of tokens, should be discouraged.
I'm using a brand-new MacBook Pro with a high-end M5 processor, and this site is extremely unresponsive for me. Huge latency between clicking and getting feedback.
It also breaks accessibility.
The QR code use case seems far more reasonable to me, you're generating a static image.
There are periods of time where I might spend 80% of my time "coding", meaning I have minimal meetings and other responsibilities.
However, even out of that 80% of my time, what fraction is actually spent "writing code"?
AI can be an enormous accelerator for the time I'd normally spend writing lines of code by hand, but it doesn't really help with the rest of the work:
- Understanding the problem
- Waiting for the build system and tests to run
- Manually testing the app to make sure it behaves as I'd like
- Reviewing the diff to make sure it's clear
- Uploading the PR and writing a description
- Responding to reviewer feedback
There are times when AI can do the "write the code" portion 10x faster than I could, but if it's production code that actually matters, by the time I actually review the code, I doubt it's more than 2x.
Also it's highly multithreaded / multiprocess - you can run subagents that can communicate with each other, you can interrupt it while it's in the middle of thinking and it handles it gracefully without forgetting what it was doing
If you watch the climb you'll see that the skyscraper definitely wasn't quite so straightforward - there were some interesting challenges along the way.
Of course, no question El Cap was technically far more challenging.
I was at Google when the Flutter team started building Fuchsia.
They had amazing talent. Seriously, some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with.
They had a huge team. Hundreds of people.
It was so ambitious.
But it seemed like such a terrible idea from the start. Nobody was ever able to articulate who would ever use it.
Technically, it was brilliant. But there was no business plan.
If they wanted to build a new kernel that could replace Linux on Android and/or Chrome OS, that would have been worth exploring - it would have had at least a chance at success.
But no, they wanted to build a new OS from scratch, including not just the kernel but the UI libraries and window manager too, all from scratch.
That's why the only platform they were able to target was Google's Home Hub - one of the few Google products that had a UI but wasn't a complete platform (no third-party apps, for example). And even there, I don't think they had a compelling story for why their OS was worth the added complexity.
It boggles my mind that Fuchsia is still going on. They should have killed it years ago. It's so depressing that they did across-the-board layoffs, including taking away resources from critically underfunded teams, while leaving projects like Fuchsia around wasting time and effort on a worthless endeavor. Instead they just kept reducing Fuchsia while still keeping it going. For what?
Here are just a few examples I found of evidence in just a few minutes of searching:
https://slate.com/technology/2005/11/the-open-source-movemen...
https://www.wired.com/2014/07/tech-time-warp-ms-matrix/
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2002-dec-26-fi-micro...
The legal questions were always overblown. The concern Ballmer was raising was that if you incorporate a bit of GPL software into your own, then it could "infect" the rest of your code and force you to release more. But that's ridiculous because nobody is forcing you to incorporate GPL software into your own. There was no serious legal concern about simply using Linux - Microsoft was just trying to scare people.
Is Microsoft a different company today? Yes, in many ways. They're much better about open-source software, for sure.
I still think they're anticompetitive in many ways. Their marketing team still prefers to try to spread lies about their competition (e.g. Chrome) rather than promote their own product on its own merits.