In the article Dyson retells the story from Pupin's autobiography. This 1923 Pulitzer-winning book is now out of copyright and freely available: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/66886
> If you buy an NVIDIA GPU, you do not get a document explaining the instruction set. It, and many other parts of the architecture, are secret. If you want to write code for it and don't want to use NVIDIA's toolchain, you are expected to generate PTX, which is a somewhat portable intermediate language that the NVIDIA drivers can consume. This means that NVIDIA can completely change the instruction set between GPU revisions without breaking your code. In contrast, an x86 CPU is expected to run the original PC DOS (assuming it has BIOS emulation in the firmware) and every OS and every piece of user-space software released for PC platforms since 1978.
Yep, but the whole file is parsed. This is not an execution issue, this is a parsing issue. IE and Edge < 12 don't know how to read this JS file because of this syntax. The whole thing.
The author does cover this point, further in the thread.
> An example:
> A company has $1.2M in revenue; and $1M in costs (let's assume all costs are employing devs fulltime).
> Before 2022: the profit of the company is $200K. Pays corporate tax on this.
> In 2022: the profit of the company is $1M (of the $1M in salaries paid for devs, this needs to be amortized over 5 years: so $200K can be amortized for the year). Need to pay corproate tax on this. But the business might not have this much cash on hand, and so needs to borrow at a high interest rate. MASSIVE change!
> ... and so now companies are incentivized to have as little R&D expenses as possible (aka fire fulltime devs doing R&D, unless they can front the 5-year spread).
Except companies are not "incentivized to have as little R&D expenses as possible (aka fire fulltime devs doing R&D)"
Anytime you see such categorical claims you're being manipulated by the author. As an aside, people here go crazy over calling out logical fallacies but seemingly fail to recognize actual rhetorical persuasion.
I would argue big companies care more about losing customers. Сompetitive pressure is more effective than laws and fines. And laws are not without downsides, including becoming barriers to entry into competition.
