I mean this in the best possible way, but I don't think you're using "altruistic" correctly. Altruism is "showing a selfless concern for the well-being of others." I think you're looking for "naive," and Microsoft is some combination of cynical and manipulative.
I guess my abandoned/dead project might be Usenet. Sure, there were very dark places, and a lot of it was just a way to distribute porn, but that pretty much describes the Web. Usenet was like Reddit not controlled by a single company; like the Fediverse with infinite channels; like all of the world's threaded web fora displayed in exactly the way you want. We had that in the 1990s, and we're slowly groping toward getting it back.
It was kind of awesome that you could telnet to port 80, type "GET / HTTP/1.0", press return a couple of times, and receive a web page. Then shitty hotel wifi that injected ads happened, so we had to encrypt traffic that had absolutely no sensitive information.
I tried to understand this, but it seems like a non-native English speaker met an LLM and used it to create a blog post. Can someone please explain why this exists?
True, Python could be better or worse than two orders of magnitude slower for your particular use case, but it's 70x slower for recursion and addition that it clearly hasn't special-cased. That's good to know.
tl;dr: Two orders of magnitude slower than Rust, so 2-3 orders slower than native. Python on a 2 GHz processor runs as fast as C on a 2-20 MHz processor.
Back in the Mac OS < 10 or MS-DOS days, all programs shared the same address space. Bugs that would crash a single program nowadays would bring down the entire system. But you could somehow run a bunch of sketchy shareware games, and your computer usually wouldn't crash or run out of memory, because programmers cared about bugs.
This. There are plenty of people trying to keep using Windows 10, and Microsoft is trying to force them to use Windows 11, which they do not want. The same goes for Mac OS 26. "Choice" doesn't matter.
I was a software developer, and have some idea where this comes from. Keeping track of multiple versions of software to separate bug fixes from new features is hard, but calling whatever is in version control on the first Friday of every month "version N+1" is easy. Back when users had to pay for a stack of floppies or CDs to get a new version, you had to give them a compelling reason to do so. When it's nearly impossible for them to prevent the new version from being auto-installed, you don't.
The vector implementation on my machine uses three pointers: start, end, and end-of-storage. It's basically the same, but uses addresses rather than counts. The valarray implementation uses a pointer and a single count.
Seconded. I've been using NetNewsWire for a couple of decades, and it does the unglamorous job of displaying feeds without ads, nags, or feature churn.
It bugs me too when actual humans adopt soulless management-speak about "content" traveling from "producer" to "consumer." (The words don't even make sense: when you consume food, it's gone; when you observe text, an image, or video, it's still there.) I use RSS to keep up with other people who "emit content" at irregular intervals.
I feel a certain way when I work with older programmers who used to program using punch cards, and debug actual core dumps, i.e. the main memory of the computer printed out in hex. They have incredible attention to detail, and can reason about why their programs didn't do what they expected.
Do they? Wildfires are some percent more likely and larger, but forests have always burned, and there are other factors like a century of fire suppression. Hurricanes are more violent and frequent, but there have always been hurricanes. Eggheads will tell you those things, but your day-to-day experiences of them are easy to dismiss. Watching a glacier die is visceral:
I have believed for years that Americans would have a completely different attitude to global warming if the Lower 48 had more glaciers. In the Alps, you can easily walk to places where there are 100m of ladders to reach a hut that used to be at the level of the ice. In Canada, you can drive to places that used to be the toe of a glacier, then drive another half-mile to the parking lot, built at the edge of the glacier 20 years ago, then walk even farther on loose rubble. 1.5℃ of warming feels abstract and trivial. A giant piece of ice disappearing feels much more real.
I may get there at some point -- I actually ran Linux on a PowerBook for a while during the dot-com boom -- but Mac OS X was Unix with tastefully-done office software, and Gnome/KDE were tasteless kludges. Now it seems all software is converging on the same bubbly, mediocre slop. Sadly, Apple still makes the best laptops by far, and trying to run Linux on them takes me to the bad old days of editing XF86Config files and failing to sleep when the lid closes.
But back to the article on hand... Windows has been shoddy since forever, and Windows-compatible laptops are mostly mediocre things that can also run Linux. I could absolutely see a lot of casual Windows users switching to Linux for email, web, and office tasks.
> $16Bn in compute spend (rent) rising to $400bn in 4 years. Definitely not a bubble. ;)
Just to put that in context, US GDP last year was about $30tn, and Apple's revenue was about $400bn. So Altman is saying he wants to spend around 1% of US GDP, or most of Apple's revenue, on compute alone in 2029. He's clearly using the "fire all your white collar employees" pitch deck at the very least, if not the "prepare to meet your Silicon God" one.
"Child of God?" You started at just about the darkest, least approachable place. Try "No Country for Old Men" or "All the Pretty Horses," both of which are far easier to read and contemplate.
If you think "Blood Meridian" is dark, try "Child of God." I'm a huge McCarthy fan, but "Blood Meridian" is tough to appreciate. "The Road," "No Country for Old Men," and "All the Pretty Horses" are his most readable works; try them, then decide how much farther you want to go.
> blogs weren't a place to promote yourself and your side hustle. Blogs were personal diaries. We didn't have the same concept of OPSEC back in the early 2000's
OPSEC has nothing to do with it. People used pseudonyms by default in the 1990s, and blocked Doubleclick (a.k.a. Google) in their ~/.hosts files. Blogs were non-commercial places where we worked out ideas and offered useful information.
OpenAI has a machine that emits plausible text. They're trying to argue that "emitting plausible text" is the hard problem, and "modeling the natural world, human consciousness, society, etc." is the easy one.
> Mastodon is social like a quiet pub. Twitter and Bluesky are social like a crowd at a concert.
Good analogy. When Twitter started, I took one look at people shouting "I had a delicious sandwich today" and "I just took an amazing dump" and wanted no part of it. When it later turned into a "clever" contest, I wanted even less.
My quiet little Mastodon community, plus some outsiders I have chosen, is the kind of "social" I want. If someone starts behaving like an influencer, they get muted.
It's a tradeoff. When package users had to manually install dependencies, package developers had to reckon with that friction. Now we're living in a world where developers don't care about another 10^X dependencies, because the package manager will just run the scripts and install the files, and the users will accept it.
It should, and also to Makefile.PL, etc. These systems were created at a time when you were dealing with a handful of dependencies, and software development was a friendlier place.
Now you're dealing with hundreds of recursive dependencies, all of which you should assume may become hostile at any time. If you neither audit your dependencies, nor have the ability to sue them for damages, you're in a precarious position.