Posts by Geez Money 189 posts • joined 27 Jul 2021
I guess you're being downvoted for tone, but you're 100% right about the wages. I don't know what it's like in the UK, but in North America you do the same amount of school and go into an equally difficult job, but if you pick software you get paid double or so.
If Intel is worried about their supply of hardware engineers they should probably do something about salaries in the industry.
This article is entirely ridiculous, implying "knocking it out of the park" means making a card nobody actually buys because it costs more than a car for the internet updoots. The *060 series has long been the most popular price point in nVidia's lineup, their performance in the current gen is pretty oustanding, and they're what actually make the money. If Intel can actually provide a competing product in terms of performance and quality in their first discrete gaming GPU they've knocked it into the stratosphere.
Thinking only in terms of happy paths is the sort of thing that you expect from new grad devs maaaaaybe, anyone with a year of experience in industry still doing it is probably unemployed if I'm honest. Or at least unemployable at anywhere I've worked.
I recall an interesting stat, I don't remember the exact number but there was a fat metastudy a while back that showed a solid majority (well over 50%) of all outages that cost companies money could be attributed directly to missed error handling conditions. Even pretty bad engineers should be acutely aware of this.
EDIT: Thinking about it, most places I've worked if you didn't include automated tests for the error conditions or explanation of how they were tested in the pull it would be shut down without further consideration immediately.
This is a very dev-minded approach to the concept. The good testers I've met in my time understood black box and white box testing, understood the tradeoffs and came to the eng team with what they wanted to know about the system and what they didn't want to know about the system and in what order/when before a single workpiece came their way.
It's not really that bad of a bullet, we're just pretending it is because we're scared.
Companies have been moving manufacturing from China for easily a decade now, primarily to other East and South Asian countries but also back to their home countries. What we've learned from that is that China really is a fairly minor optimization at the end of the day, even more so once you account for the cost and complexity of moving all the goods back out when they're done, and the bullet is actually more of a bb.
China doesn't have anywhere near the lowest wages in the region anymore, the average annual salary of a person working in a Chinese urban centre is a bit over 15k USD. For an important point of comparison that's about the same as the average income in Mexico, and is comparable to or significantly greater than the average income pretty much anywhere on the planet outside North America, Australia, Korea/Japan and the EU. That's a lot of options in a lot of regions that don't require multi-month waits on boats full of crates to return the goods. Even within the EU places like Slovakia, Hungary and Portugal are actually quite competitive with China (slightly higher incomes but your goods get finished right in the EU).
Moto X probably provides one of the more illustrative examples of how small the gap can be (MSRP $400 for a mid-range phone made in Texas), and it has shrunk significantly since then.
That's without discussing the risks of operating in China, just on benefits it barely makes sense anymore. And if you want proof from the horse's mouth, look at the levers China is pulling. China is well aware that at this point their consumers are more valuable to companies than their labour, it's not their labour they keep threatening to cut off access to, it's their consumers.
Anyone who wants to go all in on China right now should be encouraged to do so and aggressively boycotted outside China. They won't learn until they learn the hard way. I'd love to see some of these companies that tried to fuck over workers there and consumers here simultaneously lie in their own filth and then violently implode.
I see this argument rolled out a lot and it's total nonsense.
Would a phone made in the West cost more? Yes.
Is it anywhere near 5-10x? No, it's not even 2x, I don't think it was even 1.5x. We know this for a fact because there are/were smartphones made in the USA and the premium isn't large.
Would the people in the US be getting paid more? Yes, why is bringing good paying jobs into a country a bad thing?
Would people in the US afford the phone? Well, the premium is tiny and it comes along with an influx of jobs and wealth back into the country. Your call.
Your slippery slope argument is not well taken. You've done nothing to show that one of those leads to the other or should, and those are a large number of situations you're referencing each of which is completely different from the other in every way.
To answer your question however? Yes. We shouldn't be trading with probably half the places you list. Exactly what response did you expect? Someone to say 'oh no, if I can't trade with those places slavery is fine!'? China is the most pressing because they're making the most threats and throwing the most military hardware into other people's countries right now. Until proof of full blown genocide came out (and to some degree covid) priority number one was Iran as your selective memory may recall.
Whoever is most likely to kill the most people soonest gets the attention. Right now that's China.
It's also pretty silly to frame it in America vs China terms tbh, practically the entire planet is appalled with China right now including many countries that do not see eye to eye with America. Only a vanishing few friendly dictators are throwing any support their way.
