cyberax

Exactly my point. IPv6 failed to reach the "boring, just works" level after 30 years of deployment. So much so that we are now deploying solutions with 10+ years of expected service lifetime that do not support IPv6.

Meanwhile, CGNAT really solved most issues with IPv4. Yes, even the voice/video chat issues.

Want another fun example? Try to find a SIP telephony provider in the US that supports IPv6. Go on. I do this exercise about once a year.

IPv6 is dead. Nobody cares about it.

I will believe otherwise once even one US hotel chain supports it. I have _never_ seen a hotel in the US with IPv6 WiFi. Not once.

And I once stayed in a hotel (in Mountain View, CA) that gave out public IPv4 addresses.

GCP is a joke. Their sales reps are useless, and their customer support is non-existent. They are about 8% of the cloud computing marketshare as a result.

I hate Azure, but Microsoft is at least trying to sell it properly. You get a human you can talk to and their support is responsive (although it's also useless).

> Finally, it's pretty strange to credit the success of YouTube as a revenue stream with a small loss-making company that was acquired in 2006 rather than Google, who has run it for the past 20 years.

As a Youtube user, I don't really see any improvements in it (aside from technical ones) compared to 10 years ago.

It's not bacteria. The only organisms that can digest lignin are fungi, and they do it by blasting lignin with peroxides.

As such, this works only in aerobic environments (not swamps).

Geotagging. I want to know the exact locations of pictures that I took during my travels. I also usually don't copy photos immediately.

Sure, I have workarounds. When taking pictures with my camera, I also typically take a picture with my phone to get a fix. Then I can copy-paste the location in Immich.

Oh, and another thing that GPS buys: automatic timezones. I always keep forgetting to set the time and date on my camera.

You are just a bit biased by your experience working in software. IBM was smaller than it's right now, but the whole industry was even smaller.

And you actually are failing to see what I'm trying to say. IBM is a GREAT example of my point. They pivoted from a company that makes keyboards and PCs to a company that makes custom solutions with specialized hardware and software.

This sort of corporate flexibility used to be extremely rare, and that's why you have so many examples of companies that just withered away. And this corporate stagnation was the only real limiting factor of corporate growth.

It's now gone. Companies now have much higher upper limit of complexity. It's still a competition, so it's not like every company is going to become "The Corporation" from dystopias. But there's no inherent limiter that prevents it anymore.

Here's how to fix it: "Alexa, exit Alexa plus".

> I could be wrong because I haven't paid much attention but Amazon has just fast followed everyone else innovation for a awhile so it's in like one ecosystem yeah?

A lot of innovation at AWS is invisible on the outside. They pioneered hyperscale datacenters with publicly accessible capacity, software-defined networks, secure VMs, and so on.

> I'm not trying to be snarky, I just haven't thought about aws as having any innovation for a while and I always figured it was because ruthless companies that churn through people as disposable commodities generally don't do tech innovation.

I worked at AWS before COVID. It was really a varied experience, but it was not _bad_ overall. We prided ourselves on making sure our APIs are solid, stable, and backwards compatible. When we had to make a backwards-incompatible change, we actually contacted every affected customer and ensured that their workflows wouldn't be broken.

I also wrote a floodfill a while ago! We have a mapping app, and our imagery provider returns half-filled tiles at the edge of their coverage. And annoyingly, they don't have any metadata within the tile itself that indicates the coverage. They just return black pixels for a part of the tile.

So I needed a way to detect that, and doing a floodfill from the edge of the image turned out to be the easiest way.

IBM is still around. Look at its stock price. If anything, it's an example of how post-computer companies are much more nimble than their predecessors like the RCA that couldn't pivot from a dying market.

So let's invert your argument and try to find counterexamples.

Google is already close to 30 years old. It's not a new company. Microsoft is more than 50 years old! Do you have examples of large pre-computer-era companies that were at least this old and yet were able to successfully enter and expand in new markets? And not just by buying a stake in some company but incorporating new products into the parent company.

