Qasaur

As the other comment mentioned, this is still true if you want to support legacy graphics APIs. A non-negligible amount (~20%) of Android phones cannot execute compute pipelines as they only support OpenGL ES 3.0 - compute shaders were introduced in GLES 3.1.

While it is an headache if you want to support compute on legacy devices, I do think that writing regular vertex/fragment shaders for general purpose GPU computation is an underrated pleasure as you really need to break out the coding golf toolkit to squeeze out maximum performance.

This kind of rebuttal to the Austrian school is often based upon a misguided idea of monetary neutrality. Inflation does not happen everywhere in the economy at the same time - this is called the Cantillon effect and is a central pillar of Austrian Business Cycle Theory.

You are right, there is very little inflation in the consumer price index (at least nominally), but there is a significant amount of inflation in assets and other parts of the economy that are relatively close to the central bank/printing press. Inflated Silicon Valley salaries, maintained by an influx of VC money bidding up the price of labour, are a great example of this.

I always wondered why the microphone on my MacBook Pro would stop working whenever I closed the lid when using my external monitor. Glad to hear the "bug" exists for good reasons.

>I dream of an economic system that serves human beings instead of the numerical abstractions behind which the rich and powerful hide their extreme selfishness.

This is what capitalism is in its essence - a complex decentralised pricing mechanism where every human's choices is taken into account on the free market. The problem is that it has been corrupted by cronyism which has indirectly destroyed the human element of it (through centralisation and the formation of unnatural state-sanctioned monopolies and rent-seekers) and instead, as you put it, abstracted people into numbers.

I don't think anyone actually wants to be treated as a number, and I strongly believe that personal and bespoke service is a quality that most people seek in the services they choose (especially medical and caregiving services). These preferences would normally provide strong competitive pressures. However, in the medical field at least, enormous barriers of entry (largely instituted and enforced by the state) has fortified incumbent corporations and removed the competitive pressure that startups and newcomers would provide. Just look at medical education/licensing and the enormous costs involved.

If this works with Adobe Creative Cloud, then moving to a Linux distro has suddenly become much more attractive.

I strongly subscribe to this view. Opinions like this get dismissed by the usual premature optimisation argument and that engineer-time is expensive, but I think that if we built our stacks with performance and efficiency in mind a significant chunk of operating and indeed development costs would be eliminated from corporate expenditures and would outweigh the potential initial development costs (which I don't think is that much of an issue, especially when you have competent and skilled engineers building said software).

This is also, in many companies, what the lead up to an internal blacklisting looks like, especially when said company has a dysfunctional technical management. Entrenched players (competent or not, mostly the latter) who may have been involved in the original iteration of a software project and/or architecture in many cases do not take too kindly to someone who is willing to rock-the-boat and challenge their authority.

I'm a big believer in doing the right thing but all I say is tread carefully because you can and will get burned if you do not take into account the dynamics of a company's internal politics.

This already sort-of exists in the form of Nix/NixOS/NixOps. Entire system configuration is deterministic and is specified in a configuration file, and it has its own little functional DSL called Nix that is used to specify system configs and how to build software packages.

Just started using it and I think it's probably one of the best software ensembles I've ever used in my career. Completely knocks Docker, K8S etc. out of the water.

Salaries are increasing slowly in London due to the realities of market competition, but not as fast as they should be. I think it is important to note that investors and indeed managers/founders tend to erroneously focus on quantity over quality when it comes to engineers. Instead of paying two very good senior engineers 200k each, they think they can get away with the same quality and quantity of work by hiring four mediocre or entry-level engineers at 50k each, saving 200k.

I suspect this is because they consider the work that an engineer does as auxiliary in nature and that Taylorist presumptions can be applied to them (modern day factory workers).

Having some experience in the London startup ecosystem, I think London is a great place for founders and investors, but I really doubt the value proposition for startup employees.

London I think is one of those cities that crystallises how bad the general economic state of the world is, and this has been dramatically more pronounced in recent years due to extremely loose monetary policy and quantitative easing among global central banks which funnels money directly into the financial, insurance, and indeed technology (through VC) industries. Broadly speaking, I think there are three categories of hidden, but segregated nonetheless, socioeconomic groups in London, and this has a dramatic effect on quality-of-life and also general conditions within startups.

