Not really - at least in my days in that industry, the bulk of telco equipment was running C/C++ or Java code. This included Ericsson gear. Ericsson and one or two other telco companies were definitely using it in production, but it wasn't dominant.
415 karma · joined January 25, 2024
Erlang has been around for a looong time (it's about as old as C++). It never rose to any real prominence, nor has it dominated any well-defined niche. Sometimes, outcomes like that are just a matter of bad timing. But sometimes, people just try your thing, don't like it, and the best response isn't "actually, you just don't get it" - it's to learn and iterate.
Optional memory safety is, when you can opt an entire project into a "strict" mode, and this becomes trivially verifiable by others. I imagine that's the goal here.
Optional security is a problem only when you need to remember a million different rules and gotchas, because you will inevitably miss a spot. But if it's a global toggle, it's pretty good. "Use '-fmemsafe' for C/C++" is as tractable as "don't use 'unsafe' in Rust".
Yeah, as you note, library compatibility is an issue. But it's an even bigger issue when bootstrapping a new, safe language: you gotta implement the libraries from scratch, and you never really get to full parity with C/C++. Getting it done for the top 10 most-used libraries would make a spectacular difference in itself.
I should note that I'm not a huge believer in "saving" C/C++ as the memory-safe language of the future - I think there are lingering cultural problems around the standards that we had no luck overcoming for decades - but I also don't think the duo is going away any time soon, so might as well expend some effort on making it a safer tool.
Although Bing is generally OK at dealing with general queries, it's far, far worse at surfacing niche content, no? My non-commercial, hobby homepage fares reasonably OK on Google (although some queries are dominated by SEO spam). But on Bing, it ranks below a good number of spam websites, including ones that simply copied my content and serve it with ads...
"As a result of increased demand, it mixed up device ID" - no, it mixed up IDs as a result of some sort of a concurrency bug. I don't understand the point of deflecting this far.
What doesn't sit with me is that the article makes a lot of hyperbolic claims ("Caffeine is literally killing your dreams", etc) and says a lot of sciencey-sounding stuff, but then wraps it up with "no, you can't cricitize that":
> Q: Don't you care? Don't you think it's misleading?
> A: Nah. I'm not writing a philosophical treatise here. I'm not writing a lawsuit to take all coffee lovers to court. And I'm definitely not writing a scientific review.
I mean, OK, it's your blog - but you're trying to have it both ways. If you wanted to write about your subjective experience, fine. But you're making it seem as if you're presenting settled science.
An argument can be made that there is some specific and deliberate way of giving out $10T that's more equitable - say, spend it on education, public transport, or healthcare. But if we could all agree on what to do, nothing is stopping us from doing it without Sam's (theoretical) money.
And the reasons why professionals and organizations are paying huge amounts for specific software are often less enlightened than we tend to assume. Inertia is a huge factor. Many universities train students to use Altium, for example, so it's often the path of least resistance. Plus, when you have processes and teams built around a tool that was cutting-edge a decade or two ago, it can be hard to switch. Especially for niche software like this, interoperability tents to be poor, every vendor invents their own UI and terminology from first principles, etc.
But KiCad and Altium are not the only choices. There are affordable "serious hobbyist" products with much better UX (e.g., Diptrace) and there are higher-end commercial tools that leave Altium in the dust.
It's interesting that it's the opposite of the gaming industry. There, because the reviewers dictate the narrative, the industry is better at ferreting out bogus claims. On the flip side, loud voices sometimes steamroll over decent products because of some ideological vendetta.
First, a lot of simple assault arrests are for objectionable but ultimately trivial stuff - people getting into drunken brawls, spitting on each other, and so on. A series of burglaries targeting a local small business can be far more devastating to the owner than that.
But your argument also doesn't hold because it's clear that there are property crimes that are investigated with zeal. For example, in the SF Bay Area, a person was recently charged with "hate crimes" for taking down some pro-Palestine signs. I'm not making some political point here, but we can agree that the investigation wasn't motivated by the severity of the crime, right?
If you're in a city with 1,000+ home burglaries a year, nobody cares that you clear one and arrest some meth head. But, solve some gruesome or politically-tinged crime and you're holding a press conference and getting praise left and right.
We do the same thing as software engineers. Every large company has some lore about what types of work get you promoted, and many engineers prefer to work on that.
The problem isn't that people in the West need to make greater sacrifices than their ancestors did. It's that they no longer want to make small ones. The price tag you mention is what you pay if you don't want to make any lifestyle changes. Not moving closer to one's parents, so that they could provide child care. Not cutting down discretionary spending, not giving up on career goals.
