bsder

> And the 14 people who ran their own source code interfaces scoffed and said "see. I told you." And we all said "yup" - we knew something would happen one day, but that was a worst-case-scenario that few thought was even a remote possibility.

And nobody learned their lesson and they all piled over to the next centralized system that offered "FREE!".

And so it goes.

But how do you handle arguments or loop index variables? Your liveness is the entire function? You have to compile all the WASM chunks together in order to do any optimization? That seems ... problematic.

Edit: Yep. In article referenced from the original: http://troubles.md/posts/wasm-is-not-a-stack-machine/

Double edit: Some of this has already been fixed in WASM: https://github.com/WebAssembly/multi-value

I have never seen an electrical engineer who managed to skip the university context let alone an RF electrical engineer. Zero. None.

There is a reason why so many people from engineering can switch to software while the converse almost never occurs.

This is cool. However, the TI MSPM0 series are also shooting squarely in this range.

Yes, they are about 2x the same price and are ARM instead of RISC-V.

However, in return you get analog peripherals that have some hope of not sucking, actual documentation, and a standardized debugging interface.

Normally I would make snide comments about not having to deal with the vagaries of Chinese suppliers, but I live in the US so I can't really throw stones about that right now.

> How many actually contributed back to keep it going?

Or why not hire the guy?!

Seriously. Is nobody using this at a level where hiring the primary maintainer is a good idea?

> Well maybe we could just inject amyloid into a person’s brain.

Erm, we kinda did? People who got cadaver-derived human growth hormone from Alzheimer's patients got Alzheimer's.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02729-2

And we just had an actual autopsy confirm a case: https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/new-evidence-strengthen...

> Optimized for minimum cost with zero margin for surge. On paper, efficient. In practice, one bad day away from collapse.

I'm going to steal that one and add it to Stross': "Efficiency is the reciprocal of resilience."

> People with mutations in those genes got a particular type of inherited alzheimers early, this says nothing about the cause of general Alzheimers.

This is completely analogous to claiming that people with mutations in BRCA (which causes a lot of early breast cancers) says nothing about general "cancer".

That's simply flat-out wrong. Genetic mutations like BRCA affect certain subsystems and many of those subsystems are common and relevant to many different cancers outside of breast cancer or breast cancers that appear later. Lots and lots of cancer research proceeded by studying the common systems that BRCA affects. Sure, those subsystems aren't involved in every cancer, but they're involved in a solid chunk of them.

And, even better, when you find one that isn't affected by one of those subsystems that BRCA touches, that's an interesting result, too. Now you can look at what the differences are, figure out what the new subsystems are and categorize your cancer more specifically which makes successful treatment more likely.

There is absolutely no reason to believe that Alzheimer's is any different on that front.

<edit> My mistake. Responded to a bot but can't delete now. Sorry. <edit>

There is a LOT of causal data. Autopsies of brains of Alzheimer's patients were rife with amyloid. People with mutations that caused amyloid got Alzheimer's earlier than others.

The hypothesis didn't come from nowhere.

To contrast, look at how much trouble medicine has had treating brain tumors. It has taken a long time to get effective treatments for various reasons. And Alzheimer's is way less direct in cause/effect.

The Amyloid hypothesis persisted for so long because we didn't have any obvious counterarguments since it is so hard to do studies on the brain. Which also means that it's not a bad hypothesis.

What happened is we got the tools to start studying viral associations with other diseases and ... whooops ... suddenly there are associations. The shingles and RSV vaccines seem to affect dementia while others like influenza don't.

Now people can ask questions about why those particular vaccines affect dementia while others don't. And suddenly we have falsifiable tests.

Now we can subject all hypotheses (including Amyloid) to stronger scrutiny.

A PCR machine is a lot like a lathe or a milling machine. The price of the machine is absolutely dwarfed by the tooling and consumables.

> Reaching up from keyboard/trackpad to touch the screen quickly gets fatiguing. It is not ergonomic.

"Let's all laugh at an industry that never learns anything tee hee hee." -- Yahtzee Crowshaw

We figured out that light pens were an abomination for ergonomics back in the 1980s.

It has nothing to do with price. I don't check luggage on domestic flights because of the enormous time lag for the airport to give me back my luggage. (There's also "United Breaks Guitars", but that's an independent problem)

If I could walk from the plane to the luggage area and my luggage was already there 90% of the time, I probably would check more things.

However, the US airports simply don't employ enough people to move the luggage around fast enough.

The is 100% correctable by employing more people. But some CEO needs another yacht, so they don't. So, I simply don't check luggage.

> Though I do think we should distinguish between compiled and interpreted GC languages, as often there is a significant gap in performance, that can be wanted or appreciated.

Sure, that is tautologically true.

However, I maintain that the original author would have gotten much further even with a pathologically slow Python implementation. In particular, munging all the low-level stuff like linking is going to have full-on libraries that you could pass off the task to. You can then come back and do it yourself later.

For me, reaching a point that helps reinforce my motivation is BY FAR the most relevant consideration for projects. Given the original article, it seems like I'm not alone.

Proebsting's Law: Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years

You need to implement very few optimizations to get the vast majority of compiler improvements.

Many of the papers about this suggest that we would be better off focusing on making quality of life improvements for the programmer (like better debugger integration) rather than abstruse and esoteric compiler optimizations that make understanding the generated code increasingly difficult.

