twoodfin

34 ms·

841.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Now that’s an old-new-thing post I’d like to read! I assume because serial mouse support ca. 1996 is baked deeply into the USB standard, so you can’t pass connect-a-thon/compliance tests without it?
842.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I say this at least 82.764% in jest: Don’t these LLM’s have The Bitter Lesson in their training sets? What are they doing building specialized structures to handle specific needs?
843.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Indeed, isn’t that the point? LLM training is designed to distill a massive corpus of facts, in the form of token sequences, into a much, much smaller bundle of information that encodes (somehow!) the deep structure of those facts minus the
844.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Relatedly, Jack Daniel’s recently won a unanimous Supreme Court decision affirming their right to pursue trademark claims against a dog toy manufacturer. The toy company claimed their products were parodies, which have heightened protection
845.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Gruber’s commentary seems on target: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/03/20/gurman-rockwell... Siri needs (has needed for years) capital-P Product leadership, but instead it’s been a research proje
846.
by twoodfin 2y ago
It’s also a way to phrase, “Hey, we’ve figured out how to save 10% battery life on the Watch by rejiggering the sync protocol and can ship it in the next iOS / watchOS point release.” The flexibility and agility you have when the only
847.
by twoodfin 2y ago
They don’t have to drop it entirely, they just stop enabling features there that would trigger the EU’s gatekeeper requirements. It will hurt their competitiveness and sales, but that’s a relatively small price to pay vs. giving up the prod
848.
by twoodfin 2y ago
If Apple has the choice to give up developing products in a controlled, vertically integrated manner OR losing a substantial fraction of EU device and accessory sales, I don’t think that’s a hard one for them. We already see it in another r
849.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I expect Apple will react to this by scaling down the sophistication and breadth of features they make available to EU users. That most of these capabilities exist at all reflects Apple’s belief that they’re a way to differentiate their (cl
850.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I’d love for someone more informed to provide some insider detail, but by appearances Oracle really, really tried to make SPARC a differentiator for them after the Sun acquisition. They were shipping new systems (M8) based on a consistent i
851.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Sorry, implying what? That Jane Street quants aren’t getting rich enough ?
852.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Of course the inverse is true, and you don’t have to stick to software. Raising children produces value despite no one exchanging currency. But generally nobody pays quants to lose money. They expect value over the other opportunities they
853.
by twoodfin 2y ago
If for some unimaginable reason the western world had embraced this philosophy wholeheartedly in 1985, literally billions of people would be struggling in grinding poverty (or worse!) instead of living significantly better lives than their
854.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I am pretty sure anyone who sticks around Jane Street for a while is getting “rich” by any popularly accepted measure.
855.
by twoodfin 2y ago
If it didn’t provide value, nobody would pay for it. The alternative to highly technical, agile quantitative trading is fat middle men, wide spreads, and capital sitting in 8%* stupider places than it would otherwise. That’s a pretty big de
856.
by twoodfin 2y ago
How would you differentiate Africa from East Asia in those regards?
857.
by twoodfin 2y ago
The author makes this point, too, and I agree it’s the most surprising thing about the entire scenario. LLVM introduced a major CPython performance regression, and nobody noticed for six months?
858.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I agree. If the anti-trust regime had been different Microsoft would have bought Databricks years ago. Satya Nadella has surely been tapping his foot watching their valuation grow and grow. The Trump folks have given mixed messages on the B
859.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Very different business, of course, but Databricks v. Fabric reminds me a lot of Slack v. Teams. Regardless of the relative merits now, I think everyone agrees that a few years ago Slack was clearly superior. Microsoft could have certainly
860.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Microsoft is right now making a huge bet on Delta by way of their “Microsoft Fabric” initiative (as always with Microsoft: Is it a product? Is it a branding scheme? Yes.) They seem to be the only vendor crazy enough to try to fast-follow Da
861.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Windows 3.0/3.1 offered a 386 Enhanced mode with significant benefits: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0 Windows 3.0 arrived in 1990.
862.
by twoodfin 2y ago
I dunno, this write-up both seems a lot more detailed than Wikipedia re: the hypervisor & kernel and agrees with my recollection as foolishly confirmed by an LLM: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/xbox-
863.
by twoodfin 2y ago
The classic paper on what went wrong (and some surprises about what didn’t, really) for the iAPX 432: https://safari.ethz.ch/architecture_seminar/spring2020/lib/e...
864.
by twoodfin 2y ago
The question was whether Microsoft reused their NT 3.5 era PowerPC kernel (& presumably some modification of the HAL). If you can find evidence that’s the case, I’m intrigued.
865.
by twoodfin 2y ago
ChatGPT confirms my recollection: No, Microsoft developed a novel kernel and hypervisor for the 360, before moving back to a Windows kernel for the Xbox One.
866.
by twoodfin 2y ago
A (dual?) Alpha workstation was Linus’ daily driver for a while, IIRC.
867.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Federal receipts as a % of GDP has gone up and down by a few % but is basically unchanged from the 1950’s: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=ockN Meanwhile the income tax burden, specifically, has gotten considerabl
868.
by twoodfin 2y ago
Hand-optimized AoT builds with solid profile-based feedback, right?
869.
by twoodfin 2y ago
The IRS is not keeping a database of real estate transactions and birth records. Let alone modest charitable contributions or fluid household composition. When the IRS audits you, they don’t come with their own evidence beyond the basic inc
870.
by twoodfin 2y ago
“A simple form to ask you for those things” is what we have today. Or is the IRS failing to simplify these forms to the utmost degree? I think you’re seriously underestimating the amount of data the IRS would have to proactively collect. “W

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