My fear is that AI will make that even more scalable, enabling even larger companies.

Operator overloading is a non-issue, it's just another form of method calls.

JavaScript also has monkey-patching, and it's also very common. E.g. SolidJS replaces objects with dependency-tracking proxies.

There are really no fundamental language reasons why Python should be more complex. From what I heard from a JIT developer, the main issue is not the code itself but the module system and code loading.

JavaScript was designed from the start to operate inside a sealed environment with only few external handles, with the code loaded upfront or added on-demand via "eval". Not so for Python, where native code modules can (and will) result in code loaded dynamically and it's hard to track what depends on what.

Sorry, but 1000C is wildly unrealistic. There are no bulk materials that can be used to construct heat exchangers for this kind of environment. 600C is already a stretch.

At 1000C steel will react with _water_.

To be clear, I'm not talking about cooling a small crucible but a structure that is at least 20 meters in size.

They were too early. Collaboration tools and business practices built around them matured only in the 2000-s, with video conferencing becoming widely available only in the 2010-s.

If you want to study the history of bureaucracy and business (an exciting topic!), it took about 20 years for companies to adapt their business processes to be typewriter-friendly. The key invention: short memos rather than long-form letters.

So yeah, my answer is that prior to the modern computer era, companies had a natural maximum limit on their complexity*size metric. This naturally limited the scope of world takeovers and made monopolies self-limiting in the long run.

These limits have now increased, and we're seeing companies taking advantage of that.

Some numbers: the largest unregulated (i.e. not AT&T) company in the pre-computer era was GM, peaking around 600k employees in the 80-s. Amazon has 1.5 million employees now. Walmart is about 2.1 million, Alphabet is at ~250k.

And these companies are not showing any signs of slowing their growth down.

Homework: compute the heat flux from a 40 meter radius sphere, given the surface temperature 600C and the ambient temperature 0C. Now compute the amount of insulation needed to keep its temperature above 500C for 3 months, given that dry sand has an R value of 0.25 W/mK.

Flow batteries keep coming up again and again, but they just don't work well in practice. The power density of electrodes is too low to be practical, and this is a fundamental problem.

A regular 18650 cell has about 0.1 square meters of electrode surface. And you have thousands of these cells in a car battery, resulting in literal football fields of electrode area.

> So what happened to Sears, IBM, RCA, GE, Kodak, etc.?

They never had a chance to expand in the post-computer era. GE was really close, but they switched to the "do everything" model a bit too early. Before computers, your only option was to have a financial stake in other companies, and this doesn't provide enough control.

As for IBM, I think it just lacks the ambition to do anything drastic. You don't get _automatic_ world takeover, you need to work for it. But others are giving a good run for it, just look at the recent acquisitions by Oracle.

The biggest expense will be the pipework inside that pile. That you won't be able to service easily. And you'll also need a LOT of insulation around it to prevent heat from leaking out too quickly.

> The temperature swing can be much greater than 100 C.

No, because your steam will be at a lower temperature as you draw down the heat, bringing down efficiency.

I just don't see it with thermal. You have to pay the Carnot tax, and you also need humongous amounts of material.

E.g. 100 GWh (4 days of 1GW thermal power) with a 100C temperature swing (you can't go down all the way to room temperature) will need around 3.6*10^4 tons of sand. That's a lot.

Honestly, power-to-gas sounds like the only reasonable way for now. In theory, with SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cells) for power generation, it can beat the steam cycle.

It requires installing a crapp that never works well, and enabling it to get the position in the background.

I made a physical GPS logger a while ago with AGPS support (over BT), and it's now trivial to do. There's also the most trivial thing possible: after you take a photo, start getting a fix, and update the GPS position on the photo once the fix is acquired.

That's not what we're seeing. Companies grow big enough to take over entire sectors of the economy, the economy of scale works against smaller competitors.

And once you're big enough, you can just offload your inefficiencies onto the consumer (the "enshittification" stage). As long as you're not _terribly_ bad, competitors won't be able to overcome your network effects.

