protastus

Apple, Android, Windows. Every OS has jumped into this bandwagon. Usability keeps deteriorating at the expense of aesthetics.

I resent designers for messing up user experience, pushing the industry away from good solutions that were discovered and implemented decades ago.

I see no controversy here, but I like both animals and have had pet rats.

Yes, they have many similarities. Both are rodents.

Indeed, life is not easy going when someone is senior enough to work with a CxO at a giant company, and writes emails with thoughts that influence entire organizations.

Anyone in a leadership position has a responsibility to measure their words carefully, especially in a farewell email.

"Sadly, rivers dry out, and when they do, you look for a new one." broadcasts extreme negativity to the people who remain. It almost reads like a cautionary warning followed by advice.

One can write a heartfelt goodbye without ambiguity. Assuming the ambiguity was unintentional, the author was careless and paid the price. He could've gotten away with it in other places (large companies are generally too bureaucratic to fire someone who's already leaving) but obviously not in this case.

Are you certain the ICs were replaced for cost reduction, and not because the original parts were discontinued?

Bitcoin allowed me to quickly send money to a war zone (Ukraine) without dependency on a banking system. Wiring money overseas is a slow and precarious experience even in the best circumstances, and I was stoked to bypass all of that. That's innovation.

Then there's a surreal amount of noise. The hundreds of altcoins, the blockchain buzzword, insane speculation, insane energy use and carbon emissions, drama about losing funds.

So yes, I'd like to cut down the noise so we can focus on the innovations.

I haven't seen ads in navigation mode.

That's because Google Maps got massively worse over the years.

I'll add to your list of issues:

  * distracting me while I'm driving with a banner that blocks the bottom half of the screen, with a message written in small font, asking if a speed trap is still on the freeway. This is distracting and unexpected, leading me to take my eyes off the road to get a basic understanding of what the app needs, which starts with reading the text. Ironically, the font is small due to the inclusion of a "reminder" to only interact when it is safe.

  * screen space co-opted by ads, promotions and reviews for local businesses.

Google Maps and Gmail are products that rose to the top by being best in class. I can only assume that the smart people who built the original product, made many wise choices, and said "no" when it mattered are long gone. The new blood is not of the same caliber, and can only get promoted if they make changes. Unfortunately for them, the user experience was already excellent when they joined, and thus was difficult to improve upon. Seems like they resort to adding details that aren't relevant to the user, and trying to monetize things that are not core to the product. Every instance of feature creep and every dark pattern pulls the experience away from optimality, regressing on goals that were achieved 10 years ago.

To your point, most software comes with a license that says "this comes with no guarantee for any purpose, we are not liable under any circumstances".

I remember reading licenses as a teenager and wondering about their legality.

From an author's perspective, citing a paper is not an endorsement.

For example, a paper's intro might have an overview of how others have attempted to solve a problem before. Citations there will comprise a very concise summary of techniques from others, often pointing out limitations.

From the perspective of a PR team or agency, they aren't in a position to independently evaluate papers, let alone disavow a paper that carries the name of the company.

> my manager has been gone since December

What does this mean? Surely you report to someone, and this person is accountable for your work. If your manager is on leave, they should have assigned someone to act on their behalf.

At this point in your career you should have weekly meetings with your manager, and the feedback you're looking for should be communicated in these meetings. This person is responsible for creating the environment to let you learn, grow and succeed. Something is not right here.

Alternative translation: "Our documentation is weak and our engineering teams aren't held accountable for it, so we're blaming third-party developers instead of doing our jobs".

If AVX-512 was not in scope yet left turned on, parts may operate outside design limits, there's system-level validation that may not have been run, and specs that are at risk. Think about the scale of all PC OEMs that use these CPUs, rather than a specific product.

For example, it's known that AVX-512 is power hungry and significantly increases TDP (heat). Do all Alder Lake based products have the thermal headroom? If CPUs operate outside of the envelope communicated by Intel, they may not be entirely stable, and parts could fail earlier than expected.

Emphasis on attempt.

After failing to produce their own reagents and hardware, Theranos pivoted to using off-the-shelf Siemens hardware and reagents (purchased through a shell company) and dramatically diluting the blood samples to make good on the "single drop of blood" customer promise.

This would've been an impressive feat of reverse engineering, software eating the world, IF IT WORKED. But it didn't. Results couldn't even pass internal audits and the FDA forced Theranos to invalidate ~1 million test results when they found what was going on.

> How many people died from Chernobyl? About 50, despite over 100,000 people working at the site on cleanup. The adjacent reactors continued to run and provide power for about a decade after the incident.

I am surprised you're quoting official Soviet numbers. Numbers that weren't updated since the early days of the accident.

> How many people died of radiation poisoning at Fukushima? Zero.

At what cost?

> Petroleum is a natural thing.

Cyanide is also a natural thing. Is it compatible with complex life in this planet? No.

Natural occurrence is not a sufficient measure for compatibility in an ecological context.

> As if anyone would believe this woman with 3 children was not fully aware of the tradeoffs they were making in exchange for the higher pay.

I believe her. Life doesn't have an open enrollment period every year where you're presented multiple career and lifestyle options, and asked to choose one. Instead, one generally converges into a local optimum and breaking out can involve significant energy and risk.

From the perspective of remote work, the pandemic helped a lot of people break out of their local optimum.

The bigger the BOM, the higher the probability something is not available, blocking the product from being fully manufactured.

