RachelF

wow! Thanks for that.

Yes, it is very lacking in details. The Claude output would have been interesting, or a few logs or protocol dumps.

The lack of detail makes me suspect the truth of most of the story.

Not in my experience with Gemini Pro and coding. It hallucinates APIs that aren't there. Claude does not do that.

Gemini has flashes of brilliance, but I regard it as unpolished some things work amazingly, some basics don't work.

There fans are still good, but not the quietest anymore.

Noctua no longer manufactures them, they are now made by YS Tech.

I don't understand the threat model that banks worry about on rooted phones.

What is it? I can access their websites on a PC running as root or Administrator. What is the problem with rooted Android phones?

Mine is not 200MB on Android - the base apk is 67MB + 32MB for the ARM v8a specific libs. This is the code, the local caching and other data might make up the rest.

For Android, you can check [1] Download the apk, rename it as a zip and look inside to see the files.

A quick file analysis of the 67MB shows around 58MB of java code and some 32MB of ARM libs, 31MB of this is the libvideochat.

[1] https://www.apkmirror.com/apk/google-inc/gmail/gmail-2025-11...

Interesting timing, given that the PS4 has been hacked via various exploits, and the PS5 has just had its root encryption keys exposed.

Anna's archive has a great analysis of the Spotify data.

They identify a huge surge in tracks that few listen to after gen AI started.

The analysis is worth reading. The distribution is (Pareto)^3 ~99% of the tracks played are 1% of the catalogue.

> iAPX 432 Yes, this was a failure, the Itanium of the 1980's

I also regard ADA as a failure. I worked with it many years ago. ADA would take 30 minutes to compile a program. Turbo C++ compiled equivalent code in a few seconds.

Windows has been my main operating system for the last 35 years (from version 2). I've used Linux and to a lessor extent BSD and Mac as well, but my main desktop has always been Windows, as it ran most of the apps that I needed.

Windows 11 UI and spyware are so bad, that Windows 10 is where my 35 years of using Windows as my main OS has ended.

The Chinese tech manufacturers are so sick of the HDMI licencing mafia that they've developed their own replacement for it:

https://www.techpowerup.com/335152/china-develops-hdmi-alter...

In the late 1990's many HP workstations used Abit motherboards.

I remember being surprised that HP did not make the boards themselves.

Or more recently Dan Kahneman, Dan Arielly or Stephen Jay Gould have also been caught fabricating details or whole results.

and Borland's Eureka solver https://nagodede.github.io/eureka/

A lot of the time engineers are focussed with solving a problem, to build a working machine/program, while academics just want to publish.

This is also true with patents.

I would argue that designing avionics without EDAC is negligent design by Airbus.

Most modern servers at least implement ECC on their RAM. I would expect flight electronics to be designed to a higher standard.

Sad to see Half Life 3 hasn't been released yet.

As someone who used QNX back then, they didn't target end-users but embedded and real-time users.

They were expensive too. You had to pay for each device driver you used.

Sadly, society also optimizes for cheating. Meritocracy is a myth.

In many ways Stanford is preparing students for the real world by encouraging cheating.

Perhaps we'll have to start optimizing software for performance and RAM usage again.

I look at MS Teams currently using 1.5GB of RAM doing nothing.

Perhaps the memory manufacturers have seen how much Apple gets away with charging for the memory on their laptops and have decided to copy them ;-)

Well put. Since the 1980's consumer has been driving the segment. Even supercomputers were built out of higher end consumer hardware (or playstations in one example).

The move to cloud computing and now AI mean that we're back in the mainframe days.

Endurance going down is hardly a surprise given that the feature size has gone down too. The same goes for logic and DRAM memory.

I suspect that 2035 years time, hardware from 2010 will work, while that from 2020 will be less reliable.

Raspberry Pi was never really that open hardware-wise. They've IPO'd and gone fully corporate/profit driven now.

The ESP32 is probably the most vibrant platform now.

These very narrow speed measurements are getting out of hand:

1 petaFLOP using FP4, that's 4 petaFLOPS using FP1 and infinite petaFLOPS using FP0.

That's how he gets paid - increasing short term stock price.

"Show me the incentives and I'll show you the results" - Charlie Munger

I really don't understand why they do this - what is so special about banking apps vs a banking site in a web browser.

What is the particular threat model of a rooted phone?

The counterpoint for having your own domain is that emails you send have a good chance of being classified as spam.

Yeah they got burned. Sony stopped selling their Clie PalmOS phones/PDA's in the USA as they said Americans were too lazy to read the manual.

The innovation of the iPhone was the capacitive touch screen (a Japanese invention) coupled with an OS that was very easy to use (no manual reading required). And of course Apple's marketing genius.

Many other recent Microsoft products are below average. I'm thinking Teams, Outlook, Windows 11. Azure and Office are better.

I guess they spend their money on sales and licensing and not on developing good products now?