to11mtm

Ehhhhh?

And by that, I mean...

He's the CEO of a company that is in it's second of 15-ish years 'selling shovel' booms. The guy who's motto has been 'We are 30 days from going out of business' for... about-ish 30 years.

Corporate espionage should have been a concern for a good part of that in his communications.

We have no clue what actually happened. For all we know it's a case of 'he was warned, his internal security groups already knew, and they were feeding useless info the whole time'.

As someone in what is relatively the equivalent of Raven's Call of Duty mines compared to past work...

Yeah, 100%. Even for relatively complex scenarios (i.e. over-engineered for purpose) as long as the engineer can prompt coherently and tweak it's a big increase in productivity, at least for those people.

The gap is in things like contract houses where you might see better code on code review from the people submitting but if you actually use the tools, you know that the hours billed are even more inflated than they might have been before.

Hell, on top of that (i.e. the confounders you mention are very very apparent everywhere,) the challenge of folks understanding how to use AI to be more productive.

Even last week I had a case where, I was reviewing code that I know the dev was vibe coding, and honestly was good up to that review.

Buuuuuut, for the stuff I reviewed that day, there was some base-class inheritance use that was so ugly that my initial teams message to the dev was along the lines of 'What crack was Copilot smoking on that one'.

Turns out, they had asked some other random-ish questions in the chat they were doing their actual work in, and those questions more or less polluted the context.

Sure, I was able to guide them for how to not do that in future (i.e. keep unrelated questions around the work in question to a separate chat, etc.) but this was also a dev that is normally both very good, but also overworked semi-related to the general 'AI will save us on dev costs thing'.

I can't help but ask whether, for the even less-technical people that are told 'yeah you lost two colleagues but here is Copilot/Claude/etc' and they don't even get enough advice to have it actually increase productivity versus chasing down gremlins in the actual work.

> but it seems like companies these days aren't thinking about the long term.

The last 'forward-ish' thinking thing that I can think of, was the partnerships with Mitsubishi (i.e. Eagle/DSM) and the GEMA engine. But even those didn't really play out as huge wins long term, versus, say, Ford doing the quiet-ish license agreement patent swap around hybrid tech.

Penta-Star as they used to be called in the 90s, well, back then they had the Neon which was surprisingly competitive [0] in the small car segment despite being a relative death trap and having reliability issues[1][2]. They had the Grand Cherokee which was honestly innovative as far as being a Rear-wheel drive Unibody thing that could still compete with a Body-on-frame platform as far as handling/offroading.

The Daimler merger doomed them however, between the various accounting tactics used and overall clash of engineering management styles between the brands. Ironically I will note that of all the things Daimler messed up over there, they did manage to not mess up Jeep that much

But Daimler gutted the other brands, and FCA was fairly not-useful around fixing that... They had the 200, but like everything else let it sit too long without updates... to the point where 7-8-ish years ago, my father wanted to buy another Sebring to replace his increasingly problematic Sebring, and I managed to find a Chevy Malibu of all things to try instead. My dad had purchased Chrysler products since before I was even born.

He has thanked me for suggesting the Malibu multiple times since, he still talks about the things he likes about it sometimes even though it's getting a little long in the tooth, lately it has been more of a "I know I probably should replace it but I don't see anything I want" [3]

(which is the best hope I can have as his son having to do a 'bruh' moment to his father, around a purchase consideration.)

> Stelantis turned Jeep into a lifestyle brand

IMO They only accelerated the process and it wasn't just Jeep. FCA had a mixed bag around 'lifestyle branding' management as well.

After the FCA bit, 'Dodge' started becoming more of a 'performance' brand with the Hellcats/Demon/etc and for a short time had the Base Charger/Challenger and every Avenger as a 'pretender' model and the Dart as a quasi-compliance-car [4].

RAM came about under FCA as the 'commercial/truck' brand, Ignoring the thing where every other domestic maker kept their mainline Trucks [5] under their normal car brand.

[0] - OG Neons had a horsepower extremely competitive with the JDM cars of the Era

[1] - But oh wait they forgot to drill all the head gasket holes to consistent depth leading to head gasket failures

[2] - That transmission was originally designed for cars making way less HP/Torque and from experience it's not fun to deal with the clutch packs failing when trying to get onto a highway.

[3] - I mean, Worst comes to worst I will try to suggest a Crosstrek Hybrid (new) or Fusion Hybrid (used) if it comes up via incidental.

[4] - For the unaware, a compliance car, is a car made by the manufacturer to help improve their overall fleet emissions/mpg targets.

[5] - Sure, GM has GMC, but that was more branding towards a specific age demographic than 'commercial vehicle' or 'truck bro'.