- The wealthy owners and marshallers of capital: these are your VCs and investors, as well as everyone else that isn't in tech but are closely related including foreign oligarchs. Some startup founders could probably be categorised in the lower-end of this group, as well as staff at financial service firms (investment banks, private equity funds, hedge funds etc.) including investment bankers and others. Quality-of-life is stellar due to very high compensation and/or acquired wealth.

- Support staff to the above: software engineers including many CTOs fall under this category, as well as people on the lower-rungs of the financial and insurance industries. Quality-of-life is generally good, but you are basically detained under golden handcuffs, and you will never earn the same kind of compensation as the marshallers of capital. Software engineer salaries are generally capped at around £150k if you're a lucky, with very few exceptions (HFT firms etc.). Entry-level salaries start at £30-40k, which is atrocious for a very expensive city like London and you will probably have to flatshare with others to make ends meet.

- Everyone else.

What is important to note here is that there is a very implicit status-ranking in these groups, and software engineers particularly are not respected any where close to the level they are in the United States as they are not considered members of the first group. This, as you can imagine, has very severe effects on the level of compensation and the general working conditions that you can expect as an engineer as you are not deemed deserving of more compensation since you are after all "just an engineer". This is also why stock options and other equity compensation schemes are not as popular in London as they are in the Bay Area. Software engineers are considered support staff rather than integral contributors to the success of a technology business.

This social segregation, as you can imagine, also has effects on the social cohesion of the city, and I think the recent increase of crime in London is a direct consequence of the alienation of the third category of people due to the flood of liquidity from the first category, which drives up salaries for the second group of people (and thereby cost of living in London), and prices everyone else out.

Most of Europe suffers under this kind of segregation, and I presume it is partly a consequence of antiquated social structures that were more prevalent during the 20th century but haven't really modernised to align with the interconnected and meritocratic reality of today. I believe this is the primary reason why compensation for software professionals is so low in Europe compared to the meritocracy of America (but even this is changing with implicit filters such as Ivy League degrees etc.).

Most global cities have elements of this as well, but I feel the divide and indeed social inequality is very pronounced in London and is becoming worse by the year, which is among the reasons as to why I left the city for greener pastures.

I disagree strongly with this.

I'm currently writing a cross-platform app in Flutter that is launching soon, and I found that the developer experience is world-class and I've had very few issues so far. The language is incredibly easy to pick up with close to zero overhead if you are a somewhat competent programmer as it is essentially a very lightweight OOP language. My main languages are otherwise Go and Rust, and picking up Dart was not difficult at all for me and I don't think you need to be a wizard to figure it out. I suspect JS devs will find it even easier to pick up as many of the constructs are similar.

It took only a couple of days to get up to speed with Flutter-specific functionality as well as the native API bindings, and I was already writing production code for the app the first week of exposure to the language. The UI framework is declarative and very easy to reason about and design, and the tooling is also incredibly seamless and easy to use, although I do agree that it needs some polishing as there are some edge cases that you sometimes need to trawl the Github issues page to fix.

Yes, sometimes it is frustrating as there are some things that are lacking in the standard library, but the third-party library scene is picking up and you can do 95% of what you want to do without major issue. I'm convinced that Flutter is going to become bigger in the future and is going to cover most use cases for all but the most performant apps and perhaps games.

I give it a couple of months before it is rewritten in Rust, just like bat and ripgrep.

Isaac Asimovs's "The Last Question" is an excellent short story and I consider it among one of the greatest works of science-fiction. It describes a fictional future where humanity creates a computer that acheives the singularity (written in 1956!), with an interesting twist at the end.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

>It is amazing to me that we live in an era with tiny amounts of inflation despite large central bank interventions, and yet Austrians still presume to claim that their theory is vindicated.

