A $600 laptop bought new should absolutely still be useful in 5 years. It should be useful longer than 5 years. That people’s standards are so low is a condemnation of the modern computer market.
macOS will pop up a window that says the system has run out of application memory, asking you to quit applications. I have a friend with, I believe a base M3 Air, who runs into this constantly with nothing but Firefox open.
(Been trying to get them to switch to Safari, but they prefer the Firefox name. I don't think there's anything wrong with Firefox other than it being less native.)
Does Safari use less RAM because it shares some parts with the rest of the OS? (e.g. in the same way Edge probably uses a bit less because half of its components are already idling on the OS)
You could say that. WebKit is in the dyld shared cache, so all of Safari's subprocesses share the same copy of it (and JavaScriptCore, etc.) in memory. But I would say it's more efficient because it integrates better with the platform's QoS primitives. I'm not sure what Firefox does in that regard, other than stuff from other platforms that don't have QoS (such as the throttling of JavaScript APIs like timers). Safari seems better at prioritizing the tabs you have open and backgrounding everything else, letting things go to swap, killing resource hogs, etc.
> It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this...gunk..come from?
I chuckled at this. This describes pretty much every large piece of software I've ever worked on. You don't need an LLM to create a giant piece of slop. To avoid it takes tons of planning, refinement, and diligence whether it's LLM's or humans writing it.
> With an annual budget of more than $47 billion, NIH is the largest single public funder of biomedical and behavioral research in the world. In fiscal year 2023, NIH funding generated an estimated $92.89 billion in economic activity.
It's totally valid to say we don't have the money to pay for this stuff, but to frame this as "others not doing enough" is hilariously juvenile. We do this because it's good for our economy, our people, and our global industrial dominance. Not charity, lol.
You could touch type on that horrible keyboard? I learned to type on typewriters at school, but never could very well on my C64 with its elevated, mushy keyboard.
I too learned on a typewriter (IBM Selectric, if memory serves). Yes, the C64 keyboard was pretty crap, but still better than not being able to rearrange text.
Similar to me, but years earlier in the US. The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive. My friends who had one just played games. I had to learn to program instead.
> The best thing that happened to me at that time was not being able to afford a floppy drive.
Well, you were lucky in more ways than one, since the Commodore 1541 floppy drive is legendary for being both more expensive and slower than other 8-bit floppy hardware. So much so there was quite a market in software and hardware hacks to improve performance (the reasons why it was so bad have been written about extensively (including by its designers) and are a fun read).
> My friends who had one just played games.
Initially I didn't even have a tape cassette recorder and just had to type my programs in again. At least that made only having 4K of memory in my 8-bit micro not a problem :-). I guess it's a good thing you didn't know there were commercial games available on cassette tape or the world might have one less programmer!
This implies that Space X is overcharging compared to launches from 25 years ago, but is cheaper relative to ULA launches from 10 years ago.
But how does, for example, "1998: Deep Space 1 — Delta II rocket — $86 million" compare to "2025: SPHEREx astronomy mission — Falcon 9 rocket — $99 million"? Are they similar payloads? Are the reliability requirements the same? Could there be a reason the Falcon 9 launch costs more instead of less, as we would expect?
The article does mention interesting reasons why some cost more than others such as scheduling, hazardous payload, weight, non-combined payloads, etc., but without addressing each launch individually there is no way to address the headline, "Why is NASA paying more?"
Incidentally, from the data, I don't see any case of them paying significantly more. It's actually about the same, so even that is misleading.
So the takeaway I get is that these two databases should be cross linked so this doesn’t happen again. Maybe there’s a community of software developers who could help.
That would be great. Instead, we got an article vaguely demanding "transparency" for "untracked" objects, when the motivating example for the article is an object that was actually very well tracked and was launched with millions of witnesses live on stream.
I was using ChatGPT to compare Docker and Podman and getting reasonable comparisons. I also asked it about c code searching tools and getting a reasonable list with what I think were reasonable comparisons.
It hit me that in a few years, this may not be available as Docker and other tool suppliers start paying for advertising. We’ll see.
This is the same technology story told thousands of times a day with nearly every technology. Medical seems to be especially bad at this.
Take a very promising technology that could be very useful. Jump on it early without even trying to get buy in and without fully understanding the people that will use it. Then push a poor version of it.
Now the nurses hate the tech, not the poor implementation of it. The techies then bypass the nurses because they are difficult, even though they could be their best resource for improvement.
