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Comment Re:Soaring RAM prices (Score 1) 69

Yeah, and even native stuff is super bloated now.

I noticed an instance of Brave with all of the features turned off sitting at a new tab page was using 230MB.

I remember doing OK with a version of Firefox that supported xhtml and JavaScript 2 that ran on a machine with 16MB of RAM total.

And the current browsing experience isn't somehow instantaneous on a CPU with 16x the cores running at 10x the clock. The user response time is about the same.

I think that browser itself ran in 4-8MB. Probably with the Flash plugin loaded too.

FWIW that old machine would take about 15 minutes to encode a 3 minute mp3 file and my current machines does it in about six seconds. So the hardware gains are real.

Maybe ML will actually be able to find some optimizations that are too cumbersome for humans to manage.

Comment Re:Taxes (Score 1) 76

Did you think we were the 'only surviving industrial infrastructure' until the 80s? /huh?

I'm going to go ahead and assume bad faith on your part, because otherwise you're very stupid. But nobody in your potential audience is stupid enough to believe there aren't lasting effects to being bombed to shit.

Comment Recommended reading (Score 5, Insightful) 44

"The Spoils of War" by Andrew Cockburn. Goes way back to American soldiers having to steal boots off dead Chinese soldiers in Korea to get decent boots, their feet were freezing off.

"The Pentagon Wars" by Col. James F Burton. Burton was part of the 1980s "Fighter Mafia" who got the F-16 built, against Pentagon tendencies for every new plane to be twice the weight and twice the cost of the last one. (The F-35 continues the tradition.) They were the ones who publicized the $400 hammer and $600 toilet seat.

Cockburn laments that people thought it only applied to some things, when their point was that every $1 lightbulb on the console was $25 to replace.

Burton notes that one Army logistics guy got the price of a single uranium bullet down from $80 to $4 by whipsawing two suppliers into real competition, another reduction every purchasing round, for years. That guy gave a presentation to a roomful of Stars on it, and came back to his desk to find retirement papers waiting. Or a transfer to Thule. His choice.

Comment Re:I live in Washington state (Score 1) 54

Perhaps you did not buy a Tesla. They are probably the most service-hostile vehicle ever sold in the US. Not sure about the UK, I haven't heard stories (horror or otherwise) about service for Chinese EVs yet. They would have to try really hard to be worse than Tesla, though.

Comment Re:25,000 lines of code (Score 1, Interesting) 70

It might take one person one year to write 25k lines.

A year? I've regularly written that much in a month, and sometimes in a week. And, counter-intuitively, its during those sprints when I'm pumping out thousands of lines per day that I write the code that turns out to be the highest quality, requiring the fewest number of bugfixes later. I think it's because that very high productivity level can only happen when you're really in the zone, with the whole system held in your head. And when you have that full context, you make fewer mistakes, because mistakes mostly derive from not understanding the other pieces your code is interacting with.

Of course, that kind of focus is exhausting, and you can't do it long term.

How does a person get their head around that in 15 hours?

By focusing on the structure, not the details. The LLM and the compiler and the formatter will get the low-level details right. Your job is to make sure the structure is correct and maintainable, and that the test suites cover all the bases, and then to scan the code for anomalies that make your antennas twitch, then dig into those and start asking questions -- not of product managers and developers, usually, but of the LLM!

But, yeah, it is challenging -- and also strangely addictive. I haven't worked more than 8 hours per day for years, but I find myself working 10+ hours per day on a regular basis, and then pulling out the laptop in bed at 11 PM to check on the last thing I told the AI to do, mostly because it's exhilarating to be able to get so much done, at such high quality, so quickly.

Comment Re:Clever approach (Score 3, Interesting) 70

Why comment the ads out? Include the pulling and display of ads as part of every program.

If I understand correctly, you can have GitHub do the compile for you as well, so there's not need to bother the programmer with details like including their spamware code in the source code they see.

And once they've proven that the automated compile is more efficient than doing it yourself, why even have the option to do it manually?

You know that's the end game. And you know they're planning to do that in any complier Microsoft has any control over, as well.

It's for your own good, after all.

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