Cars have bigger BOMs than IoT devices.

Given the long lead times, tech companies are scrambling to use alternative chips: first finding something functionally equivalent and pin compatible; that failing, qualifying something close enough and redesigning PCBs with an updated component footprint; last case scenario, porting FW to a different chip and redesigning circuits to accommodate.

Traditional car companies largely rely on suppliers to redesign electronics (at even greater cost and lead time). There's also more liability with cars so last minute redesigns have to be taken very seriously.

I think the valuation is driven by the delivery vans rather than the R1T.

The world desperately needs electric delivery vans. Rivian already has Amazon as a customer and as an investor. That's an outstanding combination.

The R1T is a super heavy, niche pickup truck for wealthy American households (DINK?) who like camping in style. It's not a truck for the industry, and it will not come close to the F150 in utility.

I totally agree the Cybertruck is a design from a comic book and I have no idea how it would pass pedestrian safety regulations. But the Cybertruck being a bizarre vehicle doesn't imply there's a big market for the R1T.

Yes.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_river

A leader can be brutally honest, relentless about quality and ethical, all at the same time.

Same here. I had an account with them 10 years ago. They were unbelievably dysfunctional, unlike any other bank I've worked with.

I figured no business could be profitable operating in such a clumsy way, indicating that "boring" retail banking was not the focus of their operations.

> There is a persistent myth that floating point is non-deterministic and therefore cannot be used for "lockstep" multiplayer games.

Indeed, on all systems I've used, FP is deterministic in the strict sense that running the same code twice on the same platform (with identical HW and SW stack) will produce the same results.

But the results may change depending on: - programming language - libraries used and their versions - underlying silicon - whether SIMD is used - FPU flags - compiler flags (example: ffast-math affects many things behind the scenes, as does /fp:fast, including things that dramatically affect accuracy like the use of approximate reciprocal instructions) - bugs affecting all of the above

At scale, this matrix becomes difficult to track and control. So it shouldn't be a surprise that reproducibility is an issue, and this myth persists.

Americans work much longer hours than Germans.

The business culture of the SF tech scene demands long hours and intensity that most Europeans cannot imagine, having not lived in the environment.

American wages come with sacrifice.

> Are you a psychopath for driving your car for a holiday trip, even though there's people dying in 49 degrees heat in Greece? It's really not that different from Jeff Bezos flying his spacecraft.

I don't think this analogy is reasonable. Let's evaluate what is observable and controllable in both scenarios.

Scenario A: I don't observe anyone dying as I drive. I have no control over people dying in Greece.

Scenario B: Jeff Bezos was frequently reminded of more down-to-earth problems (before and after his space trip). As Amazon CEO and richest man in the world, he's had a lot of control and influence over the wellbeing of others.

> I don't understand how something this broken is allowed to operate on public roads.

Legislators are slow and ignorant about technology. There's also perception that everyone who dies on a Tesla accident is a tech bro who defeated software safeguards (e.g., chose to ride on the back seat in full self-driving mode).

If automotive history is any guide, scrutiny and regulation only appear after a lot of people get killed. It's not obvious what the threshold will be, with Elon Musk being louder than anyone else in this debate and early adopters being comfortable experimenting with the lives of others.

Yes. Cars have steadily gotten heavier and the EV conversion is making this worse.

Are most drivers aware though, or only racing enthusiasts? I think on a daily driver car, the weight increase has been masked since most people drive on smooth paved roads where there's no loss of traction (especially with ABS brakes and some form of traction control being standard). ICEs have improved power and efficiency to compensate.

I don't think we should shoot the messenger.

There are too many academics with huge egos. Too many papers obfuscate simple results behind unnecessarily complex and brittle mathematical models, because huge formulas and proofs make the authors look smart, and impressing the reviewers is a requirement for publication.

Everyone who has a PhD in engineering knows professors who make careers out of solving made up problems with tenuous connection with the real world, and thus highly questionable utility. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I think engineering is about solving practical problems and building shit.

And then in physics, it's apparently now mainstream to produce theories that aren't testable. Of course, the math has to be very sophisticated and specialized -- dead-end work with simple math wouldn't get funded, much less become an entire field of study.

Which is to say: explaining reality is hard, and all the linear problems have solutions. Today, some find it more convenient to invent another universe that still has open problems, and solve those. To obfuscate, in comes a ton of math with weird notation invented with colleagues who also play this game.

It would be awesome if 3 generations of researchers got scooped by an applied physicist from a different field because nobody bothered to model galaxy rotation curves with general relativity. GR would be too boring, entirely lacking in crazy math.

The US does not have a permanent storage solution for spent nuclear fuel and highly radioactive waste.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yucca_Mountain_nuclear_waste_r...

I agree with the need to maintain and upgrade nuclear plants.

However, I dispute calling nuclear "one of the cheapest and safest power sources humankind has ever developed".

The order of magnitude of Fukushima cleanup costs is $1 trillion. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fukushima_disaster_cleanup#Cos...

There's also the touchy issue of storing spent nuclear fuel and contaminated hardware. Ignoring the problem presents a hidden cost and safety risks.

Still on safety: nuclear enthusiasts often equate that reliable under nominal conditions implies reliable in practice. As if negligence and stupidity weren't factors in the real world.

Back to your point: we need to collectively admit that climate change relates to our practice of postponing the costs of pollution -- a massive economic externality that needs correction. The solutions are expensive and require commitment.