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Why design new, low level systems when our stacks are built on old, debugged foundations and work "well enough"? Who wants to think about cycles and bytes when
by h2odragon 5y ago
Why design new, low level systems when our stacks are built on old, debugged foundations and work "well enough"?
Who wants to think about cycles and bytes when everyone else is talking about gigabytes and "spin up another 1,000 instances" is the expected answer to every problem?
Is anyone hiring these people? Look at the SoC world, the stuff that's being made with the expectation of taking advantage of the public code ecosystem... Would you even want to work at a place like that? "Make the minimal system that passes tests; actual functionality is secondary" is not a good motivation.
Even the RasPi people have blobs of ugly and seekrit hardware; and they're the epitome of "open" systems engineering now, aren't they?
- pjc50 5y agoDownvoted for the blind cynicism. It's true that the frontend side is awash with money, and that there are nowhere near as many such engineers, but we tend to be a lot quieter about it. A lot of people went into IoT. The economics of the hardware market mean that "open" is even more unprofitable than it is for software, which already has a bit of a crisis in terms of the few people holding up the world not being paid properly.
- evocatus 5y ago> a crisis in terms of the few people holding up the world not being paid properly. Who? The farmers and sweatshop workers in frontier or emerging economies?
- enneff 5y agoYou care a lot about bytes and cycles especially when you’re going to spin up another 1000 instances. The larger the scale the more optimisations pay off. It’s actually small to medium operations that don’t care so much about performance.