gaius

Many years ago I was working on a project for a major UK high street bank, and on the team was a designer who genuinely believed "users like a challenge". No users do not like a challenge. Users like spending the absolute minimum time possible doing their online banking, then they like getting on with their lives.

I believe he later went on to win loads of awards... as judged by other designers. Anyway a large part of why the web sucks and runs like molasses is guys like that.

India has nuclear weapons, aircraft carriers and a space programme.

Companies stick with Oracle and IBM for multi-decade stretches, maybe the move to cloud will be what it takes to dislodge them, but then again, in a world where Azure, AWS and GCP exist some people still choose Oracle and IBM, so there's no explaining it.

If I were a CIO I would announce that this year's bonuses will be funded from savings on Oracle licenses, then sit back and let nature take its course.

Well, yes and no. It’s true that university is expensive (but you don’t need to repay loans until you are earning over a certain threshold). However it’s also true that if you take an apprenticeship a) you will be paid during training and b) a skilled tradesman or tradeswoman can easily out-earn most graduates, and this is well known.

The low-hanging fruit in ML is absurdly low these days, the tools are very good and there is loads of sample code available. If you were already good with Python or R, and already had some nice clean data, you could be doing something useful with Keras in a day, no joke.

But sure, intonation is a thing. "I beg your pardon" can be said in a threatening way.

Well that kinda was the concept - but they greatly underestimated the difficulty of producing a "sufficiently smart compiler". If VLIW had worked it would have greatly simplified processor design, no (or at least much less) need to worry about cleverly handling out-of-order execution for example. That in turn would have meant e.g. bigger L1 caches because you would have the die space to play with, or more execution units, or whatever.

It didn't work out and Intel did make some stupid decisions along the way (also underestimating the importance of backwards compatibility with existing code - not only binaries, but you also needed to be able to compile existing source well) but it was worth a punt, and maybe will be again someday - maybe a DL-based compiler could produce good VLIW code? Maybe a new (or old) language will be more amenable to VLIW compilation than C?

Yes and no. The B in UBI is basic, you won't starve or freeze but if you want nice things such as a new gaming PC, you would still need to earn to pay for that. Maybe in that world you would do just enough work to earn it, then not bother working again until you needed to upgrade - and that's OK.