I think it is amazing to me that economists have redefined the definition of inflation from an increase in the money supply to an increase in the consumer price index. Yes, we haven't seen significant rises in CPI yet, but you cannot deny there has been hyperinflation in other sectors of the economy like equities and real estate. As far as I can tell mainstream economists don't really believe in the Cantillon effect (that inflation happens in a gradual sector-by-sector fashion) so inflation in certain sectors of the economy is unthinkable as, according to them, money is neutral and inflation always happens everywhere at the same time and that for some reason CPI is the best measure for this. This is categorically and logically wrong and does not hold up to critical analysis.

>Prominent Austrians claimed we would have runaway inflation after QE, and it just didn't happen.

Just because it hasn't happened yet does not mean it won't happen. All fiat currencies have always throughout history, without exception, and always for the same reasons, ended with hyperinflation and the total destruction of the currency. I don't see how the US Dollar possesses properties that renders it immune to monetary laws.

>A healthy intellectual movement doesn't need to be convinced to pay attention to empirical evidence.

You misunderstand the reasoning behind the "rejection" of empiricism by Mises and those that followed him.

Austrian theory as formulated by Mises is based on a priori truths about human nature and cannot be falsifiable by evidence. This may sound outlandish when you first hear it especially when one comes from an engineering or natural science background, but there is a very well developed epistemological reasoning for this position that is often overlooked by critics.

The economy is composed of humans who act towards their own personal goals, whether that is to provide for their family, or become a billionare tech founder. This is a highly complex system with an incredible amount of variables (in the case of individual humans, the ordinal scale of preferences is quite literally infinite!). As such, there are no constants that can be inferred with the same level of reliability that we may have in physics like the rate of gravity on planet Earth.

Thus, empirical economic models have a much, much greater margin of error than what we have in the natural sciences, and it is therefore untenable to formulate economic theory based on inherently unreliable foundations.

Instead, as the economy is composed of humans acting and not objects acting, the Austrians look inwards and through a Kantian-esque process of introspection formulate the a priori action axiom ("Human action is purposeful behaviour.") and build their theory using logic based on that axiom - thereby creating a system of knowledge that is unfalsifiable through evidence and is always true.

>However, the school of thought's aversion to econometrics makes their policy advice self-limiting compared to mainstream/mainline economic theory.

This I agree with, I do think there is tremendous value in using statistics as a way of analysing trends and reinforcing theoretical arguments with empirical data. I'd disagree strongly on the point that Austrian theory is not ignored by mainstream economists though as it seems like many of the underlying assumptions that justifies the Federal Reserve are rather flimsy when examined critically from an a priori Austrian perspective.

>As for your specific points, that the large central financial institutions are, according to Austrian theory, causing recessions, even Austrian RBC doesn't completely agree.[1] Economic busts will happen with or without central banks -- being able to bail out key financial platforms is a good thing if it prevents the unnecessary misery of millions or billions. As every economics student should learn in the second half of economics 101, the free market does not always perfectly allocate resources, either immediately or over time (see discussions on externalities).

Thanks for pointing this out, maybe I wasn't too clear in my post. I elaborate a bit more on this in a comment below, but didn't touch on the neccessity of having an institution able to bail out financial platforms during economic downturns.

I do think that this boils down to the question if we can ethically and legally justify fractional-reserve banking, as bailouts would not be necessary if banks were mandated to keep a 100% reserve on demand deposits. I'm personally a bit split on this issue and so are many other Austrians, with purists adhereing to the Rothbardian view that only full-reserve banking is ethically defensible while others prefer leaving it to the free market to decide. I believe that in the latter case private insurance companies would be more than suitable to provide services to bail out banks who overextend credit, and would also serve as a natural check on said overextension as an insurance company would not be willing to take the risk to insure an irresponsible bank with a tendency to not make careful judgements.

If anything, having a central institution that will bail out banks regardless of what happens is far more dangerous as it introduces a significant moral hazard whereby banks can take significant amount of risk (within applicable regulations, Basel III made it a bit more difficult after 2008) and know that they will be bailed out regardless of what happens. I can't say that this leads to a more stable economy than it would were we to have a full-reserve banking regime, or even a free market where banks choose their own reserve ratios.

