epall

This work seems so much more challenging, interesting, and fun compared to what I do as a senior software engineer. Why does hardware engineering pay so much less??

Most employers in the U.S. over about 1,000 employees are “self-insured”, meaning they hire the insurance company for the network and administration, but the company actually does directly pay out claims. At over 1k employees, I expect MailChimp was already self-insuring, and Intuit definitely does.

No mention of permafrost? Yes, the _air_ will be more habitable, but if the _ground_ is a boggy mess, you’re not going to be doing much with this newly habitable land.

I get the sense that hyperscalers don’t give Intel a ton of margin in negotiations, so they already have access to great server chips at competitive prices. And they’re bringing in AMD now to compete. Where M1 really shines is client-side applications like video handling, ML inference, and crazy branchy nearly single-threaded code. Servers can afford to run much lower clock speeds (see GCP n1 family, for example) because web serving is an embarrassingly parallel problem. Sure, some ARM might help lower costs of internal things like S3, but Graviton2 isn’t that incredible compared to the M1-vs-Coffee Lake comparisons going on in the laptop world.

I’m rather happy about buying the recently updated 13” MBP and basically skipping ARM Macs. My last one lasted 8 years, so I expect this one to last roughly as long. By then they’ll _definitely_ have ARM figured out, and in the meantime I can continue enjoying x86 compatibility and VMWare. For the fairly small segment of the market that we devs represent, I suspect I’m not the only one here implementing a _reverse_ Osborne Effect. Get your x86 Mac while you still can!

Oof. This really hurts. So often when folks complain about Google shutdowns, I defend G with “but that was a consumer product! GCP doesn’t kill off things. It’s different.” But here we have Google Cloud (in my defense, not GCP) killing off a powerful, proprietary Enterprise product with no viable migration path. At least folks get a year to migrate off, but that’s a lot of sunk cost.

I love my ARM-powered Chromebook. True, it can’t teally do native development, but ARM clients aren just coming. They’re here. And wow doesn’t have amazing battery life and an unbrickable OS.