> One of these two countries is riding on momentum, but the drag from waste and mismanagement of resources is increasingly slowing it. The other country is building momentum while reducing drag.
Let's not stop at the two biggest economies: the US and China. Let's add the EU to the mix. The EU saw, inflation adjusted in USD, hardly any growth since the 2008 financial crisis to now. While both the US and China's GDPs grew like crazy.
I agree that China atm is doing something very right but if you believe the US not on a good path, you should look at the EU. The EU has nothing but one company left in the top 50 of the biggest worldwide companies by market cap. Not that long ago the UK was the world's first superpower and France just before that.
And now my EU is headed on a path leading to third-worldness.
> I’m somewhere between horrified and impressed, in that I feel we’ve finally discovered a cross platform binary resource embedding solution.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding your comment about having "finally discovered" that...
For to me embedding binary resources in source files is nothing new at all? It was definitely done in the early JavaScript days for a variety of reasons.
Arguably early basic listings that had lots of DATA text lines were already doing that. Maybe not the most portable but we're talking about the 70s and 80s here and definitely binary data in source code.
Games for the Atari ST and Amiga, for example, could partially share at least some of their source code and it wasn't uncommon to encode binary inside sources, including... Fonts! Back then fonts were not reused from one game to another.
Heck, I've done in Java (and Java is cross platform) in the past: quick visual debug tools for Java GUI apps to toggle a debug mode showing something not dissimilar to a HUD. Pixel-perfect fonts encoded in .java source files.
I really don't think it's anything new.
P.S: I'm pretty sure it's done like for some fonts in the Linux kernel too.
"Finally discovered" was more that there are so many difference ways, all of which work differently. Maybe this is just adding one more technique, xkcd-style, but it struck me as more possibly cross-platform-identical than several techniques I've seen. If you embed Windows resources, for example, that's highly Windows-specific; this one would work regardless.
There's more to this. Iran, not happy with protesters, killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians a few weeks ago (and sent its islamists into hospitals to finish the wounded). A few days ago they publicly killed an athlete who spoke against the regime.
And because they cannot retaliate by sending nuclear bombs on to Israel and on to the US they... Attack every single neighbouring country? Including other countries ran by islamist cracknuts who also rule by sharia law?
I don't want to know what a country who publicly executes athletes, who kills 30 000 of its own and who throws a tantrum by attacking every single neighbouring country would do once it'd get nuclear weapons.
I know there are many people who are going to guarantee us that a country doing these horrible things would suddenly be all wise and nice once it'd have nuclear weapons but I think these people are, at best, totally delusional.
North Korea executes its own citizens and anyone that speaks out against the Kim regime. It also has nukes and even occasionally even fires missiles over our allys. I can name a few other countries that have harshly responded against protestors in recent years. Why aren’t we attacking them? Trump vowed that the U.S will no longer be the world police. Using your rational , this is the U.S being the police. Disclaimer - I voted for Trump believing what he said about staying out of conflicts like these. I’ve come to the realization that I made a mistake.
If only we had had a deal that the entire intelligence community had agreed was working where Iran had agreed to stop developing nuclear weapons.
That would have been a nice thing to have. What a good world that would have been. Too bad... Wait. Wait. You're telling me we had that deal? And that Donald Trump is the one that ended it in his previous term, thus once again being the root cause for this conundrum?
This is just wrong and frankly naive. While Israel has always been crying wolf over them having nuclear weapons, they had facilities purifying uranium to weapons grade up and running.
We can debate whether they were close to a nuke or not, or whether they'd strike as far as the West, but Iran wasn't stopping trying to create a warhead.
They resumed after it went away, and had most of a decade to get the previous stuff out of mothballs and continue.
No one seriously suggests that Iran had continued working on their nuclear weapons program while the Obama deal was in place.
Edit: The IAEA had 24/7 access to the sites and constently verified they were abiding by the deal. Trump himself testified twice they were abiding by the deal. They had dismantled their heavy-water reactor and could not produce plutonium, had gotten rid of 97% of it's enriched uranium, turned off 2/3rds of their centrifuges, and was not producing weapons grade enriched uranium.
Under the deal they did not have any uranium enriched beyond 4%. After we withdrew, they had since been able to get up to 60% enriched.
> There's more to this. Iran, not happy with protesters, killed 30 000 of its own unarmed civilians (...)
The Trump admin reported a myriad of inconsistent reasons to bomb Iran. None of them was Iran murdering protesters.
In fact, one of the first justifications was that Israel was going to bomb Iran first, so the US somehow decided to go in first for God knows whatever reason.
Any single of these patched and the exploit was not functional anymore. After a collaboration between the Google Threat Intelligence Group and Apple all of these have been patched.
Already posted it here in the past, answering the same question (and some people seem to like it so here we go).
Around 1991 I was writing a DOS game... In a very rare circumstance the game would crash but it could happen after playing for 15 minutes or more. Sometimes not at all. I couldn't make sense of it.
At some point I decided to rewrite my entire game loop to make the game engine fully deterministic: input, time (frame) at which input happened. So that I could then record myself playing the game and replay it fully deterministically.
