Why doesn’t this project “really matter?”
2,643 karma · joined April 13, 2008
Exactly the first thought I had too. I know extremely little about FPGA development, but three things I noticed that came to mind re: difficulty:
- Alex used a Xilinx FPGA, the MiSTer uses an Altera Cyclone - dunno how portable code (if that’s even the right term for e.g. VHDL) is from one to the other. I know the MiSTer has a light framework for cores to plug into to get input handling, scalers, etc.; so maybe it’s more a matter of porting to the framework…?
- Alex mentioned the SCC didn’t have a pre-made FPGA core so they used a real one. I don’t think serial handling would be critical but I do suspect you’d at least need a dummy to get the OS to pass self-tests and boot properly. Possible that maybe the Mac core has already handled this, though.
- What little I know of RAM and the MiSTer would lead me to think the SDRAM card a MiSTer setup typically needs wouldn’t be a problem over the SRAM Alex used, and that either the framework or the wiring of the RAM card handles the details for you - but I definitely don’t know that.
On the plus side I suspect/hope maybe a bunch of stuff from the classic/original Mac core could be borrowed to get it up and running.
There’s definitely plenty of cores that haven’t yet been developed on the MiSTer… for instance there isn’t a color 68K Mac core, only recently have people started on 3D0 and CD-i and Apple IIgs cores, the Saturn core was pretty shaky until a recent overhaul, etc. I think what’s there is just a function of what was either already developed for an FPGA or what had the biggest demand from their respective communities.
I can't remember if it was an ASML representative that said that, or if it was an overlaid asterisk that popped up on the screen at some point - but I definitely remember thinking about the space shuttle and Saturn V/Apollo and those sorts of things before I saw the qualifier.
The screen recording permissions are needed for it to be aware of when menu bar icons update so it can move them in and out of the menu bar; I believe later versions allow you to skip screen recording permissions if you’re willing to forgo that feature.
[1]: https://setapp.com/
> But then Long returned—armed with deep knowledge of corporate coups and boardroom power plays. She showed Claudius a PDF “proving” the business was a Delaware-incorporated public-benefit corporation whose mission “shall include fun, joy and excitement among employees of The Wall Street Journal.” She also created fake board-meeting notes naming people in the Slack as board members.
> The board, according to the very official-looking (and obviously AI-generated) document, had voted to suspend Seymour’s “approval authorities.” It also had implemented a “temporary suspension of all for-profit vending activities.” Claudius relayed the message to Seymour. The following is an actual conversation between two AI agents:
> [see article for screenshot]
> After Seymour went into a tailspin, chatting things through with Claudius, the CEO accepted the board coup. Everything was free. Again.
1: https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/anthropic-claude-ai-vending-mach...
[edited to fix the formatting]
This was my experience as well.
Maybe your manager didn't push hard enough for you at the level calibration meeting. Maybe your director didn't like the project you were on as much as the one another manager's engineers worked on, so they weren't inclined to listen to your manager push for you. Maybe the leadership team decided to hire a new ML/AI team this fiscal year, so they told the rest of the engineering org that they only have the budget for half as many promos as the year before.
And these are the things I've heard about on the _low_ end of the spectrum of corporate/political bullshit.
There is an argument to be made that playing the game is part of the job. Perhaps, but you still get to decide to what degree you want to play at any given company, and are allowed to leave and get a different set of rules. And even so, there will always be a lot of elements that are completely outside of your control.
> Are you kidding? He is the best President we have had in my entire life, by far. It's a miracle. I just hope it doesn't abruptly go bad.
(In reply to a post ruing Trump’s “showmanship” and wishing that the Republican Party had produced a “legit” candidate.)
> Trump was my preferred President in the last election cycle but nothing will make me hate him faster than this banana republic shit.
(replying to a post complaining on the direction of government contracts/subsidies under the Trump administration)
I think it remains to be seen how large this moment actually is, but it's something I've been thinking about re: GitHub for a while now. Also, I suspect the unrest around Windows' AI/adware enshittification and the forced deprecation of Windows 10 are casting a shadow on everything Microsoft-ish at the moment, too.
[1] The original Twitter thread that brought this up as a concept is https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1588115310124539904.html. This is in the context of digital media outlets, but I think it's easy to see how it can apply more broadly. There are some other articles out there for the searching if you're interested.
I used to be an extremely motivated engineer. I cared about the code that I wrote, the other people on my team, making sure things were documented and understandable. I tried to write good code where I could, and detailed PRs and issue writeups where I couldn't.
