to11mtm
And by that, I mean...
He's the CEO of a company that is in it's second of 15-ish years 'selling shovel' booms. The guy who's motto has been 'We are 30 days from going out of business' for... about-ish 30 years.
Corporate espionage should have been a concern for a good part of that in his communications.
We have no clue what actually happened. For all we know it's a case of 'he was warned, his internal security groups already knew, and they were feeding useless info the whole time'.
Yeah, 100%. Even for relatively complex scenarios (i.e. over-engineered for purpose) as long as the engineer can prompt coherently and tweak it's a big increase in productivity, at least for those people.
The gap is in things like contract houses where you might see better code on code review from the people submitting but if you actually use the tools, you know that the hours billed are even more inflated than they might have been before.
Even last week I had a case where, I was reviewing code that I know the dev was vibe coding, and honestly was good up to that review.
Buuuuuut, for the stuff I reviewed that day, there was some base-class inheritance use that was so ugly that my initial teams message to the dev was along the lines of 'What crack was Copilot smoking on that one'.
Turns out, they had asked some other random-ish questions in the chat they were doing their actual work in, and those questions more or less polluted the context.
Sure, I was able to guide them for how to not do that in future (i.e. keep unrelated questions around the work in question to a separate chat, etc.) but this was also a dev that is normally both very good, but also overworked semi-related to the general 'AI will save us on dev costs thing'.
I can't help but ask whether, for the even less-technical people that are told 'yeah you lost two colleagues but here is Copilot/Claude/etc' and they don't even get enough advice to have it actually increase productivity versus chasing down gremlins in the actual work.
The last 'forward-ish' thinking thing that I can think of, was the partnerships with Mitsubishi (i.e. Eagle/DSM) and the GEMA engine. But even those didn't really play out as huge wins long term, versus, say, Ford doing the quiet-ish license agreement patent swap around hybrid tech.
Penta-Star as they used to be called in the 90s, well, back then they had the Neon which was surprisingly competitive [0] in the small car segment despite being a relative death trap and having reliability issues[1][2]. They had the Grand Cherokee which was honestly innovative as far as being a Rear-wheel drive Unibody thing that could still compete with a Body-on-frame platform as far as handling/offroading.
The Daimler merger doomed them however, between the various accounting tactics used and overall clash of engineering management styles between the brands. Ironically I will note that of all the things Daimler messed up over there, they did manage to not mess up Jeep that much
But Daimler gutted the other brands, and FCA was fairly not-useful around fixing that... They had the 200, but like everything else let it sit too long without updates... to the point where 7-8-ish years ago, my father wanted to buy another Sebring to replace his increasingly problematic Sebring, and I managed to find a Chevy Malibu of all things to try instead. My dad had purchased Chrysler products since before I was even born.
He has thanked me for suggesting the Malibu multiple times since, he still talks about the things he likes about it sometimes even though it's getting a little long in the tooth, lately it has been more of a "I know I probably should replace it but I don't see anything I want" [3]
(which is the best hope I can have as his son having to do a 'bruh' moment to his father, around a purchase consideration.)
> Stelantis turned Jeep into a lifestyle brand
IMO They only accelerated the process and it wasn't just Jeep. FCA had a mixed bag around 'lifestyle branding' management as well.
After the FCA bit, 'Dodge' started becoming more of a 'performance' brand with the Hellcats/Demon/etc and for a short time had the Base Charger/Challenger and every Avenger as a 'pretender' model and the Dart as a quasi-compliance-car [4].
RAM came about under FCA as the 'commercial/truck' brand, Ignoring the thing where every other domestic maker kept their mainline Trucks [5] under their normal car brand.
[0] - OG Neons had a horsepower extremely competitive with the JDM cars of the Era
[1] - But oh wait they forgot to drill all the head gasket holes to consistent depth leading to head gasket failures
[2] - That transmission was originally designed for cars making way less HP/Torque and from experience it's not fun to deal with the clutch packs failing when trying to get onto a highway.
[3] - I mean, Worst comes to worst I will try to suggest a Crosstrek Hybrid (new) or Fusion Hybrid (used) if it comes up via incidental.
[4] - For the unaware, a compliance car, is a car made by the manufacturer to help improve their overall fleet emissions/mpg targets.
[5] - Sure, GM has GMC, but that was more branding towards a specific age demographic than 'commercial vehicle' or 'truck bro'.
While I kinda agree (And IMO ask whether having proper syntax would be a stepping stone to other things in future like proper alignment for 16-byte fields so we could sanely do cmpxchg16b), if I had to guess, it's because there's other existing code to handle StructLayoutAttribute, so just doing another attribute versus having a field probably was the 'easiest' way to implement across the different bits of the JIT and GC.
