A (temporary) monopoly is not as bad in something that wouldn't otherwise exist. If Elon Musk concentrated only on cars, or SpaceX had had another couple of launch failures and gone bust, this functionality might be 40 years away.
Not to say you're wrong, we all benefit from competition in the long run. We get it from a level playing field and preventing natural monopolists from locking the gate behind them.
Many other industries haven't yet been fully eaten by software. All kinds of data is locked away and in proprietary formats, and is generated by humans without much automation. I don't think we know where exactly the frontiers are, once someone puts in the work to build large datasets, and automates creation of synthetic training data. Whole industries could suddenly flip from 'impossible' to 'easy' for AI.
It's at least twenty new web frameworks, but maybe not so long in low-level stuff. You can probably rely on C99 being available now more than you could in 2014.
Fun post, but I'll state the obvious because I think many people do believe that every Windows machine BSOD'd. It was only ones with Crowdstrike software. Which is apparently very common but isn't actually pre-installed by Microsoft in Windows, or anything like that.
Source: work in a Windows shop and had a normal day.
Yeah, I was going to ask about this. I think ST Micro will sublicense you a PID under their VID, but with restrictions, and companies attempting to buy a VID and sell PIDs as a service have been sued?
I can imagine exactly what that thumb would feel like if it was integrated with my nervous system. Wondering how common this is.
When I was a very small child, I was fascinated by the sensation of different body parts - the way touching each finger in turn compares to the next, and the way the opposite side has a similar range of sensations. It feels like I know exactly how it would feel to have a sixth, seventh finger in sequence with the others. I imagine that having a second right arm grafted below my current one would have the 'right' but 'lower' feeling and I could use it immediately. But there's no way to test whether this is just a childish imagining that has stayed with me.
People might remember the faux-cassette tapes with an analogue audio input, that you could use to play music from other sources on a tape-only car stereo.Does something similar exist for legacy floppy drives? Like a fake floppy with a micro SD card slotted in.
Packing it into an actual diskette might be challenging - I guess you'd need to read an encoder on the rotation. Perhaps if you had some legacy musical or scientific instrument with a tape drive you'd be better swapping out the whole drive with something that presented as a floppy drive to the device?
It seems pretty confusing given that operator D already exists as notation for the usual differential calculus. (Not the most common notation, but useful sometimes). It may not be very exciting that D{n} = 0 for all numbers, but that's the actual derivative of a number.
Warrior Within had such great gameplay, just some slightly cringe choices of tone, which particularly unfortunately, were especially apparent in the first half-hour of the game. It generated a load of negative talk for a really good game.
I'm not saying it was a sensible decision, but I think at that level you kinda need to have a few balls in the air. Having a few projects using ML or whatever else is in vogue is defensible, might be a win, might build some expertise, shows you're in touch with the current thing etc.
That is surprising, the industry of implementing industry-standard ERP systems is pretty established. I'd have expected it to go way over time and budget (they always do) but eventually succeed. Usually success is in proportion to the company's willingness to admit they're not special and can do the same things as other companies instead of having everything bespoke.
Nothing in this article pertains to actual research - development has always included elements of design. Interesting article otherwise though.
I've been in an organisation that was actively winding down the research side of R&D. Lots of chemists and physicists let go, or at least not replaced. Projects that had gone nowhere for years canned; people with no output for years canned. More focus on product roadmaps. What's really weird is that every step seemed pretty reasonable, but the overall capability was much less in the end. It's really tricky.
It's interesting, isn't it. Jack Welch must have had very many superb characteristics, to be as revered as he was. Or is it an element that the profits of golden-goose-killing created the mystique?
That's nice. I try to create ceremony for Twelfth Night with my family, essentially to keep the Christmas spirit going a bit longer. We turn off the lights on the house together, sing The Twelve Days of Christmas together one more time, and take down the tree. Definitely need to add some orchard-blessing.
I feel that way too, but there are practical aspects. Getting away to visit people can be more challenging in the very depths of winter, while Christmas is generally a bit milder. On the other hand, actual white Christmases would be more common.
Bad debts sell for pennies on the dollar, no-one is incentivised to get you not to pay.
On the psychological side, I know what you mean but you do seem to be taking things a bit personally. Yes, businesses are big and impersonal and automated, because society is big and impersonal and we have access to a huge range of services, we can't change much based on how pissed off we are.
AI assistants to make life easier for us must only be a year or two away.
