It's not just Python. You see this a lot in Javascript and Groovy too.
Really I think what makes languages with manual memory management and limited built in types like C nice is it forces people to really think about the types and interfaces they're writing instead of just hacking unmaintainable code at 20 lines an hour.
As someone who's career has involved managing large numbers of deployed Linux and BSD machines: what's wrong with scripting? It's expressive, debugable, repeatable, easy to communicate about verbally and on wikis. If you want something that's more constrained there are tools like puppet and ansible.
I guess this is another one of those "smalltalk people" vs "unix people" talking past eachother because they have shared vocabulary with different implications kind of situations.
No it runs well on hardware. I ran it as my primary OS for years. It actually has a few neat features that are only useful when booting into it like LBU. That was great for getting the last couple years out of my old macbook pro. The hard disk connector stopped working after the nth time I had to replace the little flex cable so I switched to running Alpine from a ram disk using LBU to handle changes to /etc.
Do they? I used FVWM's MWM theme for 13 years starting from when I was 12 and was pretty happy with it. I've been using CWM for the past 6 years with roughly no changes and am happy with that. Having themes and UI changes forced on you is annoying.
I actually have a homebrew Linux AR setup that I use heavily and absolutely think it will be the future (although it will be similar to the smartphone where you get a combined form factor and paradigm shift that people think are both connected.)
Good AR glasses are already available and combined with modern LLMs you can have normal people thinking about computers the way we do. This will feel less invasive than smartphones do currently while being able to do much more.
I'm absolutely certain Apple will not survive the transition though.
Ah yes, I'm sure adding more automation and policy between people rather than just letting them talk to each other and do what they feel like will solve the problem of people not talking to eachother.
we're not allowing people to auto-apply. But automation is helpful or do you manually craft your CV and wanna read through 30 applications to see if you're a good fit??
The absolute lack of vision in post millennium HP leadership is so toxic to innovation. It's a good case study in the pointlessness of obsessing over tech company financials.
HP had everything, hardware business, multiple CPU designs, operating system (quite a few actually), they where hiring Linux developers pretty early on, an extensive software portfolio (mostly enterprise stuff that I can do without, but companies bought it) and had I'd say fairly good working relationship with software partners, like Oracle and Microsoft.
Now you have two HPs:
- HPE, pretty much a shell of a company. Maintainers of HP-UX, (former) maker of Itanium servers and caretaker of Cray (but also the company that seems to have misplaced the Irix source code).
- HP, Maker of shitty printer products and expensive toner.
How do you go from having everything to be a joke of a company/companies?
Also with one of the worst logos ever. Have you seen RECTANGLE? It encapsulates our venerable company in two dimensional space. It's at least honest - Three dimensions would imply we're solid, and four would imply that we're moving anywhere.
Worth pointing out that HPE also acquired Aruba Networks and Juniper Networks – not sure how both those networking portfolios look like post-acquisition.
True, both are solid networking companies in my opinion. Juniper is already slipping on support and pricing though, and we'll be replacing all our Juniper gear starting this summer.
Simple. The execs steal all the innovative IP, start new ventures, drain HP dry with its encredible decision making; completely fuck the Linux devs, use their works and contributions to OSS in the new ventures and then new waves of innovation/competition came about and what was settled upon was whatever looked profitable on quarterlies so servers, and printers.
I'm not saying that's what happened. But, it's a capitalistic type world.
I wonder how many companies had this play out? IBM is another famous example of internal rot of engineering excellence in the 2000s as the business shell was gives fresh coats of paint and varnish.
Hey buddy, would you like to try Google Gemini AI? You can easily find it using the same button on your android phone you used to use for quick access to emergency services.
We have AI. WE HAVE AI. Why aren't you using our AI?
What if we replaced our stagnating search with AI? Would you use it then? Please? It's AI, which is the future! We're so focused on AI we fired everybody that wasn't working on AI.
A lot of companies get this process and ideology about how things work ... and that's it, no matter what the business conditions they can't do anything different. Every department and every possible person who would approve or deny something is set in their ways.
It is not specific to HP, but to the top management style of that era; I know multiple companies that went through similar things, some from inside (can't give names), it was a similar story: moving from deep technical expertise to soft "software and services" mantra that fits weak CxO. At the same time other companies that had more technical CxO did much better, these are the companies that are on top today.
There is no much differentiation in the IT services space, lately they provide worm bodies to clients and not much more, or nothing at all. There is no competition, there is no differentiation, it is the place where old elephants go to die. And the CEO of HP at that time had the vision to go there.
