Exactly, and Jacek Karpiński is the perfect tragic example of this dynamic.
It's worth noting that Poland was actually one of the least ideologically rigid countries in the Eastern Bloc. While you couldn't openly oppose the regime, it was entirely possible to have a brilliant career in science or medicine (like Zbigniew Religa, who pioneered Poland's heart transplantation program) without strictly toeing the Party line.
Yet even in Poland's relatively relaxed climate, Karpiński’s revolutionary K-202 was strangled by bureaucratic jealousy, state monopolies (Elwro), and the paranoia of central planners.
If that was the fate of an innovator in Poland, imagine how much worse it was inside the borders of the USSR proper. The Soviet system operated on a near-literal interpretation of totalitarian control, where maintaining absolute party monopoly over every facet of life was prioritized above efficiency, wealth, or technological progress.
In that environment, independent thinkers weren't just seen as eccentric or inconvenient—they were viewed as a systemic security threat. When a system treats structural innovation as a form of ideological deviance, the safest thing for a genius to do was to keep quiet, escape to the West, or risk ending up neutralized by the state. You can't build an "alien spaceship" computing paradigm when the system's primary metric of success is total bureaucratic obedience.
It wasn't a lack of raw brainpower or wealth; it was a structural and ideological failure of resource allocation.
The USSR and the Iron Curtain bloc had a massive population and world-class scientific talent. The problem was that the Soviet system viewed independent thought and individuality as a threat, actively sabotaging its own geniuses:
Persecution of Top Minds: Sergei Korolev, the literal architect of the Soviet space program, was sent to the Gulag, where he lost his teeth to scurvy and survived a broken jaw before being pulled out to work in a sharashka (a prison lab). Andrei Sakharov, the father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb, was relentlessly persecuted and exiled later in life for pointing out systemic flaws.
Ideology Over Reality: The state actively banned the teaching of modern genetics for decades because Trofim Lysenko’s fraudulent agricultural theories were deemed "more communist."
When you look at where the USSR did choose to spend its massive resources, it wasn't on pragmatic, cost-saving solutions. It was on hyper-expensive, top-down military prestige projects—many of which the West mathematically evaluated and discarded as impractical.
They built the RBMK reactors (like the one at Chernobyl) specifically because the dual-use design allowed them to generate civilian electricity while simultaneously harvesting plutonium for weapons, creating a fundamentally unstable system. They spent fortunes building the "Caspian Sea Monster" (a giant ground-effect vehicle) and the Tsar Bomba.
The tragedy of the Soviet computer industry wasn't a lack of money or smart people. It was that any "von Neumann" or "Seymour Cray" born in the USSR who asked the wrong questions or challenged a party bureaucrat's stupid idea was far more likely to end up in a labor camp than heading an independent tech company.
Those born in countries like Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria or Czechoslovakia were usually "asked" to leave country and they were working for the West ;-)
In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.
In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.
Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.
While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.
Would prefer a 'Google Linux'—a native desktop OS with a unified UI philosophy, similar to a macOS experience but built on a standard Linux foundation. Instead of ChromeOS or Android as the base, treat them as subsystems for compatibility.
The real 'next big thing' would be integrating an engine like Gemini with OS-level hooks (similar to the OpenClaw approach) so agents can manipulate app windows and state directly. Resurrecting Web Intents as 2-way App Intents would be the key to making this work.
Also, keeping prompts as local .md files with an Obsidian-like system editor would be a huge win for power users. Simply gating Gemini behind 'premium' Chromebooks feels like the old 'licking the cake' strategy from the Google+ days—trying to force a new product's success by coopting existing hardware rather than building a superior platform.
I can imagine having Gemini + local Gemma working with Agents, which have access to my e-mail (ideally on GMAIL, but also supporting outlook), keeping local history of my visited sites and messages... and using RAG or something even better, ideally with looking also on repos I have checkouted to my file system, and maybe even whole file system....
Work related e-mail about "sending invoice to customer"... it may suggest proper content for e-mail. Having "dashboard" with summary of todays communication to you, your tickets (at work) and so on....
Can Google build such thing? If somebody can - it will be them. Will they build it? Probably not, they would prefer to build 3rd version of Google Pay.
