bsder

Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

> Just buy an open source version from China

References and links?

There is currently no open source version of the high resolution monochrome LCDs. The LCDs and their drivers lock you into the Chitu ecosystem.

The problem, as Chitu figured out, is that as soon as you cough up the NRE to make the LCDs and make it publicly available, EVERYBODY will copy you and then there will be no profit left to sink the NRE that you just spent.

> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?

Because the free market considers any supplier but the cheapest to be inefficient and drives them out of business. Robustness of the supply chain is always less profitable.

Whether helium or eggs or toilet paper, we keep getting shown the results of this lesson over and over. And people refuse to learn.

> It’s a miracle markets didn’t notice this “damned if you succeed damned if you don’t” type of inevitable checkmate

They learned from 2008 that Too Big Too Fail(tm) means the government bails you out.

This was the problem with not OBLITERATING the banks in 2008. Had the US government taken over the banks and wiped the investors, there would be more pushback right now.

As Boomers would say: Mayfly Attention Span.

Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.

Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.

And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.

There is a PDF of "HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION". You should read it. He is VERY clear what the goal is:

"Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here."

They could. But then you get clipping effects and sampling effects when you convert back and forth.

Better to upsample once (generally a non-lossy operation) and operate on single precision FP (24-bit mantissa and an exponent) at higher sampling from that point forward and then downsample once (generally a LOSSY operation).

Distributing music != recording music != processing music.

There ARE good reasons for recording and processing music at higher bitrates and sample sizes. Effects, especially those with positive feedback loops, can go more unstable and clip and lose information with fewer bits and samples.

There's just no good reason to DISTRIBUTE music at the higher rates.

If you can haul a 60 pound lump up 20 stories, this article is not for you.

Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.

Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.

Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.

This is why when I taught in college I NEVER gave out group assignments.

I'm not trying to test whether the best student knows the material; I'm trying to test whether all the students know the material.

As the person who regularly carried such groups when I was in high school and college, I was especially sensitive to this.

Matt is a creature of social media and has a lot of minions and sockpuppets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Probably back room deal between Wordpress board/management and WPEngine board/management. It's a safe bet that WPEngine was destroying Wordpress legally simply because their CEO doesn't suffer from verbal diarrhea and actually shuts up when the lawyers tell him to.

If you get Matt out of the way, you can ink a deal and resolve everything so that even if Matt pulls something else, there are contracts in place that can't be gotten rid of so easily.

> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.

Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.

The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.

For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.

> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.

Citation definitely needed.

The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.

One can read the entire article AND disagree with the fundamental premise.

Reading should not feel like wading through slop. Period. If it does, that is simply bad writing.

Too many people don't have the guts to simply say "No, I do not like that; there are better things I can read."

I thought this is exactly what Linus Tech Tips did.

> So let me trot out mine: regulation is good so long as it is backed up by even handed, robust, transparent, quick and effective sanctions.

The issue is that people want quick sanctions until they wind up on the wrong end of the pointy spear--at which point they want accurate sanctions.

The problem is that quick and accurate are opposing forces when it comes to sanctions.

Doctor Who is definitely the last thing I would dub as "internally-consistent". It's a serial--and the duct taped seams show--sometimes glaringly so.

But, every now and then, the writing CLICKS and you get genuine emotional ART--generally as a monologue.

No, NOT every novel is boring from the get go. And some novels ARE boring. And the fact that so many people recommend the ones that are is the bloody problem.

The first thing to accept is that different people like different things. If someone likes the Beatles, you wouldn't immediately jump to recommend Handel or Black Sabbath.

And, yet, this is EXACTLY what people do all the time with literature. Oh, you liked that Vonnegut story? Here, have some Dickens. ARGHGHGHGHGHG! NO! NO! NO! NO! Give the Vonnegut reader some O. Henry or Roald Dahl--not Dickens or Bronte. Good grief.

I got lucky. My father understood this. He always recommended things that he thought I would like--interspersed very rarely with things that were good for me that I might or might not like. But he NEVER gave me anything he thought I would dislike simply because it was supposedly "great literature".

And, now, Dear Readers, I leave you with wisdom for the ages imparted from Wallace Stevens via my father: "The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream."

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45234/the-emperor-of-...

Unfortunately, my experience has been that it's the endless cycling with customer requirements that takes all the time.

The hardware is generally manageable quickly for me. Even th firmware isn't terrible.

And then you deploy it.

And the customer realizes it needs to do Q and that they asked it to do X and it doesn't need to do that and we need to take another $0.50 out of the BOM and ...

And then 4 years pass and you still don't have any real revenue.

There is a reason why so many places demand NRE of $1 million minimum and THEN they'll talk about designing your project.