I'm not saying this to judge people, but I think the fallacy here is that we assume things would improve if we offered longer parental leaves, child subsidies, state-run childcare, or whatever - but in every country where such programs are implemented, they don't really make any difference. There may be other reasons to do it, but I guess the only tried and true way to fix fertility is famine and war...
And for external consumption: a polished, articulate, and presentable exec who can competently testify in front of the Congress or talk to politicians without giving off weird vibes, the way Zuckerberg and some others used to.
Sundar isn't a charismatic leader with a bold vision; he is a bureaucrat. But Google never really had a Jobs-style leader, and that might be fundamentally incompatible with the corporate culture over there. It owed a lot of its early success to great engineering, and the reason it maybe isn't working as well now is mostly a function of size. They used to be content with an innovative project that could bring in $50M... now it's not a success if there's no immediate path to $1B.
It also doesn't help that the company doesn't really have a clear product identity. Apple does consumer hardware and a bunch of services subservient to that. Google is... what? An advertising network? A vendor of office apps for businesses? An ISP? A grocery delivery company (they did that for a good while)? A social network? Oh, and that gaming thing with Stadia? And let's not mention their biotech and self-driving car ventures, now spun off but still paid for from the same coffers... it's admirable that they try so many things, but it makes it hard for them to stick to any long-term plan.
I don't think you can really pin that on Sundar - he didn't create this problem, although to be fair, he's also not fixing it.
I mean, LinkedIn has what, 20,000 employees? If you had spherical developers in a vacuum, I doubt you'd need more than 40-50 to maintain their products, but there's more to running a tech company.
They basically decided they want to reap the benefits of the company's success, but work on pet projects and not be the face of this anymore. Sundar was and is a perfect pick for a CEO - that is, if you accept that Google really couldn't outrun fate.
Very, very few people. I would be surprised if it's more than a fraction of a percent of the home computing market.
In fact, most people seem quite content to downgrade. They have laptops or desktops that are collecting dust while they're browsing the web on their phones while at home. My entire family does that, I'm the only outlier.
I'm sure that cost and convenience are factors and there would be a larger market for zero-hassle "high-FOV" computing, but a bulky headset isn't it. As it is, the market for Apple Vision Pro is almost nonexistent - not without some killer use case that appeals to more than just hardcore geeks.
You can educate or coerce homeowners to maintain defensible spaces, and they often comply. But in these regions, roughly 50% of the land is owned by the federal government, and another good chunk belongs to the state. Almost none of it is proactively logged, burned, or maintained in any other meaningful way. These big fires don't start in people's backyards, they start in the government-owned wilderness - and by the time they reach residences, they are so intense that a metal roof and some cleared vegetation around your home make little difference.
I suspect the pendulum had swung too far away from exploiting natural resources to conserving them at any cost. The solution probably isn't to tell people in the PNW "too bad, move to Iowa, Oregon is closed" - it's to decide where to maintain healthy forests and where to make room for safe development.
One is that different insurance companies specialize in different things. For example, if you want to offer the best rates to good drivers, you might actually want high-risk drivers to go somewhere else, or at least compartmentalize them so that your prime clients can still pay favorable rates. But if you do that, another company will show up and specialize in the customers you're walking away from. There's enough competition that no single firm can have it all, and there's definitely a lot of divide-and-conquer going on.
I also suspect that there's a multitude of ways to end up with a specific risk profile, so there's plenty of more or less random divergence on the tail end. Some insurers get where they want to be by giving discounts if you install a monitoring app. Others if you're in a "safe" profession. Etc.
> The math of insurance is based on having the biggest, most diverse risk pool to sop up any poor bets.
Sort of? Sometimes? There are diminishing returns, especially for car insurance where claim limits are fairly modest - I doubt it makes much of a difference if you have ten million versus a hundred million customers. A state-run monopoly has a comparatively weak incentive to make the math work, because it can always count on being propped up by the taxpayer - and if not, it can charge you more or offer worse service, and you can't do much about that.
Private monopolies share some of the same problems, so I wouldn't root for either. Thankfully, the car insurance market in the US is pretty competitive.
Yes, it alters market dynamics and the whole reason it's done is that the same skills are not available domestically for that price (or at all) - but talking about "low-wage labor" and "exploitation" as the whole point of the program is pretty rich.
H-1B is probably one of the most gamed and abused visa categories, perhaps next to marriage-related stuff.
Then you're effectively creating a loophole. There would be a proliferation of private schools that accept anyone willing to pay enough $$$ and churn out barely-competent graduates just so that people have a better shot at citizenship. "Attended a school in the US" is not a good proxy for being an asset to the country.
> There should be no cap for people who are going into STEM, AI, or other jobs that are going to vastly develop the economy.
That's essentially the whole point of H-1B, and right now, they're overwhelmingly allocated to what one could generously describe as STEM professions.