Doesn't drawing equivalencies like this ever get embarrassing for you? I'm guessing you've also done a lot of comparing Trump to being "identical to Hitler" and other such disgusting and offensive takes? You're drawing direct moral equivalency between a tweet not any worse or more stupid than what you wrote above and raping a family to death. Meditate on that.
Trump is a dogshit politician and was a worse President, but even beginning to compare him to actual ongoing genocide is just fucking ignorant at best. You have so much to work with and this is the best you can do? Pathetic.
And throwing 50% of the American population casually in with the assessment is just the best.
Companies have no issue publicly kowtowing to China like this because ultimately, as much as there's some PR hit, there's no real cost to doing so. And there's certainly a cost to not doing so. Their home markets are still more important to these companies than China, if we as consumers were smarter about this companies like Intel would be terrified of pulling these stunts.
Not really the best logic. Something could be a frivolous complaint today but not yesterday, and also vice versa. If there are reasons to believe it might be different this time it's still a concept worth discussing.
As an example of a reason to believe it might be different, let me point out that in the past most of this moaning has been largely inter-generational where older people whined endlessly about how the kids today are different from them. Different was automatically assumed to be worse, but it was really about how generations differed. Now take a good look at the posts in this thread, is anyone complaining about the kids or their characteristics? The kids aren't being discussed at all, it's the parents. This is a matter of people looking at the other people /in their own cohort/ and saying 'jeez we collectively shouldn't have been parents'. That, to my knowledge, is somewhat novel.
And let me give you a second reason, millenials are the first ones to be raised with all this crap available throughout youth to varying degrees, and thus have a first hand knowledge of how technology interacted with their own development. This knowledge is likely to inform a stance much better than that of anyone older than a millenial. The simple fact is that if you're an Xer, boomer, etc you have no clue what kids really get up to where they intersect with technology because in this case 'I was young once too' is at best irrelevant and at worst leading you down the wrong path.
> I believe developers are just more used to Windows.
Basically all CS programs teach in Linux and the vast majority of development on most platforms (including the currently dominant cloud dev) is done in Linux. Devs are plenty familiar with the OS, for the vast majority of us moreso than Windows because we also run Linux or an Apple device for our dev environment itself. I've worked in this embedded device area and while both OSes were used Windows Embedded was more popular overall for this kind of stuff because all tradeoffs considered it was usually the better choice. (edit: and to be abundantly clear, the choice in my experience was never "cuz graphics")
I know MiCroShaF$T BaD WinDOZZZZZE etc is the required attitude among the lay Linux users, but devs see two pieces of software which each have merits. Sorry we live in a nuanced world.
+1 every part of what you said, came in to write more or less this exact comment. Looks really promising, well done. Anything where you control the encode and decode sides (as opposed to something like a browser/server setup) could be converted today and see performance benefits and reduced code complexity. Having worked on the coding side of video software I can also attest to how many bugs would have been dodged and hours saved by a setup like this.
First of all I am not a "denialist"; second calling your numbers heavily fudged is beyond being polite (something you could afford to do once in a while) as you smear commercial and personal numbers together and call them all personal; third yes there is harm to fixating on haranguing people for personal choices when you yourself acknowledge it won't do enough, you need to spend capital (monetary, political, social, otherwise) in effective ways and diverting it to this task is actively harmful; lastly your slippery slope argument is not even close to a good one, choosing to change things that make the most difference is not even a step toward choosing to do nothing, much less a slippery one.
Picking your targets tactically is not worse than flailing blindly as much as possible in an effort to 'try harder' or 'look busier' or whatever. Altering your lifestyle conspicuously isn't something you do for the Earth. Whichever one of those sentences you needed to hear, there it is.
My understanding of this law is that this would mean the company breached its 'duty of care' if it used encryption and would have essentially unlimited liability as a result? So the government wouldn't even go after them directly, it would just let the court system murder anyone who didn't play ball.
I'll add
4. Personal choices like this, even in aggregate across humanity, do f*** all to help climate change because they're absolutely dwarfed by commercial/industrial sources of pollution. Even if every single person on Earth made what your nearest virtue signaler insisted was the "right" personal choice at every step we'd be on the exact same path we're on now. This makes activism around personal choice multiply counterproductive since it also turns people away from doing more useful climate things.