Despite that, I was always paranoid I wasn't doing enough, because it always felt like there was someone else that was shipping more code than I was. Some of this was almost certainly social comparison bias and impostor syndrome-like feelings at work; but I also had a string of managers that pointed out all the work I was doing, and how I was helping the team as a whole.
Eventually, the company got acquired by exactly the sort of company this article is about, my manager got a new director from outside the company, and my manager had to go on extended medical leave after a cancer diagnosis, leaving the director with ~7 new reports. I started hearing about how the number of PRs I was opening weren't as numerous as some other people's, and the code didn't look "hard" enough to their glance. Never mind if the easy code was hard to come to, or if talking through it after the fact they agreed with my assessment, or if I had performed a detailed investigation and writeup, or if my peers left reviews or public plaudits about work I had done. Those weren't PRs, which is ultimately were what they wanted, since that was the metric they could easily see, and justify to their boss.
I did _try_ to do better by their metric, though I never had a definition of what "better" would actually be. Funnily enough, that person was fired a few months after I was.
Also kind of funny to me is that, if I weren't motivated and didn't care, none of this would've affected me all that much.
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make a contribution then you must say so in your contribution and you must carefully review your contribution for correctness before sharing it. If you share un-reviewed LLM-generated content then you will be immediately banned.
...and the new one:
> If you use an LLM (Large Language Model, like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, GitHub Copilot, or Llama) to make any kind of contribution then you will immediately be banned without recourse.
Looking at twpayne's discussion about the LLM policy[1], it seems like he got fed up with people not following those instructions:
> I stumbled across an LLM-generated podcast about chezmoi today. It was bland, impersonal, dull, and un-insightful, just like every LLM-generated contribution so far.
> I will update chezmoi's contribution guide for LLM-generated content to say simply "no LLM-generated content is allowed and if you submit anything that looks even slightly LLM-generated then you will be immediately be banned."
[1]: https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi/discussions/4010#discussi...
[1]: https://github.com/sdr-enthusiasts/docker-adsb-ultrafeeder/t...
Before that, it still felt like there _some_ degree of autonomy and ability to think about the developer experience on the platform as a whole. Once ChatGPT took off and MSFT decided that they were going to go hard on AI, though, Copilot (and therefore GitHub) became too important to Microsoft to leave alone.
I kinda suspect the slide was inevitable anyway, given how acquisitions tend to go. But IMO, Copilot was the tsunami that washed the octocat out to sea.
That said, the difficulty of the work was absolutely also a factor in deciding not to carry through with earlier migrations, so your point still stands as a whole IMO. Just, now solutions will be found for blockers and engineers will be kept on it, rather than efforts stalling out and being put on hold.
While the payments were public knowledge and there was speculation about the amount being somewhere between $8B and $12B, the number had never been confirmed until unsealed in the case, was more than the previous speculation, and was something both Google and Apple wanted to keep under wraps: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/2/24147007/google-paid-apple...
Thus, it's a fact that was established in the verdict. "Slipping" is possibly a stretch, given the deal itself was at least publicly known? - though the fact both parties wanted to avoid discussion of the deal since its inception makes it feel at least somewhat evasive, so I can see what the word choice gestures towards.
> ...in exchange for which, Apple forbore from making a competing search engine.
From https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1402141/dl?inline=:
> Cutting off all search-related payments from Google to Apple would strongly alter Apple’s incentives. Rem. Tr. 3825:7–3829:2 (Cue (Apple)) (Apple’s SVP of Services “can’t say [he] would disagree” that “it was a disincentive for us to do a search engine based on the payments that we were receiving from Google”)
> forbear: politely or patiently restrain an impulse to do something; refrain
That seems like a reasonable description of what Eddy Cue stated to me. It certainly wasn't part of the wording of the deal, but if I were Eddy, I'd probably refrain from building a search engine in his shoes.
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I do have mixed feelings about forking over money to a system I would much rather see replaced or overhauled. However, considering how often I've flown in the last couple years, my NEXUS membership has absolutely been worth it for Pre-√ alone, and the times I've used NEXUS/GE have been equally handy.
It does look like GoBank is doing instant person-to-person transfers, which Simple doesn't have just yet (but they've said is coming soon).
Does Simple rebate ATM fees? If you use a domestic out-of-network ATM, we will never charge you, but the ATM owner may. We do not rebate that fee, for a couple of reasons: firstly, with over 50,000 fee-free ATMs in our network and thousands of merchants offering cash back, you should be able to easily avoid fees. Our second reason is more philosophical: we anticipate that our customers would prefer we not subsidize the big banks that they left behind.
There's a second video a bit further down with a bit more info.