deviantbit
This is the most ignorant response I've seen yet. We don't expect monetary gain from publishing a book. We expect our costs to be covered.
This is about the consumer, not the publisher. If we lived in a socialist system, they would still pirate our publications and we will still be in debt over it.
The biggest problem on why we don't write books is that people don't buy them. They take the PDF and stick it on github. Publishers don't respond to the authors on take down requests, github doesn't care about authors, so why spend the time on publishing a book? We can chase grant money. I'm fortunate enough to not have to chase grant money.
Sounds like you had a good mentor. Buy them lunch one day.
You live in a fantasy—equal parts hand-wavey, ahistorical, and dangerously naive.
Let’s unpack your utopia: suggesting that we flatten address spaces, eliminate syscalls, remove hardware memory protection, and run everything inside a universal software sandbox (like a JVM/CLR/WASM)—because it’ll simplify the CPU, save power, and increase portability.
No. This is a complete misunderstanding of why modern OS and hardware architectures exist the way they do, and an even bigger misunderstanding of the real costs of doing all this “in software.”
Do you like not having random apps reading your banking info from memory? Good. That’s thanks to hardware-enforced memory isolation using virtual-memory.
Do you know what syscalls and context switches really cost? A few hundred nanoseconds. On a modern processor, that’s background noise unless you're writing ultra-low-latency code (and if you are, you're already using things like io_uring or DPDK to bypass the kernel).
Just go away.
He really science’d the heck out of that one. I’m getting tired of seeing opinions dressed up as insight—especially when they’re this detached from how real systems actually work.
I worked on the Cell processor and I can tell you it was a nightmare. It demanded an unrealistic amount of micromanagement and gave developers rope to hang themselves with. There’s a reason it didn’t survive.
What amazes me more is the comment section—full of people waxing nostalgic for architectures they clearly never had to ship stable software on. They forget why we moved on. Modern systems are built with constraints like memory protection, isolation, and stability in mind. You can’t just “flatten address spaces” and ignore the consequences. That’s how you end up with security holes, random crashes, and broken multi-tasking. There's a whole generation of engineers that don't seem to realize why we architected things this way in the first place.
I will take how things are today over how things used to be in a heart beat. I really believe I need to spend 2-weeks requiring students write code on an Amiga, and the programs have to run at the same time. If anyone of them crashes, they all will fail my course. A new found appreciation may flourish.
Yes, on Apple Silicon, the hardware supports shared physical memory, and with enough “convincing”, you can rig up a contiguous virtual address space for both the CPU and GPU. Apple’s unified memory architecture makes that possible, but Apple’s APIs and memory managers don’t expose this easily or safely for a reason. You’re messing with MMU-level mappings on a tightly integrated system that treats memory as a first-class citizen of the security model.
I can tell you never programmed on an Amiga.
I love studies. Which study, who funded it, and why?
Widespread layoffs are not necessarily a sign management screwed up, in most cases this is not the case. For example, who would have been able to predict COVID? I did, but that was in the first week of January 2020. I was able to profit from it. The largest total number of layoffs in history occurred in 2020. Market conditions change.
Is it managements faults that productivity is increasing at exponential rates because of machine learning? Did they screw up If they fire everyone because of automation, and lower costs? That is not a screw up. Automation creates opportunity. It also creates opportunity to fire people to increase the value of the share holders equity.
Buckle up butter cup, your emotions and feelings about to become even less relevant. There is going to chasm in labor like never before. We have an entire generation that has been sold they are entitled to a job. Shareholders, management and politicians are sick of them and we're doing everything possible to avoid them.
Whoever is funding these activist investors, probably a nation/state, is doing it on purpose. Natasha Lamb has to be the dumbest investors to ever live, next to Cathie Wood, IMO. You could invest in an S&P index fund and perform better at 264% for the past 11 years, compared to her 132% realized, and taking far less risk.
I get everyone has their idealistic views of how the world should work, but capitalism dominates every other society, providing better living standards, and security. It is unfortunate we have had leftists in the Democratic party take control of it, and pushing some very strange agendas, that doesn't reflect reality. These strange agendas have been exploited by other nations, like China.
Some activist investors have brought better function management and boards. Carl Icahn is a great example. But he has also brought his fair share of problems.
There are a few basic accounting principles employees need to understand. It all revolves around Assets = Liabilities + Owner’s Equity. If you think otherwise, take a "Cost Accounting" course. This is a pure numbers game. Everyone wants to wrap a psycho analysis into something that has ZERO relevancy.
If a company is bleeding revenue, it cannot sustain the overhead of employees. They have to go. Cutting hours does nothing for those on a salary, and those that are hourly, benefit costs are far more expensive than their wage. If a company has stagnant growth, that means leadership has made bad decisions, and things have to change.
Employees feelings don't matter on a Balance Sheet, Income Statement and Cash Flow Statement. There is not a "Employee's Feelings" column on the ledger. Everyone can be replaced. No one is special, unless you're a majority shareholder.