Real life money for gold is sanctioned by Jagex if done through bonds. Bonds are about 3x more expensive than the black market but bonds can't get you banned because Jagex gets a cut.
Communication overhead, like edges in a graph, scales quadratically. The computing analogy is going from 1 core to 8 core CPU gives far less than 8x performance if your task is not parallelizable. The solution is compartmentalization and clear interface boundaries, which is why microservices are so popular. Instead of 5k people working on 1 project, have 100 projects each with 50 people plus a few architects who define the interfaces.
I always wondered why x86 has LEA when its functionality can be replicated by ADD. It has to do with LEA and ADD being able to run in parallel because LEA uses a separate ALU in the address calculation part of the chip, not the main ALU.
You could have a "stolen content" pure HTML/CSS banner that gets removed by Javascript. Only proxy site visitors will see the banner because the proxy deleted the Javascript.
I had to reboot my Windows PC at least once every few days back in the XP and Vista era. BSODs were common especially while gaming. I think moving GPU drivers out of the kernel into userspace made a big difference as GPU driver crashes are now recoverable. Nowadays I can go weeks or months without rebooting, only rebooting for forced security updates.
Being smart in one field doesn't translate to being smart in another field. For example, Steve Jobs making medical decisions, doctors making investment decisions, bankers making tech decisions.
Some optimizations might only apply to certain inputs that are used by benchmarking software. Or the driver makes unfavorable power tradeoffs to maximize performance when a benchmark is running. For example, if the driver knows a benchmark is single threaded, it can artificially throttle other cores and boost the core the benchmark is running on. There's more extreme stuff like GPU drivers replacing shaders (benchmarks don't care about graphics quality) or pre-rendering frames. https://videocardz.com/74912/professional-overclocker-demons...
"Write once, run for 20 years" is a strong value proposition. I dabbled in web dev and it's rare for third party libraries and services to go a year without breaking interface changes. Meanwhile a program written for Windows XP will likely still run on Windows 11 even without a recompile (perhaps the source code was lost). In the worst case you might have to run the binary in XP compatibility mode.
I think the bigger problem with Coinbase is how they rescinded job offers. Management either didn't know a layoff was coming a few weeks ahead of time or it didn't get communicated to recruiters.
Money lets you put weight on the scale to tip it in your favor, but it doesn't let you fully control the outcome. Especially because in this case Musk screwed over other rich people.
It's a good view to have. HR stands for human resources. The company views you the same way as a EC2 instance. They make layoff decisions the same way they spin down servers if their AWS bill gets too high.
I'd even say you need a degree of sociopathy to reach upper management. I can't imagine being responsible for 1000 other people and keep them working in sync. At some point those people become a faceless resource in a spreadsheet.
Regarding chrome, browsers are basically operating systems nowadays. A standards compliant HTML5 parser is at the bare minimum millions of lines of code. Same for the renderer and Javascript engine.
The biggest weakness of C++ (and C) is non-localized behavior of bugs due to undefined behavior. Once you have undefined behavior, you can no longer reason about your program in a logically consistent way. A language like Python or Java has no undefined behavior so for example if you have an integer overflow, you can debug knowing that only data touched by that integer overflow is affected by the bug whereas in C++ your entire program is now potentially meaningless.