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A lot of people attribute the Windows Phone switch as the end of Nokia but that would only be true if people did not like Windows Phone. On the contrary, Windows phones were loved by their users. And I say this as a person who used Symbian Belle, then Meego (I had the piano white Nokia N9!) and then Windows Phone.

Meego was fantastic, but Windows Phone was fantastic as well. And arguably it had more reach: modern Windows OS was working on mobile phones, tablets, wearables, Xbox and even AR glasses like HoloLens. A developer's dream, you write once and it works on every form factor which has Windows. You could even plug your Windows phone to a docking station and you would have a Windows desktop!

What killed Nokia was being late to the game, and what killed Windows Phone was first the lack of apps (which was getting better but very slowly) and Satya not being happy with low margins and slow progress, compared to Azure.

Did they try other publicly available models on the same code with the same prompts before the ban? Was Fable the only one which was able to detect and fix the security vulnerabilities?

2 things Microsoft failed to do in the last 15 years are:

1) They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy. So, today if you develop a native Windows application, it will only work on desktops and laptops. That is it. It is not attractive for a developer to learn a whole new UI framework just to target a single form factor. And I don't know if there is any solution for this at this point, they shouldn't have completely abandoned those markets.

2) They did not back 1 UI framework for a long time (I mean 10 years+), instead they did significant changes to their UI framework strategy every 3-4 years. It takes a huge time for developers to trust, learn and develop complex and polished apps in a UI framework. Also it takes a long time for a UI framework to become mature. If you change your UI strategy every few years, you will never have complex and polished apps written with it.

To be honest I am not sure if Windows will ever be able to recover in the long term and keep its market share. The only reason it seems to be alive is because enterprise runs on Windows and it is hard to change that.

I feel like an Apple + Google dominance will be more likely in the long term for desktop operating systems. I am not sure if Google will be able to avoid the first mistake I wrote above but they are working on bringing Android to desktop. It is a good idea but it requires at least 10 years of supporting and polishing it despite not getting much traction. But if Google persists, we might be all using MacOS and Android on desktop 20 years from now.

"the Waymo Driver has long utilized several external audio receivers, or EARs"

Nice abbreviation.

Isn't it a bit exaggerating to say that users cannot use Snapdragon laptops except for running LLMs? Qualcomm and Microsoft already has a translation layer named Prism (not as good as Rosetta but pretty good nevertheless): https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/apps-on-arm-x8...

I agree with losing faith in Intel chips though.

Looks like Crucial is not so crucial for Micron's business anymore.

That decline is mostly because of Covid pandemic, no? And it looks like the life expectancy picked back up after 2022.

Similar laws existed in EU countries long before US, and EU countries also saw a decline in life expectancy during those years: https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/deu/ger...

Apparently 3M was a serious player back in the day on magnetic tapes and floppy diskettes. But today they are not present in a similar market (digital storage) at all.

I wonder what was it like to go through that timeframe, as the management and the employees, where the floppy disks were becoming obsolete. Did they purposefully took the decision to not pursue CD, flash memory market? Or was it just a shortsightedness of the management where they fell behind and eventually had to exit that market?

Of course 3M still managed to be successful and today it is one of the big market cap companies...

No, there were quite a few Symbian models which used capacitive touch, combined with a modern Qt based Symbian OS. Check out "Symbian Belle" and the phone models released with that OS version. I loved my Nokia 603 :)

But I think they only released such models with Symbian for a couple of years, before switching to Meego and then later Windows Mobile OS.

Looks like M5 Macbooks will still have an edge over PC equivalents, but I am glad that with the new Qualcomm CPUs, PCs are at least getting close. Unfortunately Intel and AMD are falling so much behind that they cannot compete on laptop form factor anymore. The best Intel and AMD laptop CPUs, regardless of their TDP, are still around 3000 score on Geekbench single core.

Didn't laptops with Snapdragon X Elite CPUs have pretty good battery life?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/2375677/surface-laptop-2024-...

X2 Elite shouldn't be that different I think.

The idea behind modern stanby is a good one, when it is implemented correctly (like how Macbooks do it). Unfortunately most PCs have a terrible implementation and instead get hot and drain the battery overnight.

There are a lot of theoretical articles which claim similar things but on the other hand we have a lot of empirical evidence that ARM CPUs are significantly more power efficient.

