I'm not sure about the title, which just seems weird.
But I think the broad point in the short post is right. Objective-C may look horrible today, but compared to the other choices at the time of its debut; it looked pretty damned good and even better because it was what NeXT was attaching its UI tooling to -- and compared to what was around at the time InterfaceBuilder was unreal good.
I was a pre-teen when I first learned to program on a TRS-80 Model 1. I was, at the time, an expert in BASIC and Z80 assembly.
At the same time I was asking my parents for quarters to play space invaders. And that's where I feel this article.
These are the shoulders I stood on. There were people who made that first generation of video games and personal computers. I benefited from their work. Their work launched me into what has been a great career.
But they are aging out and dying. Their work was foundational. And, at least to me, inspirational.
So far it has not broken the binding but then I didn't buy it as a collectors piece and if it does break the binding, that's OK with me.
Not deriding book collecting. :) I've been there. I've just decided on this one that I don't care about the book. I care about the experience. I bought it to do this exact thing with.
One of the smartest things I've done in recent years is to buy the complete Calvin and Hobbes and put it prominently on a table that I walk by daily.
I turn a page a day...
In the morning before I get coffee usually, though it's often too dark and I'll come back to read the two facing pages later. Depending on the day that means I'll read a Sunday strip and three daily strips or six daily strips. Once in a great while it's one Sunday strip and some custom art -- I presume from one of the books. Those days are a little disappointing but it's still one page turn a day.
I'm re-reading Calvin and Hobbes at somewhere around 5x original speed but somewhere about 50x slower than if I were to sit down with it and turn pages willy nilly. I've been doing it about six months and I'm still in the first book of the three that comprise the complete set.
It's a real added joy in my day and will be for some time. Some of the best money I've spent in a long long time.
My sentiment exactly mirrors yours. I own a 2017 S100D. It has turn signal stalks, and wiper stalks, and has been (and is) a good car. My only complaint is that I hate the HVAC being on touch screen.
New Tesla's are literally worse to my thinking. Would I like more range? Sure, I guess, but truth is that 70% charge on the S is reliably enough range that unless I'm traveling cross country, the car just tops up every night.
I will buy another EV. It's very unlikely to be a Tesla both for their ergonomic design and Elon's very public display of policy positions and opinions that I disagree with.
I'm not sure: "I drove with the radio blaring so I could not hear the siren" is something to brag about. More sensors == better. And the fact that LiDAR costs have come down two orders of magnitude since Tesla made this decision suggests that some of the economic drivers for such a decision have changed.
Part of the reason I've owned FSD since 2017 and yet spent exactly zero minutes in my car in the expressway, in light traffic, in good weather, in the middle of the day reading a book is because of the lack of an entry on the posted timeline saying something like: "Tesla states it will accept liability for any crashes that occur while FSD was engaged."
After all these years, it's fair to say: "In the 7 years that Tesla has accepted money from customers for FSD, Tesla still requires human supervision in all cases."
So far they have proven they are asmpytotically approaching something that drives badly and is in danger of hitting things.
> One of the primary metrics for leadership success at Google is how many people you have under you.
I mean ... you get to choose how you play the game.
If your goal is money and you are a manager then in any organization (not just Google) it's likely that income is going to be O(number of reports). More reports == more responsibility == more money.
But if your goal is to get something done and enjoy your job; you can play that game instead.
Perhaps one of the most life improving insights I've discovered about myself over the years is that I like managing engineers more than managing managers of engineers. The conversations in my week are just more interesting.
Now if I want to get a thing done that really takes 70 people then I either have to deal with it, or let someone else do it -- but just because "more comp requires more people" does not mean you have to aspire to more people. It's OK to like your work and want to get meaningful things done without aspiring to play the "more people, more money" game.
I don't think the author's point is that "C is not a good language for systems programming." You are not going to have an equivalent to volatile int *dma_register = SCATTER_GATHER_BASE; in Haskell.
The author's point is that the drive to make C and other "model the von Neumann machine" languages execute quickly has made the compiler very complicated (the author is implying that "low level requires simple compiler") and that processors built to make such code run quickly are also very complicated. And those complications carry costs.
In many ways this is a "call to programming model action" and cites GPU as illustrating the potential when "new programming model" and "silicon to support it" are done in concert.
The other solution is political. There's a reason that governments regulate and define economic rules of the road. This is a good example of where governments need to step in. The link between generative AI and the data it is trained on needs to be carefully thought through and properly handled especially given the capitalist nature of our economy.
Came to say just this. There's no profit sharing here. Mods don't get a cut of any proceeds off the traffic their communities generate. "Landed gentry" is exactly the wrong phrase.
The CEO is the landed gentry. The mods are the sharecroppers who have had enough.
I legitimately think it's possible that a properly managed "for the profit of the investors" social media company will always follow this path.
It's why I think the right future for social media is non-profit. None of this is amazing technology anymore. This would also have the benefit that it would take the question of "how do we avoid doing harm while still making profit off the table." Could write a statement of values and intent that legitimately puts well being of users and society ahead of everything else. (Which no for-profit with externally raised capital is able to do today.)
I'm backing the effort by not even landing on reddit. And it's odd. I have found reddit to be helpful over the (now many) years.
I'm coming to the conclusion that capitalism destroys social media for me by causing the business to make it unpalatable to me. Oh well. I'm sure I'll survive without it.