Microsoft Build 2017 [video] | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Build 2017 [video]

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202 pointsAlexeyBrin92 comments

The technology demonstrated today should have everyone concerned. Satya talked about the responsibilities that we, as technologists have... but the power isn't going to be in OUR hands, it's going to be in the hands of the people who own the technology we build. The world outside of tech needs to see this.

So, capitalism?

Indeed.

The classic "I'm going to make all the decisions but you're responsible for our success" spiel.

I should say -- tracking people through video and image recognition in a hospital or in a factory is creepy and awesome at the same time. I can't decide just yet.

"Find me the person who ate the last piece of cake in the fridge."

"And next time they go into the supply closet, lock them in"

"And route all supply runs to alternative locations for the next two days. Order cake to be delivered to supply closet in 47 hours."

That sounds kind of nice --but this can lead to a very sterile and stifling environment. It has the potential to be overbearing, if abused.

I've always been baffled at the 'last piece' cult. That piece is no more important than any other piece of the cake. What's with all the emotional baggage surrounding it?

I found this is a cultural thing, e.g. from my personal experience it is not regarded nearly as important in the Netherlands as it is in the United Kingdom.

I agree with you -- in addition, the person to eat the "last piece" has the courage to consume the piece that is both the least fresh and has most possibly been exposed to pathogens from "other piece" eaters.

"First Piece" folks should get more flak as they've destroyed a baked work of art.

On the contrary; the first-piece person is taking all the risk of the possibility that the cake was poisoned at the factory or store. Kings had "tasters", after all.

My dad frequently eats the last cookie in the box or last piece of cake. He then leaves the container there. It's slightly different than normal "last piece" cult, but really frustrating when you're looking forward to the one piece of cake after you mow the lawn, open the container, and realize there is none left.

I'm not sure I've ever eaten cake after mowing a lawn. That's an unusual combo; and I've mowed a lot.

Agreed.

Last beer though...

We would have big problems if he started putting empties back in the fridge.

I think we have bizarrely different definitions of the word "cult."

It's because the person complaining likely wanted another piece, but now they can't because it's all gone. The "logical" person to blame would be the person who took the last one.

Errmm, simply the fact if someone had the last piece. You can't have one.

Because if you still want a piece after the last piece being taken, you'll have to bother yourself with going to the grocery store to grab a whole?

Maybe this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_heuristic

AFAIU, when something bad happens to us, we focus our regret on the smallest/nearest action that could have been undone to change the outcome. So in this case, the bad thing being that you wanted a piece and there are none left--it's natural to blame whomever ate the last piece, because it's easier to imagine an alternate reality where the last piece wasn't eaten, than an alternate reality with some earlier piece not being eaten and everybody subsequently encountering a cake with one additional piece.

Same reason the dude who filmed the Rodney King incident was blamed for the LA Riots. People figured that if he hadn't filmed it, the riots wouldn't have happened.

Because it's more scarce at that point.

The last pieces will progressively often become more and more important because of a difference between supply and demand.

More like: "Find me the person that stole my lunch from the fridge. The bag was clearly labeled with my name! Come on people, what, are we animals here?!?!"

"and send out a battle drone after him!"

I feel the same way. It will make working in an environment like this a tab bit more stressful, I'm sure.

However, it feels better than having actual people doing the same (watching you while working).

Not for the children who grew up with the same systems in their schools.

Now I start to understand the reference to 1984 and Brave New World from the beginning of the keynote.

It's awesome.

I guess, as long as you're not working in the department that has this implemented.

It will very quickly go from workplace safety to public safety.

Just a phone call away. https://www.ibm.com/uk-en/marketplace/video-analytics-for-se...

+1 , we wont even know when this boundary get crossed. however I think it inevitable

I think this has great potential in in the ER and in Surgery to ensure the basics are followed and forgetfulness does not allow for obvious mistakes --but at the same time allow for on the spot decisionmaking for the surgeon when things don't go as planned.

The thing is we have seen that checklists for both actions and communication solve that without creepy big brother shit.

Yes definitely both (I'm feeling the same).

However, these immediate policy violations are strange to me. As someone who writes software for a lot of field crews, these kinds of exceptions happen _all the time_ and very often they're for explainable reasons. (the guy's hands were busy, he asked his buddy to move the heavy tool).

