> All of my kids spent hours pouring over a book we had called 'The Way Things Work' with a delightfully funny Mammoth and a good description of how things actually work
I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.
> Usually, companies like Apple are largely to blame
Just as a point of fact, Micron and its peers have in the past operated an illegal cartel that engaged in a price fixing conspiracy to manipulate the cost of RAM.
> mega-buyers like Apple caused various issues, and the production equipment that was scaled back during that time is now leading to supply shortages in the upcycle [2]. Apple fans probably won't admit it, though.
That's Micron's problem. Nobody held a gun to their heads and made them accept the prices Apple was offering. Micron willingly took those deals.
> Many such IDs are designed for local physical verification, like proof that the mobile phone owner is above certain age or has a valid driving license, they are not designed for remote verification.
This is incorrect, the Digital Credentials API[1] is designed so that identity information can be remotely verified in a cryptographically secure manner.
There is no reason Anthropic could not use the DC API for this in countries and states that support digital identity, I assume they simply aren't because they threw this together at the last minute and simply out-sourced it to Persona.
> They scaled up the team briefly, which meant that lots of weird stuff was tried, but the roadmap was diluted.
Boz never cared for Portal, it wasn't his product. I was one of the original engineers on Portal. The VP running the research lap responsible for Portal was canned in a political coup, and her entire org moved under Boz, merging it with Oculus into the AR/VR team. There was some ham-fisted justification around why a smart home product should be part of AR/VR, but it never really made sense.
Portal had a bunch of other problems, including:
* Massively over-specced hardware, the SoC was the same SoC as the Quest, even though it had no reason to be. The BOM was something like $500. We were selling these units at a huge loss.
* Cambridge Analytica broke right in the middle of development, which completely tanked any remaining trust in the Facebook brand. Everyone knew the product was completely sunk at that point, but nobody wanted to come out and say it. At the last minute we had to stuff a plastic camera cover into the box as a result.
* Boz was convinced we could build a voice assistant for Portal and Quest that was better than Siri, but the Assistant team at FB was completely out of their depth. We ended up right before launch having to sign a deal with Amazon to ship Alexa on the product.
* So much politics. AR/VR had a virtually unlimited budget so there was a massive land grab to hire as many people as possible, with no consideration around what they'd actually work on. Even though Quest and Portal had the same SoCs, they had completely separate Android OS builds and engineering teams, because everyone was trying to build the biggest engineering teams they could. People were constantly leaking shit: I found out we were delaying the project because an executive leaked it to Bloomberg while the executive meeting was still happening.
> It's common here in France for credit card operators to have fees in the 5-10% range (or 0.30€ per operation + 2% of the amount)
Interchange in the EU is capped at 0.4% for credit cards. Typical costs for processing are much lower than 5-10%.
For example, Adyen charges the 0.4% interchange + their fee of 0.6% and a flat 0.11€. On a 10€ transaction, that's 2.1%.
In most cases this is cheaper than handling cash. When you accept cash, you have to pay somebody to close and reconcile the drawer, take the cash to the bank (or have a security company do it for you), account for shrinkage / mistakes...it's a bit of a myth that cash is cheaper for businesses to handle, especially in places like the EU where card interchange rates are highly regulated.
Now of course, if your cash is not going the usual routes and isn't getting accounted for in the books...that equation can change.
> Beneath the Emmanuel Church on Newbury Street in Boston, tucked away in the basement, sits a library
This is underselling it: it's in a side street off Newbury, where nobody would have any reason to go, with a tiny little door about half the size of all the other doors marked "Puppet Library"[1].
I visited many years ago by complete accident: I was out running with some friends on a Tuesday afternoon, we were going down the public alley because Newbury was heaving, and saw this sign. We wandered in, and...yeah, there's a lot of puppets.
> Meanwhile in Germany: Let's stick to combustion engines for at least 10 more years with 500km range and a multiple of energy and maintenance costs...
BMW is heavily invested in Neue Klasse[1], the iX3 has a long waiting list and a 800KM range.
> Majority of California based companies employee English only or English and Spanish speakers possibly with some Indian language as well [...] Never mind rarer languages like Czech or Greek.
That may be generally true, in this case Apple actually has an engineering team in Czechia that works on biometrics and authentication:
> Your post feels like the last generation lamenting the new generation [...] There's so much plumbing and refactoring bullshit in writing code [...] I've had my excitement
I don't read the OP as saying that: to me they're saying you're still going to have plumbing and bullshit, it's just your plumbing and bullshit is now going to be in prompt engineering and/or specifications, rather than the code itself.
> in any other threat model, security is an advantage of closed source
I think there's a lot of historical evidence that doesn't support this position. For instance, Internet Explorer was generally agreed by all to be a much weaker product from a security perspective than its open source competitors (Gecko, WebKit, etc).
Nobody was defending IE from a security perspective because it was closed source.
> Building physical buildings is a much simpler, much less complex process with many fewer degrees of freedom than building software.
I don't...think this is true? Google has no problems shipping complex software projects, their London HQ is years behind schedule and vastly over budget.
Construction is really complex. These can be mega-projects with tens of thousands of people involved, where the consequences of failure are injury or even death. When software failure does have those consequences - things like aviation control software, or medical device firmware - engineers are held to a considerably higher standard.
> The private market is perfectly capable of performing this function
But it's totally not! There are so many examples in the construction space of private markets being wholly unable to perform quality control because there are financial incentives not to.
The reason building codes exist and are enforced by municipalities is because the private market is incapable of doing so.
"Need blind" here just means that your ability to pay the fees doesn't factor into the admissions decision, not that the admissions office doesn't know how wealthy you are (...since as you note, this is often easily inferred).
In other words, you won't be refused an offer simply because the university thinks you can't afford it.
> Can I now build my app in Xcode with an Android target and use that binary in the Play Store?
No. The vision document[1] lays out the direction of travel. Currently the focus is on shared business logic and libraries, rather than full native applications (although that's certainly a goal, albeit a very long term one).
> These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams
...the author has reached the wrong conclusion from this. The problem is they weren't able to articulate why the modernization tasks were business priorities, not that the modernization wasn't a business priority in the first place.
If the tech debt is problematic, fixing it will presumably bring a number of benefits (faster development cycles, reduced defect rates, etc). They were doing the wrong work - they were doing a terrible job explaining why that work was necessary.
In many ways, tech debt and modernization is a near guaranteed way to have business impact, in a way product work is not. If you're at Meta and you figure out how to save 1% of total CPU time on the server by fixing some tech debt you can expect to be showered with money.
I grew up with this book - I have vivid memories still of the pages about a nuclear reactor - and I was pleasantly surprised to visit a bookshop recently and find it still in print, updated with new things like LIDAR, 3D Printers, MoCap, etc.