nrclark

Agree. Even asking it can anchor your thinking.

This was a really interesting read. I'd highly recommend it for anybody who's setting up (or currently maintains) a pre-commit workflow for their developers.

I want to add one other note: in any large organization, some developers will use tools in ways nobody can predict. This includes Git. Don't try to force any particular workflow, including mandatory or automatically-enabled hooks.

Instead, put what you want in an optional pre-push hook and also put it into an early CI/CD step for your pull request checker. You'll get the same end result but your fussiest developers will be happier.

fwiw I'm the CEO of htmx, and I am a huge fan of these types of hyperbolic articles.

Game theory is a model that's sometimes accurate. Game theorists often forget that humans are bags of thinking meat, and that our thinking is accomplished by goopy electrochemical processes

Brains can and do make straight-up mistakes all the time. Like "there was a transmission error"-type mistakes. They can't be modeled or predicted, and so humans can never truly be rational actors.

Humans also make irrational decisions all the time based on gut feeling and instinct. Sometimes with reasons that a brain backfills, sometimes not.

People can and do act against the own self interest all the time, and not for "oh, but they actually thought X" reasons. Brains make unexplainable mistakes. Have you ever walked into a room and forgotten what you went in there to do? That state isn't modelable with game theory, and it generalizes to every aspect of human behavior.

It's a bummer that the library and utilities are GPLv3 - really limits adoption, because it means that product developers can't build it into the kinds of small embedded Linux systems where it would really shine.

Maybe Ventana's software engineers can also help Qualcomm fix its BSPs.

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I can dream, right?

Fully agree - Ventana's cores are more like Cortex A76 kinds of things, and are on a completely different scale from typical Cortex-M cores.

But switching to RISC-V would shut Qualcomm out from QNX and would limit its Android compatibility. And on the Qualcomm chips that I've seen so far, they're really bought in on both QNX and Android. That's why I think this is probably an aquihire more than a desire to ship Ventana's CPU cores.

I'd be surprised if Qualcomm replaces their application processors (the cores that typically run Android/Linux or QNX) with RISC-V any time soon. Aarch64's ecosystem is huge, and Qualcomm would cut their customers off from it by moving fully to RISC-V.

They're more likely to replace the smaller CPU cores imo.

Most SOCs on the market today have a mix of various CPU cores. It's common to see designs with a few big ARM Cortex-A cores running an OS like Linux or Android, and then some smaller Cortex-M microcontroller cores that do housekeeping things like security checks, power management, realtime features, peripheral management, etc.

If I were to guess, Qualcomm wants to replace its various Cortex-M cores with RISC-V equivalents. This saves them money on licensing, reduces their dependency on ARM, and doesn't break customer-facing compatibility. Ventana is probably more of an aquihire to get their designer team.

"We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile." -Qualcomm, probably

Awesome, that's great to hear. Now if Qualcomm would only relax the walls between their business units, their other customers could benefit as well.

Who benefits from having separate BUs maintain fully separate software stacks? It's duplicated, wasted effort on Qualcomm's part. Maybe it lets them double-charge their customers for this duplicate effort, but that feels short-sighted. It leaves a bad taste in their customers' mouths. And there's certainly no benefit in delivered software quality.

Qualcomm should be making it easy for everybody to buy and use their chips, not artificially segmenting every single customer. They could sweep the market so hard if they were just a little less greedy.

It matters when you're doing custom hardware, or when you're designing a product where boot speed matters, or when you need to implement something special.

A full-featured U-Boot implementation would be fine IMO. But for the generations that I've used, that's not on the table. What we get is a proprietary flow through a proprietary hypervisor into a fork of Android's bootloader (even if vanilla Linux is the target OS). There's no way to control startup boot options, and no way to use KVM, Xen or any hypervisor except the proprietary one that's also part of the boot chain.

This doesn't lend itself to flexible products, or to products that are easy for a company to design or support. That is why things like this happen: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008156

If anybody in Qualcomm leadership is reading this thread: this is a good start, and I applaud you for it. There is also a lot more to do if you're serious about growing your market penetration beyond phones.

The drivers might be up on LKML, but they're not mainlined yet. And this is just gen5. It would be great if you could fix your gen4 and 4.5 drivers, so that people building products with your chips weren't stuck on an orphaned vendor kernel that doesn't even upstream to your public fork.

Also your boot-chain is still closed and proprietary, and completely different than the one used by all other ARM vendors. Being the special snowflake is not helping your business or your customers.

And don't even get me started on Gunyah and GearVM, or on the proprietary, locked nature of your BSP, or how far behind TI and NXP you are on software quality and ease of use. Maybe also consider releasing some actual documentation on your chips.

