Sure that is exactly what he did, but do you actually work with engineers? Engineers are terrible at connecting technology with people. We are the ones who spend 2 years learning about the intricacies of the 12000 page Bluetooth spec, and then design the control panel for it with EVERY feature option, because, well, what if someone needs to use that thing on page 3943. The result is technology that nobody can use - not even the same engineer - because six months later they've forgotten what half the stuff does.

Engineers geek out like this all the time and produce terrible user experience. I think I'm a really design conscious engineer and I do this all the time as well.

Finding someone who can 'repackage' this stuff in a way that gets to the heart of what a user actually needs is very difficult and rare. Most manager types can't do it because they don't understand the tech itself - they just start demanding things that can't be done until everyone who knows what they're doing leaves.

Love him or hate him, Jobs seemed to be able to grasp technical concepts, and figure out how they related to normal users, and then lean on his engineers but still within the bounds of possibility.

Having said all that, I think he would have gone full Elon mode if he had lived long enough to buy his own social media company and expose his inner raving sociopath to the world.

Absolutely. Sadly, Georgism is over 150 years old and it still has little chance of ever being adopted. People have some kind of weird quasi-religious connection to land ownership. They just seem to want their own little fiefdom of dirt, no matter how meaningless that is.

This whole narrative is because the neoliberals NEED to get everyone to believe that the 'country is like a household' again. You know, where they pretend the GDP is the same as income and the debt is like having a mortgage, and if you don't pay the mortgage of the big scary bank manager will come and see you. It was the most effective economic narrative we have had since likely forever, because every mom and pop goes 'oh dear, debt is bad!!!'. It meant governments could beat their populations while telling them it was good for them.

The reality is that if you had no assets, then the post COVID economy was the best thing you've probably ever experienced in your working life. Anyone could wonder into a new job the same day if they wanted. Companies were climbing over themselves to get workers. Pay rises were insane. Economic growth was stratospheric. The result was inflation going crazy, but if you had no savings then it didn't matter. One month prices go up, later that month your pay goes up.

I'm not saying that it was cost free from an economics point of view, but it showed that the the moribund perma-crisis economy we have had since 2008 has been a deliberate choice. Governments choose not to use fiscal stimulus powers which depressed the economy to the point where the central banks were pouring money upon rich people in the hope that some of it might keep the economy from contracting.

Now they are trying to take us back to that place.

If this model for running your economy had produced historically record levels of growth for the 20 years we have been doing it, then sure, I'd happily admit that it's a price worth paying. But growth has been rubbish. Things just grind along and the dynamism has fallen out of our economy.

We saw a way forward - just use fiscal stimulus. As for the debt, most of the debt is because they kept bailing out asset holders though ZIRP and QE. If we had let asset holders lose all their shirts, then done a COVID like fiscal stimulus after 2008, we would have been able to restart the economy without the debt, and all the people who speculated wouldn't have been bailed out. A whole lot of the rich people who now tell us what to do would have lost everything and have had to go get a regular job.

I think Temple OS would better suit you. Linux development is full of DEI and all that stuff you hate.

right comment this time

Sorry responded to the wrong comment

I think Temple OS would better suit you. Linux development is full of DEI and all that stuff you hate.

isn't that the math Maeby used in the banana stand ?

Did they also burn the 300T USD they were backed by ?

Well there is a reason. Our western economies are so geared up towards rentier type income that you have to be a sadist to do the sort of businesses China is doing. Where I live, the floor space cost of the workshop area (uninsulated tin shed in a faceless industrial park that is clogged with traffic) required to place a 3-axis CNC machine is worth about the same as the machine itself. Basically the cost issue is no longer the machine, it's the space to put the machine.

The machine also depreciates in value and requires skilled labour to generate a return. Yet any idiot can get a loan to buy the workshop, sit on it doing nothing but collecting rent from the losers who try to run a business out of it, and wait for prices to appreciate so they can flog it off for a profit that is taxed less than the loser's profit who is trying to run a business.

I could also go work on the sort of automation stuff that the Chinese are doing. I'd love to. But the pay for those jobs is atrocious. It would be roughly what I'd pay in tax working for a finance shop writing some internal benchmarking application. Doing automation/robotics work is hard and the salaries being offered will not pay for the people who can do it well.

When I was in my 20s and starting a business, older people would always say to me 'oh starting a business is hard and risky'. I didn't really understand why they were stating the obvious - I always though, 'yeah sure, but how else do you make money?'. Twenty years later, I now realise that they were just all sitting around on a couple of property investments and raking in the tax sheltered gains while doing stuff all. None of this is going to change because the alternative - building actual productive businesses - is damn hard work, and enough people are still benefitting from the easy money of rentierism that why would they want to stop the party?

Kids are stupid and Skrilla is a shitty, no talent rapper. The brain rots just gets worse.

I agree that there is likely a lot of correlation going on here.

The people who watch Love Island tiktoks and the people who watch 2hr Asionometry documentaries on semiconductor fabrication are not the same group. You're not going to turn one group into the other by simply exposing them to the material from childhood.

Yeah but avoiding complexity takes a lot of time. It's like the saying 'I didn't have time to write a short letter...'. Especially with powerful high level languages, I can just bash out something that works extremely quickly. Things like JavaScript where what they call 'dynamic programming features' could also be construed as 'no respect for any sort of useful scoping rules' means you can pull assets around your project like globals on steroids. This is damn fast if you just want to mock something, but it's teh worst sort of code. To then break the problem down into modular and orthogonal components, design the interfaces for those components, specify them, code them, document them and test them is massively time consuming in comparison.

In many commercial environments management won't let you do that effectively.

I feel like part of the problem is that modern languages are designed to do so many different paradigms that you are not forced to think about good design earlier on. Even in C, I find you can't get anywhere unless you really plan out what you're doing with memory and other resources from very early on.

I bet the problem is that parts of original calculator app is written in Objective-C from before there was automatic reference counting, and someone messed with the legacy code and didn't free memory properly - a good old fashioned dangling pointer leak.

It should not be possible for this sort of bug to occur in a modern language with garbage collection (or even ARC unless you're going crazy with your program structure).

I don't think it should be based on under 16 or under 18. If it must be done at all, then base it on birth year alone. No need to record a full birthdate then at least.

Um...commercial receivers (e.g. anything from ublox) have been doing this since at least 2010 (when I started using them).

The standard positioning signal on all of those GNSS systems is not encrypted. Your front end is already picking it up, so you might as well process it, whether you like a country or not, and that's exactly what they do.

The issue with urban canyons is not that there aren't enough satellites (sure that helps) but that you don't have a wide enough view of the sky for accurate triangulation. If you can only see a small sliver of sky directly above you, the trigonometry means your accuracy is going to be limited. Add in problems of reflections of those buildings and you've messed up all the path lengths and now your result are going to be all over the place.

This looks like a very impressive solution.