seec

I agree with some reservations about this being completly generalised. There are still some successfull companies that rewards good players. But yes, there are very few and most of the rest are stuck coasting at a glacial pace, doing stuff that are not very competitive on so many levels it is impossible to describe succintly.

I would also argue that it is not just about the software industry. Many EU industries have become extremely uncompetitive on so many level. Even when you are ready to pay more for EU made products, it is not easy to find something that is decently competitive and not just a pale copy of better offerings.

It is clear that the EU has become too collectivist but they are still stuck blaming capitalism (just like the soviets I guess).

In France, even old big players that were once at the top and/or were (semi)public organisation have fallen very hard or have been scandalously sold piecemeal to foreign actors. The problem is not even that they are governement funded but it really is rooted in the collectivist organisation model that gives too much power to politics and very little lattitude to consumer/key actors choice.

Those systems become necessarily corrupted because they rely too much on human behaviors and most humans are fundamentally corrupt.

It has gotten a bit cheaper, a lot easier and somewhat better lately. But I agree that it does not make that much sense because you end up with a product that has many flaws and is a bit annoying to use.

The main factor is being able to sell the iMac for that relatively high price. I can't figure out why they are still so expensive because most of the early 5K models are kind of useless nowadays (on low end version, the compute just cannot cope with modern media/files at such a resolution). But maybe it's people converting them to display driving the market...

Genelecs are a no brainer if you have the money (the small ones are not too expensive but if you want power, wallet will get hurt a lot).

It's crazy how good those speakers sound for how small they are. And extremely well built of course, the aluminium casting was a very good decision, albeit an expensive one of course.

While OLED definitely has this problem, his real issue is using a too small DPI monitor. It's not a real problem in OLED equiped smartphones with high DPI so it really shouldn't be a problem on monitors as well.

If you wan to point out that there is no large OLED display with a DPI > 200, yes that's the real issue at the moment but since 5K displays are becoming more common, I think it will be solved in relatively short time.

It's a very cynical view but I kind of agree. In those kinds of jobs, the only rewards for doing the job well and fast is just more mindless jobs of the same type. It would be usefull if you would receive a benefit for doing the job better or you could leave earlier for the same pay but that is rarely the case, since as you said, employers generally pay for your time instead of task completion (which is rather dumb because it offers bad incentives for both sides).

I have talked about this with some business owners who were getting kinda angree that some employes were not putting in a lot of efforts. In all case they were paying the minimum wage with absolutly zero compensation for doing the job better and/or faster.

I can't decide if they are just stupid or simply corrupt but they really should realise that with a strong welfare state and plenty of similar shitty jobs available, the stick really cannot work all that well and they should really use the carrot a lot more. But of course those people generally make at least 3-4 times the minimum wage and they feel they deserve the premium because they deserve it and are so much better. Funnily enough, those that I know consistenly do a worse job than their employees at most things and it's obvious they didn't get there by starting at the bottom.

What is funny to me is that once the plan was drawn, much of the usefull "hard" work was done. Humans are not perfect like robot so it is pointless to try to find the "perfect" path, in any case, mistakes will be made. It is also solving for the wrong thing, there is not much benefits travelling less distance, but minimising time spent on the task is the real problem. For those sort of tasks, it is very much like driving: the shortest path is not necesserally the fastest. Another very important point is that ease of application is of prime importance, it's not very usefull if you need to think hard about which way you should go just to minimize distance, it increase task complexity tremendously for no real benefit.

Considering all that, it is obvious that the real winner solution would be just look at the map and draw a path by hand, using human intuition and heuristics as an algorithm. Even if you would have to make a few corrections, this could be done in minutes instead of hours.

But of course I understand that the point was really to find an application as an excuse to practice working with optimisation algorithms. In that sense, it is a well done job !

Now for how "normal" humans would do it: they would try a few ways and settle on an approximate optimun depending on how much time each pass took and how easy it was to complete. The thing about those sort of task is that they are not really uniform (some places are bound to be dirtier than others and it is easier to approach some features in a certain way), so a naive optimisation like that is unlikely to be what's truly needed even if the solution is technically perfect.