> Also can we please have proper syntax for inline arrays instead of a special purpose attribute? Don't really get that one.

While I kinda agree (And IMO ask whether having proper syntax would be a stepping stone to other things in future like proper alignment for 16-byte fields so we could sanely do cmpxchg16b), if I had to guess, it's because there's other existing code to handle StructLayoutAttribute, so just doing another attribute versus having a field probably was the 'easiest' way to implement across the different bits of the JIT and GC.

They had a few 'squirrel' moments.

Silverlight comes to mind, Also the fever dream that was '.NET micro'. I might still have my NetDuino somewhere...

> the main target audience of C#/.NET has always been LOB CRUD app shops.

I do think this has changed over time. There's definitely been improvements to the overall ecosystem from game developers (Cysharp being the most prolific) via both libraries and feedback around the BCL/JIT/etc.

Github desktop is such a hot mess that I instead choose to continue to suffer with SourceTree. Sourcetree annoys me for reasons I still cannot articulate after a decade, but it at least tends to actually work without being too intrusive as far as updating, doesn't randomly derp out on credentials, and is super handy when trying to visualize janky branch patterns of dev teams.

> co-leads/part of ensemble leads in Wild Things, Flatliners, The River Wild, and Hollow Man,

Kinda surprised you left Apollo 13 out of that list, as it was definitely an ensemble cast of the 90s but he still IMO nailed the role.

FWIW me reading the headline alone was enough to help justify a NAS purchase with my not-as-tech-inclined wife so we can just start dumping things there one way or another...

300K ARR means you get 300K in annual recurring revenue.

Subtract costs for employees. Which, given current economy and inflation, that gets you a founder scraping on their savings, one or two other people (remember that if you're paying someone unless it's totally offshored through a house which has it's own inflation, you have other factors) and then your own taxes... yeah... much more than that and you are in the black.

As a general factor I keep in mind, when I worked at a 'normal' but toxic place before I was an actual software engineer, my manager's rules were something like '40 percent L2R' (might have been lower) for in-house employees and 70- 80% L2R for contractors.

IOW, for every dollar billed for an actual employee, we paid the employee 40 cents. For every dollar billed for a contractor, we paid them 70-80 cents.

I've heard similar figures from others (e.x. 'in house employee has a real cost of 1.5-2x their actual pay').

And yes it sucks and yes the structure at least here in the US is a factor.

Well, historically Subaru hits a different market segment than Toyota/Honda.

This curious bit is that it was 'You want something between a Toyota/Honda and a Lexus/Acura, but closer to the capability of a Jeep'. Where it's more curious, is that the modern Subaru hybrids are actually better at off-roading than the new Jeep Cherokee hybrid.

Why is that? Well at least IMO it's cause Subaru sticks to their guns, their hybrid system sticks to what they have always tried to do versus the Jeep doing, at least AFAIK, the same sort of 'AWD' hybrid setup of most hybrids, where the rear wheels are electric only and you have to wait for the computer to decide to apply Any power.

Interestingly, The closest hybrid AWD design I'm aware of to what Subaru is doing, is Ford with the AWD HF55 on the Maverick, in that case they are doing it to also help make sure it can meet the needs for 4K towing.

It's not as efficient, but it is at last consistent from a branding execution strategy. Definitely moreso than Jeep who has watered down everything they sell so much it's... who knows anymore.

> which is why the crunch has lasted so long,

It's been like a year-ish...

And maybe 2027 is a truly optimistic relief on some level,

> a second wave comes in 2028–29, and a lot of that new capacity is aimed at HBM and server memory, so consumer DDR5 and GDDR will likely ease last.

'Consumer DDR5' has a pretty big set of knock-on effects though.

Unless you are working at a 'tech' company, the norm is that even developer machines will be constrained on memory usage for a given workload[0][1]. IOW companies trying to keep procurement in check wind up looking at procurement cost vs lost productivity.

[0] - Modern infosec and corporate software, at least where I'm at, seems to be vaguely more efficient than electron apps, IOW I can reboot, open teams and my IDE, after 4GBish of my IDE and 1GB of a fresh Teams instance I'm already around 16 of 32GB.

[1] - I had to fight hard to get 32GB as a developer baseline at my org. They wanted 16GB. Ironically the JVM based devs get 64GB but still have slowdown issues on biuld...

Pssssh that seems boring.

The real deal would be putting another drill on the back wheel, so that you have All-Wheel-Drive!

FLD and FSTP have opcode variants that load/store 10 bytes from/to a memory address.

Downside is, of course, 10 bytes is a fairly awkward size; it is not nearly as fast as 32/64 bits to move in and out, plus it -has- to be memory (i.e. can't just borrow another register) and then the potential impacts around alignment of data structures/etc to consider.