To be honest I had always a lot of thoughts about this how Rama would be filled with air.... I mean it spins, but how Ramas filled it with air? Central Sea was one of sources, but water wasn't possible there before whole Rama being filled with air. So my thinking was always, air enters in the center, goes in all directions, hits surface which is 750 km/h... so ~40% of speed of molecules... how much it "slows down" Rama? Would there be needed some additional force to spin it? How long it would take to "calm down", and build gradient of oxygen/air in Rama...
Always was thinking about writting some simulation for it, but it was always "someday" ;-)
You know that there is no Facebook in China? The same for Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
Even Google Search is not available in China.
And not because those companies didn't want to work in China, simply China forbade them to do it.
Funny thing, even TikTok in China is blocked... Chinese audience have Douyin from ByteDance.
So it isn't like this that "bad US is doing something to poor Chinese company"
I was thinking more about -Xint, or in Docker, or x86 JVM, but my guess is that somebody already tested it ;-)
Other thing is that one of developers in my team who is on M1 and 14.4 is able to run Java app, so...
As long as you have some days in office for everybody it may work, but it should not be done in this way that some people are working from home, and some are working from office. Long before COVID (~8 years before ;-)) we had situation where one our colleague was in office only on Mondays, and big part of team was WFH on Friday and sometimes even Thursday & Friday, so best collaboration was on Monday, little worse on Tuesday-Wednesday and Thursday-Friday almost nothing was happening
Yeah, but ask for developers to do better documentation and you will get angry answers ;-)
Remote work requires higher seniority, more independence and more decision making on worker side, but a lot of people don't want to make decisions, so there is a lot of meetings, calls and similar stuff which is replacing normal in office interaction. Things which were solvable in office by going to someones desk are now in need of coordinating some meetings, finding time which fits both sides and so on. Stuff which was done by talking during walk for lunch is now meeting. Meeting in person which took 30 minutes are taking 60-90 minutes because people are not build to use simplex channel where only voice is transferred. Stupid things like drawing something on whiteboard is impossible.
Working from home you don't have all this stuff which is happening next to watercooler.
IMHO WFH is making people also less happy, it is more comfortable, but makes people more miserable.
In office yes, remotely not. Simply they are having a lot of problems, they can describe why this is a problem, they may miss Daily so there may not be an occasion to ask.
It is also much easier to be busy working from home. Much easier to say that someone spend last 2 hours answering on questions on Slack or similar, or on e-mails, or was waiting for answer from somebody else (very often they will ask question before lunch break).
In office team is doing self monitoring, remote it doesn't work so well.
Especially in case where most of companies pretend to work from office working from home.
If something goes from higher ups it is constrain, team can try to squeeze into constrains, some people will be unhappy but this is something over theirs heads so they will be able to live with it (especially people who joined company before COVID). If this will be left to teams in many cases there will be peer pressure, some kind of blackmail and similar, latter this will result in a lot of passive aggressive comments and behaviors.
Public company is accountable to shareholders, in case if share prices will go down shareholders will want to know why, and some activist investor may go to the court complaining that company was able to have better financial results it should not work on some stuff and should fire people.
But it sounds better than "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and we are accountable for shareholders"
(edited from "Sorry for terminating your positions but we need to keep our finances in check not to loose share values, and according to law it is only thing we are force to do")
yeah, but in real world when this kind of problem will need to be solved people will most probably sort O(NlogN), or use priority queue O(NlogK), or even will go with something like O(N*K), almost no one will go with O(N) algo and because usually N and K are rather small and this code will not be called too often time complexity may be ignored. Still any solution shorter than O(N) will be called inefficient. And in real world they will know N and K from this what kind of problem they are solving, and this will not be hidden in mist of abstraction with assumption that "candidate should ask".
I'm not sure.
Yep, I tanked several interviews because even when I got info at the beginning that "we will look for your way of thinking and this how you handle problems" finally I heard "Yeah, it was OK, but there exist better algo to do it".
But still for sure those interview questions are close to checking raw IQ/algos, and if somebody shines in those probably will be OK employee.
And now it is question of candidates pool size, if you are one of wanted employers like Google, Amazon you may use this filter, you will loose a lot of good candidates who aren't good in algos, but those who will pass your interviews are still good, and you have good amount of those.
Smaller, less sexy companies may have problem finding people with this approach, but bigger and better know probably don't have problems here.
