1,127 karma · joined November 30, 2022
The idea that they are doing a share buyback and not investing in new product lines is also not well founded. They are almost certainly doing both.
[edit: add a question mark]
That's an interesting take that doesn't seem to line up very well either with history or the article, which points out that governments have made moves like this in the past, only to return to Microsoft products at some point in the future.
Since at least the late 90's I've been hearing prognostications that Microsoft was doomed because of open source and how it's only a matter of time, and they are now the most valuable company listed on US stock exchanges.
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24522887-apple-v-and...
Here’s one: https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/16ixoc8/i_...
And another which links to the California Assembly Bill to try to prevent this: https://calmatters.org/health/2023/12/surprise-ambulance-bil...
I didn’t receive any notice of the bill until nine months later and was told it would go to collections in 30 days. My insurance company decided to reconsider whether they would pay anything after I called them, and they told AMR they would review the case which put the clock for collections on hold for about six weeks until the insurance coughed up $3k or so.
[edit to add this]
I did hear on the radio that a bill was passed in California recently to help fix this to some extent but I don’t recall the details. I believe it goes into effect mid-2024.
They mention vendor neutrality but I don’t see a mention of which OSes this is supported on, or if they have any form of support for Metal on macOS (e.g. through one of the cross-compilation routes like through SPIRV).
So it was definitely not a general purpose reusable system.
I’ve talked to other people working at other large companies in the 90’s and they had similar experiences. I think either multiple people at different places recognized the need and value of systems like these before they were widely written about, or word was getting around in some circles. Not sure which.
I think one thing I have seen over the years is people making extreme assumptions based on experiences they hear via the grapevine, and seeing more perspectives seems like one way to counter that.
For example I have seen the claim here that CI systems were somehow new in the same timeframe that XP and Scrum were first written about and being adopted, and that testing was always an afterthought back then, etc.
If anything I think we were often building more reliable and higher quality systems in that timeframe, if only because there was more alignment that testing and fixing bugs mattered. Today I get responses like “quality isn’t just about bugs” if I am critical about the quality of a particular product. As if what users want is 2N as many features, none of which quite work rather than N features that are all solid.
- We happily adopted a CI system from another team in 1998.
- We had a decent unit testing framework and a fair bit of automation for integration testing (although yes, some aspects of UI were hand tested periodically).
- We continuously refactored and improved existing code, especially if we touched something in it or around it. The only practice I think was poor then was mixing the refactoring and new work into a single commit, which I would never do today.
- I was using source control even in school in the late 80s, and I’ve never come across a team that didn’t, although I’m sure they did exist at that time.
- As far as deployment, everything I’ve worked on has been shipped on a very episodic basis (anywhere from a month between shipping to a few years), so most of the automation I’ve seen there from early on was about deploying internally for testing, and that’s always been more or less automated.
Although I did work at one place that tried Scrum for a little while around 2003-2005, the only practice I’ve generally seen adopted from that in the remaining years has been having periodic check-ins on status, e.g. monthly demo days to show off accomplishments from the last month. These are relatively low-prep although not impromptu, and that practice isn’t uniform.
With all that said, some things I have seen change, which aren’t mentioned by parent:
- Much more emphasis on developers writing tests. In the 90’s test teams were sometimes as large as development teams, and usually way behind the development team in progress. There was a belief that developers couldn’t possibly write good tests, or simply wouldn’t.
- I never worked anywhere where it was “docs first”, at least not to the extent that people mean that when they talk about older development practices. We did sometimes write the equivalent of a 1-pager to get everyone aligned on what particular work was about, and had a meeting to discuss and determine if everyone was in fact aligned. I think that was very useful, and sadly what I see more often than not now is “code first” meaning that you write code and then try to use code reviews to deal with everything, which means that what could have been an hour of writing something up and an hour meeting turns into someone spending days coding something that has to be thrown away because it’s so clear during code reviews that the approach is the wrong one. So now this “agile” approach means a throwaway work sometimes because people aren’t communicating in any meaningful way before writing code.
[edited formatting]
https://www.npr.org/2024/01/07/1223351685/some-people-are-pa...
Apparently Michigan helped normalize the ionization of salt in the US: https://www.michiganradio.org/show/stateside/2022-05-12/once...
I’d love to be in a position to work on a new project using Rust or Haskell instead.
> On average across all population subgroups, people who survived to age 50 were expected to live over 8 years longer in 2000 than in 1940, corresponding to an increase in e50 from 23 years in 1940 to 31.3 years in 2006, or an average rise of 1.3 years per decade.
An 8 year increase in life expectancy at age 50 (from 73 to 81.3) seems like a pretty large increase over the span of 60 years.
I’d be more interested to know what the change in healthspan is, though. Living longer is less interesting to me than living longer in good health without worsening pain and disability.
For examples of people playing them, search for Lumatone on YouTube, or “microtonal”, or “xenharmonic”.
The reality is that GPT isn't even great at answering factual questions at this point, despite all the hype. I have a modest amount of expertise in music theory and I've found that asking even relatively basic questions resulted in completely incorrect answers coming out of GPT. It's been impressive that in some cases if you say, "No, that's incorrect." it will actually go back and spit out a new answer which in some cases is correct, but that's hardly any fundamental advancement in "understanding", and just more evidence that it's parroting what it's been trained on, which includes substantial amounts of misinformation.
Although I personally suspect this is correct, the issue seems to be that there are a lot of people who feel otherwise, whether right or wrong, including some of the people involved in the research and/or running these companies.
I've seen several prominent people say things to the effect of "We just don't know if we're six months or 600 years from AGI,", which to me is a little like saying, "We don't know if we'll have time travel and ray guns in six months or 600 years."
No, we don't know, but all signs seem to be pointing toward a longer timeframe rather than a short one.
The counterargument to that seems to be, "If we can make something that appears to be able to mimic human responses, isn't that AGI in practice even if it's not in principle?", which is a sentiment I have also seen expressed by some of the same people.
Came here to post this but you beat me to it.
We have reasonably safe C/C++ code in some places because of a combination of a huge amount of extra effort to be careful plus years of prior bug fixing and rewriting of that code to use safer practices.
In California, all of my vaccinations have come from phlebotomists, and it seems that pharmacists can also do them here.
Why does NY State require an RN?
Perhaps that’s a West Coast thing, though, and it’s not as common in other parts of the country?
Given the number of layers of management I see on LinkedIn, it seems like they could go through a serious flattening and housecleaning and still have a substantial team that could execute on the right vision.
If you’re talking about FP32 rates, they double it because of FMA (floating-point multiply-accumulate). Everyone does that.
That’s a rather dubious conclusion if based on that criteria.