I'm sure they're aware of this but you have to work in some kind of tolerance to these kinds of compliance violations, because the ultimate goal is increased safety, not finger-wagging.

I don't think that whoever is using this kind of app is expecting to act on every single "violation". It is just nice and convenient that all of the "violations" are recorded, so that if something goes down, there is a documentation in form of pictures/timestamps to back it all up.

Seems to be a pretty useful technology. As a MSFT stock owner it'll be nice to be able to go back to the video and figure out exactly when Nadella made the bad decision. This sort of monitoring and recording will be utilized with CEOs and executives and such, right?

This is about safety, not about making "bad decisions". Do executives risk their lives and health daily? What about someone working with heavy machinery?

I'm guessing that the buyers will decide for themselves what it will be "about", lacking any privisos about allowed usage in the fine print.

At first? Maybe not. But once you have that kind of power, it's hard to give up.

you move in to selective enforcement. there will be recorded violations of something for pretty much everyone, and only a handful of people will have access to it, and they'll selective enforce as they see fit. but maybe if you do this one little favor for them, they'll look the other way (for a spell).

I mean, that kind of selective enforcement is possible right now as well, cameras have been available for quite a while. I don't think that the technology shown today has added anything important for those who want to powertrip in the way you described.

And I bet any real system would accommodate for the exceptions you mention. However, it makes for a very poor presentation. The presentation here is a marketing device, not a product spec.

Sadly, I bet this goes into employee documentation.

Eg. If an employee has a workplace accident, company distances itself / minimizes cost by citing all your workplace safety violations that were conveniently recorded.

More optimistic use would be for re-training, identifying superstar employees. But saving on lawsuit costs is the big dollar win and probably the motivating factor (In my cynical opinion)

Why Windows must die. For the third time.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/why-windows-must-die-for-the-th...

Was a pretty interesting read today.

Full of crap.

WinRT/UWP is a toy application framework able to produce no better than toy apps. That is why any Windows application worth using is not "modern". The real story is that today's Microsoft can no longer execute and create something new on the same quality level as Win32 was in the 90s.

Sandboxing has nothing to do with it. You can sandbox win32 and in fact they do when you submit a legacy desktop app to the store.

Centennial apps aren't really "sandboxed" in the sense that modern apps are - they use the same declarative installer format, but once the app is running it runs as the user with full trust and can party on the user's files and other apps etc. The filesystem and registry virtualization/redirection is for compatibility with the redirection the installer does and helps against accidental damage, but it's not a security feature.

The beginning of this keynote is very unusual, instead of the "pumped up check out our new products"... he's talking about the responsibility of technologists? Guessing Microsoft has some cool AI stuff coming.

Exactly my thoughts. Raised stakes in the discourse. This either delivers, or will become a shower of BS.

Yep I think you are right. Satya just mentioned bots. Also, I'm pretty sure they'll show off Microsoft Home Hub in Windows 10 today.

My guess is that he's talking about the responsibility of technologists because they are rolling out Windows 10 S, which is a step towards leaving behind Win32, an "unsafe" API that is heavily invested in by their core programmer base.

That and they go on to show technology that can be used ways that could cause privacy concerns.

"Data has gravity and computation will move to it."

Eloquent as always.

I thought that was an exceptional way of phrasing that phenomenon, and the best pitch for moving compute back out to the edge that I have heard.

Beats the old 'developers! developers! developers!' script for sure.

Nothing beats "Developers! Developers! Developers!"

Real-time translation is the type of technology that has practical implementations. I could care less about finding designers on LinkedIn via a voice command. But if I am stuck somewhere in another country and unsure where to go or how to communicate, I guarantee I will be happy to have that translation service available.

Here is an idea for a service: You lease the translation service for the term of your trip for a dollar a day. You can lease on demand for 24 hours for 5 dollars.

Google already has this for consumers for free. Voice, text, and OCR on images.

Google Translate by Google, Inc. https://appsto.re/us/kT-Ty.i

So does Microsoft. Microsoft Translator: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/microsoft-translator/id10189...