I think you are right because people who bought minis got them for a specific reason and now there is just nothing in the market that can pretend to replace it.

My own mini has not been upgraded to latest iOS but I know it is in short probation before it gets really unusuable. It's pretty bad with swapping already because Apple was so stingy with the godamn RAM (it's insane how much modern apps use for not much more utility).

The problem is that I have really no clue what to buy, even if I were to go Android. I just can't find a phone that I think merit the tradeoffs of form factor, I just don't have much use for all the modern gimmicks. A better battery life would be nice but it's not even a big deal in my case.

The problem is basically the same as for cars. People are buying larger phones with many useless features for social status reasons or aspirational/fashion statement.

The smartphone as a tool was a finished product a long time ago but now they keep adding all kind of extra stuff that even manage to kill the initial feature of conveniently fitting in an average pocket.

I would compare that to Victorinox Swiss knifes: there are a handfull or reasonably sized models with all the tools you are likely to need for small tasks and there are monstrosities that have 100+ tools that are so large, even using them as a knife is inconvenient. If people would buy Victorinox Swiss knifes like they buy smartphones, most would get the largely useless bigger ones.

Most people are not very rational and make purchasing decision not on their needs but because of trends, marketing, social status, peer pressure, etc... When a market becomes very large and target the whole population at once, products tends to get pretty bad because they are not focused on specific use case and try to please everyone, really pleasing no one in the end. Since there is not much other choices than to follow, people deal with it and that's that.

Same. Something like the Citroen AMI but with better range and speed, probably slighty bigger and around 10K.

I doubt it's going to happen because that would kill a large part of the market : every familly that needs 2 cars just because they go to work to different places but would only use a single car for the heavy duty or long range needs. At the start it would be a hard sell for many because of social status but overtime people end up voting with their wallet, so it could work. But that would be a pretty bad deal for the industry, so they'll only turn to that if they can't sell anything else.

Nowadays even the smallest cars starts around 20k, which is absurd and it even affect the second hand market because cars maintain their value better thanks to this pricing.

It's pretty much the results of inter-platform competition. None of the actors want to use what the others are making for various reasons which I think are valid. For example, history has showned that being completly dependant on Apple tooling/frameworks/APIs isn't really a good idea because they are not a trustworthy player. The same thing could be said about the reverse I guess and about most companies in general.

Software really has a big dependency problem because the sellers always bundle it with a service or a hardware in order to make money. I doubt it can be solved, since one has to make money somehow.

Yeah but I would argue that they just used cheaper ressources since historically has been cheaper than compute.

It's not clear if compute can be cheaper than storage still today.

On one hand you can afford to use less storage but you have to use GPU power everytime to draw graphics, if the chip can support the compute requirement you can save on storage, but you pay with higher power draw at every interraction.

On the other hand you can just put more storage, chip assest that are rendered for the device they'll be used on and be ok.

Outside of crisis like now, storage should be cheaper in the long term I think. I doubt there is that much benefit in having assets being able to resize to any arbitrary resolution. The definition used in phones isn't that far away than what is used in laptops, monitors and now even TVs.

Something to think about is that icons/assets often need to change shape slightly as they become smaller or bigger for optical reasons. So even if you manage a fully vector scaled UI, you might still need to have difference depending on DPI to reading distance ratio. Rasterized assests might still be the real answer for a very long time.

Considering how bad is the iOS 26 release on performance, because of its dynamically computed interface, I'm not sure it's worth pursuing vector UIs, it doesn't make a lot of sense to make a more powerfull chip just to draw prettier or more "pure" interfaces...

I agree, I tried those brands and they are more expensive while being less performant and even worse lasting.

Nike has lost a battle of trends but their foundation is much more serious. People dismissing Nike as just being a fashion brand relying on athletes image see them too simply.