Prior to the current generation of very fast EVs, having a louder vehicle was a way to indicate more power. A more powerful (internal combustion) engine implies more noise. Of course the reverse doesn't apply, more noise doesn't strictly imply more power - it can just be an exhaust with lousy noise suppression. ALSO you might eke a little more power from an engine with less back pressure from the exhaust, so there is some real effect available.
So if you've got some modified monster with an insane engine, it's going to be loud. And if you're a wannabe with a superficially-modified, underpowered car, you can add more noise easier than you can add more power, and hope to fool people. It's not very laudable, but you can see how it could motivate the ego of the inconsiderate.
We're still on the exponential rise of the hype cycle. If capabilities appear to plateau - no GPT5/6 that are even more amazing, then the hype will not merely plateau but plummet. For now, anything seems possible.
As for a killer app, I'm another person for whom ChatGPT is it. I use GPT-4 something like Google, Wikipedia and Stack Overflow in one, but being very aware of the limitations. It feels a bit like circa 2000 when being good at googling things felt like a superpower. It doesn't do everything for you but can make you drastically more effective.
There's three levels of what's going on with AI at the moment, each with their own momentum and hype cycle: (1) the current generation of chat bots and image generators, which some of us would be using for the rest of our lives even with only minor refinements; (2) the prospect that new tools built on top of this and subsequent generations could remake the internet and how we interact with our gadgets; and (3) the prospect that the systems will keep getting smarter and smarter.
I've wondered the same thing. It's really hard to distinguish real grass roots from astroturf.
It doesn't bother me. It's fine if the contrast between these films has just sparked off people's imaginations. But if there is some clever operation 'seeding' the memes and articles, I hope we get to hear about it some day.
A system-wide key-value store, that's distinct from file storage, seems like a pretty great idea. The Windows Registry is icky, we all know that, it somehow appeared out of nowhere in Windows 95 already crusty as hell. But if it were designed by people with taste and discretion, would it be good?
This is crazy. The electronics and telecommunications industries have just kept trucking on and improving hardware and connectivity by orders of magnitude. Meanwhile web technologies have provided the software complement to smartphones that let people manage their whole digital lives online, at the same time as hundreds of millions of people come online for the first time.
Are you defining 'tech' as purely social media companies? Or demanding entirely new classes of product? There has been an incredible amount of iterative improvement.
To be slightly more charitable, the argument is that big changes come off better than random chance would indicate, because the psychology of status-quo-bias/loss-avoidance makes people stick in bad situations too long.
On balance I believe people who are impulsive catapult themselves into worse outcomes. This article could be dangerous advice for people with poor impulse control. I'd phrase the most workable advice as something like, 'If you are loss-averse and tend to stick at things, blowing up your life to do something new could be a good choice'.
Autodesk are sunsetting it in favour of their subscription, cloud-based, always-online Fusion 360. Most Altium users are probably on a subscription too for that matter.
Reminds me of a joke in a John Meaney novel, a physicist discovers faster-than-light travel through a dimension with unusual properties, gaining inspiration from Java's booleans having three states (true, false and NullPointerException).
And the pun in the headline being 'The Last Post', the bugle call played at funerals. (To American ears, it may sound like a slow mournful version of 'Taps').
Weird how Windows is mentioned as one of the two programming models and then discarded. Obviously people have long-standing objections to commercial operating systems and Microsoft in particular, but it would be interesting to hear whether the many non-POSIX-y parts of Windows provide a better or worse model.
For software-eating-the-world reasons, I'd guess. A chance to differentiate your product as software does more and more, versus a big chunk of the experience being within someone else's control and the underlying vehicle being an interchangeable commodity.
I haven't tried it personally, but people seem pretty passionate about the software on the leading electric vehicle brand, plus its associated do-everything phone app letting you control the vehicle, find a charger, or even order a new model.
The situation will probably be like smart TVs for quite a while: lots of janky experiences and user-hostile behaviour, because it's just so valuable to own a software platform that every company tries.
I have been hired essentially on the strength of a covering letter... weirdly, I was later cc'ed on a whole email chain going back to my application, and saw the impact of certain things I had mentioned.
It was basically explaining my passion for a cross-industry move. But for most people for most jobs, most of the time, a job is just a somewhat match for their skillset and there isn't much else to say. Now I'm hiring I don't pay much credence to cover letters or objective statements, but they can still be meaningful for certain people's circumstances. I think cover letters have a bad rep because a generic one is meaningless.