roadbuster

There is no substance. It's navel-gazing dribble.

The "about" section of the website is equally vacuous:

    SmolNero is a philosophical startup rooted
    in first-principles thinking.

    We explore how humans relate to technology—
    how we speak to it, depend on it, thank it,
    and sometimes forget it’s there at all.
    
    We don’t claim expertise. We see ourselves 
    as translators—working at the crossroads of
    emotion and programming, curiosity and care

If there weren't "clear owners," who was approving code changes for merge?

Every other major arm of Microsoft has been tasked with burdensome controls over tracking any and all production changes to source code, but Github was operating without a useful system and record of ownership for nearly 80% of its repos (11000/14000)?

3000 words which can be distilled down to 10:

"Cream and egg yolk are expensive; industry tightens its belt."

It really wasn't a bad operating system

It was a wonderful operating system. It provided consumer desktop essentials (Plug & Play, DirectX 7, ACPI power management, Windows Driver Model (WDM), and support for consumer I/O interfaces like USB and Firewire) alongside a modernized UI, all running atop the NT kernel. I was extremely lucky to receive a free copy of Windows 2000 Pro as a student, because I rode that horse for years.

Then Microsoft added a green start button and dark blue backgrounds and packaged Win2k for home users as Windows XP.

Looking at the categories should tell you what happened (lifestyle & fashion, finance, travel, parenting, food & recipes):

They moved to Youtube/Instagram/TikTok for better reach, a larger, total audience, and improved monetization

I think you are taking an excessive interpretation of what was suggested.

Let's level-set on the issue: Of late, GH has suffered a continuous stream of noteworthy outages. It is hypothesized the underlying cause of the instability has been the dramatic rise in submissions from coding agents ("AI"). The open question is how (or whether) GH can get load at a manageable level, with the proposal being, 'don't immediately allocate build/compute resources against any and all submissions.'

I don't see why that is equivalent to rampant disenfranchisement in the open source community. I believe what people have in mind is closer to, "don't immediately trigger an expensive build process as soon as someone submits a pull request."

would break the entire model

The "model" - GH effectively allowing an overload of their infra - is already broken

How would a random kid in a 3rd world country ever get noticed enough to enter a trust circle

By submitting a quality change with a clear description, preferably with unit tests? Is that no longer considered an acceptable hurdle?

I think Clearmotion has a very interesting technology and product (ride stabilization), but let's paint a full picture here: the company was founded in 2009, took on $370 million in funding, and only recently landed large contracts (a $1 billion dollar deal in 2023 with Chinese auto manufacturer, Nio).

I'm sure they were in a constant struggle for survival and had to "move fast" to stay afloat, but their technology is more than a decade in the making.

Yes. But, looking at BRCM/AVGO's stock chart, I may have made a mistake.

Yes, that's the issue: the (thick) solid grey "major axis" lines on the background seemed to be a wire.

If I could make a recommendation, get rid of the grid lines entirely and only have 'dots' at regular spacing. Here's what Cadence Virtuoso looks like (the most popular circuit schematic tool for integrated circuit design):

https://www.eecs.umich.edu/courses/eecs311/f09/tutorials/cad...

I worked on deep sub-micron, full custom mixed-signal integrated circuits for more than a decade, and I can't pass the first level.

Wire an NMOS transistor so that when In is 1, the output is pulled to ground (0). When In is 0, the output should be unconnected (Z).

Certainly:

(a) The nMOS has 3 connections: its drain is only connected to the output (no +Vdd supply), it's source is tied to ground, it's gate is tied to the signal input

(b) When the gate (input) is driven high, the nMOS transistor turns "on," connecting the output to the source (which is grounded). This acts as a "pull-down network"

(c) When the gate is driven low, the nMOS turns "off," leaving no connection to the output. This is equivalent to a "high-impedance" / "unconnected" / "Z" output

Fails 1/2 tests

(Edit) - I thought the light grey, thick line on the background grid was a wire from "input" to the transistor's gate. It is not. You need to explicitly add a wire from "input" to gate :\

They certainly have, but the general idea is to first use stealth jets to bomb defensive systems (including radar observability) to conquer the skies, and then you can fly around somewhat freely. While SAM technology has improved, so have America's observability and stealth bombing capabilities. It will be interesting to learn the context and sequence of events which led to an F-15 being shot down by enemy fire.