Silverlight comes to mind, Also the fever dream that was '.NET micro'. I might still have my NetDuino somewhere...
> the main target audience of C#/.NET has always been LOB CRUD app shops.
I do think this has changed over time. There's definitely been improvements to the overall ecosystem from game developers (Cysharp being the most prolific) via both libraries and feedback around the BCL/JIT/etc.
i.e. I think the x64 framework compiler was based on MSVC, but the x86 was a bit of a different beast. That was part of why they did RyuJit in the first place, to help unify the JITs between the large divergence in how they worked [0].
One big thing being, AFAIK the old 32 bit JIT would never use SSE2 outside of some block copy type stuff. They assumed a safe baseline for most other instructions and stuck with that (although, there can be good reasons for this, e.x. consistency with x87 behavior.)
Will also add that the old x64 compiler sometimes really did do some questionable stuff, i.e. when we flipped things to use it we never really saw a perf benefit even when dealing with larger datatypes/etc that should have seen a benefit from wider registers.
RyuJit definitely has fixed that, but... again, the past is a bit hazy.
[0] - https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/ryujit-the-next-genera...
Kinda surprised you left Apollo 13 out of that list, as it was definitely an ensemble cast of the 90s but he still IMO nailed the role.
Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.
As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70- 80% L2R for contractors.
IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.
I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').
And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.
This curious bit is that it was 'You want something between a Toyota/Honda and a Lexus/Acura, but closer to the capability of a Jeep'. Where it's more curious, is that the modern Subaru hybrids are actually better at off-roading than the new Jeep Cherokee hybrid.
Why is that? Well at least IMO it's cause Subaru sticks to their guns, their hybrid system sticks to what they have always tried to do versus the Jeep doing, at least AFAIK, the same sort of 'AWD' hybrid setup of most hybrids, where the rear wheels are electric only and you have to wait for the computer to decide to apply Any power.
Interestingly, The closest hybrid AWD design I'm aware of to what Subaru is doing, is Ford with the AWD HF55 on the Maverick, in that case they are doing it to also help make sure it can meet the needs for 4K towing.
It's not as efficient, but it is at last consistent from a branding execution strategy. Definitely moreso than Jeep who has watered down everything they sell so much it's... who knows anymore.
It's been like a year-ish...
And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,
> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.
'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.
Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.
[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.
[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...
The real deal would be putting another drill on the back wheel, so that you have All-Wheel-Drive!
Downside is, of course, 10 bytes is a fairly awkward size; it is not nearly as fast as 32/64 bits to move in and out, plus it -has- to be memory (i.e. can't just borrow another register) and then the potential impacts around alignment of data structures/etc to consider.
That said, I think that Mercedes-Benz promises to shield liability, but only under some almost contradictory conditions (pre-mapped highways, good weather, and at speeds lower than any highway I've ever driven) and the driver has to take over within 10 seconds if prompted.
RAW can be it's own entire nasty^nasty rabbit hole. The sorts of stuff that honestly do make me wonder if certain raw formats have their own unique ways of exposing vulnerabilities in accepted ways of implementing.
Things that come to mind are;
- Compressed RAW images. Both the lossless and lossy variants, esp because every manufacturer does their own thing, well except maybe MFT[0], buuuut;
-For MFT, my understanding is that the RAW doesn't just contain some info for LR/C1/DPL[1] or any other sufficiently implemented processing tool to apply correction data (again, I could be wrong, but I think that is something that the Micro 4/3 format does.)
[0] - Micro 4/3
[1] Light room, Capture One, DXO PhotoLab (FKA DXO OpticsPro)
I guess, maybe, but perhaps the risk that GP is commenting on is that it could be it's own form of Juicing.
I do sincerely doubt, even with the big shifts that AI enables to have companies 'move away' from Oracle, that Oracle will default.
On the other hand, There's still an elevated chance of decline.
IOW, Those stocks might move from pension type plans to different baskets as a result, however there is a non-negligible risk of some (not total!) loss in the 5-10 year term.
Will add, I would -hope- that the same pension rules around selling questionable stocks, would also have rules limiting what level of exploitation is possible.
Even people who have laptops, the shift to smartphones and tablets for much (maybe most? IDK I'm still a laptop person at minimum when I write this so it's hard to say) of their computing/communication is another order of magnitude change for sure.
As another side note/anecdata, I still remember the amazement where the aftermath of a nasty (mostly wind) storm in 2017 caused major outages in my region. I had just moved into an apartment and due to the lagging maintenance around makeready/treetrim it took the better part of a week to get power back. Thankfully however, I had a fully charged, fancy-ish APS Backup unit [0] that was able to keep my Surface Pro 3 and 4G Hotspot charged enough to at least not feel totally in the dark. It was crazy to see how even with both charging the 'time remaining' indicator said I could have used both way more than I even needed to.