It is amazing how con men make it. Leo has an atrocious track record, yet he is still getting into advisory roles because he was CEO of HP (despite being fired and losing BILLIONS in his short tenure). A girl scout would have made better CEO and cut losses. All it takes is for someone to be propped up by an establishment; they make a career out of it, despite lacking the technical skills to run a brothel. He was worse than Carly by miles. I do not agree with the author: HP is a dying company. While its current technical leadership is savvy, it is not the company Hewlett built. Disruption from the inside cannot fix a company that has been plagued (similar to Boeing).
Money is differed labor, debt is forwards on money -> the debt market is labor futures and the dollar is backed by US GDP combined with our reputation for the rule of law (ie people expect us to deliver when other countries might give up.)
Of course when you have too much open interest in a futures market you can get a squeeze and that's what everyone is worried about.
This argument reminds me of theists asking, "without a god, what is there to keep you from being amoral and running around killing people?"
Humans are capable of and do, in fact, act on more than just one or two simplistic external levers. We have agency, understanding, and drive to have empathy and to create.
Right but the natural state of humanity without real social norms and meta norms is to just form small, violent, relatively unproductive tribes. Civilization doesn't scale without rules.
You say people don't collaborate yet cite no source, so I can only assume you mean you wouldn't be collablrative. I can assure you I would be collaborative.
The idea that people in the wild are uncivilised savages is old racist propaganda.
You wouldn't exist because part of what makes you who you are is the society you've lived in and its social norms. If you had been born into a tribal society, you'd be tribal - or dead if you refused to cooperate with its culture.
Right but what says that culture would be violent and unproductive, rather than kind and productive? That's what I don't get. Runs counter to what I think is my nature and tbose around me, so I'd expect a position that has considered more evidence from your end.
I think there is a bit stronger version of your argument:
The wealth that I have is intrinsically tied to me personally: It's a business that I'm running, an idea I'm pursuing, etc. Taking it away from me destroys it.
The discrepancy comes from confusing money with wealth. You can take my $100 and then you will have $100. But if you take my business away from me, you will end up with very little. And so will everybody else that was benefitting from the business that I was running.
This is a compelling argument but there is an upper limit of how much wealth can be intrinsically tied to a person. When we start talking about 8, 9, 10, 11, even 12 figures it's really hard to argue that the value of the wealth would diminish if it was distributed among more people. If anything I would expect people with more modest amounts of wealth to be more motivated to manage it (rather than hiring someone else to do it, at which point there is no intrinsic personal connection).
You can become rich enough that you can afford to give away a dollar to someone every second and still be rich. For some perspective, this full amount is about 33% of annual income of $100mm. The richest people make well more than this.
Consider, even without such a system, more people than you realize have enough to live on (and pass on for generations), but still work. A lot of rich people also didn't work for their wealth. People have worked their whole lives and not become rich. I'm not sure there's a connection.
Unfortunately, money is not stuff. Taking money from rich people and giving it to poor people doesn't create any additional stuff for those poor people to consume.
It would create more stuff by increasing market size. Those poor would be able to afford more stuff, so more stuff would be made. I'm currently in process of making something people don't need, but might like (recreating old glass who everyone remembers from their youth). I can't produce too much, because it's not competitive with cheapest glasses. If more people had more money, more people would be able to impulse buy that glass and I could make more of it. If more people had money, they would be able to do such things themselves, I'm only doing it because I'm earning a lot and banks essentially compete in who can give me the cheapest money to do interesting things. It's pretty funny actually and I have access to money much more cheaply than poor people (lower interest rate).
The wealthy have no incentive to invest their money in productive enterprises if it is sufficiently profitable to sit on it and earn interest. Similarly, people who would otherwise work hard at productive enterprises are discouraged by seeing how easy it is for the wealthy to simply do nothing and get richer.
And the result you have is: the modern American economy, where most efforts go into derivative financial products and investing, rather than actual productive enterprise. Day-to-day goods and services get worse and more expensive while the stock market keeps going up.
Earning mere interest is a poor rate of return, and the taxes paid on the interest make it worse than useless. Wealthy people want larger returns, and that's why they invest in companies.
> where most efforts go into derivative financial products
No evidence for "most".
> and investing
Yes, investing in productive enterprises.
Who do you think invested in Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Nvidia, Apple, etc?
