lateforwork

Because there is no intellectual property in the toilet?

It gets worse. I've seen some managers hold back strong developers because they want everyone to be a replaceable cog. They push for average work across the team so no one becomes irreplaceable--even if it means the product ends up weaker than it could be.

There are two broad types of databases: operational and analytical.

Operational databases store transactions and support day-to-day application workflows.

For analysis, data is often copied into separate analytical databases (data warehouses), which are structured for efficient querying and large-scale data processing. These systems are designed to handle complex, random queries and heavy workloads.

LLM agents are the best way to analyze data stored in these databases. This is the future.

If you quit at age 55 or later and you have been with Microsoft for 15 years your stock continues to vest. That has always been the case.

This "buyout" appears to extend that benefit to employees who are >= 50 and have been with the company for 20 years. (Or any other combination that adds up to 70, for example you are 46 and have been with the company for 24 years).

Neither... it is illegal when used against citizens

The word "prosecution" implies criminal case brought by the government. This was a civil case brought by the victims.

If you mean higher bar for litigation, then maybe this lawsuit and its outcome shows that the bar isn't as high as you think when it comes to defamation?

But is Medicare as good as the insurance you had before?

Why would Craig have been great? macOS usability and quality has suffered greatly under Craig.

To what extent do you think Apple software has done well under Craig's leadership?

Tim Cook stepped down when he hit 65. Sundar has 12 years to go to hit that milestone.

iPhone (and smartphones in general) are a mature product, so of course it'll be iterative.

That's the kind of thing people say when they are out of ideas. The reality is that the mobile phone market was already a mature market, with Nokia as the leader, even before the iPhone was released. Then Steve Jobs showed the world how to innovate.

Plus his degree is in mechanical engineering. I wonder how he climbed up the ranks of hardware engineering with a degree in mechanical engineering. Quite amazing.

Apple’s software is the best in the non-free software world compared to Google's or Microsoft's

You are comparing against the wrong thing.

Compare it to NeXTSTEP from 35 years ago:

https://infinitemac.org/1989/NeXTStep%201.0

NeXTSTEP was both more usable and better looking.

Think about a junior coworker you offloaded some of your tasks to. It turns out the coworker frequently makes mistakes. At some point you are going to say it is easier to just do this myself. Especially if a single mistake can cost you your life!

This looks bad for Microsoft. They added a Copilot button to all their products but it doesn't do much more than open a chat side panel.

I recently tried Claude Cowork for PowerPoint and I was stunned by the content as well as design quality of the deck it produced. That's a threat for Microsoft because now you don't need the editing tools of PowerPoint, AI replaces it, so all you need is the presentation mode of PowerPoint.

Copilot for Excel is useless. Ask it what is in cell A1 and it can't answer. I am looking forward to trying ChatGPT for Excel.

You claimed bugs, and when asked for evidence of said bugs, you said it is rude to ask for evidence, and I should simply "assume" you are right. Okay. I think people can make up their own minds as to what that means.

Sorry I disagree. I have written compilers by hand and this compiler generated by Claude is pretty good for learning.

I am only asking you to backup your own assertions. If you can't then I would have to assume that you are denigrating AI because you are threatened by it.

You have not provided any evidence that can be refuted, only vague assertions.

The compiler is indeed useless for any purpose other than learning how compilers work. It has all the key pieces such as a lexer, abstract syntax tree, parser, code generator, and it is easy to understand.

If the general approach taken by the compiler is wrong then I would agree it is useless even for learning. But you are not making that claim, only claiming to have found some bugs.

Are you concerned that the compiler might generate code that takes over your computer? If so the provided Dockerfile runs the generated code in a container.

Regarding test coverage, this is a toy compiler. Don't use it to compile production code! Regarding while loops and such, again, this is a simple compiler intended only to compile sort and search functions written in C.

Exactly! Writing a compiler is not rocket science if you know assembly language. You can pick up the gist in an hour or two by looking at a simple toy compiler.

Because an actual compiler would be tens of thousands of lines and most of it is going to be perf optimization. If you want to get the big picture first, read a simple working compiler that has all the key parts, such as a lexer, abstract syntax tree, parser, code generator and so on.

These days there's an even easier way to learn to write a compiler. Just ask Claude to write a simple compiler. Here's a simple C compiler (under 1500 lines) written by Claude: https://github.com/Rajeev-K/c-compiler It can compile and run C programs for sorting and searching. The code is very readable and very easy to understand.

people just hate immigration, always have, always will

"We have always been a nation of immigrants who hate the newer immigrants." -- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show

Really it is not immigration people hate, it is having to compete for food.

Are you trying to argue that increased supply of labor is responsible for increasing wages?

I am saying the reason silicon valley exists is because of the immigration of the smartest people from around the world. High Tech needs the best in the world, not the best in the US.

Consider the seminal research paper that kicked off the AI revolution (titled "Attention is all you need"). It was written by 2 Indians, 1 German, 1 British Canadian, 1 Pole, 1 Ukrainian, and 2 US born people. These people came to America, worked together and changed the world as we know it. Why would we want to stop it? Has this immigration been bad for American workers? Far from it. These immigrants are the lifeblood of the tech industry, without them the center of tech would be Beijing.

In the early 1990s a good software engineer was paid $40K starting salary, and good companies like Sun Microsystems paid $45K. If you adjust that for inflation it is around $100K. But good companies in silicon valley today pay $120K plus stock grants (so around $170K or so), and Meta and Google pay much more.

So software engineer salaries have gone up dramatically in the last 35 years H-1B visa has been around. In fact, the H-1B visa is the reason the salaries have gone up. Without it the industry would be stagnant, just like non-tech S&P 500 companies and most companies in Europe in the same time period.

I wrote my first neural net in the late 90s

Why aren't we using it, if that's all the world needs?

How does that help the person that can't pay for healthcare or afford to go to school

How would you like to make t-shirts for rich Chinese, for $5 an hour? There is a reason Americans are not doing that. It is because we are smarter than the rest of the world. How do you think that happened? Were all the smart people born here? Nope. It is because smart people born around the world immigrated here. The prosperity they bring doesn't only help high tech workers, it feeds the economy, so everyone benefits.

having workers with limited negotiating power

Sorry, this is 100% false. Companies like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Meta etc. do not hire H-1Bs in order to depress wages. That does happen, but not at these companies. It typically happens when hiring IT workers.

There are plenty of Americans who can do these jobs.

This thinking is wrong. For IT jobs, the work is pre-defined and you go find people who can do the job. For product development this is sometimes the case, but for truly innovative products, such as AI models, this is not the case. You have to hire the best in the world and give them the resources they need, as opposed to defining the project upfront and hiring people "who can do the job".

Because if we didn't we wouldn't have a tech industry?

The main problem with immigrant talent in computer field is that legislators don't understand the difference between IT and Tech product development jobs. IT jobs don't need immigrant talent, so companies like Accenture, Infosys etc. should not be given H-1B visas. But tech companies like Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI etc. absolutely need immigrant talent, or they will lose to Chinese competitors.