opinali

ChatGPT is a pure conversational model, while Google can integrate this into a vast knowledge model to work with actual facts. (Just speculation; Googler, but no inside info on this.) Of course, as Microsoft adds ChatGPT into Bing they should also integrate it into the rest of their search stack. This will be an interesting horse-race to watch since it won't be just the AI models but also a massive amount of secondary infrastructure for desired outcomes with content safety (no erotica or nazi pamphlets on demand), IP protection (no plagiarism), political and cultural sensibilities, disinfo, and a ton of other problems.

Maintained an in house Java ORM for years, instead of moving to Hibernate like everyone else. Good for me learning lots of cool techniques, bad for company but it was their idea/plan in 1999.

Thanks! Replying a bit here since that post is from 2015. One can write anecdotal examples that are biased both ways. But let's talk about a single issue, the IX/IY registers.

The IX/IY registers are heavyweight but one needs to remember the "best-practices" of that era and architecture. In well optimized Z80 code, the IX/IY registers are often used for critical "global variables" that you can keep all the time in registers across many subroutine calls (think "segment registers": base pointers for important tables or buffers that are not fixed addresses through the whole program). Their performance beats needing frequent indirect load/store from pointers stored in memory via other registers that often need to be preserved/restored.

You can also use some relatively low-latency instructions that involve IX/IY, in particular PUSH/POP were often used in optimized buffer-copy routines: you burn all registers to fetch up to 20 bytes of contiguous data with POPs, then you patch the SP register and issue PUSHs in inverse order to store those 20 bytes in another location; loop if needed for >20 bytes, even with loop overhead this is faster than LDIR/LDDR. Games used that trick all the time for block copies like sprite bitblt or double-buffer animation.

I'll be more convinced by realistic benchmarks, and yes the Fib2 that I quoted before is not impressive even for the standards of CPU microbenchmarks, but maybe someone would know some real-world code that had good ports to both CPUs and could give a better verdict. Unfortunately games are never good choices, the 8-bit systems had radically different architectures for essential features like video and audio so "ports" were often full rewrites even at a high level like rendering strategies... there might be exceptions, like the AI component of a chess game.

MSX was a hit in Brazil largely because of our closed market at the time, where importing computers was always very expensive and often illegal. A computer had to be a "national" product, even if that meant just a clone of foreign machines built with mostly imported parts (and very often violating copyright, e.g. I had a ZX Spectrum clone which manufacturer was sued by Sinclair, unsuccessfully, despite copying even the ROM code). In that environment the MSX was a great solution, local companies could join the party of selling a computer/peripherals/SW that benefited from a (hoped) worldwide market, without the costs of licensing or the hurdles of straight piracy.

The mental part is easy, if you can do that: close your eyes and focus on the background white noise that exists inside your head, until it becomes a clearly audible buzz that oscillates in sync with your pulse.

Virtually all big science/tech projects from early 20th century were state sponsored, so it was difficult for SF writers to imagine a future where important innovation might come from the private sector or emerge from large scale decentralized contributions. Frankly, this is still large true today if you consider that lots of modern stuff comes from tech companies that are becoming as rich and powerful as small nation states, so they can spare a few billions in basic research with long-term or uncertain ROI.

And to be fair with Asimov, he saw some of that for example with "U.S.Robotics", a fictitious private company that invented the positronic brain and had a monopoly on that business. Also, his Encyclopedia Galactica is the creation of a large group of "encyclopedists" who are basically academic elites, something we could see as a Wikipedia-like except that it wasn't produced by millions of joe schmoes but rather by a kind of priesthood of professional intellectuals. (Foundation makes these people work in a centralized organization, but that happens in a late period of the galactic empire, it's my impression that the origins of the Encyclopedia are way more descentralized.)

What do you mean? No sellers got stiffed by this cancellation, if this happens it's Google that foots the bill (minus its own share).

Support for Javascript? (53-bit mantissa limit)

Old times of hardware designed both for safer Assembly coding, and support for simple OS & compilers thanks to low-level safety... like Obi-Wan would say, "an elegant weapon for a more civilized age".

We also accidentally dropped two nukes in Japan, and accidentally made Napalm and Agent Orange rain into the Vietnamese, with enormously high and vastly-civilian casualties in both cases. And these are just easy cases where direct responsibility can be tracked all way up to the commander-in-chief, so please no BS about no official strategy.

And then of course, the military chain of command is exceedingly good at diluting responsibility -- generals will demand results implying but not writing down how far commanders can go; soldiers and commanders will cross many lines which no colleagues will report() and no immediate superiors will punish; the press will be strictly managed to not see anything that "national security" doesn't need us to see so our own civilian population will be morally appeased that we're being righteous, everyone is happy.

() A few will do, and then they're jailed for life as traitors.

And we used to think x86 was a bad design of native code.

I wish we'd crack down on this kind of abuse, but it's an arms race, and at some point hard to distinguish objectively. There's no solution without some parental responsibility... many parents are just too lazy, the hand a device to their kids and hope for the best. Parenting takes some effort; my children's devices have parental control apps (I use and recommend ScreenTime), as for purchases of any kind they have to ask me to put my password every single time because I don't check the "remember" checkbox, it's not terribly hard.

Freemium is almost always a scam, remarkably for games where it degenerates into "pay-to-win". As a parent of two young tablet users, I'll happily pay a decent price for any game they want, but I won't allow them to spend even a single cent in in-game crap.