Economic malinvestment will always be a phenomenon that arises naturally in a free market - its a product of imperfect information. Thus, isolated booms and busts are also a natural occurence in an economy as companies that aren't profitable shutdown due to aforementioned judgement errors.

The fundemental question behind the development of Austrian monetary theory is not why there are booms and bust, but why these errors of judgement occur throughout the economy in often times very different sectors at the same time. Turns out this is more often than not because of significant, and crucicially, artificial distortions to the price system that causes resources to be put to use in places where they otherwise would not be, and creates illusions of profits to those who control said resources (individual employees, investors, executivies in companies etc.). Eventually the law of scarcity catches up, and the bust materialises and prices realign themselves (through deflation, which establishment economists are terrified of) to what they should be in a natural price system.

The only way to avoid this inevitable deflationary collapse of prices is to continue the illusion, of course, which is what central banks have been doing since 2008. This makes the eventual realignment much worse though since the price system continues to be distorted to an extent larger than it previously was.

The panics that occured prior to the instatement of the Federal Reserve were more often than not caused by either inflationary policies pursued by the the Treasury and general government interference, as was the case in the panic of 1907 in an effort to save overleveraged banks, or overextension of credit (and consequent overexpansion of the money supply) by fractional-reserve banks. In most cases however, these recessions resolved themselves rather quickly and did not lead to prolonged depressions and recovery periods like we saw in the 1930s during the Great Depression.

The Austrian school of economics has been advocating for an alternative form of monetary thinking since the 1920s, and despite predicting with astonishing accuracy the mechanics of almost every recession since then nobody takes them seriously because the teachings goes against establishment economists at the Federal Reserve, the IMF, and other central planners (probably related to the fact that they show with logic that recessions and the "business cycle" are to a large extent created by interference by central banks and not a natural consequence of the free market).

What needs to happen after the coming recession is the total abandonment of the notion that centrally planning the price and quantity of money to induce inflation is somehow a necessary policy to ensure that the economic machine functions, and with that the complete abolishment of central banking and a return to either a gold standard or, with recent developments in mind, the adoption of a crypto-backed money supply that cannot be manipulated by governments.

Inflationary monetary policy is the root cause of many of the issues we see today (widespread inequalities, political tension, erosion of purchasing power and, yes, ridiculous startup valuations) we see today, and it is about time that we abandon it.

“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law' becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” - Paul Krugman

> "Furthermore, Equifax employed the username “admin” and thepassword “admin” to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a passwordthat “is a surefire way to get hacked.”"

The document does not state any further detail than this, so it is a bit unclear as to what exactly was located on this portal - does not seem like it was their main database anyhow.

Still incredibly incompetent though.

>I don’t know how things are in Paris (never really been), but here in NYC public transit is extremely unreliable and optimized for only one use case: to move 9-5 commuters between their homes in the outer boroughs and the two central business districts of Manhattan.

This reminds me of the London Underground. It really seems like no matter where you are in London it is going to take roughly 40-60 minutes to get from A to B.

It's not pointless, because control of monetary policy is exactly why they are banning it.

>The poor tend not to have much savings, by definition, which means that all this win goes to the already wealthy.

This is not true - saving rates were higher in the past before irresponsible monetary policy took over after the erosion of the gold standard.

>Your argument is simply that your dollars should be worth more later because you got your dollar first.

This is exactly what happens in an inflationary monetary regime, althought the difference is that the distribution of purchasing power increases is not homogenous in an economy rather it is concentrated on those who are either politically or economically well-connected, usually asset holders.

>Your argument is simply that your dollars should be worth more later because you got your dollar first.

How about not controlling the value of money and instead letting it reflect the general purchasing power in an economy?

>There is, for a number of reasons, but not least of which is fairness. If I get a dollar, then the size of the economy doubles, my purchasing power as a fraction of the total amount of economic activity doubles. This creates wealth inequality over time.

You assume that as an economy doubles prices won't decrease. The natural tendency of a free market is a decrease in prices due to competition, technological innovation, and other factors. If anything, holding the same dollar will lead you to purchase more goods at a higher quality than before as the market develops and expands - a higher purchasing power.

