breadwinner

I think it was C-Cubed's trash, but it was DEC's IP. See: https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

"The listings evidently included Basic for the PDP-10, but it was Allen who did the Assembler programming to simulate the Altair, while Gates, Monte Davidoff and later Allen worked on a Basic interpreter for the machine."

See https://www.theregister.com/2000/06/29/bill_gates_roots/

Sun made incredibly good hardware and software. They were incredibly good technologists, responsible for lots of innovations, but they were bad at business. So in that sense they were the opposite of Microsoft.

They were not dim, but Microsoft copied a lot, and didn't innovate. This aspect of Microsoft hasn't changed.

In the 1990s, during the competition between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, Sun's CEO, Scott McNealy, compared Bill Gates to Ginger Rogers. This analogy suggested that, like Rogers, who danced everything Fred Astaire did but backward and in high heels, Gates was adept at following and adapting competitors' innovations. This comparison was part of Sun's broader critique of Microsoft's business practices at the time.

"It has been noted that everything Astaire did, Rogers was able to do -- backwards and in high heels. That's high praise for the nimble Ms. Rogers. But for a would-be visionary, following someone else's lead -- no matter how skillfully -- simply doesn't cut it."

https://web.archive.org/web/19991013082222/www.sun.com/dot-c...

Microsoft got its start by Bill Gates doing some dumpster diving. Back then software wasn't seen as valuable thing, only hardware was. Source code wasn't something to be protected, so printouts of code would be thrown in trash. And that's where Bill Gates found the source code for Basic interpreter, which he ported and it became the first Microsoft product.

https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm

https://paulallen.com/Futurist/Microsoft.aspx

Wait a minute, they used greek symbols and stuff [1]. When was the last time you saw an idiot use a greek symbol?

[1] https://x.com/Brendan_Duke/status/1907741651172311353

Apache Spark, Delta Lake are written Scala. Being JVM based, it has a large ecosystem. Scala seems like a better choice than F#.

Sorry I meant Microsoft Copilot should be as integrated into Office as Cursor is into VSCode. I was not talking about GitHub Copilot.

I consider Copilot a flop because it can't do anything. For example open Copilot on Windows and ask it to increase volume. It can't do it, but it will give you instructions for how to do it. In other words it is no better than standalone AI chat websites.

Lots of articles on it... and I am not even talking about competitors like Benioff [1]. I am talking about user complaints like this [2]. Users expect Copilot to be fully integrated, like Cursor is into VSCode. Instead what you get is barely better than typing into standalone AI chats like Claude.AI.

[1] https://www.cio.com/article/3586887/marc-benioff-rails-again...

[2] https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/discussions/microsoft365...

Good for them! This is something the inept Merrick Garland failed to do, thereby dooming the country as well as the planet.

The loser in the AI model competition appears to be... Microsoft.

When ChatGPT was the only game in town Microsoft was seen as a leader, thanks to their wise investment in Open AI. They relied on Open AI's model and didn't develop their own. As a result Microsoft has no interesting AI products. Copilot is a flop. Bing failed to take advantage of AI, Perplexity ate their lunch.

Satya Nadella last year: “Google should have been the default winner in the world of big tech’s AI race”.

Sundar Pichai's response: “I would love to do a side-by-side comparison of Microsoft’s own models and our models any day, any time. They are using someone else's model.”

See: https://www.msn.com/en-in/money/news/sundar-pichai-vs-satya-...

From the article:

The concerns about losing ground in science are particularly acute in artificial intelligence, the technology that experts believe is most likely to drive productivity gains in coming decades. American companies have dominated the early phases of the A.I. revolution, partly because much of the foundational work was done at U.S. universities.

This is badly needed. Until we have combobox, the <select> is best implemented as a readonly combobox, because you need to implement combobox in any case.

What is special about April 20?

Congress has allocated budget to USAID. Elon Musk decided not to spend it.