In the construction world, it's basically the separation between architects and builders.

Sure you can definitely build things and figure out things along the way. But for any sufficiently complex project, it's unlikely to yield good results.

As a French I feel that the SNCF is pretty good. We like to complain about it but I have had a few minor problems (3 hours pause from locomotive breakdown, or 2 hours stop to allow cleaning after a suicide) but nothing too bad. There are on times and rarely canceled.

The major issues are with pricing and lack of investment outside of TGV but it's not too bad.

It does have a great impact.

Nowadays TTL are pretty short because infra is very dynamic, you don't necessarily hit the cache that often. And a random webpage will pull assests from all over the place, with many different domains/subdomains, all requiring DNS resolution.

In the end, even if it's hidden you can definitely feel it in the "snapiness" of loading webpages. Of course when you only load/stream content it has no impact, so it is really dependent on your usage patterns.

Running your own private DNS resolver is also much faster, even with a medium org, you can definitely feel it.

That would be interresting is Native Switft apps would work and feel better than electron apps. But they are not much better and only consume less RAM (not that big of a deal outside of Apple hardware).

I have had Safari syncing bugs since basically 2016. But now I can't be bothered to even use it, no matter how good it gets.

Chrome extensions, functionning ad blocking (without having to pay for a stupid Apple blessed extension) and just generally more usefull feature set is the real reason Google is winning.

Apple can't even be bothered to try making a cross platform browser, because he would cost them too much money or whatever (not that the pile of cash they are sitting on is getting a lot of valuable use).

I still don't understand who actually use iOS/iPadOS apps heavily.

Everyone I know just try to do stuff with them and at some point go find a computer to actually get shit done, frustrated with how backward everything is on those platforms.

Now they want to make the Mac the same. What the fuck.

Cook is just a major idiot. It's actually surprising he didn't completly fuck everything over. But it just shows how strong the fondation and initial strategy was.

I'm always annoyed by random idiots arguing that since Cook made Apple a shit ton of money, he must be good. By the same standard, cartel head drug dealers are extremely good and an asshole who inerhit a business with a captive market and just manages to make more money by raising price is just as good.

Outside of Apple Silicon, much of what Apple has produced in the last 10 years isn't really good. And even Apple Silicon has major tradeoffs that do not look like they'll improve meaningfully.

In my opinion the problem is the lack of good GUI editing apps for purely HTML documents and no standard for self-contained HTML docs (that would bundle all the ressources into a single clickable file).

Word for the web basically, but with support for multimedia.

In that sense the web has failed, there is epub but it's not really good.

And sometimes it randomly scramble the output for no good reason.

I think their HMDI implementation completly suck as well, I have had to get an USB-C adaptor to make it work properly.

Macs with external displays don't make a lot of sense, it basically against their initial idea about computer (standalone, with everything needed built-in). They don't even have chips that get very hot, it makes zero sense.

I started on Macs and I tend to agree.

They have some good things on the hardware side but you have pay a lot for it, and it's not just about the money.

They just need to feel superior about their Macs. My experience is that Windows wake just as fast if not faster.

But in typical Apple fanboy fashion, they will compare a 2K laptop to a random 500 cheapo laptop.

Apple real strength is in the efficiency, but there are many things it can't run and they leave top end performance on the table (outside of video editing).

The so called safety net don't do jack shit. They are a way to give power to mean, power hungry bitches that can feel good about themselve for "taking care" and scolding other people that receive much less than they do for their bullshit job.

The funny thing is that if the wealth was actually shared fairly instead of politicaly, most of the recipient would fare a better life and we could do away with insane bureaucratic waste.

Another way would be to have less governement taxes and regulations that would allow for jobs to pay better and remove much of the need of the so-called safety nets. Of course, this way you would take power away from the mean girl bitches running those things so that can't happen.

From my experience, I can tell you that none of the people running those things have actually worked a single day in their life (as in, usefull work, that people would actually agree to pay for) but they can feel good about themselve because they are "helping".

