For example he made the back then very-very brave decision to completely getting rid of Windows as the leading Microsoft brand. He had a very clear vision for Microsoft and the industry even if the outcome is not super exciting products for you and me. He’s not squeezing Azure - he was the person who made Azure into what it is now.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
> I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
Well he did change Google fundamentally. Imagine being so dense you're fumbling to a competitor built on a technology that you innovated .
That being said, I'm still long Google because they're the tortoise. And this is one of those races where slow and steady might actually win. And while I was a strong critic of Pichai on a lot of fronts (just check my past comments!), he still must be given due credit for his measured approach and for navigating Google through some of the roughest regulatory environments, and for leaving Google relatively unscathed.
My point was more that MS hasn't had an industry changing product in a while. Google became joint-SOTA in AI and seems poised to take the crown with the next Gemini, and also in self-driving cars and quantum computing. They've kept their cash cows going while also being up to date on the tech that might upend their business model, so in a way they've cracked the innovator's dilemma which is definitely not an easy thing to do. A lot of HNers even wrote them off after ChatGPT and the disastrous Bard. Apple has a successful mass product in Airpods, a moonshot in Vision Pro and the insane Apple Silicon which they executed over more than a decade.
Nadella did well in the last decade to consolidate the MS stack (Teams, Azure, Office) and to invest in OpenAI when he realized MS's internal efforts wouldn't yield the expected output. He has protected their turf and made some strategic acquisitions like Linkedin and Github to keep their lead in enterprise software. From the POV of Wall Street performance and stock returns, he is a definitely a great CEO but so are Cook, Pichai even Ellison.
This is exactly how sound studios do mixing. They don't just use top-end monitors -- they generally also listen on low-end speakers that color sound in a way that's representative to what people have at home (hello, Yamaha NS-10).
People used to buy NS-10s because they knew professional studios used them. They were then underwhelmed when they sounded worse than the hifi speakers they had at home.
Many audio engineers live by the mantra "if it sounds good on NS-10s, it'll sound good on anything".
It'd be moving touchstone is the problems, speakers in the consumer space don't evolve as fast as computing tech in the user space.
You could get somewhat close by looking at what was a middle of the road consumer laptop from Dell/HP/Lenovo 5 years ago and buying one of those though.
I think compliance is one of the key advantages of cloud. When you go through SOC2 or ISO27001, you can just tick off entire categories of questions by saying 'we host on AWS/GCP/Azure'.
It's really shitty that we all need to pay this tax, but I've been just asked about whether our company has armed guards and redundant HVAC systems in our DC, and I wouldn't know how to do that apart from saying that 'our cloud provider has all of those'.
In my experience you still have to provide an awful lot of "evidence". I guess the advsntage of AWS/GCP/Cloud is that they are so ubiquitous you could literally ask an LLM to generate fake evidence to speed up the process.
> I really don’t get having all of your images in a a library and not in a file structure
Immich can store your photos in a file structure you want. It can also reorganise your files on disk based on EXIF data, and so on.
> I can’t injest, say my iPhone photos and then later categorize them and move them to the folder structure for more secure and stable long-term storage
The storage template is nothing like managing your photos within the app, moving them to different, more specific, folders. All it does is allow a type of folder structure on the main drive where the upload directories are, but if you have a more specific file structure, it doesn't allow you to manage this.
Does this make Immich effectively function like Photoview? My current Immich by default stores my uploads in an `uploads/<UUID>/<bunch of random two character folders>` structure. This was a huge disappointment after moving from Photoview.
Example: if user IDs are not random but eg Bigserial (autoincremented) and they're exposed through some API, then API clients can infer the creation time of said users in the system. Now if my system is storing eg health data for a large population, then it'll be easy to guess the age of the user. Etc. This is not a security problem, this is an information governance problem. But it's a problem. Now if you say that I should not expose these IDs - fine, but then whatever I expose is essentially an ID anyway.
I really don’t think using primary keys publicly is ever good, just because UUID4 has allowed people to smash junk into the URL doesn’t mean it’s good for the web or the users over a slug or a cleaner ID.
I definitely don't think so. You're seeing companies who have a lot of publicity on the internet. There are tons of very successful SMBs who have no real idea of what to do with AI, and they're not jumping on it at all. They're at risk.
This. It's a fascinating project, it is hard to believe how can an FLOSS project be so high quality. In my book it's on the level of Postgres (although it's a smaller project, probably).
Their frontend is amazing, their apps are not as performant, and the backend is (IMHO) the worst of them all.
No hate here, I'm really grateful for what they've achieved so far, but I think there's a lot of room for improvement (e.g: proper R/W query split, native S3 integration, faster endpoints, ...). I already mentioned it in their channel (they're a really welcoming community!) and I'm working on an alternative drop-in replacement backend (written in Go) [1] that will hopefully bring all the needed improvements.
TL;DR: It's definitely good, especially for an open-source project, and the team is very dedicated - but it's definitely not Postgres-good
Why the focus on S3 for a self-hosted app? Anyway kudos for the effort, I'm not experiencing performance issues in my locally self-hosted Immich installation but more performant software is always welcome.