To be honest I'm commenting only part with "f.. it I'm not longer working on it", I have ambivalent feelings to "lets change code in such way that builds will go into infinite loop or fail", ambivalent because as it is not nice, but somebody who was a victim of such situation should learn not to add dependencies to newest version, because here was only some small "joke", but it might be something much worse like poisoning whole code with some malicious thing.
Problem is in this that default behavior is "we are not paying for tools", people are looking for free tools to avoid fighting with procurement and everyone seems happy.
Only really big companies are giving something back, most is simply leeching from OpenSource community.
You are mentioning several ways how this guy was able to collect money, yep, but again changing license would mean that somebody else will fork previous version and thats all.
I'm not saying that this action was super, but for me it is result of problem deep in whole idea of "free libraries" and "free tools", often this all base on some poor guy or gal spending weekends on some project, which at the start was cool and funny, but later becomes burden.
Hmm, but as I understand original developer was rather pissed off by situation when devs are working on projects in theirs own time, and those projects sometimes become important tools to lower costs of creating software for big companies, and authors are not getting a dime and are forced to use some kinds of sponsorship and so on....
In such case making one of tools "community" owned smells like some kind of dick move, even if original wasn't doing too many commits.
Working for companies we are taking big bucks for writing some glorified invoicing systems (let be honest 90% or 99% of business logic is "move from screen to DB, move from DB to screen"), but code which is often important part of whole process is created for free by some folks. Strange.
I used to love code reviews when I worked for Motorola in 2004, it was doing wonders, we observed showing up "phantom developer" where mix of inputs from different people was causing new look on code.
Those were Fagan-like code inspections. A lot of paperwork (we were doing formal reviews on paper, with one person in role of reader), but it was working. This whole paperwork was forcing people to follow rules and it seemed to work (but was sometimes very painful).
Latter in other companies I found out that code reviews are in most cases bullshit placeholders, and in many cases are only for making some developers feeling more important, or other devs not loosing contact with code. I saw most stupid things in code moved to position of examples how to write code only because of code reviews...
Good code reviews are doing wonders, but as I can see without very strong culture in dev teams and whole company those code reviews don't add anything useful. And this strong culture is difficult. From observations it seems that this is easier to build in team culture to work with "master/main only" without branches and code reviews, than to build culture of code reviews which are working.
From my observations most of comments in code reviews are variations on "I would code it in different way", or "why you are doing it in this way/I don't like your variable name" of course usually written in less direct way.
Last year problems with Log4J2 showed that even in OpenSource peer reviews don't help. Good developers let to introduce to one of most used libraries something what never should be introduced there. For sure variable names were nice, but somehow whole "why we are adding this" was lost, because devs were looking only for some easy to spot things.
So.... yep, good code reviews are important, but my guess is that most of code reviews are only to make some devs happier that they still know what happens in code, and that variables are named in acceptable by them ways....
Maybe, but still this seems as vanity feature added because "It would be really convenient"... this wasn't something what was needed, but something what was added to make life of maybe 0.1% of users little bit easier. My guess is that most of users of Log4J2 don't even know that it is able to do such magic, and would be horrified knowing it.
IMHO Log library should log, not do some magic stuff.
When I'm using IntelliJ Idea on Macbook I use function keys very often. Having those on touch bar would mean need to look to ensure that I'm hitting F7 instead of F8 or F9 when Debugging. I'm able to change those shortcuts but I like to use the same shortcuts on OS X and on Ubuntu.
Yeah, so maybe governments should stop setting rules about right- and left-hand traffic? Private sector will be so much better on establishing non government standards... For example Trucks (for British people Lorries) will user right-handed traffic rules, and normal cars will user left-hand traffic rules. Market will decide what is better....
As we can see market standard for charges was "every company has its own standards, and charge customers more", after UE and China decided ruled at created regulations for charges it was short time and every (except one) producers started to support microUSB/minuUSB as standard. Strange, don't you think? ;-)
Yeah, but how many business was using Google Checkout as only method of payment?
This decision will hurt only those businesses. Rest of businesses using Google Checkout will remove one of payments method. Not a big deal, and we may guess that this method was probably not so popular already.
@iamshs where you found info that Google forbidden MS to use YouTube API? I only read that MS said that Google didn't help them and that they don't have access to metadata. But I never found direct wording "forbidden MS to use YouTube API" or similar.
Can you share with info where somebody from MS says that Google forbidden them to use YouTube API?
