51–60 of 109 posts
The only sentence I disagree is this one > We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society. Swap "power" and "money" and I agree. > We are allowing too much MONEY to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of POWER First step, stop giving them yo…
money==power.
I feel like the person writing this article has never worked in a professional environment: getting it right is hard, you always have pressure to meet a deadline (for obvious reasons), but if you don't have a deadline, you can also end up in analysis/development paralysis where you don't spend your time on important stuff. A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after thei…
> A lot of the projects that person is talking about ended up being pretty good a year after their launch Right. His point was that these things are being released before they're fully baked. That's a problem, and one that is much more common now.
"Too big to fail" means everything fails. In my opinion we are on the precipice of civilization collapse. The reason is that people can no longer think logically and the tools they use are increasingly becoming a hinderence. The problem crosses multiple domains, not just "Tech." Basically we have reach a point as a civilization where failure and ineptitude are increasingly not penalized.
We're living in the Golden Age : they with the gold (money actually) make all the rules. As the article mentions, the emergence of quasi-monopolies constrains decisions at all levels in service of further maximizing financial gains. The 99.9% are mere pawns in this game.
Monopolies are the norm, I believe. The 20th century in the United States (from the Sherman antitrust act, 1890, to the changes in the Reagan era, 1984ish) is an exceptional period.
"In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft's new terminal [32]." "In the…
As an example the tab handling is a mess - eg. you can't configure tabs where title updates using escape codes is blocked and the close "x" is removed even though the settings are there - the tab title just reverts to the profile name.
I suspect it would have been fine if they actually designed all the features from the start vs grafting things on ad-hoc.
"In 2019, the company released an entirely new version of its terminal for Windows 10, promising a better performance. However, user Casey Muratori was not convinced, claiming that the performance was still far from what could have been done without much effort. To prove his point, Casey developed in just a few days an open source prototype that performed 200 times better than Microsoft's new terminal [32]." "In the…
You can, anyone can, write all your programs with the mindset that you are given X amount of memory, and you use it as a cache or buffer like they did back when computers had 64K or whatever. It would solve a lot of what I see as the problems of modern software. For so many years, people have pursued the false vision of a programming environment where resources can be assumed to be infinite. The problem is, no matter…
Yeah you could arena allocate and do some nonstandard techniques like that, but basically you are at the mercy of a garbage collector, and those LOVE to use memory.
So... use C++? use Rust? As you point out, malloc and the heap are kinda the same problem as GC.
Personally, some "runs on 1Ghz and 256MB of RAM" would probably be the most real world effective way to advertise some degree of restraint.
We can't keep wasting processing power, the "laws" are running out of steam. MHz/Ghz is stalled for a decade, and the die shrinks are going to start running out of steam as well.
I can't think the coming AI coding blast will help things either.
We also lack stability and sharing in the runtime libraries (and containers are NOT helping this, they just load all their own mini-OSes for each application), and efficient means of extracting only the necessary routines from big libraries in build processes.
Of the 100 largest tech companies, 62 are from the US. Next-highest China has 9. [0] Where's all the great software developed by non-capitalist economies?
[0] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
This article has stated very clearly and succinctly something that a lot of knowledgeable people have been screaming about for a long time. Excellent work. Unfortunately, I don't see a solution to it anytime soon, short of everything just falling apart.
If you look on the opposite side of the coin, you will see that we do have a bunch of tech that is very good these days, in a larger quality than the failures. IMO these types of failures are simply a percentage of the overall tech, and the reason they seem prominent is because there is just a huge race in tech over the past decade. If you actually want to fix it and reduce that percentage, push to replace engineers…
We have moved to products just being "good enough".
An example is telco equipment, phones always just worked in the past, you would never expect an outage. Ask most people who had office or home phones up until the 90s and most would say they never had a single instance of their phone not working.
Then we went to Voip, and now soft phones like MS teams, and reliability is shit.
Its embarrassing that products like MS teams require multiple retry attempts each week just to make a simple phone call.
You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism. With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor. What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve? On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in m…
Meanwhile vendor products from early 2000s loaded their web interfaces instantly. And they had more functionality.
The only sentence I disagree is this one > We are allowing too much power to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of money, not a human project for society. Swap "power" and "money" and I agree. > We are allowing too much MONEY to be concentrated in the hands of a few people, whose ultimate goal is this relentless pursuit of POWER First step, stop giving them yo…
money is power. they are interchangable. money==power.
You know what’s bullshit? Articles like these. They all mash together a big list of unrelated and cherry-picked problems and pile on complaints and cynicism. With how long this piece is I honestly feel bad for the author for wasting so much time on the endeavor. What purpose does an article that’s essentially a gigantic list of every recent corporate scandal serve? On top of that, toss in the tech geezer’s “back in m…
Counterpoint, I click a link to load a feature page on the google cloud console, it takes around 10 seconds if not longer to load on a modern PC. Meanwhile vendor products from early 2000s loaded their web interfaces instantly. And they had more functionality.
“And they had more functionality” lmfao which cloud provider had more functionality in 2000? Which cloud provider existed in 2000?
Funny joke though I’m dying over here.
Hold up I gotta go install Macromedia, Java, RealPlayer, and enable ActiveX.