> But I also accept that that choice means there's an upper limit to how fast my compiler will.

Don't buy it.

A decent OCaml version of a C or Zig compiler would almost certainly not be 10x slower. And it would be significantly easier to parallelize without introducing bugs so it might even be quite a bit faster on big codebases.

Actually designing your programming language to be processed quickly (can definitively figure things out with local parsing, minimizing the number of files that need to be touched, etc.) is WAY more important than the low-level implementation for overall compilation speed.

And I suspect that the author would have gotten a lot further had he been using a GC language and not had to deal with all the low-level issues and debugging.

I like Zig, and I use it a lot. But it is NOT my general purpose language. I'm definitely going to reach for Python first unless I absolutely know that I'm going to be doing systems programming. Python (or anything garbage collected with solid libraries) simply is way more productive on short time scales for small codebases.

Until he gets laid off and now is in a complete panic because he MUST make that mortgage payment.

I have watched this scenario dissolve marriages over and over among my friends.

You cannot assume your job is stable for 15 years nowadays.

People viscerally feel the disdain from the monopolies giving you the "What are you gonna do? Switch to a competitor? BWHAHAHAHA! Good luck, plebe." And it makes them angry.

For all intents and purposes, every single supply chain devolves to a cabal of suppliers who have no downstream capacity. As such, even if someone downstream wanted to shake up their competition, they can't get the supply to do it. Covid didn't cause this, but it did make it obvious to even the dumbest businesspeople. Consequently, all the businesses across the chain have settled into extraction knowing that their position is unassailable.

The problem is that the general public fails to diagnose that the issue is monopolistic control, and that the solution is to keep breaking these cabals up everywhere, aggressively.

The "inflation basket" keeps getting rejiggled to hide things.

Rent as percentage of income is up. Groceries as percentage of income is up. Medical insurance as percentage of income is up. etc.

People aren't stupid. They can see and feel this.

Yes, it's nice that computers and phones are super cheap and powerful. That doesn't help people eat.

I know of 4 companies that are already starting to stomp down on the AI whales using the "$1000 per day". There was the cost of the entire AI usage of the company and then there was the cost of about a half-dozen people who dwarfed it individually.

So, we've established a hard upper ceiling for what AI can extract per user at roughly $100K and more realistically at $10K per year. Basically, if using the AI costs the same as a human salary, it's going to get pushback. I mean, the whole point was to get rid of those pesky human salaries, after all.

So, there are about 2 million-ish software jobs in the US? It's more than 1 million but a far cry from 10 million. So that pencils in at $20 billion in the US per year total? That means that if an AI company literally won all the US software programmers, it would be worth max $200 billion to be bought out (10x revenue).

Now how much investment have the AI companies taken? Yeah, roughly that. And investors are going to want quite a bit more than that back.

Even if they had zero delivery costs, the AI companies are cooked long term. The moment your number bumps into "All the X in the US/World", you've got a problem.

Short term? Greater fool theory applies. And there appear to be a lot of them.

And all this is before we start getting into people exploring the open models. Most people were like me; we started on something like Claude and just stayed put because it was straightforward. Now that we've been kicked, we'll start looking at the other options.

It's the Carly Fiorina playbook. Welcome back to the TeleBomb! Lucent sends their regards.

I suspect lower demand was more likely (although more supply never hurts).

San Diego has a ton of contractors dependent upon the federal government. I imagine the shenanigans of the current administration caused a bunch of them to pack it in and leave town.

Got any good pointers to documentation for making the transition? I'd like to pull the trigger for OpenCode and OpenRouter as well.

Until magically all their demand vaporizes.

I suspect a lot of people are like me. They got into this at the $20/month level individually to check things out. I'm not stressing things out, so I haven't moved up, but the moment I bump into a limit, I'll pull the trigger by default. Until then, I'm the sleeping dog, and you should let me lie.

Well, Anthropic decided to kick me. Now, I'm investing the time to figure out how to use the "open" and "Chinese" models assuming that Anthropic is about to screw me. Once I switch, Anthropic is going to have to demonstrate significant improvements over what I'm now using to get me to even consider them again.

Well, interactivity was solved by OnlyFans, no? And OnlyFans seems to butcher video quality pretty badly yet it doesn't seem to dissuade people very much.

Porn tech usage is driven by solving some problem from the previous generation.

Videotape solved the "can't watch film porn at home" problem. Online payments and delivery solved the "need to risk going to the store to buy porn" problem.

What does VR porn solve over just watching standard porn on your monitor/TV?

And because of the resolution limitations, aren't VR headsets actually worse for watching porn than modern 4K monitors?

I also seem to remember that Betamax made it far more difficult to get equipment and tapes in order to produce pornography.

That conceded a big chunk of early adopters to VHS.

> There is nothing stopping you from building an old-fashioned single-pass compiler, if compile time is your only concern. The code it generates just wouldn't be very good.

Define "very good".

The very simplest optimizations get you almost all the benefit. Proebsting's Law applies: Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 18 Years

> Had V6 launched five years earlier V4 would probably be dead.

Not a chance. IPv6 ate way more memory than IPv4 and memory was expensive back in 1995. Even IPv4 proliferation was chewing up memory and that was why the IETF introduced Classless Inter-Domain Routing (CIDR) in 1993 which gave us subnet masking.

Memory cost was a problem in routing tables until after both the DotBomb and the TeleBomb.