I have and love my self-hosted immich install. If self-hosted could also use S3 storage, that allows me to use Garage (https://git.deuxfleurs.fr/Deuxfleurs/garage) , which also lets me play games with growable/redundant storage on a pile of second-hand hard drives. IIRC it can only use a mounted block device at the moment, (unless there is a nfs-exposed s3 translator ....)
A lot of existing tooling supports the s3 protocol, so it would simplify the storage picture (no pun intended).
S3-compatible storage. In my case, Backblaze B2. The idea is to make the backend compatible with rclone, so that one can pick whatever storage they want (including B2 / S3 and others)
I backup my immich photos in B2 with rclone but I prefer having it as a separate process (also, the backup is append-only). I don't need "hyperscale", and storing directly on S3/B2/remotely breaks a bit the 3-2-1 rule I want to follow.
On B2 (and S3 storage in general) you can set a retention policy for what happens after you delete an object (e.g: object lock with persistance for at least 30 days). Of course this is not a substitute for a backup - but it's better than discovering that you deleted your whole 1TB library when it's too late
Looking at the world around me, so much of it is driven by open source. In fact, I can't name a single piece of electronics around me that isn't using it.
OpenAI is winning in a similar way that Apple is winning in smartphones.
OpenAI is capturing most of the value in the space (generic LLM models), even though they have competitors who are beating them on price or capabilities.
I think OpenAI may be able to maintain this position at least for the medium term because of their name recognition/prominence and they are still a fast mover.
I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
Apple is not the right analogy. OpenAI has first mover advantage and they have a widely recognized brand name — ChatGPT — and that’s kind of it. Anyone (with very deep pockets) can buy Nvidia chips and go to town if they have a better or equivalent idea. There was a brief time (long before I was born) when “Univac” was synonymous with “computer.”
> I also think the US is going to ban all non-US LLM providers from the US market soon for "security reasons."
Well Trump is interested in tariffing movies and South Korea took DeepSeek off mobile app stores, so they certainly may try. But for high-end tasks, DeepSeek R1 671B is available for download, so any company with a VPN to download it and the necessary GPUs or cloud credits can run it. And for consumers, DeepSeek V3's distilled models are available for download, so anyone with a (~4 year old or newer) Mac or gaming PC can run them.
If the only thing keeping these companies valuations so high is banning the competition, that's not a good sign for their long-term value. If you have to ban the competition, you can't be feeling good about what you're making.
For what it's worth, I think GPT o3 and o1, Gemini 2.5 Pro and Claude 3.7 Sonnet are good enough to compete. DeepSeek R1 is often the best option (due to cost) for tasks that it can handle, but there are times where one of the other models can achieve a task that it can't.
But if the US is looking to ban Chinese models, then that could suggest that maybe these models aren't good enough to raise the funding required for newer, significantly better (and more expensive) models. That, or they just want to stop as much money as possible from going to China. Banning the competition actually makes the problem worse though, as now these domestic companies have fewer competitors. But I somewhat doubt there's any coherent strategy as to what they ban, tariff, etc.
What do you consider an "LLM provider"? Is it a website where you interact with a language model by uploading text or images? That definition might become too broad too quickly. Hard to ban.
the bulk of money comes from enterprise users. Just need to call 500 CEOs from the S&P500 list, and enforce via "cyber data safety" enforcement via SEC or something like that.
everyone will roll over if all large public companies roll over (and they will)
IE once captured all of the value in browserland, with even much higher mindshare and market dominance than OpenAI has ever had. Comparing with Apple (= physical products) is Apples to oranges (heh).
Their relationship with MS breaking down is a bad omen. I'm already seeing non-tech users who use "Copilot" because their spouse uses it at work. Barely knowing it's rebadged GPT. You think they'll switch when MS replaces the backend with e.g. Anthropic? No chance.
MS, Google and Apple and Meta have gigantic levers to pull and get the whole world to abandon OpenAI. They've barely been pulling them, but it's a matter of time. People didn't use Siri and Bixby because they were crap. Once everyone's Android has a Gemini button that's just as good as GPT (which it already is (it's better) for anything besides image generation), people are going to start pressing them. And good luck to OpenAI fighting that.
Companies that are contractors with the US government already aren’t allowed to use Deepseek even if its an airgapped R1 model is running on our own hardware. Legal told us we can’t run any distills of it or anything. I think this is very dumb.
> If your goal is saving energy/money, you don’t want a system capable of going from cool to toasty in 20 minutes.
Depends. As explained in a sibling comments, I have some rooms that have combined UFH and radiators, and if the desired temp is more than 1 celsius away from the current temp, then both are driven, otherwise it's just the UFH.
So long as you can get the boiler return water temps low enough, you can operate the boiler in its high efficiency range.
Most dual-temp setups are set for the highest temp and mixed-down to provide the lower temp for under-floor. That’s cheapest in terms of equipment and install but cannot be as efficient as a system that mixes down when both loads call but also lowers flow temp (thereby lowering return temp) when no high-temp rads are calling.
So he changed Microsoft fundamentally - a very difficult thing for such a large company.
I don’t see Pichai changing Google so fundamentally. I admire Cook though.
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