I know multiple developers who have sworn off Qualcomm and will never design with your chips again at any price point. Your closed-off support model is 100% the culprit, and it hurts your core business. Any software support revenue that you managage to extract comes at the cost of goodwill and future chip sales.

Your chips are good - best in the industry. If you can up your software game to match, you'll really meet your potential.

Ironically, the actual luddites weren't anti-technology at all. Mechanized looms at the time produced low-quality, low-durability cloth at low prices. The luddite pushback was more about the shift from durable to disposable.

It's a message that's actually pretty relevant in an age of AI slop.

Yes it is. It can be hard to spot if you don’t know it’s there though.

Would you feel the same way if we're talking about your car's driver-assistance ECU? If you can change its contents, then so can a remote attacker.

I think that a lot of companies stepped back from the GPL when GPLv3 was announced, because it puts some pretty severe restrictions on how you can productize.

The tl;dr is that for any GPLv3 software that you ship, you have to also give your users a way to install a modified copy. If you're trying to ship a secured product, that basically means that you have to give code/rootfs signing keys to your customers. This is a non-starter for many kinds of products that need tamper protection (whether for product, legal, or safety reasons).

The Linux kernel remains on GPLv2, and is still used quite heavily. Most GNU software (coreutils, gcc, etc) moved to GPLv3 and then commercial companies abandoned them in favor of permissively-licensed replacements.

Mozilla sure is going out of their way to alienate their remaining users. This is going to be Pocket 2.0.

Who asked for this? Who wants it? Certainly not the Linux / open-source crowd, and they're just about the only ones who are keeping Firefox alive.

If there's anybody from Mozilla or the Firefox dev team in this thread, I'd be interested to hear the thinking behind this addition.

one possible counter-argument: can you say for sure how your brain is creating those replacement words? When you replace tree with rainbow, does rainbow come to mind because of an unconscious neural mapping between both words and "forest"?

It's entirely possible that our brains are complex pattern matchers, not all that different than an LLM.

out of curiosity, can you elaborate on that a bit? I've shipped std::variant in a few designs and it's been OK, but maybe I didn't use it deeply enough to see issues.

Understood. Even in keeping with your definition - people are irrational actors. We make incomprehensible choices all the time, with no real reason at the moment of decision. Then our brains backfill and rationalize later.

Keep in mind that our brains are made of meat that talks to itself via chemical reactions. Brains are not digital computers, and are very much an analog thing. Brains can and do make actual mistakes all the time. Like straight up "this computed incorrectly" or "there was a transmission error" kinds of mistakes.

Humans are not rational actors, and never have been. That's why economic theory so frequently fails to predict behavior in spectacular ways.

Game theory has its place. But most game-theory explanations that I see fail to take humanity into account.

People are irrational actors way more often than they are rational ones.

afaik, Raspberry Pis move around 7M units annually.

Based on their first announced product (https://www.arduino.cc/product-uno-q), I think Qualcomm is trying to get into that space, and they bought Arduino for the brand name.

You're right that Qualcomm isn't in the business of small business. But maybe they expect that the market is big enough that it's worth their while to pay a subsidiary (Arduino) to do it.

If I had a dollar for every time a Qualcomm rep promised me something that never actually happened, I'd be a hundredaire.

it's time to accept that you are on the wrong side of history, my guy

As a product, I like Slack a lot more than teams. Chatting is easier, the apps are better, reminders and scheduled messages, workflows, etc. Threaded conversations are much easier as well, and aren't artificially restricted to certain types of channels.

At a high level though, Salesforce is often seen as a predatory company. Prices are high and they will squeeze their users for every nickel (as demonstrated here). They will also monetize your data in ways that you probably don't want.

Teams chat is pretty bad, I agree. But it does have these benefits:

  - Free if you're already in the Microsoft ecosystem, which most companies are.
  - Microsoft is probably a better steward of your data.
  - Teams video / audio calls are much much better than Slack huddles.
  - That's pretty much it tbh

Agreed for flavor - using good ingredients makes a huge difference. But texture is also a big part of how we experience food, and box cake's texture is very hard to beat IMO (at least I've never been able to do it).

Depends on how you’re using the data. There’s a pretty strong correctness signal in the user behavior.

Did they rephrase the question? Probably the first answer was wrong. Did the session end? Good chance the answer was acceptable. Did they ask follow-ups? What kind? Etc.

That would be doing Californians a favor tbh. Then we'd have an excuse to leave this rotten union.

Coastal Oregon and coastal Washington can come too.

That sounds a lot like "They're eating the cats! They're eating the dogs!". I know a lot of Sikh folks and they're pretty chill.

Yes to calling CMake/etc. No to checking in generated Makefiles. But for your top-level “thing that calls CMake”, try writing a Makefile instead of a shell script. You’ll be surprised at how powerful it is. Make is a dark horse.