I used laptops with both Intel and AMD CPUs, and I read/watch a lot of reviews in thin and light laptop space. Although AMD became more power efficient compared to Intel in the last few years, AMD alternative is only marginally more efficient (like 5-10%). And AMD is using TSMC fabs.

On the other hand Qualcomm's recent Snapdragon X series CPUs are significantly more efficient then both Intel and AMD in most tests while providing the same performance or sometimes even better performance.

Some people mention the efficiency gains on Intel Lunar Lake as evidence that x86 is just as efficient, but Lunar Lake was still slightly behind in battery life and performance, while using a newer TSMC process node compared to Snapdragon X series.

So, even though I see theoretical articles like this, the empirical evidence says otherwise. Qualcomm will release their second generation Snapdragon X series CPUs this month. My guess is that the performance/efficiency gap with Intel and AMD will get even bigger.

I was also very excited about it and that's why I immediately upgraded to Android 16. But it turns out that it is not part of this update. The same with the new Material design, it doesn't come with Android 16 update. So weird that they announced both of these features as if they are part of Android 16.

- I donated to PyInstaller project in the past. Being able to package Python programs as executable literally made a big difference at work. I am very grateful for that project. But I can't find a donation link on their web site anymore.

- I donate to Wikipedia every year a small amount.

- It is not related to programming directly, but I try to donate to https://u24.gov.ua every month.

I hate the default animation speed of Androids that come with Pixel phones. They are too long and makes it feel like the phone is slow. One of the first things I do after buying a new phone is to half the animation durations using developer settings, and the phone feels much faster.

This kind of digitization is great.

I don't know if they are doing it, but I always thought that it should be easy for regular citizens to see the historical reasons why a law or regulation exists. Because there is sometimes a good reason why a regulation exists, but nobody knows it.

Indeed, on one hand PDM works great, but on the other hand we wouldn't want to choose a package manager which might not be maintained anymore after a few years because there are just not many users of it.

I am feeling the same way about PDM, it works very well, easy to configure and checks all the boxes feature-wise.

PyCharm also added uv support in their latest versions.

We recently switched to PDM in our company because it worked very well in our tests with different package/dependency managers. Now I am rethinking if we should switch to uv while PDM usage is still not very wide-spread in our company. But PDM works very well, so I am not sure whether to keep using it.

Indeed checking analytics turned the button to "save & proceed" and after unchecking, the button remained like that.

I cannot get pass the cookie screen without "accept all". I cannot find "accept selected" or something like that.

Out of curiosity, if you would like to start a new, offline-first project that needs syncing, which database would be the best candidate today?

I'll check it out, thanks!

I'll look into it, thanks!

We have SSO + 2FA in place, and would like to use Bitwarden for the rest of the password management. But for a company around ~50 people, the pricing feels too expensive, considering the only purpose is to manage a few passwords. So for now we are using Keepass which is kind of painful, but free. We would probably be willing to pay ~2$ per user per month, but instead it is 6$ if you want Bitwarden to work integrated with your SSO which means 3600$ per year.

SSO + 2FA is more secure in practice than letting people create/manage their own accounts at every service. Because:

- You can force a password policy centrally (minimum 12 char + uppercase/lowercase + number etc), for every service the company is using that supports SSO.

- You can force 2FA, again for every service the company is using that supports SSO.

- You can disable an account immediately from the central admin panel as soon as you notice an account is stolen.

- When the employee leaves the company, you can delete their account centrally from every service, so there are no inactive company accounts registered to various services.

Being a work related accident does not mean the company I work for payed for everything. It just means they took responsibility of handling the case which is very logical, as the reason I walk 1 km every day to the train station and back is only because I am going to work and coming back from it.

In the end, my health insurance, the bus company and the company I work for, all contributed to the payment of expenses.

I wish him a speedy and full recovery. It is no joke, the results could have been worse.

A few years ago, when returning back from work, I was hit by a bus while crossing the road and had some of the similar injuries. Fortunately, the laws here (Belgium) are firm and it was considered as work related accident because it happened while I was returning from work. Stayed at the hospital for 3 weeks, and then stayed at home for about 1.5 more months for recovery.

And I was the only software developer at a tech company at the time. Bus factor is real: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

As somebody who is not familiar with how garbage collection is implemented at the low level, can somebody explain why WasmGC is needed on top of Wasm?

For example, isn't CPython a C program and hence can just be compiled to Wasm, including its garbage collection part? Does garbage collection usually depend on OS specific calls, which are not part of C standard?