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probablybetter

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probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
no. just NO. look at maps of polio proliferation before/after Jonas Salk, the frikkin guy who DISCOVERED/CREATED the polio vaccine, and then look at maps related to Gates work, which, while admirable, bears no comparison from the night-vs-day world of pre-polio-vaccine vs post-vaccine. Wards of people in iron-lung machines staring at mirrors on the ceiling. It was before your time, but this is no excuse for spouting total nonsense.
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
WHAT??? Jonas Salk GAVE the IP for the Polio Vaccine TO THE WORLD FOR FREE!

how dare you say that Billionaires gave us these things. you are telling lies.
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
no, creating the actual technical standards and the internet is/was hard. monetizing it and walling off sections of it is STEALING FROM THE PUBLIC that which we already PAID for and selling it back to us!

Zoom!? WebRTC! Proprietary XYZ? Standards!
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
and a lot of it is directly funneled to crony's of the current king...

I doubt DOGE will recommend cuts to SpaceX funding.

I need to remind you that Mush has invented nothing nor is he an engineer. His vast personal wealth is extracted, and at least part of it's vastness is due to corruption. Mush's personal views expressed on his own-media-trumpet Xitter, have hampered more technological innovation than he has ever enabled or paid for.

BTW what's SpaceX carbon footprint like? This 'man' also just paid for a slice of the US presidency that just pulled the US out of a global treaty to attempt to address human-caused climate crises that are unfolding in front of our face on a daily basis as predicted. Mush has done net harm to Earth, not good.
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
sure it is. "mature" markets are only interesting for large moneyed entities to try to tweak things and squeeze .01% more profit out of a service/process/product.

innovation is risky and rewards accordingly.

Ycombinator app-startups are low-hanging-fruit with marginal innovation and marginal risk => it ain't hardware, and it's just webservices and a few React devs...

SpaceX and DARPA and ARPA = our tax dollars.
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
nice try. The billionaires gave us none of the above. Sincerly, an old programmer who was actually there when these things were funded, often at the public expense in many nations.

Computer games are pan-et-circenses, IMO, but I also don't recall any billionaires having created any.

Your John Galt story is trite and untruthful.
probablybetter
·geçen yıl·discuss
They are dodging a bubble and don't even know it. If America thinks it can base future prosperity on the AppStore and AI, it should think again, because actual innovations are needed, and this low-hanging-fruit tech-bro-fantasy investment cakewalk will not provide anything but pain upon the inevitable comedown and disillusionment. You will not be able to sell products nor services with the term AI anywhere near them in the very near future. (already the case amongst a certain percentage of us)
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
RaspberryPi's SOC famously boots from it's GPU first, then it's CPU. The GPU is a binary blob (not open source) thanks to Broadcom...

Broadcom... that same hardware mfgr that makes your Debian install so much extra fun... (well, if you care about networking and integrated controllers...)
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
It boggles my mind that the entirety of the hardware world cannot accept the simple concept of making computer hardware capable of booting and running <latest open source operating systems literally purpose-built to take advantage of general hardware standards the Hardware Manufacturers WERE ALREADY MAKING for Microsoft Windows (TM)>

I mean, it's not like Linux didn't spend 30 frikkin' years specifically aping hardware that carried the WIntel brand from the IBM PC with MS-DOS up to WindozeWhatever13 or whatever they are up to now...

I cannot fathom the strange incentivization schema that would cause the entirety of the existing mass-retail OEM computer production to be "Windows ONLY" and actively contributing to literally selling LESS of their own units via efforts to lock their own hardware against running your own damned OS upon it!

I buy hardware I can run Linux on. I have no use for Microsoft Windows in any capacity for any purpose, period. end of story.

Hardware Manufacturers please take note! (I remain puzzled... Dell even sells some preloaded Linux laptops, IIRC... what gives, Dell?)
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Please tell me what quantum leap was provided by LLMs. Please inform me of any developments that made current LLMs possible.

I contend that there are none. Witness the actual transformer kernel technologies over the last 20 years and try to find a single new one.

Neural Networks? that's 90's technology. Scale is the only new factor I can think of.

This is an investor-dollar driven attempt to use brute-force to deliver "magical" results when the fundamental technology is being mis-represented to the general public, to CTOs, and even to Developers.

This is dishonest and will not end well.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Please name me one technological advance of major import in the fundamental transformer kernel space that has occurred in the last decade that has any import at all on today's LLMs.

I will wait.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
it is unlikely that the output of LLMs will improve. there is no fundamental breakthrough in transformer technology (or anything else) powering todays' LLM "revolution"

There is only scale being employed like never before => vast datasets being plowed through being sufficient to provide the current illusion for the less observant humans out there...

10 years from now this current fad of LLM's pretending to be intelligent will look preposterous and unbelievable: "how COULD they all have fallen for such hype, and what a cost of joules/computation... the least deterministic means possible of coming to any result... just wasteful for no purpose..."
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Consider the bubble already burst, in terms of developer confidence in this sort of nonsense.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Containerization and orchestration of containers vs learning how to configure HaProxy, how to use Certbot, hmmmm

The questions you pose are legit skills web developers need to have. Nothing you mentioned is obviated by K8s or containerization.

"oh but you can get someone elses pre-configured image" uh huh... sure, you can also install malware. You will also need to one day maintain or configure the software running in them. You may even need to address issues your running software causes. You can't do that without mastering the software you are running!
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
Author presumes we need Docker in the first paragraph. I suppose this is why they think we need Kubernetes. I propose using "the operating system" as the basic-unit here. It already runs on shared hardware thanks to a hypervisor. Operating systems know how to network.

The entire desire for Docker in a production app comes down to willful ignorance of how software one depends upon is configured.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
I have no need for Redis in my life. There is nothing unique it provides in 2024, and they have no special sauce I would consider getting hooked-on (locked into).

I am trying to remember why their software became considered ubiquitous for caching and sessions, and I reckon many a framework is busy rectifying this choice, as we speak.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
... but, garbage collection, no direct memory management = impossible to write any firmware etc that needed to directly set bitflags and such. how could you call Go "low-level systems programming"?

Relative to Ruby, an interpreted dynamic language, sure, I will grant you that Go is lower-level, in the sense that you can compile a binary executable from it.

Go also happens to have web server primitives in their standard library and you COULD build a web app with only net/http...
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
i saw that... (gem, ruby... hahhaha)
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
I would say that bad ideas are having a heyday across all economic sectors, not only tech. You could call it the epoch of bad ideas having a heyday, if you want.

One has to be careful around opportunistic gold-rushes; if one is not actively purveying gold, one may be getting rushed.
probablybetter
·2 yıl önce·discuss
no Linux build? (appimage or snap etc? not expecting distro support for proprietary small-shop software)