What _really_ held companies from taking over the world was the inherent overheads of distributed corporate structures. Before computers, you couldn't really manage a horizontal company with offices in hundreds of different cities. Network effects were also less pronounced.

Internet-enabled companies like Google (or Yandex, Baidu, etc.) are a really great example. The early Internet was about as close to a perfect free market as possible. And in every case (Google in the US, Yandex in Russia, Baidu in China) the same thing happened: one large company ended up dominating and then gobbling up all the competitors.

> Handheld cameras aren’t meant to be interacted with a lot. The interface is supposed to get out of the way and get photos to the SD card as fast and predictably as possible.

Yeah, sure. If you want a great shot in low-light conditions, you often need to tweak the color balance and exposure.

My usual test is taking a picture of the full moon. Most cameras on automatic settings result in a white blob.

I also frequently want to review a couple of previous photos to see if I messed up anything.

> Some of the camera makers have added apps and app stores and they haven’t been popular.

Camera app stores were never popular because the SDKs for cameras were obscure and buggy.

And exactly _one_. In 2013. I had it.

This camera was great. I could take pictures and upload them directly to Picassa without screwing around with SD cards. The camera UI was also a step up from the regular morass of menus, all alike.

Still no GPS. What's WRONG with you, camera makers?

> Then there are some problems that some (almost all!) people couldn't solve with unlimited time and resources.

This again comes down to the huge search space and specialized knowledge.

> Say prove Fermat's Last Theorem.

I'm not so sure about it. Can you prove it by working from the statement itself? Likely no. Can you do that if you know about the work on elliptical curves and modular forms? It's not unrealistic.

> And then there are the problems that test special knowledge.

So AI would totally crush any human on that. It has in its mind all the knowledge, including all possible methods.

So yes, AI likely has "IQ in millions". It can spot patterns really well, and it has access to all the specialized knowledge possible.

It's pretty normal to have a somewhat deficient but still mostly phonetic script. So you _can_ read it purely phonetically, but you would sound robotic and/or unnatural. It also might miss some information that is obvious to native speakers.

Most Slavic languages belong to that category. E.g. Russian and Ukrainian texts usually don't mark the stressed syllables. Russian tends to reduce vowels so they are pronounced ambiguously. Czech had some vowel shifts so that some letters are now pronounced identically, etc.

It's still much better than English, where you often need to _know_ how a word is pronounced (e.g. "put" but "putty").

I hosted Immich on an 8-year-old Intel NUC. It worked faster than Google Photos locally.

> It ignores all direct federal subsidies on roads.

It doesn't.

> It ignores the original moonshot-scale creation of the interstate highway system, which was obviously not based on user fees.

That is correct, but the last Interstate freeway was finished 30 years ago.

> It ignores related health costs caused by dirty air.

So does transit.

> It ignores the intangible but very high cost of turning cities into noisy, unpleasant, and dangerous places built for cars instead of humans.

Yeah, and cars ride without any humans inside. Nope. Freeways make cities liveable for humans, not bike bros.

> It ignores the less tangible subsidies involving things like military to keep oil flowing.

So does transit. It's a hidden subsidy for companies that can offload personnel costs onto the public.

Also, we're already in the process of switching to EVs. In a decade gas cars will be a minority of vehicles.

> It ignores current and especially future costs due to a rapidly changing climate.

Just wait until you find out how much transit and dense cities cost.

> Fainali, xen, aafte sam 20 iers ov orxogrefkl riform, wi wud hev a lojikl, kohirnt speling in ius xrewawt xe Ingliy-spiking werld.

It actually looks pretty good. It's written for comical effect, but it highlights nicely how _bad_ English orthography is.

Nope. In my state 75-95% (depends on year) of _all_ road-related expenses (including capital projects!) is funded by user fees: https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/state-infrastructur...

In comparison, transit is about 99% subsidized (when capital expenses are included) and about 90% subsidized just for the operational budget.