> And yet there are large chunks of the world's population who don't eat them. Many of those could choose to and don't for their own reasons, but in some areas, it's prohibited at a higher level. I could not make you dislike the taste, but I could prevent you from eating them if I had enough power and the desire to do so.
You seem to be labouring under the impression that a beer and a ham sandwich would be hard to get in Pakistan (even for a local). If anything this comparison shows how bad and ineffective these sorts of bans are.
"We recommend that end-to-end encryption should be identified as a specific risk factor in risk profiles and risk assessments. Providers should be required to identify and address risks arising from the encrypted nature of their services under the Safety by Design requirements."
Since every app on Earth uses TLS for transport this is just going to become a piece of boilerplate 'pursuant to best practices in the industry we encrypt data to protect our users blah blah' that's basically just a permanent part of the form that gets filled in. If we're really lucky the boilerplate might not even have any blanks in it. Should be pointful.
Not much to miss anyway. In much the same way that chugging champagne on top of a private jet is the sort of thing that poor people cosplaying rich people would do, Vegas is basically people who have never been in a city with nightlife being asked to build a replica of it. It's the most vulgar and superficial imitation of a more interesting place that you could have gone to instead.
I'm so glad this is the first comment. I've heard this so many times (and every project I spec goes this way) that it's entirely 'meh' to me. Postgres is a rock solid database thanks to the core philosophy of only doing things once they can do them right, with some pretty amazing extensions (PostGIS comes to mind) built on top of that. MySQL tried to ram as many features in as possible from day one, does them all pretty poorly and hasn't really been able to expand its featureset as much over the decades because they didn't take the time and care in crafting that postgres team did. It's worse at everything. Don't use it.
I know an Apple fan probably doesn't want to hear this, but a change that cripples third party monitors is no accident. I doubt Apple considers it broken or in need of a fix, it's actually likely the initial state was considered a bug or oversight. Creating incompatibility and then using it as a sales opportunity is kind of Apple's bread and butter. "What else do you expect from some lousy third party? Genuine Apple stuff just works, buy our monitors and you'll see how much better they are!"
As the article says the company in question isn't controlled by HPE, just a joint venture it retains non-controlling ownership stake in - technically a 3Com/Huawei joint venture that HPE just inherited a financial stake in when they bought 3Com. While I believe they work together very closely there's really no reason this company couldn't be working with the Chinese government without HPE having any clue and with no part of that being weird or shady.
> It's really not worth the effort. You either nod and smile, which reinforces their beliefs
This is the biggest problem, these people have literally no capacity to identify the smile, nod and slowly back away move. It's used on them so often they just take it as genuine concordance and it only reinforces their crazy. :(
You're comparing a work-in-progress project that's bordering on proof of concept with a mature and highly optimized product, of course the latter is faster. Nothing to do with languages or authors or potential, coreutils is just tuned right.
It's really not a great analogy though. Would you fork Xorg if you wanted to build a new display server or would you build it from scratch while potentially retaining API compatibility with X11 to let all existing software run? How you choose a starting codebase and how you choose dependencies may be very different.
I've been around long enough to remember the founding of Gnome and how they were first trying to rally devs and users on various online forums. The project has asshole woven direct into its DNA and will never be another way.
The whole premise of Gnome was that everyone who didn't want exactly what they wanted (a MacOS UI clone originally) was stupid and wrong because vague UI theory reasons. Ditto all existing windowing libs, drawing libs, etc. Not that they didn't have valid criticisms, but it was always black and white and anyone who wanted other choices to exist just didn't get it, the very idea of dev resources going to KDE used to piss off gnome devs. KDE was wrong and therefore wasteful, plus "who wants to look at windoZe lululul". They have the right answer and you will acknowledge them as far as they're concerned.
Stuff like dragging a guy in public until he quits his job for the crime of working on a competitor after you made it clear Gnome won't meet his needs is just... So in line with the Gnome mentality that I'm certain not one person in the entire project will ever get the issue people take with that behaviour.
Rust and Ada have nothing in common besides that one philosophical notion of making writing bugs harder. "Just use Ada" isn't really solving the problems Rust solves and Ada has many downsides for real world development. It's sort of like saying we don't need Java or C# because Eiffel exists.
"Only a matter of time till a nasty mem manager flaw gets found and exploited and the fix will make it no better than c"
Tell me all you know about Rust is its name without telling me all you know about Rust is its name. Rust is not a managed language and there is no memory manager to exploit.
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