Posts by StrangerHereMyself 1920 publicly visible posts • joined 9 Jul 2020
I love VR, but at the moment the headsets are just too heavy to wear comfortably for an extended period of time.
I was pleased to see Xynavo virtual display glasses (not VR) of less than 100 grams on Kickstarter. Something of this order is needed to make extended use possible.
I do fear that Meta will eventually abandon VR because the profitability isn't up to snuff and they need more cash to invest in A.I.
KolibriOS has forever changed my view on software development. An entire operating system including GUI, applications and device drivers that fits on a single 1.44MB floppy?!! How did we get to this mess where a simple editor requires 4GB (!!!) of memory?
Many contemporary software developers only know JavaScript and other wasteful languages and have no idea how it all works under the hood. When Electron uses gigabytes of memory to display a simple editor control they just shrug.
Yes, knowledgeable people aren't cheap, but they can save money in the long run.
No, the tranpiling to another language is just the grunt part. After that software engineers need to partially rewrite and test the code to verify it functions and to change the architecture to suite their needs. It's only the start of a process where there's a large human input and effort needed to be able to put the software into production.
The job of transpiling is done is a few days. The job of engineering the software to be ready for use takes much much longer. But this route makes it feasible when it previously wasn't.
I personally believe this is a good idea. The job of transpiling / translating code from one programming language to another is mostly grunt work: it requires some inteligence but not much and A.I. is perfectly suited for this.
It's comparable to the Y2K code modifications we did a quarter of a century ago.
How many COBOL codebases are still running because transpiling them to a modern language is simply too costly and risky? With .A.I. the job could be done in weeks or even days.
Musk needs to increase Tesla's stock valuation to $8.5 trillion if he's to cash-in that cool $1 trillion. Many investors believe that's a fair bargain since the current market cap is about $1.5 trillion so they stand to gain a huge amount if he succeeds.
He'll probably do that by hyping FSD robo-taxis and his home robots, not by selling more electric cars, which will become a commodity in a few years.
I'm just wondering what kind of applications Azure is supporting that can't be duplicated on other platforms. Worse, they claim they would need to fully redesign the application to work somewhere else.
AFAIK Azure doesn't really have unique capabilities. It's mostly repackaged commodity and open-source software with an administrative layer on top.
First of all, this is just how this works in the C# and Java world. Their codebases become bloated and adding a new feature (like AI or cloud) requires such a huge rewrite that they decide on starting from scratch.
Secondly, there's real value in rewriting it in Rust since you've freed yourself from a whole class of problems. So even inexperienced programmers can't introduce these errors when they're let loose on the codebase. That's a real boon and something that happens quite often.
The C++ language will never be regenerated to become memory-safe since there's too much legacy code out there and most users are unwilling to accept a performance penalty, how slight, to attain it.
Therefore the entire world's codebase will need to be rewritten in Rust, which is the future. Luckily oodles of code is currently being written in it, so the transformation is happening faster than previously thought.
Microsoft has degenerated from a technology company to being a marketing operation where clueless managers dream up stupid ideas all day to jack up the stock price valuation.
Microsoft Recall, Notepad AI and AI PC's are just some of their half-assed ideas. I have a dire feeling more is to come floating out of their behinds in the near future.
Linux succeeded where others had failed because it was free, both in beer and speech. It was and isn't the best operating system you can conjure, but it suffices for the majority of tasks or can be modified so that it does.
I'd rather have seen MINIX or MMURTL succeed, but both of these were hampered by licensing issues. And by the time Tanenbaum corrected his ill-fated decision it was too late.
This is a prime example of everything that's wrong with Microsoft: they don't care what their users need or want, but only what fattens up their bottom line or lifts their stock valuation.
Literally nobody asked for this or wanted this. It took them almost four decades just to add tabs to Notepad and now they're stuffing it with A.I. just to please shareholders.
The higher they fly, the harder they fall!
The fact is that we can't confirm this until we get samples back from Mars or find evidence of recent bacteriological activity. This means we'll have lingering doubts and heated discussions like we had in the late 90's with stalemate in the end because neither side can win the argument. The public will simply shrug it off as another hot air balloon.
The Rust usage in the kernel is infinitesimal and highly non-critical. Not very sexy or interesting. More a footnote than anything else.
IMHO the kernel isn't the most interesting part to use Rust. It rarely changes and has been scrutinized and tested to death so you can more or less assume it's faultless. The biggest problems lie in code that is frequently updated, like Windows Services, .NET, IIS etc.
I personally don't see the usage of C, C++ or even assembler as a problem in a microkernel. It's very small (several thousands of lines of code) and once it's debugged and verified it rarely changes. So Microsoft would do much better rewriting the monolithic kernel into a microkernel and testing this out on Azure.
You will ALWAYS need unsafe blocks for code that accesses low-level hardware since it's beyond the scope of Rust's memory model. Having said that there's still plenty of code inside a device driver where Rust would be a benefit.
I'm wondering what Microsoft is doing with Rust in userspace programs. Still very few updates on its usage in new Windows UI, for example.
The overblown valuation of megacorp isn't because of some incremental (if revolutionary) improvement in real-time language translation. It's in the premise that AGI is around the corner and all wealth will be concentrated at a few megacorps worldwide.
It now seems that's not going to happen. At least not without some breakthroughs (and a fair number of them).
Ergo: the bubble pops and trillions will be lost. But no matter because the U.S. economy is one big bubble anyway and there's too many people invested in keeping it alive.
