a fun side effect is that CS is also an early warning system for companies, so when you make it harder to get through to a human, you start throwing out info on your users' pain points. of course this only matters if people have a choice about whether to use your product, so that's gotta be an upside for insurance companies, etc.

some older pre-395 AMD articles suggested it'd be possible to use the NPU for prefill and the GPU for decoding and this would be faster than using either alone, but we have yet to see that (even on Windows) for any usefully sized models, just toys like LLaMA-8B.

also, having had to figure out some of the Pixelfed code for previous projects, i wonder if he's up to the task of maintaining any of this once the next shiny thing comes along. Fedi software has a lot of quirks in general (comes with the nearly nonexistent budgets) but as a representative issue, the dude managed to build a photo blogging service with no way to export or back up your photos and that hasn't been fixed in seven years.

ultimately, though, if we ignore software quality and developer reputation, Loops is going to live or die based on whether anyone on Fedi actually wants to make short-form video. given existing Fedi culture, plus how expensive it can be to produce and how the RoI is basically zero, i don't think we're going to see much native to Fedi. some might get crossposted by TikTok/Shorts/Reels creators that want a backup location that won't get erased the second someone makes a spurious copyright claim, but i suspect we're just going to see a few months of stolen TikToks and then not much after that.

i've gotten interview questions best solved with them a few times; a Microsoft version involved spell-checking in extremely limited memory, and the interviewer told me that they'd actually been used for that back in the PDP era.