I find that MS's translation tends to work slightly better... though Google is imho better in voice recognition. However, I really want to see all IVR systems burn in hell.

FYI "I could care less" is probably not what you meant.

It's "couldn't care less" [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw

"I could care less" is an idiom, it means the same thing as "I couldn't care less". (This may seem somewhat odd, but it's perfectly natural once you know it started out as sarcastic.)

Yes, it is something I have to consciously correct and I was doing too many things at once. I appreciate the correction.

The Parkinson's device is awesome

I'm not teary eyed at all.

I am so impressed by the device and her reaction. Something so small can give someone just enough sense of control in their lives. It's incredible.

I've not watched Build yet, but Project Emma was created as part of The Big Life Fix which was on BBC 1 (UK).

I watched the episode and was blown away!

I have just watched the part where Emma Lawton was there as a guest. I wonder why did not they do a live demonstration of the device?

Anyone know of some high-quality (meaning: good reporting, high signal-to-noise ratio), live, textual ("SFW") commentary stream covering the event? (blog? twitter? reddit? some IT news agency?)

Its blocked where I work, but http://arstechnica.com may have something going.

MS should have used their Azure speech recognition service to create live speech-to-text transcripts...

Re: myself: https://www.wired.com/2017/05/microsoft-build-2017-liveblog/ has something, but it's too fast and too noisy, and they don't even try to highlight some key "twits" with bold or something :/

In my experience it's better to wait for everything to be digested and released in text format. There's just too much bullshit to cut through. Live events are a world of cringe that I can't handle anymore. Last one I watched was NVIDIA's "Tom" incident, never again. Anandtech did a good job with the live blog, and that event was like 95% bullshit and 5% content.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mo6kRl430h4 . youtube

Interesting that many, if not most, presentations is done on MacOS.

A lot of demos are, but the actual presentations are in PowerPoint. I was watching the people in the booth run them.

So far it has been Azure Build, not Microsoft Build. Everything is about azure so far.

There are two keynotes: one today and one tomorrow. The one tomorrow will be about Windows et al.

I wasn't aware of this. This makes more sense. I thought they have abandoned Windows for a second ;)

They have however swapped the order of presentation, which might say something about priorities. Previous MSBuilds have all been day 1 Windows, day 2 Azure.

I think that reflects where they see their predominant opportunity. How much "Blue Ocean" is there left for desktop operating systems and applications? Or what use to inhabit the Enterprise data center (Server OSs, Groupware, etc)? You could coast on that more traditional business for some time, but if you're going for real growth opportunities, seems like they've got a pretty good idea where the lies.

I would add that if an Azure strategy works out for them, the "device" wars (be it Win vs. iOS vs. Android or Desktop vs. Mobile) really won't matter if they manage to be at the center of it all.

A theme this year is that the Cloud isn't just "someone else's PC" anymore. A lot of the discussions have been about several ways of running and deploying "cloud"/Azure apps on "the edges", aka user devices and IoT machines. There was the expected emphasis on Azure Stack, the on premises version of Azure. There was the new Azure IoT stack. There were many references to Project Rome (and it's Enterprise name Microsoft Device Graph) for device roaming and contextual knowledge about all of a user's devices.

Some of the implication is that "everything is Cloud" now. Serverless (AWS Lambda/Azure Functions) and "Cloud" container models may increasingly be a way applications are built and deployed, to any device, including end user devices.

Microsoft seems to be positioning that Azure is increasingly a platform for every type of application, from IoT, to on premises Enterprise, to, of course, Cloud, and possibly everything between.

Sorry if this sounds completely dumb but I can't hold it:

Can anyone explain what's with this: "you are running ML algorithms in the cloud, and we enable you to run them locally!"

Can't we already run them locally??? Why not run them locally in the first place if speed and low latency is required?

This conference is going really really well. I am impressed at the products.

Speech recognition failed 2 times before managing to translate the Chinese speech: the sentence to be translate was (in Chinese) "AI is fantastic". Isn't this ridiculous ?

Watching this now... am I the only one who thinks it's a breath of fresh air compared to the mess of the JS world?

Machine learning procedures stored inside a SQL server ???

How ugly can that be?

They are using iOS device.

Terminals in browser is the next cool thing.

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