Thanks for the thorough explanation, that, indeed, is a level of nuance that's hard for me to spot.
Interestingly, "absolutely right" is very common in German: "du hast natürlich absolut Recht" is something which I can easily imagine a friend's voice (or my voice) say at a dinner table. It's "du hast Recht" that sounds a little bit too formal and strong x[.
Agreed on the sycophancy point, in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
> in Gemini I even have a preamble that basically says "don't be a sycophant". It still doesn't always work.
Using this kind of strategy eventually leads to the LLM recurrently advertising what it just produced as «straight to the point, no fluff, no bullshit». («Here is the blunt truth»).
Of course no matter how the LLM advertise its production, it is too often non devoid of sycophancy.
There's likely a cultural element to it as well regarding how we admit mistakes and correct ourselves.
With how blame-avoidant western individualist culture can be, seeing something "admit" doing wrong so quickly, and so emphatically, could be uncanny valley-level jarring.
It's almost like an uneducated public is easier to control..
Praise anti-intellectualism, change the media landscape so that everything is either consumed through short bursts of dopamine or presented in a way to manipulate you, and you'll have a society of people who are driven by their emotions with a very short memory.
As for the UK OSA, I think people are waking up to the fact that politicians will do what they want, use the enemy of the day to justify it, and group you in with that enemy if you oppose them, but I'm afraid without significant change to the system that this will continue to occur.
> They got incredibly lucky with IBM choosing the 386 for the PC platform...
1. IBM picked the 8088 for the PC platform. This was part luck, part Motorola being too slow to market with the 68k.
2. The first PC with an 80386 was made by Compaq, not IBM.
3. A big part of what held OS/2 1.x back was IBM insisting on it working with the 80286, which made properly supporting DOS programs challenging. OS/2 2.0 came out 6 years after the first 386 based machine from Compaq.
> Itanium was a flop from bad business decisions IIRC.
Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.
Intel is suffering because their old fab folks all retired, and no young, smart engineer over the last 20 years wanted to work for any semiconductor company let alone Intel.
> Itanium was a flop from a technical standpoint but not from a business one. Intel spent roughly a gigabuck and effectively scared every competitor out the pool except for IBM and AMD.
Even without the Itanium, the economies of scale in the x86(-64) world would have driven the RISC vendors out of the game.
True, but who knows how much later that would have happened, and how the market would have looked by then.
The false information about the future of Itanium scared almost all of them to surrender, about in the same way as the fictional Strategic Defense Initiative had scared the Russians.
Sure, the details would certainly have been different, but my argument is that the end result would not have been that different from what we saw playing out.
My quick 5 cents for what might have happened in the interim:
- Without a separate high-end offering in the form of the Itanium, Intel is quicker to adopt x86-64, and produce high-end server chips with extra RAS etc. features.
- POWER and SPARC, being the last holdouts in the RISC market in our actual timeline and outliving Itanium, would likely not have been affected much wrt. Itanium existing or not.
- SGI with MIPS would likely have been the first one to fold. Would SGI have pivoted to x86-64 & Linux sooner than they historically did, or would the company have gone bankrupt first?
- HP/Compaq with PA-RISC and Alpha is perhaps the most interesting question. HP did a lot of early VLIW/EPIC research with an eye towards developing a successor to PA-RISC. Would they have thrown that R&D away and selected to focus on either PA-RISC or Alpha after failing to secure Intel as a partner in the Itanium? Or would they have tried to develop something Itanium-like without Intel?
Another interesting what-if, if Itanium didn't exist, would instead 3rd-party manufacturing of high end chips (similar to TSMC today) have been developed sooner than historical? Keeping in mind that a large reason for the Itanium was accessing the semi process R&D and chip manufacturing prowess of Intel, as the thinking at the time was that tight (vertical!) integration of the chip design and manufacturing was a requirement for the highest end CPU's. And it was the spiraling costs and volume required of chip manufacturing that was the boat anchor around the necks of the RISC vendors moreso than the chip design itself.
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