qzw
Joined 4,004 karma
- qzwWhile that’s definitely true, I think it’s maybe more fair to say that their actual strength has always been to take a personal computing technology that’s just about “ready-for-prime-time” and make it as accessible and fashionable as possible. Almost all of their failed products have been errors in judging how close a tech is to being ready for mass adoption.
- Wait, are you parodying Madonna or meta-parodying Weird Al?
- But then we have the same complaint against Electron, namely large deployment sizes and no shared memory, no?
- Doing a mindless chore in the background to satisfy a meaningless metric sounds like the perfect task to give to an AI agent…
- Definitely worse. This sort of thing still happening in 2025 is completely bonkers to me. Recently a financial institution sent me an email asking me to "re-validate my ownership" of a linked account by uploading a bank statement. The link was to a completely unrelated and unknown domain (not even a shortener). The message itself didn't address me by name but simply said "Dear Customer". It also didn't including any legitimate info like partial account numbers. And when I logged into my account, there was no notice or message mentioning any re-validation requirement. I was convinced it was a low/medium-effort phishing attempt and submitted it to their support channel so others could be warned. It turns out it was actually their legitimate email. I told the CS rep that they're basically training their customers to fall for the next real phishing attack. Won't do any good, I'm sure.
- Well, one man's junk is another man's treasure.
In any case, none of the requirements you listed seem that exotic. There are computer cases with hot-swap ready drive cages, and status lights (or even LCDs) are easy to find. The software is probably already on github. The toughest ask is probably for it to be "little", but that's not something everybody cares about. So I don't find the GP's claim to be that much of a stretch.
- Doesn’t that name make it confusing for your users? A tribute maybe shouldn’t be identical?
- > in short, the ARM systems boot Windows and only Windows.
I’ve not tried it myself, but a quick google seems to indicate people are running Linux on existing ARM64 laptops and there’s active development to try to achieve full support. For example, Ubuntu is installable on a number of off the shelf laptops, including one of Microsoft’s own Surface devices [0].
[0] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-24-10-concept-snapdrag...
- I abhor the general trend of governments outsourcing everything to private companies, but in this case, a technologically advanced country’s central government couldn’t even muster up the most basic of IT practices, and as you said, accountability will likely not rest with the people actually responsible for this debacle. Even a nefarious cloud services CEO couldn’t dream up a better sales case for the wholesale outsourcing of such infrastructure in the future.
- Shit (meaning “how true”), shit is veritably the aladeen of words. It can basically mean anything depending on usage, context, attitude, or tone of voice.
- Appreciate the real numbers. Would be interesting to see what percentage of data structures contain Arc, but that's a lot more work.
- > They're actually spending a shit-ton of money on designer-hours and developer-hours in order to have everything custom, but still with a subpar experience.
Are they though? My impression is that most companies are just using frameworks or sdks that promise some degree of cross platform uniformity, and that’s why they don’t use the native toolkits. The savings come from not having to develop UI for multiple OS targets.
- Remember when Microsoft invested in Apple when Apple was down in the dumps? This is giving similar vibes. That deal was arguably what saved Apple near its nadir. I’m not a fan of Intel’s past monopolistic practices, but for the sake of sustaining competition in the CPU/GPU market, I hope this deal works out for them even half as well as the MS deal did for Apple.
- Your best moat against low effort copycats? Stamina. Keep your app in the store, update it regularly, add support for new devices, add new features if appropriate, keep marketing and selling it, and keep polishing it. The copycats don't want any part of that. They want to make a quick buck with as little work as possible, hence the copying and plagiarizing. In a matter of weeks or months, unless they're making bank from it, their app will start to rot. If your app has staying power, then you will eventually rise above them all. And when you have another good idea down the road, cross promote between your own apps (but don't be obnoxious about it), and you'll begin to grow a user base who trust you. That's as good a moat against copycats as you could ever get.
- This is a very naive view of what goes on in China. Not saying China doesn’t do anything right, but it’s far from the utopia you seem to think it is. There’s pretty rampant corruption at all levels of government and business, even to the point the central government acknowledges that repeated reforms are necessary. There are also plenty of billionaires in China who, along with the rich and well connected (often one and the same), enjoy a level of privilege and freedom unimaginable to the ordinary people. China’s social safety net has also been eroding to the point that if someone really has to depend on the state to take care of them, they’d be living a very meager life indeed.
- Western Capitalists didn’t and don’t give two shits about a liberal China. The investments were made and technologies transferred because the Chinese government required them in order for Western companies to access China’s enormous pool of stable and cheap labor. As for this being the Chinese century, I think it’s not an inevitability. Japan at one point also looked like it had a shot of becoming a dominant economic superpower.
- A lot of state universities (not just in the Midwest) have become professional football teams with an educational institution attached. And I say this as a fan of one of those teams.
- Some part of American students’ education, yes, but a large number of colleges have also used the extra money to inflate spending in other non-academic areas such as administrator salaries, athletics, resort style dorms, etc. Of course when the international money runs dry, those are not necessarily the first areas to see cutbacks.
- I’m with you here. No way these companies are labeling all the AI code as such. They must all be commingled with human code and copyrighted.
- Or will they miss it like they missed self-driving cars? It remains to be seen.