HN user
Pretty sure LESS industrial feedback loop generating behavior is the best climate-change solution.
Nuclear power probably seems pretty great to WSJ and capitalist readers who want to own it all, and need the public to be ok with nuclear power again, though.
Decentralization seems to work well for cases …
I skipped copying it all because it’s right there; not limiting my reply to that snippet.
Yeah information network signal attenuates over longer distances (space and time).
The internet created an ansible for assholes to hassle us.
Knowing this, fuck the open web. I want an email provider that just straight up blocks messages from senders I haven’t approved.
I’d like Signal to go the extra step and make communication over a 1:1 link, maybe using Wireguard, an option, as a fallback and to put other options in front of less savvy users.
Spam is just advertising by agents that won’t kowtow to government. I don’t need schemers in big biz or Africa.
Decentralizing of communication will never happen running some platform centralized around rugged individualist hackers motives. But we don’t exactly need FB, Twitter, etc, either.
Our phones are just TVs for business opportunities. I’ll just send my adventures straight to people who care and skip the noise thanks.
General purpose won as it was realized monolithic chips that did it all were infeasible due to manufacturing technology in the past.
Overtime the political story about market winners took over, and technology development became mired in MBA bean counting to extract wealth, as it became clear the public would happily consume what was fed them via PC screens like we did TV.
None of these textual objects or CPUs will mean anything in the future. Manufacturing technology will evolve to provide “end to end” computing gadgets, black boxes that need user interface code at most, to contextualizing outputs. We’re subsidizing a process of technical evolution at scale.
Describing this all through the words of contemporary political discourse is missing the point.
I’m going to rely on the insight of my friends in the chip biz working at Intel and Qualcomm back in the day; generic CPUs “won” as it became aware manufacturing anything different was literally impractical 10+ years ago.
The goal of custom to spec silicon never went away it just had to bide it’s time, then Intel got taken over by MBAs.
Choices were made based upon real data. That generic CPUs “won” due to consumer choice; anything winning due to consumer choice is just a handy political meme. We get what supply side can sell for the most profit.
Xfinity provides internet while Comcast screws customers
Trickle down is a euphemism for peeing on people from the top
It’s all obfuscating semantic games to conceal their application of agency, not literally, but cognitively
Security will play a huge role in obsoleting software development as a job.
Monkeys in chairs papering over generic CPU design is pushing chip makers to consider silicon designed to workload spec; input parameter set, let it go.
Chips are now undergoing their great decoupling like software. It’ll take a while as manufacturing process pivots but rather than 8 generic cores we’ll eventually have SOCs per application. Software will be pushed to the UI layer alone for users, and whatever industry needs to boot strap manufacturing.
Frankly I’m looking forward to it; I can’t think of anything software companies have provided humanity that will stand the test of time, except making us all learn their new preferences.
There’s an argument to be made that political austerity causes social segregation and people to die in poverty of preventable problems.
Why don’t we set aside the rap battle and Mathematica concerns and focus on well known human society features failing people.
Cut the crap with the pearl clutching “there’s an argument to made other peoples behavior did…” and consider yours as a member of an implicitly caste based society.
Treat yourself like the subject of study instead of abstractly focusing on the flock, dad.
Western psychotherapy role play is the worst personality trait.
Fair doesn’t mean the same.
I align with Apple a bit more as they actually do interesting manufacturing R&D; they’re all terrible on the software and privacy side.
Google is 3-4 useful websites, cloud software hype, and resource consumption.
We could write desktop software that recurses over personal data, abstracts useful metadata, and share that with each other. Users pay for bandwidth when they could just utilize their computer better.
Somehow we’ve anchored our agency to doing that via cloud providers who externalized their real costs onto startups which is why they’re rich.
I’m really hopeful the future of hardware comes with power savings and performance that make building a business with off the shelf parts tenable again. But who knows
How is this different than instigating demand for Lamborghinis and 30 room mansions?
Gaming people to do things of nonsense utility is about all humans have to do after basic life supporting logistics.
Seems like mining fake objects, while power consuming, is less literally damaging than rocket ships and garages full of cars, boats, and 5 mansions that never get used.
It’s not outside the realm of possibility pretend loot is what the masses have to look forward to “owning” aside from basics down the line.
Agreed. Just put your commercials on YT, Twitch, but always link to your wallet; whether it’s Patreon or a tshirt store elsewhere.
Decouple. Take advantage of network effects. Model income generation wide and deep.
It’s all about extending social geometry.
With different software pipelines they could run right on a GPU
It’s all state in a machine, and ML is showing us recursion + memory accomplish a lot; why all the generic structure in x86 if we can prove our substrate works just as well with better power efficiency if it’s structured specifically?
Chips aren’t concepts, they’re coupled to physics; simplify the real geometry. I think that’s what Apple is really proving with its chips, and why Intel is trying to become a foundry; they realize their culture can only extend x86 and x86 comes from another era of manufacturing.
I got into tech designing telecom hardware for mass production in the late-90 and early-00s. I just code now but still follow manufacturing, and have friends that work in fabs all over; this is just sort of a summary of the trends we see shrug emoji
Yeah I think that’s a side effect of knowing how the sausage is made.
I have written my own ECS loops, rendering pipelines; all naive but after that it’s optimizing to product fit, and product emotional themes are pretty copy-paste to satisfy social memes.
“Enthusiast” CPUs seem pointless. My CPU is never above 20% in AAA games as it’s all on the GFX card now.
Good to see CPUs going through the great decoupling that software did.
IMO Steamdeck is the future of home desktops. Both my kids are into science; I’m excited to have a drone remote, sensor base station, generic pc, etc, in a high quality package versus something like Pine phone.
Valve and Apple are pushing hardware forward. Hopefully they can obsolete needing data centers of generic CPUs and tons of Byzantine software by making hardware with the best logic for a task built in, available to home users.
Check out bio electrical regeneration research
If you haven’t come across it, the teams inject drugs that do nothing to cells but instigate an electrical field effect. What happens is regrowth of a limb to the correct “spec” even though that physical information is gone (limb amputated).
This suggests to me an equalizing effect exists, where fields and matter feed each other just enough to reach structural equilibrium.
Relativistic information network effects, proving what math objects create which field effects, and the social impacts, are going to become huge and blow away our current engineering goals of making hard silicon computers.
We might be able to use nature itself as our CPU.
It’s been known for a while that human communication is the real impediment to technical development.
Companies I’ve worked at that sucked had awful internal communication. It was all very friendly, but it was all platitudes and euphemisms, dumpster fire technology implementation.
Phone and web apps are basically librarian work these days. If a businesses tech stack is having issues it’s human communication that’s the real problem.
So only after it’s precedent and harder to undo then does it matter?
This is basically saying there’s no point in testing software, ship every line to prod and see what happens.
This is exactly the kind of political ennui the system purposely tries to inculcate. Not fine grain mind control, but indifference.
Laws dictate acceptable social agency. One might think we’d take what ends up in them at least as seriously as rich man’s busy work.
The author covers your perspective:
But, that’s only because you are a noob and you don’t deal with the things that I have deal with.
Someone on the internet
In conclusion: not all software problems require the same implementation.
I don’t run a DB for some deterministic applications I have that can regenerate the same outputs such I don’t need to store it all. I could, in theory, regenerate an entire data set with a seed. Maybe app developers are ignorant and lazy for not designing systems that do that!
What does your one story have to do with “software engineering” as a field?
Sounds like people are conflating problem solving and personal career demands.