It's hard to describe how corrupted the system is, church corruption seems a bit tame in comparison.

The sensibilities of the people running the librairies are extremely political. One could argue that since their employment largely lies outside of market forces, they get chosen or self-select for political reasons. Having the power to chose what should be read and influence children in the direction you prefer is very much a political endeavor, a power that shouldn't be left to anyone else but the parents and whoever they chose can have that power. This should be true until people become fully formed adult, they are not properties/projects of the state, but very much the result of an alliance between two individuals, it seems that people that are pro-governement forget that a bit too easily.

Politics is the realm of feminity, it brings only chaos, bad strategies and poor decision making. Much of the western world is in a bad spot because they have embraced too much politics. It doesn't look too bad because there are still structures (business, army) that try to tone done politics as much as possible in order to be achieve their goals.

Yes, politics affect life too much and that is precisely the problem, it hilarious that you advocate for it, instead of requiring a system to become less political and more grounded in reality so that it can thrive. There is no functional system on earth that works because of politics, in fact, politics is the cancer that tries to bring down working system for power and gains to be distributed according to the sensibilites of the rulers.

Old books survive because they are ever-green content. They describe human nature and what works/fails. They are usefull precisely because if you read them carefully, you can understand all the problematic behaviors that lead to failure. Just because we are a more technologically advanced society, doesn't mean we have transcended the bad parts of human behavior. In fact, pretty much everything that makes modern life confortable, happened despite politics. And now we are falling back into the old ways, with war, unsustainable debts and all kinds of disruptions because we gave in to much into the politics.

Yeah I don't get the hate. The only issues I have had with the "Pro" version of Windows were hardware related and it wasn't a big deal.

As someone who sarted with Apple in the PowerPC days I couldn't agree more. To me it seems like the only real advantage is good battery, but I can't figure out who exactly is running powerfull/complicated software on the go where it matters.

If you just need to browse the web and whatnot, just get a cheap tablet?

For all the good softwares, it seems like you just get much better performance out of a much lowered priced PC. I just don't get who is benifiting for the 1-2 hours of supplementary runtime out of a MacBook and this is wortht the price delta as well as the hassle of dealing with all the specificity of that software implementation.

But then again, my experience with Apple users is that they are not the most logical peoples around, so maybe that's just it.

I still like some parts of macOS but it has been very hard to justify considering how Apple has been behaving lately.

If Apple manages to produce a decent iMac soon enough, it might just bite the bullet once again, but otherwise I'm out.

I don't feel like we are in disagreement. I don't advocate to make everything needlesly tedious on mobile.

I'm just saying that you have to do the basics right for the "commoner" but it is not necesseraly needed for the "good stuff".

Look at books layout, there are very clear difference depending on target demographics. If you want to mass market stuff, go ahead, do "mobile first" or whatever. But if you have high-quality content that require a good layout, it is not worth much to spend time "optimizing" for access patterns that woud barely get used.

The best cookbooks I have are all physical, because reproducing the experience/layout for mobile is impossible, if you want to do a quality product, at some point you have to define a minimum viable standard, otherwise you end up with with infinite scroll and that's not terribly usefull.

Yeah, pretty much this.

One thing that is really important to understand is that power is not something that is uniformely needed everywhere at the same level. Traditionally, power plants were created close to where industries needed them. Renewables require specific conditions to be viable and those factors are not necesseraly what allows industries to thrive, so you need a lot of additional infrastructure to make it possible.

Turns out this infrastructure is extremely coslty and very hard to make reliable. So, even if you have infinite money, that's a massive challenge in itself. But now Europe does not have that much money, the massive debt burdens being a large evidence of this. Yet we are asked to pay more for this future, in the name of climate change, even though most of the factors contributing to this is already happening overseas, largely out of the control of European regulations. So what is the point exactly ?

In the long run, it just ends up making everyone more dependent on external powers while weakening the position of the countries that believe in that "solution".

