> With open source projects (and in particular ones like Linux where there's a huge number of contributors and interested parties), support for would-be niche facilities can keep going as long as there's someone with the knowledge and spare time to do it.
And that increasingly gets difficult to do. i386 support went down the drain in the kernel in 2012, i486 is probably going down the drain as well this year [1] and soon-ish another bunch of really really old stuff will go as well because it isn't maintained [2] - good luck finding someone still running IPX networks or ISDN hardware.
> There's a case to be made that VR games and VR universes can be fun... But work meetings?
If it's actual holograms like in Star Wars? Sure, why not. Get the visual and body language cues of the rest of the room but no one has to physically congregate at a location.
> Apple hertzes and apple bytes are much better than PC hertzes and bytes because they are made by virgin elves during a full moon.
The thing that Apple has always been excellent at is efficiency - even during the Intel era, MacBooks outclassed their Windows peers. Same CPU, same RAM, same disks, so it definitely wasn't the hardware, it was the software, that allowed Apple to pull much more real-world performance out of the same clock cycles and power usage.
Windows itself, but especially third party drivers, are disastrous when it comes to code quality, and they are much much more generic (and thus inefficient) compared to Apple with its very small amount of different SKUs. Apple insisted on writing all drivers and IIRC even most of the firmware for embedded modules themselves to achieve that tight control... which was (in addition to the 2010-ish lead-free Soldergate) why they fired NVIDIA from making GPUs for Apple - NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
> NV didn't want to give Apple the specs any more to write drivers.
I think that's a valid demand, considering Nvidia's budding commitment to CUDA and other GPGPU paradigms. Apple, backing OpenCL, would have every reason to break Nvidia's code and ship half-baked drivers. They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
Apple wouldn't have made GeForce more efficient with their own firmware, they would have installed a Sword of Damocles over Nvidia's head.
> They did it with AMD's GPUs later down the line, pretending like Vulkan couldn't be implemented so they could promote Metal.
It was even worse than that, they just stopped updating OpenGL for years before either Vulkan or Metal existed at all. Taking a Macbook and using bootcamp would instantly raise the GPU feature level by several generations just because Apple's GPU drivers were so fucking old & outdated.
> "1,500 to 2,000km (930-1,240 miles) inside Russian territory is no longer the 'peaceful rear'," Robert Brovdi warns. "The freedom-loving Ukrainian 'bird' flies there whenever and wherever it wants."
For comparison for the Americans, it's New York to Kansas City. For the Europeans, Copenhagen to Rome.
Crazy that the Ukrainians can keep up command-and-control for drones over such a distance. Probably most of it is via Starlink...
Ukraine's "long range attack drones" are really just cost optimized cruise missiles. Long-range strike against strategic targets is something you can handle without man in loop control. For example, the original Tomahawks could do terrain radar matching (+inertial guidance) for navigation, and had a fully onboard camera based system for terminal guidance.
There are other technologies. GPS is an obvious one though it can be blocked. I think HIMARs used GPS with inertial backup if it's lost. Also with modern image recognition you can give the thing a picture of what it's supposed to hit for the last bit. I'm not sure which actual techs are used. Ukraine has a market set up where fighters can order the tech they need from defence startups. It's a significant advantage over Russia which has comparable tech but is bureaucratic and corrupt as to how it's allocated.
Some stuff from Google on FP-1 drones - the most popular long range one:
>Technological Features: They emphasize modularity, resilience to electronic warfare, and are developing optical navigation systems to reduce reliance on GPS.
You could literally fly drone as a starlink antenna+rpi combo. Have that drone fly far in and then go radio silent until a prescribed time. Do this a few times and you could get CNC pretty far in relatively lightly.
I don't know, ELRS/LoRa is pretty amazing. I don't know what kind of jamming happens there, but with a big (and tall) enough antenna, you should be able to get pretty far.
> I always had an inkling this was the case, but man it's been depressing to see it laid so bare. So many proudly screaming "I hated programming!".
For personal stuff? Sure.