(In 1991, the United States relied on the F-117 Nighthawk to penetrate Baghdad and launch salvos against radar and SAM sites. Simultaneously, Tomahawk cruise missiles were fired against similar communication and defense sites. In this war with Iran, the F-35 and B-2 have been used for stealth missions).

During the entire gulf war (Iraq, 1990-91), only two F-15s were shot down via surface-to-air engagement. At the time, Baghdad was known to have the highest density of SAM protection out of any city in the world.

An F-15 being shot down in Iran after weeks of strategic bombing of their anti-air defense systems is not a good sign.

The Claude C Compiler illustrates the other side: it optimizes for

passing tests, not for correctness. It hard-codes values to satisfy

the test suite. It will not generalize.

This is one of the pain points I am suffering at work: workers ask coding agents to generate some code, and then to generate test coverage for the code. The LLM happily churns out unit tests which are simply reinforcing the existing behaviour of the code. At no point does anyone stop and ask whether the generated code implements the desired functional behaviour for the system ("business logic").

The icing on the cake is that LLMs are producing so much code that humans are just rubber stamping all of it. Off to merge and build it goes.

I have no constructive recommendations; I feel the industry will keep their foot on the pedal until something catastrophic happens.

All it really shows is that the “poor” are getting milked for everything they earn and own

How are you concluding that? The only way I can see that could be true is if the bottom 50% has shifted their meagre savings to spending in an effort to stay afloat.

I find this to be dubious because the bottom 50% was never saving much at all in the first place. For context, the median income across planet earth is $850 USD _per year._ There's not a lot of room at the bottom for savings.

Whenever a new layer of abstraction is added

LLMs aren't a "layer of abstraction."

99% of people writing in assembly don't have to drop down into manual cobbling of machine code. People who write in C rarely drop into assembly. Java developers typically treat the JVM as "the computer." In the OSI network stack, developers writing at level 7 (application layer) almost never drop to level 5 (session layer), and virtually no one even bothers to understand the magic at layers 1 & 2. These all represent successful, effective abstractions for developers.

In contrast, unless you believe 99% of "software development" is about to be replaced with "vibe coding", it's off the mark to describe LLMs as a new layer of abstraction.

[Synology] comes with dedicated Time Machine support

Your umbrance is with Synology, not Apple.

Apple raised security default configurations in Tahoe. That led to a config breakage with NAS devices which rely on relaxed security configurations.

I agree Apple should publish a technical note / changelog of config changes such as this one, but Apple has never implied to users they'd carry a support burden for any/all third-party hardware vendors. To the contrary, they've notified users that you're meant to consult with your NAS vendor for configuration steps:

Check the documentation of your NAS device for help setting it up for use with Time Machine

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423

Acknowledged. Thanks for pointing that out.

It's a hand-waved estimate, but let's recognize that Apple actively plans on killing support for NAS targets for Time Machine:

Time Machine backup to NAS devices over Apple Filing Protocol (AFP) is not recommended and won't be supported in a future version of macOS.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/102423

For someone using consumer technology on a consumer laptop

Mounting an SMB share on a Synology NAS to use as a Time Machine backup target is not what most users would consider "consumer technology."

Article title is a bit dramatic. The summary seems to be: for the 5% of users who back-up to a network share (rather than direct-attached storage like a USB hard drive enclosure), Apple's default SMB configs on Tahoe are strict and won't work out of the box with many common NAS solutions.

Apple should document such changes, but, looking at the post title, you'd think they were silently corrupting data during restoration.

Forget to provide paper in toilets

The world's greatest spy agency at work.

- Power fail-over (battery + generator backup) in every house?