Nuclear constructions costs are largely overblown, because of the massive bureaucracy/over-regulation, thanks to Germany in no small part. If China can manage to build twice as fast at half the cost, we are doing something wrong for sure.

But the conversation is dominated by ideologues, that have an sadist like fetish. As if weakening your position will ever make your competition/enemies take pity on you and allows you to dictate the terms of the converstion, because people are supposed to be nice, right ?

Even with perfect implementation, there is no way to make renewables work to allow industries to thrive, and now we are going to pay the price of those poor political choices.

With all the money in the world, it was already a discutable choice, but now it is just replacing depence on fossil fuel with depence on overseas manufacturing (most of it in China). Funny thing is that China is not that stupid, and we are selling them the knowledge/skillset to become dominant on the cheap. I just can't fathom what was going on in the mind of the decision makers 20 years ago, but now it seems they are just insane. There is no way it will work in 15 years, yet we needed that power generation yesterday.

In the process of trying to make climate change better, we have done the reverse. Now people are burning more wood, and I feel like we might go back to coal if electricity doesn't become cheaper (for residential heat). Gas is hopeless, even if the depency on Russia wasn't that strong. Electric cars are very nice but if it turns out to be more expensive to run them than just using foreign oil it's not going to happen.

I'm just rambling at this point but it feels like there was a large anti-nuclear sentiment by people who are dominated by irrational fears and they have dominated our politics for the worse. It's really not usefull to fear a nuclear meltdown if you end up making your people poorer overtime. Why would you fear something with such a low probability of problems if you end up having to become dependent on foreing power that has no such quaslm.

France had the right path but then leftist ideologues took power and Germany's sabotaging did the rest. In theory we are not at war but in practice, there is very much an economical/ideological battleground going on and we are losing it.

I agree a lot.

China is very good at industrialising stuff because they are very obedient and efficient on matters that are already known. Once the west has identified a worthwhile endeavor, they are quite quick at reproducing and churning out copies efficiently. Sometimes they improve on it slightly but their game is mostly about making it cheaper.

This can readily be seen in the smartphone market. They have all the industrial base, large supply of engineers and large amount of cash. Yet they are unable to make a truly defining product once you remove the price out of the equation. The first reason to buy a Chinese smartphone is lower price otherwise people still prefer to go with Apple, Google or Samsung. There are small details that make those devices generally just better; even when the Chinese manage to do better in a particular dimension, overall the western designed devices are just better. They have tried increasing price (at least MSRP, to make their devices look more expensive) but there is no way one would pay Apple/Samsung prices for their smartphone. I actually think this is why smartphone haven't trended down on price much lately, the Chinese are trying to capture the design/engineering part of the pie but with limited success. Meanwhile, since competiton has reduced, the major western player can feel content selling the same stuff without reducing price.

And yes the private sector is quite developed but to me it seems like it is largely devoted to fulfill western needs because that's were the real money is. When they manage to do something special, there is always an enormous western influence, either through education (chinese who studied abroad) or via direct involvement of western people inside their business.

For the big projects, they are relying a lot on technology transfer from the west, buying the IP with consulting from western companies and then copying what they learned at scale.

I think a lot of people still don't understand what a profond influence having a communist mindset has. It looks successfull to them because they manage to afford a good lifestyle thanks to their massive industries but that is downstream of all their copying/mimicking the western inventions.

Western societies should think about what they are doing when they transfer their knowledge to this country on the cheap, because it strenghten them and China isn't a nice player in general.

Yeah they are just insane whishfull thinkers.

I calculated the costs of covering the needs of Germany for a 2 days low production event (as it happened between 6-9 december) and you would need about a trillion dollar. That's for something that cannot even garantee you more than 48h of runtime for half the country's needs.

You would need at least 4 times that to be safe. Even if batteries price are divided by 2 (very unlikely, there are large fixed costs) you would need trillions of dollar for a single country. That's just not happening any time soon and even in 30 years time, I doubt it will be that prevalent of a solution.