The big gap isn't scaling. It's the scaling PATH. You need to have a viable and profitable path all along AS you scale from tens to thousands to millions. And those projects are VERY rare.

See: BeatBuddy for interesting post mortem and note that AI wouldn't really have helped them much at all.

Without a repo link to design files, I have no evidence that this project is real and not marketing copy. Sorry.

I believe it's real, but there are no artifacts to corroborate. That's a poor article.

It is sad that the internet has devolved into this state.

Until holding and losing PII (Personally Identifiable Information) is treated and punished like holding and losing radioactive waste, this will not stop.

The penalties for losing PII should be sufficiently high that even the most junior programmer should recognize the probably and immediately blanch whenever asked to write code about it.

Applications like Blackboard exist because of the genre of "Checkboxware."

A University must comply with Laws and Regulations X, Y, Z, P, D and Q and a host of other regulations the University never heard of and Blackboard went through the process to "comply" with those checkboxes. So, if you deploy Blackboard, you tick all the checkboxes automatically.

The fact that Blackboard was a garbage content management system and a terrible grade recording system was irrelevant--because the "better" systems wouldn't check the boxes.

(I say this as someone who, as a lecturer, had to manage the account logins, mailing list, and Subversion source control system for an entire class. I only ever put grades that needed to be "secure" into Blackboard. I did all that because I HATED Blackboard that badly, but it was a LOT of work. And I probably wouldn't have passed any significant security audit; although my accessibility ratings should have been excellent since everything was plain text and plain HTML)

You are technically correct. The best kind of correct.

However, what most people think of as Moore's Law--CPU speed doubles every 18 months--broke somewhere between 90nm and 22nm.

And even the actual Moore's Law--2x the transistors every 18 months--doesn't hold for all types of chips anymore. Memory only gained 2x density over 10 years.

There are levels of integration in between "Bubba down the block" and "Weyland-Yutani Megacorp"

Busting up Taylor Farms into 5 different companies would affect the food safety not one whit. In fact, it would probably improve it. If there were 6 different companies to choose from, for example, this incident would mean that one of them would go bankrupt as everybody switched to the other 5. And that would be a warning to the remaining companies not to screw up the same way.

However, since there is only a single supplier, Taylor Farms doesn't get any penalty at all. A couple of junior VPs get sacked and life rolls on for the CEO and his buddies.

> But I can assure you that Nvidia didn't buy them for 13 billion cause HuggingFace were desperate.

From Nvidia's side? You get to keep the shell game of where your money and hardware are going spinning on the table for a little longer. If the party stops, Nvidia loses a zero right off their valuation instantly.

And, as a side benefit, you get to place your thumb on the scale of the open-weight hosting ecosystem. And maybe even fund a Chinese Anthropic or OpenAI at a discount.

OpenAI just popped out an inference ASIC. Google is on their 8th generation of TPU. Graviton is out from Amazon. The hosting companies want Nvidia out of their finances. Full stop. Nvidia has to do something, or it's going to get swept away.

AI does not make me "smarter" in the important thing I am working on.

In software particularly, what AI does do is give me back my time from the drudge work that I don't care about. Keeping my build system configured and my tests up to date and my documentation synchronized is a good use of AI because I mostly don't care about how crummy the result is as long as it "works".

> I always thought that was a case of "the tech is still catching up",[0] but it sounds like there are fundamental issues that prevent performant implementations?

Yes, the fundamental problem is the fact that everybody involved in RISC-V wants to sell IP instead of a chip.

The problem with the RISC-V chips in non-embedded contexts (ie desktop or server) has absolutely nothing to do with the instruction set architecture (not entirely true but a really good first approximation). The problem is that performance is strongly dependent upon your high speed interfaces--memory, graphics, PCI, etc. And those blocks need to be strongly integrated in with your CPU interfaces.

However, if you buy a whole bunch of IP blocks and then just wire them together, your performance is going to be sub-par. And this is what every single RISC-V chip that I know of currently is.

It's not beyond someone to sit down and do the required integration like Apple did for ARM. There's just insufficient money in it so nobody is going to expend the engineers.

Because the people driving the RISC-V ISA all care about delivering IP and not chips and, as such, only care about the high end portion of the market.

The problem is that RISC-V is never going to win at the high end. RISC-V will never have as much money driving it forward as x86 and ARM. As such, the blocks and integration will always lag.

The portion of the market which RISC-V could dominate is the low-end (you know ... the same way ARM climbed up the ladder?) and nobody in charge of RISC-V cares because you have to actually ... SHIP FREAKIN' CHIPS ... and that's, you know, so icky.

And this is the disconnect. Low-end embedded has a bunch of needs and the RISC-V architecture completely whiffs on many of them and has active misfeatures on others while having very little that is actively good in that space.

And many of us are angry about this. It didn't have to be this way.