compiler-guy

"We might, maybe, have some article go viral some day. With unknown revenue implications." is a weak argument for trying to figure out and maintain GDPR compliance, which costs real money right now, today. And you have to be sure to maintain that compliance as the web site evolves.

It's such a low-probability event that I don't blame them for just saying, "Nah. Not gonna hassle with that."

The recognition argument is also quite weak--it's not like recognition pays the bills.

And I gave a reason why that isn't true. There are many, many others.

But we aren’t talking probability. Your claim was that deeper pockets means you are more sophisticated. That simply isn’t true. The inheritance argument is just one example to show why it isn’t. People make large amounts of money all the time in one field or another, but that doesn’t make them sophisticated investors.

Indeed. But that doesn't invalidate the point that deeper-pockets is not equivalent to a more sophisticated or better investor.

If I inherit a billion dollars tomorrow, I will have zero additional information and be no more sophisticated than I am today. But I will have deeper pockets than any retail investor and will be able to withstand market irrationality longer than them.

It's often prohibited by contract, not just law, so what the administration thinks is only part of the story.

Most company's stock would fall pretty hard if all the holders decided to sell at the same time.

So although Google, say, technically has a huge float on a percentage basis, because none of the big three holders (Eric Schmidt, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin) are selling any significant amount of their shares, the practical float is much lower.

They borrowed the shares and held those borrowed shares briefly, and sold them. So they don't hold them any longer, but they do have a contract where they are required to buy them later.

The original owner doesn't hold the shares either, but they do have a contract for them to be returned.

As a practical matter, this effectively creates shares, just like a bank loaning money creates money.

Bold of you to assume that the feedback one gets from random internet commenters helps sharpen one's tools.

One is far more likely to get useful criticism from a mentor or teacher than random internet folks. No upload required.

And there are a million ways to thicken one's skin without putting one's art on the internet for jerks to shoot at.

They will just settle if a settlement gets them what they want for less than fighting this to legal completion would cost them (on a risk-adjusted basis).

These letters are simple "If you have evidence related to this lawsuit, you must preserve it" letters. And entirely routine in this kind of action. There are more of them than in most cases, because this is such a big case. But the gist is entirely routine.

Definitely not randomly chosen--Apple would have chosen people it believes may have evidence that relates to the case. It's a legal request to preserve that data.

But it doesn't follow at all that Apple is threatening to sue them. A long time ago, in an unrelated case, I got a letter like this because I was in the room when a certain decision was made and happened to have some notes about that meeting. But there was no chance I would be sued. I wasn't the decider, and was basically a third-party involved.

Apple also has server logs that track these former employees downloading confidential docs. It doesn't prove that they shared them over to OpenAI, but Apple has pretty solid proof that the former employees saved them without authorization.

"putting your art, writing, expression out to be judged by others is an act of bravery as much as talent, and a lot of people lack braver-y. Sorry to say it but if you need your work to be polished and beyond reproach, that's a determination and character problem, not a skill problem."

Or maybe you know enough people are just generally mean and jerk enough that you don't want to listen to their silly criticism and over-the-topness. And there really isn't any benefit to you for putting it out there.

In the early days of commercial optical-character-recognition software, vendors would brag about 99% accuracy.

But a single-spaced-typewritten page has about 500 words, so you were looking at five typos every single page. It was good at the time, but you still had to manually check every single word.

I support a bevy of older people with older computers, senior-citizen types. Upgrades are expensive. Monetarily, but also in retraining. These folks don't want the latest UI, they want what is familiar, and retraining is super annoying.

Computers that were EOL a few years ago, running ten-year-old browsers, are absolutely routine.

One classic paper for on this topic:

_Parachute use to prevent death and major trauma related to gravitational challenge: systematic review of randomised controlled trials_

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC300808/

"Advocates of evidence based medicine have criticised the adoption of interventions evaluated by using only observational data. We think that everyone might benefit if the most radical protagonists of evidence based medicine organised and participated in a double blind, randomised, placebo controlled, crossover trial of the parachute."

Sparc and Xtensa also have register windows, although each has a slightly different implementation.

They were all the rage for a while, because they make procedure calls fast but turn out to have subtle issues in highly-multithreaded scenarios.

Thousands, maybe tens-of-thousands, leave tech companies everyday and never post anything. You just don’t hear about them.

https://tessil.github.io/2016/08/29/benchmark-hopscotch-map....

Has some older benchmarks, including those two.

Pretty sure greed existed long before capitalism was a twinkle in any economist's eye. The East India Company was rapacious and evil and full of greed. But it was mercantilist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."

--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_

It takes about 3-4 years to build a fab and ten-billion dollars.

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/manufacturing/fab-f...

And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.

The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.

=-=-=-=

"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.

“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.

“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/memory-stocks-cyclical-boom-...

This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.

It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.

Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.

Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.

Chesterton's fence has two parts:

1. I want to remove a rule

2. Understand why that rule is in place before proceeding

This article deals with the second part, but not the first. So it is only about about half of Chesterton's fence at best.

In these examples, a rule (avoid blocking calls) is in place to guide the programmer to a performant system. Programmers apparently thought that if they found a way to avoid directly blocking calls, but managed to indirectly block, they had still obeyed the rule. And strictly by the most narrow reading of the rule they had obeyed it. But they had defeated the purpose of the rule.

So definitely Chesterton's Fence adjacent, but not Chesterton's Fence itself.

Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.

Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.

But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.

It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.

Even before the internet, employees were making these kinds of criticisms at lunch, at the water cooler and during their car pools.

If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.

If one is writing trailers and custom formatters, then probably the information that the formatter uses should be even more structured that sticking it in the subject line.

COMPANY-1234 in the title doesn't tell the reader all that much about the the feature or motivation. It does tell the client, but I'm not seeing why that is better than having it in the description as a tag, or some other nice way of extracting it.

SoA can be a big win. But so can plain AoS, just depends on the access pattern.

Profiling important workloads matters. Without that everything else is guesswork.