seanc

How often would those cold-start switches be altered?

Just when they wanted to swap tape-reading hardware?

Or did different programs want slightly different loaders?

Agree 100%. I often tell expecting parents "All the hard stuff they tell you about; the sleep loss, the stress, the cost... All that stuff is true. But there's also all this amazing stuff they don't tell you about, which is also true."

Which is why they cleverly moved the central story of a software change from the commit to the PR. Commits migrate automatically with the repo. But migrating PR descriptions and comments takes engineering effort.

My goodness, the security layer looks like it could be more complex than the applications themselves.

And if this security agent is wandering around the IT system gathering all of these details about access and identity and business process, who watches the watcher? How does that thing build and maintain trust?

If you're NVIDIA then open-weight models are a classic example of commoditizing your complements; cheaper models mean more people buying GPU's to run them. [1]

Your guess is as good as mine for China though.

[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/

Not as such, but out of the box you get reword and fixup as first-class rebase macros. I use them all the time.

If you wanted to split a commit you'd still have to use a magit-assisted rebase.

So if magit added explicit 'history' support I just about wouldn't notice, it would mostly be under the hood.

I agree. It's amazing. I feel like I've got a private Emacs consultant at my elbow.

This is the way.

Folks focus on the impact simplicity has on the customer, but it's also worth noting the impact it has on the manufacturer. With a simple product they get a simple business.

- Simple warranty support - No deep bench of customer support staff - No complex financing - Straightforward sales process

Heck, even the website is bare bones.

Upvoted. Sooner or later the Grim Reaper comes for us all.

I'm more curious about the other direction. How many times has a model replied to a request with "Are you sure?" I'd bet just about zero.

In my job I do it all the time; people ask for stuff and I often spend a lot of time on clarifying questions, the most fundamental of which is "Are you sure this is what you want?"

We had to pause the movie and explain to our kids who June Cleaver was.

It was a fun echo, because when I was a kid I watched it with my parents, and my Mom had to explain to me who Ethel Merman was.

Code filled with errors and warnings? PR's merged with failing CI?

So I guess they've achieved human parity then?

(I'll see myself out)

As always, anticipated (at least in some sense) by Neal Stephenson:

https://www.wired.com/1994/10/spew/

Kim Stanley Robinson's description of a Martian space elevator falling and wrapping twice around the entire planet convinced me that they aren't a good idea.

https://www.kimstanleyrobinson.info/content/clarke

I knew which scene that was before I clicked the link.

I think Library Science has contributed much more to modern computing than we ever realize.

For example, I often bring up images of card catalogs when explaining database indexing. As soon as people see the index card, and then see that there is a wooden case for looking up by Author, a separate case for looking up by Dewey Decimal et. cet. the light goes on.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_catalog

Back in the 90's I worked at Nortel and visited a modest size Captive Office in Los Angeles. It supported maybe 20k or 30k people. I was amazed by the field of lead-acid batteries, 1.5m high x 50m^2.

"The past is never dead. It's not even past" - William Faulkner

Visual code is all over the place if you look; Any time something advertises itself as "low code" or "no code" it's a drag-and-drop flow based UI like this one. Most (if not all) ETL systems work this way, and all kinds of low-code AI Agent frameworks are cropping up.

I do agree that there very high prices to be paid for this stuff, and worst of all most of those costs are hard to see, and only crop up late in the project, when, as you point out, the more complex algorithms and processes crop up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extract,_transform,_load https://nifi.apache.org/ https://hop.apache.org/

"No one wants to write ifs, fors and whiles as connected nodes"

For what it's worth LabVIEW presents those structures as container boxes, which IMO works well enough. To put it another way, visual coding has many problems, but when programming LabVIEW I didn't find the representation of control flow to be one of them.

https://labviewwiki.org/wiki/For_loop

Exactly! Several different sorts of folks have an interest in product architecture, and each group needs the story told at a different level of abstraction. So inevitably one has to maintain a few different flavours of the diagram and associated story.

One way I think of it is that the architect needs to market the architecture, at least a little bit. If you ask a marketing team to deliver a message they immediately start crafting multiple delivery methods to meet people where they are at. Architects shouldn't think they can somehow escape that basic requirement of effective communication.

We're not as far apart as you might think. Clock time is correlated with performance, but by no means determinative. More important is initiative, enthusiasm, leadership, reliability, etc. All in, I work very little overtime.

And you're right, this is a marathon, and working sustainably is absolutely the most important thing. One can do both. If you love what you build and you're leading a balanced life then I would say you're Doing It Right.

I've been in high tech for 30 years, and I've been laid off many times, most often from failed start ups. I _strongly_ disagree with a fully cynical response of working only to contract, leveraging job offers for raises, etc.

There are a few reasons for this, but the most concrete is that your behavior in this job has an impact on getting the next one. The author is correct that exemplary performance will not save you from being laid off, but when layoffs come your next job often comes from contacts that you built up from the current job, or jobs before. If people know you are a standout contributor then you will be hired quickly into desirable roles. If people think you are a hired gun who only does the bare minimum that next role will be harder to find.

On top of that, carrying around bitterness and cynicism is just bad for you. Pride in good work and pleasure in having an impact on customers and coworkers is good for you. Sometimes that means making dumb business decisions like sacrificing an evening to a company that doesn't care, but IMO that sort of thing is worth it now and then.

To be sure, don't give your heart away to a company (I did that exactly once, never again) because a company will never love you back. But your co-workers will.

No, the carrier leverage did not come from network policy, it came from sales-channel. That is to say, in those days one way or another every device passed through a carrier's hands before reaching the customer. So carriers controlled pricing, and to a large degree, marketing. If they didn't like your device they would refuse to sell it and then you were stuck.

Unlike RIM or Palm, Apple could realistically choose not to sell their device at all, or at least not sell it for a while, and so they were able to break the carrier oligopsony. It also didn't hurt that Steve Jobs was, well, Steve Jobs. A one-of-one business negotiator.

Remember Jim B. scoffing at how you had to plug an iPhone in every night? And how much more efficient BlackBerrys were with data?

Steve knew that the customers did. not. care. And that the carriers would build more cell stations if they had to.

I was at RIM at that time and saw _exactly_ the same thing. When I started in 2008, in addition to WiFi and apps they were squabbling with carriers about whether or not the Blackberry needed an antenna. Carriers were micromanaging devices to an astonishing degree.

The river of money from Macs, iPods and iTunes gave Steve Jobs a completely different kind of leverage in those carrier negotiations. Device only companies like Palm and RIM couldn't have broken that carrier strangle even if they did have the technology.

The sort order of the alphabet symbols is arbitrary, but since all of the words are composed of an ordered set of symbols then sorting the words relative to one another is trivial.

Now I'm wondering how well calibrated those automatic public cuffs are in the first place...

Maybe an apochryphal story, but a famous orchestra conductor was talking to the players before a Mozart review show and had this to say:

"Look, I know that professionals like you have been playing this music since you were kids and don't find it very inspiring anymore. And I'll be honest, we do this material to sell tickets and make money for our other more challenging repertoire.

But if you're having trouble finding your passion for this show, please remember that it's a full house, so you can be sure that for some of those people, this will be the first time they hear this music.

And for others in the audience, it will be their last."

In the old days we'd use tcpdump and wireshark for this, but nowadays everything is encrypted up in the application layer so you need this kind of thing. Or tricky key dumping hacks.