You're looking at just the APY on savings accounts. Actually the rich make far more than that on interest-derived financial products through various forms of rent-seeking. Interest is the hidden tax baked into every transaction. Some studies found interest accounts for roughly half of end-user prices—12 percent on garbage collection, up to 77 percent on public housing.[1]
And as Musk warns: “If we don’t act, the entire government budget will be used just to pay interest — there won’t be money for anything. No, there won’t be money for Social Security, no Medicare, nothing. That’s where we’re headed.” [2]
In the late-stage capitalist West, most public and private money goes to servicing interest at some point in the food chain.
>The incentive is that you could potentially enjoy something briefly and that's the best deal you can get.
Many people might say that is a lower incentive than to being able to leave your family better off than they were, or in your more greedy interpretation, so that their children and their children can enjoy something less briefly than you were able to.
Many more people are single and don't plan on having a family. And for those who have .. tax is always lower than 100%. You won't leave your family worse off by earning more money, regardless of the specific level of the tax.
To give your life a purpose? To do something meaningful and fulfilling? To build something cool? To be able to afford additional, cooler things? To work on a common mission with likeminded people? To contribute something back to the system? To experience how things work in the background? To have a sense of ownership over your productive output?
And if you wanna express yourself creatively or just do nothing for a while, that's fine by me too! I'm sure you'd get bored after a while and want to make yourself useful again, so I don't think you should starve in the meantime.
That's our point. The limit of this is no serious social collaboration. You can't have cities, you can't have industry, everyone lives in small tribal villages until they get run over by other industrious people.
Oh yeah I forgot that's why I deal with insane corporate administrative bullshit to write bad software that solves problems only generated because of the scale of the internal social interactions: because it gives my life meaning.
You have hobbies and personal relationships to give your life meaning, you pay to be allowed to do that not the other way around.
A little bit of inequality is good as an incentive as you describe. A large amount of inequality devolves an economy into being pseudo-centrally-planned as nearly all the wealth is allocated by a small group of super wealthy individuals.
You want the incentive to get rich and then have that incentive fall off as you acquire more wealth.
We already have a pretty steeply progressive income tax. Part of the problem with schemes like this is that the wealthy have the resources to dodge them so it mostly just creates problems for the productive middle class.
You can't do great things without a large amount of money. Preventing people from accumulating large amounts of money means you cannot have things like SpaceX. By limiting wealthy people, you put a cap on your own standard of living.
Most great things that require a large amount of money are funded mostly by collectives (historically the state and church, more recently companies) rather than wealthy people. SpaceX has certainly done some cool stuff (even before it started being funded by taxpayer money through government contracts), but I think the value of all of these billionaire-funded endeavors are a rounding error in comparison to all the infrastructure, science, education and healthcare that has been collectively funded. By limiting excessively wealthy people you give money a better chance to be allocated well.
You might find it interesting to know that in the mid 1800s, in the UK, during a 10-year period, private investment in railways totaled 40% of GDP- an average of 4% per year. For comparison, the Apollo program was <0.5% of GDP.
The list of enormously valuable privately developed technologies goes on and on- in fact, almost all technologies. Many of these developed in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very little government spending on research/etc. For example, oil, railways, cars, etc.
Even in cases where government research did help, often the practical realization takes a lot of money!
P.S. Companies are not necessarily collectives. It depends on the ownership structure.
If you were correct, the Soviet Union would have dominated the world. Instead, they copied technology from the west. They did have some innovations, but not many.
Did you know that their entire aviation industry was based on technology copied from a B-29 bomber that made forced landing in Russia?
I don't see how the failure of Soviet Union is supposed to disprove my argument – correlation does not imply causation. It was an incompetently managed and corrupt state. Collectively funding infrastructure projects and science is not something that only happened in the USSR, it was (and is) the norm everywhere. Consider all the innovations that spawned from (D)ARPA and NASA research projects for example. Taxpayer money through government contracts drives the entire military-industrial complex.
Yes, but people like examples. There are plenty more. N Korea, for example. China, when they had collective farms. It goes on and on, to the point were I can't find any examples of successful collective farms.
> It was an incompetently managed and corrupt state
Nobody has ever managed to create one otherwise. State run economies are always a mess.
Consider all the innovations that come from Bell Labs, Xerox, Kodak, Boeing, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, Nvidia, RCA, US Steel, Ford, General Electric, industrialized agriculture, Dow Chemical, and on and on and on.
Really I think what makes languages with manual memory management and limited built in types like C nice is it forces people to really think about the types and interfaces they're writing instead of just hacking unmaintainable code at 20 lines an hour.
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