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Comment Re:Uah no (Score 1) 147

About 25 years ago, I was at a bbq where I spent the evening chatting with this guy named Lars Knoll. Even though I was busting my butt with my team to develop the Opera for Linux web browser, this guy had been hired by TrollTech after he had developed something called Konquerer which was becoming the default HTML rendering engine in the KDE project. He wrote the whole thing on top of the KDE libraries which were painfully slow. He rendered text and for controls using the KDE objects which were rarely more than Qt objects with a little KDE specific stuff on top. I remember thinking "there's no point thinking much about this because there's no chance it could compete with a real browser like Opera".

Shortly after, I was in Cupertino sitting across from a strange product manager type. His name was Tim Cooke. We were discussing developing the default web engine for this new Mac OS X project which was coming along. We would have to develop for Carbon because Apple hadn't implemented Objective C++ yet and we were a C++ shop and we couldn't use half the developers in the company to make a C abstraction layer for Cocoa. We came to an agreement and Apple sent us a palette full of the latest G4 macs and screens. I remember fighting over the 21" screens like children. We had an idiot project manager who insisted that we implement the browser the way Adobe was demanding. It didn't matter that we were pretty much the "experts" on making cross platform embedded browser engines. He was like "Adobe said it... it must be done this way... they are gods".

Well long story short, while we were implementing a crap Carbon based browser engine using crap tools from Metrowerks instead of the good Apple tools (which weren't that good yet). Apple put together a team which abstracted the KDE libraries and built bindings to C and then Objective-C/Cocoa. And they abstracted out everything that was platform specific otherwise from KHTML (Konquerer's underlying html widget) and wrapped it in a Cocoa wrapper and a Carbon wrapper and shipped it as Webkit and Safari. And man did it suck.

Who would have ever imagined that Lars Knoll's half assed KDE web browser would have eventually become the defacto Web standard and the default web browsing engine in every operating system... including Windows... except the strange 5 user corner case operating systems.

Don't bash a project like this. It has value. I immediately considered that I have had many cases in recent times where it could have been of value to me. That said, I wouldn't run a C based web browser engine ever. It's not that you can't write a good web browser in C. It's just that it's the wrong tool for the job. At 160,000 lines, it's a small job to port to something else. When JavaScript evolves into a JIT and the JS runtime is thunking the heck out of the DOM, then it's pretty much no longer an option. Oh, and someone will think it's a good idea to implement proper form controls. That's an insanely massive project, especially when adding WebGL as well. If this browser core catches on, which unfortunately due to the license, I don't expect it will, it will likely be 5 million lines of code almost overnight.

Comment Re:Sanction don't work (Score 1) 3

Yeh, no.

Three major events started "trade wars" and the government propaganda anti-China rhetoric.

1) 5G happened and Huawai was the only company with a full 5G implementation including millimeter wave and SA mode on release. Ericsson was 2-3 years behind. Nokia was 6. Huawei could deliver on day 1 and they cost much less because neither Sweden or Finland are ... well, they are terrible at competing. They simply expected China wouldn't be in the competition because... Why would they be. So, they were confused because they never had to actually compete against a company who actually did a good job.

Keep in mind, by now, nearly $2 trillion has been spent building 5G networks. Money to Sweden and Nokia recirculates. To China, it's horded and weakens the US.

2) Apple evaluated CXMT as RAM suppliers and YMTC and certified them as good enough for Apple to trust in their products and with their reputation. The US slammed the door shut on that. They are still making up excuses for why as there were no legitimate ones except that if those two companies get a foothold, the entire world semiconductor commodity trading market would collapse. As a result, non-Chinese companies can't legally license their tech to CXMT or YMTC so those companies operate patent free. But other companies have to pay license for their tech. This allows CXMT and YMTC to sell RAM and Flash for half the price. If the US lifts sanctions, in 3 years or less, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron could be considering bankruptcy of their RAM divisions and CXMT could aggressively dump RAM to collapse the value of the patents.

3) China focused on brands. Before Chinese brands happened, buying expensive Chinese products was a high risk, Huawei, Xiaomi and others started legitimizing Chinese premium brands. This made it so buying an $80k Chinese car was ok because it wasn't cheap Chinese no name crap.

The money floods to China and they invest in One China by spending obsessively on education and R&D. They raised 800 million people out of poverty so far. They know every yuan spent in China is worth it. They invest massively in Silk Road because they don't think 4 years at a time. Building infrastructure across Asia, South America and Africa will pay them back massively.

The one thing which will cause China's greatest growth will be when they start opening Chinese universities to the masses. It will be way bigger than any other Silk Road initiative. And it will devastate the US economy. The US cannot afford to lose access to the world's top talent and can't afford to lose control of who gets an education and who doesn't.

Did you know that China's defense against American anti-Chinese propaganda is simple pro-China marketing? Which do you think is working better long term globally?

There are people who see what's happening and prepares for the changes. There are fools who make idiotic comments like yours.

Comment Ultimately is this not all to the good ? (Score 3, Insightful) 85

Bugs (in new code) are hopefully being added more slowly than bugs found and squashed in existing code - so surely the number of remaining bugs will drop. Hopefully those running bug finding AIs are not keeping some remote exploitable bugs to themselves; I would not be surprised if government agencies were doing this.

Comment He is allowed to slow down (Score 1) 118

No one is forcing him to spend money he doesn't have to produce a product no one will pay for.

He has irresponsibly played a game and even helped make the rules. Now he realizes other people are better at it than he is, but he keeps spending borrowed money for 'pay to play' and all the other players except openai (his twin) are figuring out how to play for much less.

His biggest competition are the bastards at companies like Alibaba, Microsoft, and Google who actually have products, services, and paying customers who will stick with them even if their AI is a generation or three behind.

See, it's perfectly ok to slow down. The others have done it. But they cheated... They actually had business plans.

Comment Re:Yes but is it genocide? (Score 3, Informative) 61

People who have a much greater standing than me have said that Israel is carrying out genocide, eg: The International Association of Genocide Scholars, Holocaust scholar Amos Goldberg, Médecins Sans Frontières, Raz Segal "A Textbook Case of Genocide" to list but a few. The evidence is there for all to see but our political leaders in the West ignore it.

Then there is Jerusalem, the West Bank, South Lebanon - all with the aim of Greater Israel.

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