Generally speaking, yes, relative to the giants. Smallsoft co at least isn't going to monetize every bit of knowledge about you directly. They'll probably leak stuff to chatgpt and so on, but it depends on the business purpose whether I'd be worried about that.
I sympathise. People just have "bigger" problems that are personal to them. I think i could convince someone not to litter if i knew someone who did, but convincing them they should refuse gifts derived from petroleum, or stop wearing synthetic fabrics, or not buy a home dense with plastics, and so on? It's so far down on most peoples list of struggles
It's very much a matter of of marketing. I think the explanation for why partially hydrogenated oils have been replaced is because there was a viable alternative (palm oil, mainly) and no one was devious enough or saw profit in countering the honest narrative that they were hurting everyone's health. That's unlike tobacco or oil industry games. They spend as much as needed to protect their profits, consequences be damned. More importantly, I think, plastics are actually wonderful materials and the cost of overproducing is hard to convince people of. It's like the abuse of antibiotics or CO2 pollution. Some people try being alarmist to compensate for how little most people care about these serious problems. But most people go on uninformed or just don't care, even if they are informed.
That's a study that underestimates growth in cost of living, i.e. gouging by rent seekers and businesses, and ignores changes in status, i.e. people leaving the job market or moving down to something worse. It's not surprising that the lowest income earners got a substantial boost in that period, since life is getting substantially more expensive. Importantly, I don't think their "real wage" inflation adjusted values are fair. People being told inflation was one amount when their actual CoL was vastly outpacing that was part of what fueled the anger that got Trump elected again, not that he has helped (or will help) anything since '23 where that analysis ends.
Anecdotally, many people I know would be in dire straits if they didn't own appreciating real property, because their cost of living adjustments at work aren't coming close to matching inflation. Others I know are actually in dire straits. Some are doing fine and getting the benefit of profitable work. Overall things have been awful economically post-COVID, and there are a lot of causal factors, from the policy decisions of the last decade, to the surprises of COVID, natural disasters and geopolitics, to the AI investment bubble and the changing zeitgeist. (Oh and let's not forget simple demographics, birth rate, etc...)
IBM left my once prosperous hometown as a kid. Others followed suit. Since then it's been in a sad state economically, just some rust belt town. Corporations abandoning communities is hardly anything new. Capital acts with 0 empathy, or rather, the people who direct it do.
I've heard on this forum of a tactic Intel employed where they broke off some people into a subsidiary, dissolved the subsidiary, and then offered to rehire them with the caveat: Oops, the pension you were promised is now gone. Then Intel's foundry business started failing. Oops!!
By the way, compilers can conceivably do "lowest common denominator" architecture optimization to get decent perf on heterogenous cores as a compromise, without leaning into every optimization for both core types.
Yeah, sorry, everything you're saying is right. Compilers won't do the work for you. I just took issue with the wording about it being unsolved. If we can produce optimal binaries for a given process for multiple architectures we can also swap them as needed. I don't think any big new ideas need to come around, just work to implement ideas we have.
> No one has come close to solving the problem of optimizing software for multiple heterogeneous CPU's with differing micro-architectures when the scheduler is 'randomly' placing threads.
I think this isn't wholly correct. The comp sci part of things is pretty well figured out. You can do work-stealing parallelism to keep queues filled with decent latency, you can even dynamically adjust work distribution to thread performance (i.e. manual scheduling.) It's not trivial to use the best techniques for parallelism on heterogenous architecture, especially when it comes to adapting existing code bases that aren't fundamentally compatible with those techniques. Things get even more interesting as you take cache-locality, io, and library/driver interactions into consideration. However, I think it's more accurately described as an adoption problem than something that's unsolved.
It took many years after their debut for homogenous multicore processors to be well supported across software for similar reasons. There are still games that are actively played which don't appreciably leverage multiple cores. (e.g. Starcraft 2 does some minimal offloading to a 2nd thread.)
You can still buy and build (I do) powerful gaming-capable systems that do not emit rainbow-puke or have transparent panels and other gimmicky stuff like that.
They used to complain about that 10 years ago, but apple was just ahead of it's time. Microsoft saw the light and is racing down that path. Soon enough, no computer without user-defeating secret logic and remote ownership will be allowed to interact with important networked applications. Linux users will either need a tainted linux variant or not have access to banking, streaming (already a problem), games, and so on.
There is societal improvement and then there is the huge amount of ego driven waste and externalized harm. Ideally, theoretically, we could have a lot of the former without a lot of the latter. In practice this ratio seems to be getting worse. Me-first attitudes are way up, profit is misunderstood as merit.
What's clear to me, at least, is that a few cents doesn't represent the actual cost. It's a shortcoming of our economics that we consider such a great and long lasting material so disposable.
Plastics and other oil-derivative, crucial materials should be the main use of crude oil and methane, not energy. Save the oil to make things that don't have an easy replacement. Replace oil burning with solar, wind, nuclear, etc., and use the underground reserve of hydrocarbons for noble causes like medecine, or for the type of investments that add to the net good for our species.
I have had various ways of testing things over the years, too, and like I said, they're not doing a good job. They don't employ experts, they just project expertise to an uninformed audience.
LTT is only popular because of youtube in the first place and kind of bad at what they do. I've seen lots of bad methodology and low value content so added them to my "don't recommend" list years ago. More on topic, Floatplane doesn't fix any of the problems with youtube, it's just another take on it that they're filling up with more clickbait thumbnails.
None of this attack was personal, that is wrong. All was deserved. Complaining about academia without any specifics is one of the dumbest and most well funded and prominent memes in the pseudo intellectual podcast sphere today.
It really upsets me when i see this kind of hollow rhetoric, which is specifically designed to confuse, and to stear people away from learning and instead make them sceptical of the most honest pursuers of truth.