Wealth inequality is exactly what is caused when you print money to match the growth of the economy due to the aforementioned Cantillon effects.

>Most importantly, philosophically, nobody owes you a risk-free return over time on your idle, un-invested capital.

There is nobody that is giving you that return. The so-called "return" is the tendency of a free market to lead to cheaper prices and higher quality goods and services. If anything, I can't see a justification to allow the public's money to decrease in value over time.

>You mean the industrial revolution? I'd say there were externalities that affected that. Counter-point, the great depression.

Yes, there were externalities that affected it, but the core point remains the same. Competition and rapid technological innovation lead to a decrease in prices over time. The Great Depression was not a consequence of a natural deflationary regime rather it was the consequence of extremely lose monetary policy during the 1920s ("The Roaring Twenties") and it would have resolved itself quite quickly but as letting people be unemployed is usually politically unpopular Roosevelt enacted price controls that extended the market correction process that would have otherwise taken a much shorter time than it did.

>Keeping it from going up and giving disproportionate gains to money holders past is part of the job. There's nothing ironic about it, this is the job of central banks, and there's nothing shady about it.

There is something incredibly shady about it, because inflationary monetary policy is inherently a regressionary redistribution of purchasing power and wealth due to Cantillon effects whereby those relatively closer to the printing press (governments, banks, and asset holders in roughly that order) gain a higher purchasing power than those at the very end of the chain which has traditionally been wage-earners and average workers.

There is no need to print money in a growing economy, it's purely ideology from the Keynesian economic establishment where they've somehow convinced the general public that it is crucial to have a steady inflation in an economy because otherwise people won't spend money or invest (which is a priori false, as time preference is a thing in both humans and firms). For thousands of years gold has been used as a monetary backing (which is deflationary by definition), and some of the highest recorded levels of economic growth in history has generally been slightly deflationary (the United States during the 1800s is a prime example).

I think this action is a symptom of a much larger, and much more serious disease, namely the fall in trust for traditional fiat currencies like the euro and the dollar. Decades of irresponsible monetary policy and runaway inflation (CPI does not capture the whole picture, look at asset prices the past decade) since the abolishment of the gold standard has lead the general public to indirectly feel disenfranchised with the current monetary regime and I truly believe that we will see more of this kind of action in the future as fiat currencies continue to lose value and eventually collapse due to the extraordinary injection of money that most western central banks have been pursuing in the past couple of years.

Governments feel threatened as the power to levy the inflation tax is being eroded with the rise of cryptocurrency, and I think the next couple of years are going to be very interesting as more businesses adopt crypto as a means of payment. And I wholeheartedly support this development, because much of the inequality that we've seen in recent years and general social turmoil is a direct consequence of irresponsible monetary policy.

Ironic that the German government wants to avoid irresponsible monetary policy through a private entity when it is literally printing money to stimulate growth through the ECB.

It's the fear that people may prefer using other currencies than their own, which collapses the regime of spending through inflation.

I do agree with you with the measuring aspect. Part of building high-performance systems is being able to measure performance in an accurate and actionable way, and consequently optimise code paths that have significant performance impacts.

However, I do believe that a competent engineer would have the judgement to be able to see, roughly, where performance hits would likely arise and optimise accordingly. Command-line arguments would likely not fall under this mandate, but serialisation to stdout is likely a good candidate for well-designed and well-optimised code. A nice side-effect is that this also avoids significant refactors down the line when you need to, in this case, change your serialisation from dynamic dispatch to static dispatch.

It could probably be done using conditional builds for which there is support for in cargo, though that would require the programmer to write two versions of the same code. I doubt that it is possible for the compiler to do this optimisation automatically.

Recall that dynamic dispatch does not need you as a programmer to know which implementation is being used for a given polymorphic method or function - I find it difficult to see how the compiler would be able to reason what implementation is being referred to in code to generate static polymorphic code without the programmer being explicit. If that were the case, there would be no need to be explicit at all (and consequently no need for static dispatch in Rust code), and all you would need to do for polymorphism is to use dynamic dispatch. However, although this would be incredibly convenient and ergonomic, unfortunately the Rust compiler is not capable of magic.