As a Mac user at work I just close the lid and put the laptop in my back. Windows users shut down and power up again the next day.

Whenever I bring this topic up IRL people inundate me with stories about how much issues arise if they just sleep their computers.

Apple literally rolled out the feature 13 months ago with 24 months free use with the purchase of a compatible device.

How can you claim any statistics on the topic?

But yeah, I think the real interesting thing is what’s going to happen with the LEO constellations, but I also get why Apple isn’t keen on relying on a Musk-driven enterprise.

All other LEO-constellations are probably a decade away from having enough coverage.

I think Apple wants to get in the game now, and they have the money to spend on differentiating themselves.

And for those who have stumbled into a situation where they needed it and been rescued it’s great, but on the other hand the majority of the planet is not served as of now.

I didn’t mean the customers, but sure.

Apple has shown that the market could be willing to adapt.

But then again, they’ve always had more leverage than the Wintel-crowd.

But what people seem to ignore is that there is another option as well: hardware emulation.

IIRC correctly old AMD CPU’s, notably the K6, was actually a RISC core with a translation layer turning X86 instructions into the necessary chain of RISC instructions.

That could also be a potential approach to swapping outright. If 80% of your code runs natively and then 20% passes this hardware layer where the energy loss is bigger than the performance loss you might have a compelling product.

A 1% recommendation 👌

Wasn’t there a funny little zero-day in a widely used Wordpress plugin just last week?

Most of the sysadmins I know have incredibly high tolerances for friction, but ridiculously low tolerances for repetitive tasks. Which I think is a bit ironic.

I’m not sure this crowd will be representative in terms of which tools and services they use (or prefer to use).

Heck, sometimes someone comes to me and asks if some system can solve something they just thought of. Sometimes, albeit very rarely, it just works perfectly, no code changes required.

Not going to argue that my code is artificial intelligence, but huge AI models obviously has a higher odds of getting something random correct, just because it correlates.

I’m sure co-pilot will be revamped with the newer GPT-models, they’re just not prioritizing it right now.

If you are publishing an existing catalogue, sure, but yeah.

Implicit trust is a horrible idea for something like this.

Just needed to be sure, but thanks for confirming.

I like how you just keep on talking about what we all agree on.

Would you like to imagine how you would argue if the first sentence you wrote was true?

That’s when the interesting scenarios start showing up, including how humans are ready to grab the pitchforks when an automated system kills someone, but when humans do it 10x more it’s perfectly fine.

If the weight of the car stopped her from breathing it would have been a very different thing.

You are adapting your arguments to the situation.

It should be clear that no self-driving car will ever know what “the right thing” is in cases like this and it would require human interaction/intervention to resolve*. This is simply because the car would be unable to gather the necessary information about the situation.

That should not deter us from adopting self-driving, as self-driving vehicles will be the biggest boon to pedestrian safety seen since the advent of urbanization.

* One could obviously imagine a future where other vehicles could contribute information about the situation so that the vehicle in question could take actions and react based on what happens around it and seeing different perspectives than its own. Interactions with robots or drones could potentially also contribute information or actively aid in the situation.

If the vehicle was intelligent enough to converse with other humans or even the human in question, or at least use human voice to gather information to aid its decision making this could also be different. But the vehicle itself will always struggle with the lack of information about what is actually going on in a situation like this.

Where I work we haven’t really shut down any projects in the last six years.

We’ve had some smaller projects which got parked due to shifting priorities, but other than that we’ve shipped everything else.

But inevitably, over a career in software there will be projects that don’t make it to production for one reason or another.

Personally I’m very pragmatic about it, but I know people who get very attached to the code they write.

I’m the kind of guy that is passionate about what I’m doing when I’m doing it, not necessarily for all eternity. I’ve written stuff that I’d be more than happy for someone to come and replace, but the thing about revenue generating systems (most people say “legacy”, but I prefer this term) is that they aren’t always easy to replace.

I know we’re not all wired that way, and some people find it harder to see an older system get retired. A consultant I use is more attached to my code than I am, for instance.

Author seems to think that starting salary for developers working for Google is representative as well. The average computer science graduate does not get a job at Google.

People who learn to code because it means job security are not the ones we look to hire. We look for people who are passionate about it, whose interest in the subject is deeper than skin deep.

Not looking for people who live and breathe code, but you need to like to solve problems and like to learn new things.

No idea where the other guy is getting his Lenovos. We’ve been buying Pi’s because of form factor and GPIO.

We had a fair share of those Lenovos in the office when I started (I think they were around $500 in our config back then), but they’ve all been replaced with laptops now.

In my department we run around with $3000 MacBook Pros, so not very budget minded at all.

eBay is not where we buy new hardware.

Pi has been ridiculously expensive and hard to get from 2020 to 2023, and we’ve had applications where we’ve been deploying them.

Think we’ve seen cost up to $200 for a complete kit.

You need power, SD-card, a case, and depending on application also a micro HDMI adapter. It all adds up.

Slight difference if you are just upgrading in place, but comparing the unit price of a bare Pi to a computer with everything that you need is not apples to apples.

Still not a reason to give Google more power.

Not OP, but “something else from another company” is the only thing that makes sense.

I mean, it’s all fine on paper.

But… how… the… fuck… do…. we… get… there???

Communism is fine on paper. Fuck. Even capitalism is fine on paper.

However; through empiric data we can learn that humanity is full of shitheads who want to be in power and have control.

Sadly, as I see it, that is incompatible with any form of utopia.

I’m from Norway and we used to be fucking close to having an utopia for a short while. Politics were civil, the differences between low income and high income were low, and we actually pooled our oil money into a pension fund so that we would be wealthy when the oil age ended.

On top of that we were rich on natural resources and had abundant renewable electricity from harnessing our mountains (read: damming up valleys and putting rivers and falls in pipes) to create hydro power.

Combine that with a socialist government (“the Scandinavian model”) with free education for the masses, affordable housing, free healthcare, some of the best employee protections in the world, great consumer protection with the law basically granting consumers 5 years warranty on everything from cars to phones or TV’s.

Sadly, since everyone was feeling so wealthy everyone stopped caring. Housing is now anything but affordable. Electricity that we paid for by destroying beautiful nature is no longer a resource for the Norwegian people, but thanks to numerous new export cables to Europe and the fact that production is sold on a fucked-up “stock market” where the most expensive bid to produce electricity for any hour of the day sets the price for everyone, we now have extremely high and volatile electricity prices affecting inflation and reducing competitiveness of Norwegian businesses.

On top of that politicians keep getting caught with their hands in the cookie-jar at an ever increasing rate, and I think it must have been 20-30 years since we had a prime minister with actual work experience.

Call me cynical, but good things don’t last if we even get them at all.

The Romans knew it; the masses simply needs to be entertained by bread and circus and you can do what you want.

Social media is the best circus so far, and when everyone is busy debating pronouns or whatever flavor of distraction there is this week the political decisions that actually affect us gets made without anyone paying any attention.

Sincerely though, best of luck with your utopian society. I hope for all of us that we get what you describe.

I sadly suspect we will keep doing what we are doing until it kills the planet.