Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
no. just NO. look at maps of polio proliferation before/after Jonas Salk, the frikkin guy who DISCOVERED/CREATED the polio vaccine, and then look at maps related to Gates work, which, while admirable, bears no comparison from the night-vs-day world of pre-polio-vaccine vs post-vaccine. Wards of people in iron-lung machines staring at mirrors on the ceiling. It was before your time, but this is no excuse for spouting total nonsense.
Comment · 1 year ago
WHAT??? Jonas Salk GAVE the IP for the Polio Vaccine TO THE WORLD FOR FREE!

how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.

Comment · 1 year ago
no, creating the actual technical standards and the internet is/was hard. monetizing it and walling off sections of it is STEALING FROM THE PUBLIC that which we already PAID for and selling it back to us!

Zoom!? WebRTC! Proprietary XYZ? Standards!

Comment · 1 year ago
and a lot of it is directly funneled to crony's of the current king...

I doubt DOGE will recommend cuts to SpaceX funding.

I need to remind you that Mush has invented nothing nor is he an engineer. His vast personal wealth is extracted, and at least part of it's vastness is due to corruption. Mush's personal views expressed on his own-media-trumpet Xitter, have hampered more technological innovation than he has ever enabled or paid for.

BTW what's SpaceX carbon footprint like? This 'man' also just paid for a slice of the US presidency that just pulled the US out of a global treaty to attempt to address human-caused climate crises that are unfolding in front of our face on a daily basis as predicted. Mush has done net harm to Earth, not good.

Comment · 1 year ago
sure it is. "mature" markets are only interesting for large moneyed entities to try to tweak things and squeeze .01% more profit out of a service/process/product.

innovation is risky and rewards accordingly.

Ycombinator app-startups are low-hanging-fruit with marginal innovation and marginal risk => it ain't hardware, and it's just webservices and a few React devs...

SpaceX and DARPA and ARPA = our tax dollars.

Comment · 1 year ago
nice try. The billionaires gave us none of the above. Sincerly, an old programmer who was actually there when these things were funded, often at the public expense in many nations.

Computer games are pan-et-circenses, IMO, but I also don't recall any billionaires having created any.

Your John Galt story is trite and untruthful.

Comment · 1 year ago
They are dodging a bubble and don't even know it. If America thinks it can base future prosperity on the AppStore and AI, it should think again, because actual innovations are needed, and this low-hanging-fruit tech-bro-fantasy investment cakewalk will not provide anything but pain upon the inevitable comedown and disillusionment. You will not be able to sell products nor services with the term AI anywhere near them in the very near future. (already the case amongst a certain percentage of us)
Comment · 1 year ago
RaspberryPi's SOC famously boots from it's GPU first, then it's CPU. The GPU is a binary blob (not open source) thanks to Broadcom...

Broadcom... that same hardware mfgr that makes your Debian install so much extra fun... (well, if you care about networking and integrated controllers...)

Comment · 1 year ago
It boggles my mind that the entirety of the hardware world cannot accept the simple concept of making computer hardware capable of booting and running <latest open source operating systems literally purpose-built to take advantage of general hardware standards the Hardware Manufacturers WERE ALREADY MAKING for Microsoft Windows (TM)>

I mean, it's not like Linux didn't spend 30 frikkin' years specifically aping hardware that carried the WIntel brand from the IBM PC with MS-DOS up to WindozeWhatever13 or whatever they are up to now...

I cannot fathom the strange incentivization schema that would cause the entirety of the existing mass-retail OEM computer production to be "Windows ONLY" and actively contributing to literally selling LESS of their own units via efforts to lock their own hardware against running your own damned OS upon it!

I buy hardware I can run Linux on. I have no use for Microsoft Windows in any capacity for any purpose, period. end of story.

Hardware Manufacturers please take note! (I remain puzzled... Dell even sells some preloaded Linux laptops, IIRC... what gives, Dell?)

Comment · 1 year ago
Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs. Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.

I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.

Neural Networks? that's 90's technology. Scale is the only new factor I can think of.

This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.

This is dishonest and will not end well.

Comment · 1 year ago
Please name me one technological advance of major import in the fundamental transformer kernel space that has occurred in the last decade that has any import at all on today's LLMs.

I will wait.

Comment · 1 year ago
it is unlikely that the output of LLMs will improve. there is no fundamental breakthrough in transformer technology (or anything else) powering todays' LLM "revolution"

There is only scale being employed like never before => vast datasets being plowed through being sufficient to provide the current illusion for the less observant humans out there...

10 years from now this current fad of LLM's pretending to be intelligent will look preposterous and unbelievable: "how COULD they all have fallen for such hype, and what a cost of joules/computation... the least deterministic means possible of coming to any result... just wasteful for no purpose..."

Comment · 1 year ago
Consider the bubble already burst, in terms of developer confidence in this sort of nonsense.
Comment · 1 year ago
Containerization and orchestration of containers vs learning how to configure HaProxy, how to use Certbot, hmmmm

The questions you pose are legit skills web developers need to have. Nothing you mentioned is obviated by K8s or containerization.

"oh but you can get someone elses pre-configured image" uh huh... sure, you can also install malware. You will also need to one day maintain or configure the software running in them. You may even need to address issues your running software causes. You can't do that without mastering the software you are running!

Comment · 1 year ago
Author presumes we need Docker in the first paragraph. I suppose this is why they think we need Kubernetes. I propose using "the operating system" as the basic-unit here. It already runs on shared hardware thanks to a hypervisor. Operating systems know how to network.

The entire desire for Docker in a production app comes down to willful ignorance of how software one depends upon is configured.

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