dblohm7

This is precisely why I consider the notion that the IC track and manager track are somehow parallel to each other.

Only managers truly have any say over employee performance; there is an inherent power imbalance that always puts ICs at a disadvantage.

It's not about who is the "Netscape" this time around, it's about the irrational exuberance surrounding the entire thing.

These days it seems like anybody can throw "AI" into their company name (even if it's complete BS) and it has the same effect as adding ".com" to a company name did in the late nineties.

IMHO AI is a .com-like hype cycle that's orders of magnitude larger and more irrational than anything that happened post-iPhone.

That's not to say that there aren't good businesses in there (the same was true of .com, of course), but there's a lot of junk that's getting a lot of money thrown at it.

> Them along absolutely everyone else. ChatGPT was an iPhone moment.

Old guy here, but it feels more like a Netscape moment than an iPhone moment. We'll end up with our pets.com of the LLM age, the whole thing will implode, and the few companies that were actually doing useful stuff with LLMs will survive.

I'm not GP, but I've had transitions denied while attempting to purchase something because the retailer's code flagged my email address as suspicious because it contained their name in it.

AIUI the verbosity is by design to make scripts more clear, and users are expected to use aliases to make cmdlets easier to work with interactively. But I assume that few of those aliases are actually standardized...

More like 30 years ago at this point.

> It's not NASA's job to keep Boeing in the running.

In theory it is not. The reality is that a lot of NASA's budgeting and decisions are made based on the pork-barrel politics of the ones who hold the purse strings -- congress.

> Adding generics was too much

I strongly disagree. Sure, like anything in programming, generics can be misused. But even comments can be misused!

OTOH I am able to build things in Go with generics that I would not be very happy building without them.

Microsoft added a feature to Windows that allows specially-signed antimalware drivers to be loaded extremely early in the boot sequence and be marked as non-optional. The idea is to give antimalware drivers the opportunity to load first, before anything else has had the chance to start.

Furthermore, if a driver is marked as optional and crashes, Windows can reboot with that optional driver disabled next time, preventing infinite crash/boot loops. Obviously that's no good if your antimalware driver gets disabled, so they can mark theirs as "required." Obviously in the CrowdStrike case, we got the worst of both worlds.

This is silly. Home users also don't use CrowdStrike.

Apple also 100% controls their hardware, so they can afford to do away with third-party kernel extensions.

** SLS has entered the chat **

Android has a permission for internet access. It's still there, but enabled for everybody by default. This was an intentional decision on the part of Google.

Back in the day, you could install Android apps that explicitly did not use the internet permission. You could make your installation decisions based on whether apps requested that permission and whether it made sense for them to do so. Some AOSP mods even let you disable that permission for apps (though YMMV as to how well that actually worked in practice).

As somebody whose machine learning expertise consists of the first cohort of Andrew Ng's MOOC back in 2011, I'm not too surprised. One of the big takeaways I took from that experience was the importance of getting the features right.

I'm surprised the BBC left out the elephant in the room: Supply Management [1].

TL;DR Canada has highly protectionist dairy and poultry sectors that artificially constrict supply of dairy and poultry. You'll periodically read reports of dairy farmers intentionally dumping perfectly good milk [2] because they produced more than their allotted quota.

Even worse, all the federal political parties are too cowardly to stop it; in fact, the House of Commons recently passed [3] a private member's bill that essentially prevents the Minister of Foreign Affairs from negotiating any trade agreement that would weaken the supply management regime. (As you can imagine, Canada often gets called out for its hypocrisy during trade negotiations.) The politicians are scared to anger dairy farmers, particularly the ones in Quebec.

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

[2] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/dairy-covid-19-1.5528331

[3] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/gift/eca53705d5e7568f5ed88c7...

Don’t forget that the notwithstanding clause cannot be used to override just anything; only specific sections.

ILM Compositor Todd Vaziri talks a lot about stuff like this both on his blog [1] and on X [2]. One of his pet peeves is marketing campaigns claiming mostly practical effects when in fact the opposite is true.

[1]https://fxrant.blogspot.com/

[2]https://x.com/tvaziri

(Former browser dev)

Agreed. Feature detection is the way, not UA sniffing.

> (they tend to have 2-4% acceptance rates to either the college or the CS department)

This leads me to a broader question: What does their acceptance rate of high schoolers have to do with anything? We're always using that as some kind of proxy, but high schoolers (even the top ones) don't know much...

I remember that Apple used to wave around these SIMD benchmarks showing their PowerPC chips trouncing Intel chips. In the fine print, you'd see that the benchmark was built to use AltiVec on PowerPC, but without MMX or SSE on Intel.

AIUI the UNIX subsystem was there entirely for the purpose of getting Windows NT certified at C2-level security.

Look up the F-1B.

Firefox has done a lot of work on devirtualization over the years. There is a cost.

Unfortunately a lot of developers are conditioned so heavily to believe that inheritance is intrinsically bad, that they contort their code into an unreadable mess just to re-implement something that could have been trivial to do with inheritance.

I'm not saying that I like it everywhere; IMHO it's a tool to be used sparingly and not with deep hierarchies. But it's not reasonable to avoid it 100% of the time because we're soiling ourselves over the thought of possibly encountering the diamond problem.

Found the one!

It's because the emperor has no clothes. Most of the VCs I've met have been complete airheads.

I think it's worth pointing out that 5.25" floppies were already well out their way out in 1998, already.

I really like the way the author explained RCU!

Don't get me started talking about #cccc

Apollo 11 isn't really the proper comparison to make, though; more precise landings were goals of later missions.