That's certainly true for the OS, because the OS releases are tied to hardware releases. But features do sometimes get pulled. Apple Maps is a feature. So IMO, that's not a great argument for Apple Maps shipping in the state that it did.

Frankly, I'm of the opinion that the internal divide between iOS engineering (Forstall's fiefdom) and OS X engineering (everybody else) was probably a big part of why Maps didn't work as well as it should have initially (less internal testing). Forstall's departure tore down a lot of those walls, and IMO the company is better off for that change.

Yeah, I'd expect that most of the eligible people have TCO in the mid-six figures to low seven figures, with salaries $250-500k, annual bonus $50-100kk+ and equity another $250-500k. Since offers need to be at least six months' pay (preferably more) to really make sense for someone who wasn't already about to leave anyway, the number has to be quite a bit higher than $100k.

Google has offered a couple of rounds of voluntary separation plans (though they didn't age-gate them), but the offers weren't very good. They were great if someone happened to already be in the process of leaving, or just about to retire, but otherwise not so much.

In 2025, the offer was (from memory) 12 weeks of pay plus two weeks per year with the company. I had 14 years, so that would have been 40 weeks for me... which sounds pretty good until you realize that the package was salary only. At big tech companies salary is only about 40% of compensation, 20% is annual bonus and the other 40% is equity (these are approximations; details vary from person to person, but it's roughly in this ballpark). So, effectively, it wasn't 40 weeks of pay, it was 16 weeks. Basically, the offer should be read as 4.8 weeks plus 0.8 weeks per year of tenure. Not nothing, but not nearly enough to motivate me to give up a job until I had another one lined up.

And, of course, they set the offer acceptance timeline too short for people to hear the announcement, find another job, then accept the package. Finding someone to interview you for a job is easy -- I get several recruiters pings every week. But finding a good fit, going through the multiple rounds of interviews and negotiating an offer takes a while.

For someone with less seniority, the structure was even worse. And I hear the 2026 offer was weaker yet; same two weeks per year, but with a smaller base (6 weeks instead of 12, IIRC?).

Anyway, for the sake of the microsofties who are eligible, I hope they get a better offer than I did.

(I ended up leaving Google anyway, so in hindsight I should have taken the money. I landed the new gig in July, and I'd have separated and gotten the payout in May. But at my stage of life I'm not interested in taking risks, so there was no way I was jumping without another job lined up.)

Here, it's $2.87 per therm, 41 cents per kWh once you hit a certain usage threshold, and most households are above that threshold already. So adding a heat pump (e.g. to replace a gas water heater) means that new usage would be billed at that higher per-kWh rate.

Plugging those numbers into Maine's calculator, it says electric is cheaper. So that has I guess improved since I last did the math a year or two ago. Tankless natural gas is still cheaper than heat pumps with tanks, though. No idea about tankless electric, but the power consumption makes them infeasible unless you already have 200A service, and maybe even then.

Never talk about fig....No, wait, that's management.

To do QA well is very very hard, but you have to absolutely hammer everything, test extremes, etc. If the QA people are playing it safe, it's because they're nervous that it's a really bad product. QA should haunt the dreams of developers and fill them with existential dread, to the point they don't make silly mistakes.

With compilers, it does, or at least it can.

When you build GCC for the first time on a new architecture, it builds a limited miniature version of GCC using the system compiler, and uses that to compile the actual version of GCC, so that it is always compiled with itself, not with the system compiler, both to minimize the risk of system compiler bugs causing bugs in GCC and to minimize the risk of someone using a malicious compiler to create a modified GCC that introduces security bugs in code compiled with GCC or whatever.

After that, you can at least ostensibly delete the system compiler, because you'll never need it anymore to build future versions of GCC or anything that GCC can compile.

Could we bring back core memory? Having our phones come back instantly when you plug it back in after the battery dying would be awesome. :-D

To a very limited extent, their tax breaks, ignoring that they help the wealthy far more than the poor. But that's about the only thing, and even that is helping the poor at the expense of their kids having a country with deeper debt that they will eventually have to pay, or at the expense of the government not having the money to do various things, likely some of which help the poor (or at the very least are designed to help the poor).

It is. The reviews and "we did this amazing pocket-protector design by AI" columns don't really tell us what AI can do, what the limits are, and where the problems lie. As long as AI is never used for anything that you'd actually want/need help with, this isn't something anyone can really answer.

Can AI design a piston engine? If the answer to that is yes, then it's obviously capable of handling incredibly intricate constraints and optimisation.

Chances are, the answer is no, but it'd be good to know. The other designs are lower complexity and have a much narrower band of areas they combine.

I would need to know how well these would work, but the ultimate goal is to develop a large set of such projects, each testing different permutations of abilities the AI would need to have to do anything useful at this level of complexity.

Once I have a heat-map of AI talent, then people can use AI where it's actually better. And we really don't know that right now.

Bullshit.

Just a quick followup: I've also talked to a number of Trump supporters who blithely dismiss his rampant corruption, saying they don't really care because it doesn't affect them. I think they're facially wrong on this, but the impacts are often subtle and indirect. The example of island nation power generation, though, demonstrates what happens if you allow corruption to be endemic: People are paying 50 cents per kWh rather than 10 cents, and the only reason is corruption. And these aren't, by and large, people who don't care about 35 cents/kWh difference. That's a lot of money to them.

It is absolutely true -- and completely insane -- that basically all island nations are diesel-powered. Most of these countries have sun like 300 days of the year, and while they don't have a lot of available land, they can and definitely should be covering their rooftops with solar panels. That would not only make them less reliant on fossil fuels, it would also make their electricity dramatically cheaper. They'll still need the diesel generators at night, but power consumption is lower at night and diesel generators are great at load-following.

I've talked to locals in a half-dozen different island nations about how strange it is that they aren't deploying a lot of solar, given how cheap it is and how much sun they have, and in every case I got the same story: Corruption. Someone associated with government has a monopoly on the import of diesel for power production and arranges for the government to take various actions to block the deployment of solar, even by individuals. The mechanisms vary -- sometimes it's blocking financing, sometimes banning grid-tie inverters, sometimes refusing building permits, etc. -- but the real motivation is very consistent: Maintaining diesel consumption to benefit some wealthy individuals.

It did... which we shouldn't take as a reason to stop improving, but as encouragement that we actually can make things better.

That's true of all criminals; the Trumps aren't exceptional in that regard. The news is pretty careful to add that hedge around all reports of criminal activity until the perpetrator is convicted. For example, when discussing the business record fraud that Trump used to attempt to hide his payoff of Stormy Daniels, the news no longer uses the word "alleged" because he was convicted of all 34 felonies.