251–260 of 291 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny you mention that. Apple will crash if they don't get a serious personality cult back in there. Even that probably won't save them. Plus Musk is not the same brilliant, simple communicator that Jobs was.
Why is it funny that he mentions that?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably not a popular opinion, but I think Musk is overrated. The guy has a huge ego, just like Jobs had, and while he's putting it into a nice package, he's not the guy to come up with anything; electric cars, spacecraft etc. Yes, he might change the world if/once he gets to Mars, but most of his stuff is a marketing tech demo. Bell Labs changed the world. Tesla did not.
>but most of his stuff is a marketing tech demo. Disclaimer: I work at SpaceX, albeit as a technician so I'm very far down the corporate ladder, but I feel that may be unduly harsh. There can certainly be legitimate criticisms around Musk personally, and SpaceX/Tesla in regards to whether they are overhyped relative to competitors or whether they will succeed on delivering what they promise. With that being said, whe…
Apple has a car project. Autopilot must be one of its core features. But Apple would not create a VP-level position for Autopilot or any one feature for any of their products (even if they it called something else for secrecy/generalization reasons). This move increases his compensation and clout. Post-Tesla, he'll only have VP or founder titles elsewhere, never anything lower-level (unless he gets his old job back).…
Or it could be just that there 100s of engineers and tech leads working on Swift/Xcode/LLVM and giving enormous compensation to one because (s)he is famous engineer and wanted to leave does not really make sense. Unlike marketing or sales writing core software does not seem to be star driven, or at least I hope so.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of his best insights required technical knowledge - adopting Ethernet, SCSI, Mach kernels, BSD userland, object oriented programming, Postscript, TrueType fonts, WebObjects (and Java server, while ditching it on the client), html5 (over Flash)
Were they his personally formed insights or did they come from talking to the right people?
Apple has a car project. Autopilot must be one of its core features. But Apple would not create a VP-level position for Autopilot or any one feature for any of their products (even if they it called something else for secrecy/generalization reasons). This move increases his compensation and clout. Post-Tesla, he'll only have VP or founder titles elsewhere, never anything lower-level (unless he gets his old job back).…
Well said. Apple would have made the strides it did in its developer platform had it not been for Lattner. It does seem that the company has different priorities than it did when he was hired
I doubt that this is a right decision.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually a fair bit is in Sierra. Apple decided apparently not to invest resources in targeting 32-bit platform support, so they have had to hold off shipping software relying on it until the platforms drop 32-bit support. Sierra did that last year, and I'd put $5 on iOS 11 doing that as well.
Correct, I should have said "the platforms dropping 32-bit processor support". The ability to run 32-bit applications means that preexisting libraries cannot incorporate Swift code yet. The "application may slow down your phone" warnings that users are getting with 32-bit apps this year is a pretty strong indicator that Apple is going to remove support for running 32-bit apps completely for iOS 11 or 12. They previou…
Apps have had to support 64-bit since June 2015 (February 2015 for new apps), and Apple hasn't backed off that deadline. But there are still 32-bit apps on the store that haven't received an 64-bit update, and I don't think Apple has ever stated what it is going to do about them (other than showing the warning).
What's really interesting about this is not just that Lattner is brilliant and liked, but that is highlights just how critical software correctness and reliability is to autonomous vehicles. Naively one might have expected some machine learning expert to take over the reins at Tesla. But fast-moving Silicon Valley needs a fundamental shift in quality standards when it comes to safety-critical software, and if you loo…
Swift, XCode, and Apple software in general don't scream reliability to me. No doubt Lattner is a smart guy, but I'd be more comfortable with a smart guy from NASA or somewhere similar with experience developing survival-critical software systems.
It is not fair to judge Lattner's ability or commitment to safety based upon Xcode and Swift. One of these predates him, the other is the result of his decisions (no doubt) but also countless decisions of others, including those above his pay grade at Apple.
Xcode is basically the evolution of something designed for NEXT. Swift is a solution to various problems in application development. I'm not aware if he (et.al.) had real time processing or safety critical devices in mind with 3.0.2.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Elon Musk is what Steve Jobs wanted to be. Steve Jobs thought he was changing the world with the iPhone, and while it was new it wasn't world changing. What Elon Musk does is world changing.
iPhone wasnt world changing? I mean sure, you could make the argument that if it wasnt Apple with the iPhone it would have been someone else, but it's undeniably daft to think that the iPhone didn't lead to a complete change in not only consumer electronics (mobile phones), but also so many services around it. It's well documented that Android was going to be Blackberry-ish, then they pivoted to be iPhone-ish after t…