But I certainly get why people get burned out on corporate programming. It's either tedious busywork following orders designed by architects whose last time writing code was 30 years ago and they never learned anything ever since, waterfall with glaring issues that the lowest rungs are supposed to magically make go away because upper management doesn't want to reset like they're supposed to, or it's "agile" in its various abominations. There's barely any time, budget or possibility left for actually experimenting a bit or for actually crafting out stuff that works. It's all output, output, output, and being micromanaged by Jira or whatever only adds to the dissatisfaction.
Personally, I left the field for good - I'm heading towards electrical engineering. Good luck coding a robot pulling physical wires.
Idk, I'd like to see AI design a schematic and lay out a board. Even the occasional "Show HN" that combines AI+PCB stuff is about analysis and checks. It doesn't seem like anybody is even near any kind of ECAD using AI. People still complain about autorouters. Even frontier models need architecting and guard rails in software to avoid spaghetti, it seems like an even harder problem to get them to choose the correct parts, create accurate footprints and symbols, and wire those all up together.
"This is wrong, fix it" + recompile, can happen twenty times in ten minutes, but "we discovered the layout is wrong, fix it" is precluded by the cost and time of a new board spin.
AI + text (code) seems like a good match but (E)CAD seems a lot harder to interface AI with. If I'm wrong, I'd like to share that with the EEs on my team, though.
Who the hell gives a flying fuck about RCS? RCS is bullshit pushed by carriers praying they can get a sliver of marketshare back from Whatsapp, Telegram and Signal when it comes to text communications.
Carriers have been reduced to dumb data pipes and they haven't figured out how to live in a reality where the only thing that matters is service quality and price.
Anyone who wants to communicate cross-OS and doesn't want to use a whole separate application for it, when it should be a basic capability of the phone?
> I literally searched Friendster and the app is named Friendster but App Store gave me all kinds of other crap in the search result instead. Weird.
App Store search is fucked. Hilariously, Apple is at least non-discriminatory - try searching for any Apple app, and they will also be (at best) in the second slot after "sponsored" crap.
> Unlike the PC space where laptop manufacturers have to maintain broad compatibility over time
LOL
If anything Apple is infamous for keeping around hardware blocks for as long as they can. IIRC the serial port driver for everything Apple ARM dates back to the very first generations of iPods.
Of course Apple will remain a moving target, but they are orders of magnitude more stable than everyone else in the non-x86 universe.
> All the 'teaching how to think' was replaced with 'how to get a well paying job'.
Yeah. Companies didn't want to train new employees any more as that costs money (both for paying the trainees and the teachers) so they shifted to requiring academic degrees. That in turn shifted the cost to students (via student loans) and governments.
People call it a red flag for scams if you are supposed to pay your employer for training or whatever as a condition of getting employed... but the degree mill system is conveniently ignored.
The problem was the government providing the blank check loans with no underwriting. Without that subsidy from future taxpayers, incentives would be properly aligned.
No lender would have been stupid enough to give 18 to 22 year olds $200k for bullshit degrees and sports facilities.
The onus would have remained on employers and government to pay for education, rather than a certification, because they would have been the ones paying.
College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
I recently spoke to a young art school grad who talked about getting on disability over a life of the corporate grind.
Who am I to disagree ? The Pentagon has never passed an audit, the government coffers are effectively a slush fund for defense contractors.
At this point, I think a universal basic income is the only way.
Not enough jobs exist for everyone. Poverty doesn’t need to exist
>College should have never been presented as the only way to the middle class. In high school they shutdown my advanced trades class, maybe I could have been ready to hop into a decent job after graduation.
Not unless you were willing to compete on price against people in China learning the same advanced trades.
No, I search a few YouTube videos, and buy less than $100 of tools and supplies that were made in China from Home Depot, and fix the issue. Or a plumber uses tools and supplies made in China to fix the issue.
“Advanced trades” would be making and fixing the machines used to make the tools and supplies to fix the leak.
And that increasingly gets difficult to do. i386 support went down the drain in the kernel in 2012, i486 is probably going down the drain as well this year [1] and soon-ish another bunch of really really old stuff will go as well because it isn't maintained [2] - good luck finding someone still running IPX networks or ISDN hardware.
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/06/patch_to_end_i486_sup...
[2] https://lwn.net/Articles/1068928/
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