From the interview:

> “There are methods which you could do it,” the president said when asked whether there are strategies on the table to allow him to seek another term. Welker mentioned a possible plan in which Vice President JD Vance would run in 2028 and then “pass the baton” to Trump. “Well, that’s one. But there are others too,” the president said, before refusing to elaborate.

The other method of course, is to not have an election at all! Why risk losing?

Anyone who thinks there is going to be a presidential election in 2028 hasn't been paying attention. There is no way Trump is going to that risk. He doesn't have to. All checks and balances have been suppressed already.

> The difference between this and a real dictatorship is the courts. If we lose that, we're in trouble.

Trump admin has ignored judge's orders regarding deportation. https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-admin-ignores-judges-order-b...

> “There are methods which you could do it,” the president said when asked whether there are strategies on the table to allow him to seek another term. Welker mentioned a possible plan in which Vice President JD Vance would run in 2028 and then “pass the baton” to Trump. “Well, that’s one. But there are others too,” the president said, before refusing to elaborate.

The other method of course, is to not have an election at all! Why risk losing?

The American people, through their elected representatives in Congress, decided saving those kids' lives are in our moral interest. Then Elon Musk decided it isn't.

Foreign tourists? How about a million children dying so American billionaires can enjoy tax cuts?

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/15/opinion/forei...

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyd505vzlwo

Agree that "modern" OS user interfaces are objectively worse from a usability perspective. That's thanks to Flat UI, mostly.

In my opinion, nothing beats the 35-year-old NeXTSTEP interface (which W95 is a weak imitation of):

https://www.gnustep.org/carousel/PC_1300x650.png

This Wikipedia article [1] seems to match this situation well.

I believe the real purpose of the current administration is to establish a precedent of suppressing dissent at universities. Their method is twofold: (1) Ambush and spirit away students to intimidate the student community and establish an atmosphere of fear, and (2) make it clear to university administrations that their research funding — to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars — will be taken away if they don't suppress dissent.

They are not just doing this to universities. They are doing this to members of congress (threat of primarying by Trump and Musk), judges (threat of impeachment), law firms (threat of canceling federal contracts and security clearances), etc. This atmosphere of fear and intimidation — of pretty much everyone — will be needed when Trump refuses to give up power at the end of his second term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_terrorism

I just typed define terrorism into Google and that's where the definition came from.

Disagree that it's only terrorism if perpetuated by non-state actors. State-sponsored terrorism occurs when a government actively supports or engages in terrorist violence, either directly or through non-state actors, to achieve its political goals. (This definition is from Google as well, from its AI overview).

Here's the dictionary definition of terrorism: the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.

Does this apply to the current case? It seems to check every box. The actions were unlawful, since the student — even immigrant students on visas — have 1st amendment rights. Was it intimidation? It certainly was. Was it against civilians? Yes. In pursuit of political aims? Yes.

Disagree. Men in plain clothes ambushing a student, capturing and taking her away in an unmarked car — for the crime of writing an essay — is absolutely terrorizing. And I bet the intent of the administration is to terrorize. This is worthy of the Gestapo, not USA, the land of the free.

America is the leading economy in the world today not because it has the most number of people, but because it has the best and the brightest. We have the smartest people not because the smartest people of the world were all born here, but because smart people born elsewhere have been immigrating to the United States.

Most immigrated on student visas. Harassing immigrant students in universities will lead to the US no longer being a seen as a great destination for the brightest minds.

But forget being a leading economy, this type of attack on students — for the crime of writing an essay in a student newspaper — is morally outrageous as well. It is unamerican.

Screenshots of her crime (the essay) are on display at that website. The real crime here is arresting someone for an essay in a school newspaper.

No you don't. Google Search only offers search, and one-shot AI. You have to go somewhere else if you want a conversation.

> it's certain they'll eventually try this with citizens if they can

See: https://x.com/StephenM/status/1712094935820780029?lang=en