Except this was in 1991 and deterministic game engines did not exist back then. The first time I read about one was on a postmortem about Age of Empire on Gamasutra (IIRC). I even wrote to the article's author telling him: "Oh wow, it's the first time I read about a deterministic game engine. I made one in 1991 but since then had never heard about anybody using one." and he answered, as much excited as I was, saying he didn't know about any game doing that in 1991 either and he liked why I came up with it.
Since then it became extremely common: a game like Warcraft III for example, where there can be hundreds of units, has tiny save game files for it only records inputs and the time at which they happened (and btw it of course requires to have a same version of the game engine, or a backward compatible one, to be able to replay the save files).
But Age of Empire (1997) is the first one that I remember describing using such an engine.
Back to my 1991 DOS game... I rewrote the game engine, wrote a simple recorder recording the inputs, and played and played and played until it crashed. I then replayed the game (seen that now I could): and, sure enough, the game crashed. Huge relief. At that point I knew the bug was dead: I could reproduce it, I knew I'd smash it.
Turns out: when the hero had taken an extra allowing it to fire two shot at once and would fire two shots, and the first shot would kill the last thing on the level, then the second shot would keep living it's life during the next level (my logic would keep updating that shot and overwriting memory it wasn't supposed to access), happily corrupting memory until something would make the game crash.
It was tricky because it require a special condition.
And the only way I found to be able to reproduce the bug was to basically invent the concept of a deterministic game engine. Or at the very least independently discover it.
The game was never published but it's how my career started (very long story, for a blog or something).
P.S: if anyone know of a game using a deterministic engine from before 1991, I'm all ears (especially if it's an arcade one: that'd really make my day).
Looks like a great new tool to help ship less bugs!
Nitpicking on this though:
> "In my measurement, Sashiko was able to find 53% of bugs based on a completely unfiltered set of 1000 recent upstream issues based on "Fixes:" tags (using Gemini 3.1 Pro). Some might say that 53% is not that impressive, but 100% of these issues were missed by human reviewers."
That'd assume 100% of the issues that were fixed and used for training were not fixed following a human review. I don't buy it: it's extremely common to have a dev notice a bug in the code, without a user having ever reported the bug.
I think the wording meant to say: "... but 100% of these issues were first missed by humans".
My point being: the original code review by a human ain't the only code review by a human. Or put it this way: it's not as if we were writing code, shipping it, then never ever looking at that line of code again unless a bug report were to come out. It's not how development works.
Also very tangentially related... I remember the first time I heard a real recorded music (not a chiptune) playing from a computer. It was on my Commodore 64, at home, in 1986: I had a copy of a floppy disk with a partial recording of the song Kung-Fu Fighting.
I was there! (not on that ICQ chat though). We were huge Half-Life mods players: playing on our LAN with friends on maps like "small" (a little house) and whatnots. Then one day my brother gave me a phone call, ecstatic: "You've got to come see this NOW: there's a new mod for Half-Life that is in beta". That and Diablo 2 (came out in 2000?) pretty much became our lives.
My Celeron II 300 Mhz and the GPU I had back then weren't that great at playing Counter-Strike at 99 fps (IIRC it was the max it could do back then), so to bump the framerate up I had a "low polygons" mod: terrorists and counter-terrorists would look not unlike lego figurines. Less polygons, more frames.
> So, a fraction of the AI investments? It’s pretty clear where the focus is bow and who/what no longer has a future at Meta.
And the tens of billions spent on AI at Meta... As a result, we're all using "Meta Code CLI" and "ChatBook" and "Geminizuck" right?
Seriously: while we're all on Claude Code using the Anthropic models and many are happy with Gemini and ChatGPT for other stuff, where is Meta's AI offering? I love their Segment Anything Models (SAM) but what the heck has Meta to answer to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI and xAI?
Do they need one do you think? They are trying to make one for sure but it's interesting to think about whether they actually need their own models to survive the shift. Maybe they just deliver other people's models via Meta products?
Meta stock is priced as a growth stock - not on its current financial returns but on what the market believes it will do in the future. It has been priced like this from the start because it has been growing since the start.
As soon as it stops being able to convince the market it is still growing, then the stock price drops to what the business's current financials dictate, which will be a huge drop. That huge drop has severe negative consequences for everyone involved in that decision. Spending tens of billions on the Metaverse project was better, even though it failed, because it created a growth story they could sell to the market.
So now that's gone they need another growth story. Given the current state of the tech world, that's probably AI-related. And they probably need their own models as part of it.
They can't just "survive the shift" because it's not really about survival. They need to be part of the shift, so that they can convince the market that they're still growing.
Sure they are spending like crazy. I do think now they have bought Manus, they will try to compete. We'll have to see what all the talent they bought is going to create.
Let's not stop at the two biggest economies: the US and China. Let's add the EU to the mix. The EU saw, inflation adjusted in USD, hardly any growth since the 2008 financial crisis to now. While both the US and China's GDPs grew like crazy.
I agree that China atm is doing something very right but if you believe the US not on a good path, you should look at the EU. The EU has nothing but one company left in the top 50 of the biggest worldwide companies by market cap. Not that long ago the UK was the world's first superpower and France just before that.
And now my EU is headed on a path leading to third-worldness.
The times they are a changin'.