I feel like admiral Akhbar in Star Wars: Return of the Jedi after the Death Star is destroyed: sighing in relief and sagging in his chair.
This vastly overblown and overinflated hype was starting to make me lose my good temper. It was literally everywhere. Every business was chanting they they were using A.I. for this or that. Clueless management were totally caught up in the hype, dreaming of firing all their employees and making infinite profits and rewarding themselves with $100 million bonuses.
I'm crossing my fingers that the stock market will lose trillions in valuations.
On one hand it's understandable that the government and the taxpayers want to profit from the turnaround if it works out. It's inconceivable that the private sector gets all the profit and the taxpayers foot the bill if things go sour. Without taking a stake the government is handing out free money which might just as easily end up in the pockets of the shareholders whilst not doing anything to safeguard the survival of the company.
On the other hand if the company becomes a government-owned entity it becomes liable to political intervention and agendas. Stockholders may not want to own a company where the government runs the show or limits their profits by blocking share buybacks, for example.
In addition other nations may move away from working with Intel if they see the U.S. government is invested in them. Or they may impose stricter rules and regulations to prevent political escapades.
The U.S. isn't exactly a backwards nation. If the FDA considers it safe then it's good enough for me.
And other nations allow GM foods and growth hormones as well. Or are they all wrong?
There's a leftist environmental block in Europe which fights everything the U.S. comes up with and at the same time wants to ruin Europe economically by force feeding them into abandoning fossil fuels just to tick some checkbox on a list called "Paris."
These tariffs were inevitable since both sides weren't willing to compromise on certain issues. The EU more or less closes off its agricultural market by banning genetic manipulation and growth hormones, both of which are widely used in the U.S. and considered safe. They keep reiterating that they won't negotiate on "health and safety directives" but many see these rules as indirect trade barriers. So I'm somewhat surprised the U.S. didn't retaliate sooner by just agreeing to disagree and slapping a tariff on E.U. agricultural products.
Automobiles from the U.S. are subject to higher tariffs in the E.U. then vice versa so there too you could reasonably expect measures to bring tariffs more in balance.
The biggest storm clouds on the horizon are the DSA and DMA which allows the E.U. to arbitrarily slap taxation on U.S. tech-giants' profits. I suspect they'll let this rest for now in order not to anger the Orange Monster and having to renegotiate a trade deal all over again.
A monolithic kernel also performs a context switch when a component invokes a system call. In the microkernel there is, however, more overhead since it's based on messaging.
These hardware based limitations are IIMHO a good reason to write a microkernel in assembly language, where you have much more control over registers and (to some degree) on-chip caches. The MURTL microkernel is written in assembly, for example.
From a programmer's perspective there's little or no difference in developing for microkernel operating systems. All operating systems virtualize calls to hardware.
When you program QNX you just include a C library where you call functions. The implementation of those functions format messages and send them to the kernel. You implement a callback for receiving results and status updates.
I simply can't understand why the world won't accept a small performance hit (5 to 10%^) in return for a much more resilient, clearer and easier-to-understand and secure operating system? I mean, not everyone's a hard-core gamer are they?
There are loads of systems where security matters more than performance, like in finance, healthcare, financial, aviation and critical infrastructure embedded control. Most likely many of these are already quietly and securely humming along with a microkernel OS like QNX.
Microkernels need much more accolades for the security and reliability they bring to the world. But the sad fact is that these are simply overlooked because they "just work" and people therefore tend to forget about them. This article didn't give a shout out to the myriad of software running on microkernels either.
Should this even be debated? The prospect of fostering a home-grown software industry instead of lining the pockets of some foreign tech-behemoth are more than enough reason to dump Microsoft on the spot, I would think.
And maybe some Brit company will emerge that will come up with a microkernel OS (didn't Archimedes already have a microkernel OS in the 80's?) that can supplant Windows once and for all.
I'd like to see Microsoft updating the UI into one consistent whole. Currently there are about four different UI's in Windows. The original Win32, WPF, WinRT / UWP (i.e. the mobile touch interface) and MAUI / WinUI. It's a complete mess. Any other company would've been flamed to death over this but Redmond gets away with it since they are "the standard."
I suppose it'll take them another three Windows releases to get it sorted out since it has almost zero priority for them. They're too busy overhyping A.I.
Now that Linux maintainers are talking about introducing ASI [1], which has a 13% performance hit, we might as well consider switching to a full microkernel.
Most microkernels have a lower performance impact than that (on the order of 5 - 10%).
[1] https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-ASI-Lower-Overhead
This moron thinks he can join the ranks of Gates and Zuckerberg but unless there's a huge breakthrough at OpenAI I see the company simply one of many providing an AI platform as a service (PaaS). Anyone can make an AI these days, including hobbyists and people in their basements. You only need to expose it as a service and you're in business.
The real expectation lies in companies coming up with an AI that truly thinks and learns like a human being. And OpenAI is expecting to get their sooner than others by simply throwing trillions in GPU's at it. They're wrong. Some High School kid in his bedroom could figure it out tomorrow on his PC.
Open source may have hidden costs, but it also has hidden advantages namely that it will support a national software industry instead of lining the pockets of some foreign tech-behemoth. And don't forget data and application sovereignty which allow this foreign power to subpoena your data at any time for any purpose or deny you access to said data and applications.
IMHO these two advantages are in themselves sufficient to warrant a complete switchover to open-source software, no matter what the cost.
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