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I don’t know, but the evidence shows that software engineering is not that deep of an art.

People come and go at rates that would not be sustainable in any manufacturing business.


Yes, businesses tend to believe that.

No, every time people switch knowledge gets lost and code quality degrades.

In part I blame accounting rules justifying investments is easier than maintenance.


Interesting take. We are not going to talk about Office, Windows, Adobe or Autodesk products here. Neither Linux kernel.

Just classified ads or e-commerce platforms such as gumroad and shopify are complex enough that a single person cannot master them end to end. The domain is huge to master and takes a lots of time to master.


Have you ever seen a tech company calling a 65y.o. retired wizard to debug a system failure? I doubt it.

In manufacturing it so regular, that typically senior technical people retire as soon as possible to form their consulting firms and charge much higher rates, just by selling their multi-decade expertise back to their company.

In oil & gas, there are consulting firms that their role is to just store and provide domain knowledge to companies who lost their experts.

In tech, consulting firms provide cheap labor.


Software is code and code is documentation. Do you know MAME that is documenting the arcade consoles as code? And that they work is just a side effect and is not an intended goal?

That doesn't mean that MAME is a trivial project. Far from it. It'll take you several years to get proficient with the whole codebase.

Just that unlike manufacturing, the software is much more self contained and everything is in those files including how to build them.


Cool. Will they use their balance sheets to pour all of this cash or are they going to bring the banking system to its knees and then we bail out everyone again ?

I don't see why not. The US is bailing out foreign countries, might as well bail out unsustainable businesses too.

Let me guess. Year of efficiency?

It’s being coined the decade of efficiency now.

The little red book says so

The quality of books is horrible these days though.

Like I feel the paper is not of the same quality. Maybe it's because they now print them on demand ?


Wait what's new ? This is an established library

I mean we were suspecting for some time that smartphone processors have reached parity with laptop class ones. MacBook Neo proved it.

Not clear how both Amd and Intel not only lost the smartphone fight but also lost in their own field (aka servers, laptops, desktops)

15 years ago if I told you that windows would be running better on ARM you would call me crazy.


According to CPU bench, the Neo CPU is about the same speed as a mid range intel laptop CPU from 4 years ago.

Apple A18 Pro (Q1 2026): Multithread 11977, Single Thread 4043

Intel Core i5-1235U (Q1 2022): Multithread 12605, Single Thread 3084

--

On the high-end we got i9-13900KS at about 60k, M5 Max 18 scores about the same. But when you move on to server CPUs like Threadripper and EPYC things are about 3x faster.

Lets see if the brand new Arm AGI changes this situation in a few months.


I look at those numbers and think that A18 pro is 25% faster as single thread is what matters for UX.

browserbench speedometer 3.0 on A18 pro - 33, Intel Core i5-1235U - 22

i9-13900KS gets about 33

M4 Pro - 44-50


You can't compare raw CPU speed by measuring different browsers on different OSes :)

Try this:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/6693vs7115vs7229vs7232/...


That is why I mentioned that the litmus test was to put the mobile processor on a real laptop. Not the synthetic benchmarks.

The laptop is in the hands of customers and they are happy for the performance they get.


You can pick the same browsers i.e. brave or chrome.

Also, let's not forget about unified memory impact. Raw cpu benchmarks are only one side of the complex system.


it's worth noting that the neo is running at 3W compared to 15W for the i5. Just putting an $8 thermal pad on the neo gives you a 20-30% perf improvement by letting it run 5W continuous.

For now, in server applications the ARM CPUs can win when the workloads are not computationally intensive, i.e. they consist mostly in data transfers and searches, for example in Web servers, database servers, storage servers, networking appliances, etc.

There still are applications where ISA matters, like technical/scientific computing, where the performance can be dominated by array operations or operations with big numbers. For such workloads the x86 CPUs with AVX-512 can provide a performance per watt and per dollar that cannot be reached by the current ARM-based CPUs.


Please make a standalone case with a usb port for the keyboard trackpad! I would love to have it for when I connect the laptop to an external monitor. I hate the mouse, but I love the trackpad right under the keyboard.

There is no such product in the market.


All of the evidence shows that anthropic is dealing with a capacity crisis since February.

There are no good solutions for them.

If OpenAI is indeed overbuilt they will completely eliminate Claude.


The shareholders expect more profits. So no, the only way is ads and fees on the best sellers.

If they can make 50B from ads in the iPhone in 12 months why invent a new device that will make pennies.

Sorry folks, the math is brutal for the big corps. They cannot pivot and make cool things, the market demands to be milked until they bleed.


Pennies? Their devices have famously high margins.

Whatever. We have public utility OS, all the hardware vendors should be forced to provide open-source working drivers after they stop supporting their hardware.

If they are afraid of IP leak, well, they can continue support.

My desktop I built in 2012 is still working running ubuntu, even after Intel & MS decided that it is EOL with the release of windows 11.


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