[0] - Some variant of an APS 1500VA
- CRTs got replaced by LCDs, and LCDs even 25 years ago were maybe around half the wattage
- CFLs and then LED Light bulbs replacing older filament bulbs.
- The switch from desktop PCs that might take 100-200W before even considering the screen, to Laptops that might use 50W on average.
With the smaller thought of:
- Set-top appliances like rice cookers and air-fryers that tend to be better for smaller everyday cooking than a full-on oven or stovetop.
And it's fun to think about, e.x. I remember when I had to move back in 15-ish years ago my parents (very politely!) complained about the power bill increase until I went ahead and did the one-time cost of switching all the bulbs I could to LED. That change alone managed to cover the PC, monitors, and TV I had at the time.
Realistically, your average citizen is using less power than they were even 40 years ago, even with all the additional technology they have.
I did go ahead and do a query against gemini, and the estimate is 25 cents a box after considering long tail expenses (i.e. fuel, CARB premiums, etc.)
So, Less than you thought and way less than even I initially expected.
Mea culpa on my end, I wonder where the other parts of the price are coming from.
I do have other thoughts, but don't know California labor laws and the like enough to guess.
e.x. I know one big factor in the 'slowing' of inflation of grocery prices in my state over the last 20 years, has been the erosion of pay/benefits for workers. If California is still guaranteeing that for the workers (decent health care, at least a couple weeks of vacation time, etc.) and it's built into the cost... makes sense and TBH I wouldn't hate paying extra for that. Grocers here have with only a few exceptions gotten terrible.
Unless you mean, it happened to be actively transmitting during a(n investigative) sweep.
Still, raises some fun concepts. The sort of things where in this current level of technology you'd almost need to supercool a room for a sweep, blast various RF/sound/etc and look for anything that even remotely warms up, to detect (1) whether something detected something worth recording for later as well as (2) something that might be on the right wavelength/etc to trigger a send.
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)
My understanding is that yes, and that was part of Tom Hall parting ways; based on the alpha versions and the 'Doom Bible' it was intended to be a more story driven experience, closer to Marathon.
That said, The engine could support such at least with some enhancements. Strife is still one of my favorite games if that era thanks to the 'living world' feel, even if it has some nasty ways to get in a hostile overall world state or dead end.
AKA, the decade where everyone bought way too much into the 'Just do JIT supply chain for the manufacturing location to warehouse tail and pretend we are Amazon' bullshit.
I put it that way because it is short-sighted to not consider that transportation costs will always increase over time (i.e. fuel prices, wages of drivers) and shipping a final product over that long of a distance (i.e. at least half of the country, and instead of shipping grain to process it is finished boxes which is less efficient for volume) and yet they made that choice.
Where it got nasty is that when the average consumer base decided it was fine to pay dealer markups on cars because of the parts issues that industry saw from their JIT shortsights, everyone saw dollar signs instead of a problem to fix.
Lots of oil sites, oil refinery plants, (heck, even landfills) just 'flare' excess Natural gas today.
Biggest reason for that, is, they don't have the infrastructure to store that excess safely (at least around here, a lot of the landfill trucks are NG powered as a way to lower their fuel costs and lower flaring, but storing too much NG in one place makes for a fun terrorism target.) Natural gas is actually -way- worse for global warming than CO2, thus the flaring process.
Not saying that's a good thing. It would be better if companies saw the growing energy demand and figured out how to economically put power generation in place, back when such projects would have been cheaper to build. Alas the cost/benefit for that has usually been on the wrong side, to the detriment of us all.
Not sure if still the case but normally you have to not only 'sign in' but also feed them information (e.x. salary at a position, write a review, etc.) in order to be able to view much of anything.
They also do not give a shit about obvious 'juicing' (i.e. when it is obvious that upper management and/or HR is adding reviews where the 'con' reads like one of those softball warning phrases in a job description.)
I'm sure there's other devils hiding in details, but that alone would make it a very tempting target for orgs that want to move off-prem to chase the 'move to cloud' 'KPI' 'Synergy' but still have a bunch of trash queries/etc running under the covers, with the additional benefit of you are safer when the sales/legal folks from licensing visit your offices for renewals and the like.
Cantrill tried to, as diplomatically as possible, warn everyone.
Nobody listened.
I think as far as the 'debacle', there was definitely a lot of hype (at least as far as HN goes) around it, the level of buzz felt similar to what one would see today around a new AI model release.
Not saying you're wrong about anything you're saying, to be clear.
Even songs we don't like have a lot of 'poetry' in their notes...