- Could get expensive flying a technician to every household to upgrade hardware in the racks

- Probably don't want everyone at home having physical access to storage devices

- Massive theft risk

- Homeowner's insurance would probably be irked

It has less to do with "oligarchs" and more to do with protectionism over domestic industry: retain jobs in America, preserve worker income taxes revenue, capture taxation of corporate profits, tilt the scales in favour of an American business becoming a global exporter of their products, keep development of high-tech assets under American regulatory control.

This is a well-written, well-researched piece, but some of the narratives are off the mark. For example:

Phase 1 (Courtship, 2010-2014): TSMC needed Apple for legitimacy

TSMC was already the world's largest pure-play foundry long before Apple walked through the door, controlling more than 50% of market revenue. Although vertically-integrated microprocessor businesses had better-performing processes (Intel, AMD/IBM with PD-SOI), TSMC was head of the pack in the foundry world (competitors: UMC, Chartered, SMIC, etc).

What if Apple chose Intel in 2014?

How would they have done that? Intel didn't even offer a foundry service at that time, and it would have taken years for Intel to adapt to a foundry model (one which publishes a "process design kit" for use by industry-standard EDA software to design and simulate circuits).

Payroll taxes are inefficient

I agree, but governments intentionally shifted from corporate taxes (taxes on net, corporate income) to payroll taxes (taxes proportional to employee wages) because businesses were either finding creatives ways of deferring/diverting income, or they just weren't taking profit (and, thus, nothing to tax).

See the third graph here (yellow line vs. dark blue line) https://taxpolicycenter.org/briefing-book/what-are-sources-r...

The bill in favour of the Elizabeth Line was only put to parliament in 2005, receiving royal assent in 2008. Construction work began in 2009, faced some delays during COVID, but was completed in 2022 (total construction time: 13 years)

Construction on New York's Tunnel #3 began in 1970. It was 28 years before any part of it was operational. A second section came online 15 years later (2013). The final stage isn't expected to be completed until 2032, a full 62 years after construction began. I'm unaware of any comparable tunnel project which has progressed at this slow of a pace.

You still need an interface which does at least two things: handles incoming read/write requests using some kind of network protocol, and operates as a memory controller for the RAM.

Texas Memory Systems was in the business of making large 'RAM Drives'. They had a product line known as "RamSan" which made many gigabytes/terabytes of DDR available via a block storage interface over infiniband and fibre channel. The control layer was implemented via FPGA.

I recall a press release from 2004 which publicized the US govt purchase of a 2.5TB RamSan. They later expanded into SSDs and were acquired by IBM in 2012.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_Memory_Systems

https://www.lhcomp.com/vendors/tms/TMS-RamSan300-DataSheet.p...

https://gizmodo.com/u-s-government-purchases-worlds-largest-...

https://www.lhcomp.com/vendors/tms/TMS-RamSan20-DataSheet.pd...

https://www.ibm.com/support/pages/ibm-plans-acquire-texas-me...

Thinking of building a small 1TB WiFi SSD that works like a tiny standalone NAS.

Step 1: Purchase Android smartphone with microSD slot and 1TB microSD card

Step 2: Deploy Samba server on phone

The RAM is unusable as it stands, it's just raw wafer, they'd need a semiconductor fab

The wafers are processed. That means Samsung/Hynix have taken the raw ("blank") wafers, then run them through their DRAM lithography process, etching hundreds of DRAM dies ("chips") onto the wafer.

You could attach test probes to individual chips on the wafer and you'd have a working DRAM chip. In fact, that's how testing is performed: you connect to each die one at a time with a "probe card" which supplies power & ground, plus an electrical interface for functional testing.

If OpenAI takes possession of the processed wafers and wants finished RAM modules, they need to do a few things: test each die (expensive), saw the wafer into individual chips (cheap), package them (moderately expensive), test them again (medium expense), and then assemble the final module (inexpensive). Modern semiconductor test facilities cost billions of dollars and take years to build, so they'd need to immediately outsource that work (typically done in Southeast Asia)

OpenAI likely doesn't want to do any of this. They probably just want to make sure they're in control of their own destiny with regard to DRAM, then decided the best place to accomplish that was by cutting deals directly with the DRAM semiconductor producers. This will allow them to take the wafers to the existing supply chain, then contract them to turn the wafers into finished modules.