@iamshs not sure here, but I'm guessing that you are not breaking TOS.
But app for displaying YouTube content needs to be OK with TOS for YouTube API.
And this TOS says:
II. Prohibitions
Your API Client will not, and You will not encourage or create functionality for Your users or other third parties to:
[...]
modify, replace, interfere with or block advertisements placed by YouTube in the YouTube Data, YouTube audiovisual content, or the YouTube player;
You see each service in Internet has something called Terms Of Service.
In case of YouTube one of terms says that apps cannot skip ads. In other words it says that apps cannot steal from poor creators of materials.
MS created app which is doing it. They ordinary steal money from ads from creators. People spent theirs time on creating content, uploaded it to YouTube, and now WP users thanks to MS will watch theirs work in way which will cause that creators will not get money from it.
Does behavior of MS means that now anybody can download all MS products and start to use those products without paying?
Nope ;-)
Problem with Apple is that if all players will play using Apple strategy we will not have any innovation at all.
Motorola, Nokia, Samsung invested billions in mobile technology without knowing if this will even work, they risked and created cell phones and so on. They had big invest, big risk and at the end big win.
Apple didn't take any risk, they simply polished existing products and started to sell it with much higher price tag. This isn't wrong, wrong is this that Apple tries to block another players using courts. Apple didn't make big invest, didn't take big risk, but takes biggest win by using patent system to force all competitors to give to Apple theirs patents (and when Motorola says, OK we want 2.5% of iPhone price as fee for our patents Apple screams that Motorola wants way too much... yeah, it's only essential technology for mobile phone, so who cares?), without letting them to use Apple's patents.
If players like Motorola or Nokia would use Apple strategy we would simple still using line phones. Because nobody would invent cell phones, the best strategy would be to patent idea of cell phone and to wait till somebody will build it and to sue him.
Patent system was intended to promote innovation, but here it isn't doing it, it is used to block innovation.
Google didn't patent notifications, so thanks to this users of iOS5 may use much better notifications. Thanks to this that Google didn't patent it, users of Apple so competitor product may use it. But Apple patents all small things blocking other players. Apple behaves like parasite on innovation tree, and patent system should protect whole tree because this guarantee progress and innovation.
Nope.
It works slightly different, first companies like Motorola, Nokia, Samsung and others invested billions of dollars in creating telecommunication standards. Next those companies are forced to license patents for those technologies to Apple. Apple creates phone which base in 95% on technology created by those companies, they are adding several features like "slide to unlock" or "pinch to zoom" and patent it. Samsung, Motorola and others looks on Apple product and says "OK, so it means that customers want other UI, we can give them it too", they are participants in OHA which created very similar to iPhone project of OS for mobile phones (in the same time). So they start to produce and sell such phones. Now Apple goes to court and pretends that theirs big "innovation" is so unique that it should let them to block anything similar to theirs "inventions" (in the same time Apple took notifications system from Android)... what is the most funny part, Motorola and Samsung must license to Apple patents needed to build cell phone, but Apple may do not license theirs patents. This cause that patents for cell phones which costed billions of dollars are cheap for Apple (but its competitors needed to pay billions for those), but patents from Apple which costed only money needed for filling patent applications are impossible to obtain by its competitors.
I'm curious if recent changes in Google (taking special characters) will change TIOBE (They base among other signals also on search engines) index? Maybe C gets extra points when those should go to C# or Objective-C? ;-)
Simply wait ;-) probably with age your sight will decrease and at one point you simply will stop to see difference.
I guess that 70% or more of people in theirs 30's will have problem with seeing difference (except brighter colors). Of course in one or two years everything will have screens with more pixels, but from some point it will be always only marketing thing.
As for now if you look on 22 cm long screen with resolution 1280 pixels for width, and you keep screen in 0.5 m distance it means that one pixel have size of 1.17 minute, so some, and maybe even most of people aren't able to distinguish single pixels.
Some people are using tablets for work, some are doing the same on phones, but for many computers are much more comfortable. It is very personal thing, for me tablet is cool for playing in some addictive games like Cut the Rope or Where's my water? but I will kill anybody who will propose to change my computer which I'm using for development for any tablet. The same, after reading several books on tablet I much more like reading on Kindle, it hasn't this ugly glossy screen when I can see me instead of text ;-)