It honestly might be helpful if we framed more conversations that way, when talking about the creeping dependencies on tech firms that fill our lives.
Those of us without a medical dependency are lucky that catching one of the many tech failures modes won't actually kill us - but you'll still want to throttle more than a few folks if you ever have to recover from your Google/Apple ID getting banned, or PayPal running off with all your money, etc.
The medical technology isn't the problem - the profit motive negatively affecting its continued operation (or not) is (and this is not just the technology firm, it includes the insurance company, the hospital/pharmacy operators, etc).
You can't have a reasonable customer relation with any corporation when you are a captive audience - let alone one when they could kill you at any moment, whether from negligence or plain indifference.
This plays out in less-lethal versions all over tech. Do you dare redeem that Apple Gift Card your aunt gave you for your birthday, knowing that Apple might nuke your whole digital identity from orbit[1]?
Cloudflare's undercounts my download by 25% and my upload by 75% (versus both speedtest.net and my observed sustained data rates). Also reports double the latency.
Versus versus my own measurement of sustained download/upload rates (this isn't rocket science - upload a 1 GB file to S3, download it again, time both). speedtest.net is within ~5% of my own test results, cloudflare isn't even in the ballpark.
It's not that uncommon experience with Apple hardware. I hand my old Macs off to family members, and currently in the house are 2, 4, 8 and 10 year-old MacBooks.
Only thing wrong with any of them is that the 10 year old one only runs about 20 minutes off the charger.
That said, I do skip all the problem models (no butterfly keyboard switches, etc), and ~12 years ago I did need a logicboard replacement under AppleCare
In my case, the corporate MDM solution consumed so much resources that a 16GB MacBook was basically unusable for dev work (my personal Mac, also with 16GB in those days, was fine)
(Many) Windows admins have no idea what to do with Macs. It’s very easy for overzealous agent antivirus and firewall software to suck up CPU resources. Particularly when it is written by a company with no idea how to write Mac software, bought and installed by admins that don’t use Macs.
I had one set of “enterprise” software destroy the battery in my work Mac because of how it worked (and crashed). Meanwhile, my personal Mac was completely fine. Apple moving MDM related security software out of the kernel was the best thing they could have done for stability.
Reverse painters algorithm is still painters algorithm. You trade off the cost of a full screen clear before the frame, in return for eliminating overdraw
that's what the y-buffer is that the article mentions in the front-to-back rendering section.
it tracks how tall each columns write is so you can use it to only write the diff between it and the voxel behind it, skipping writing anything at all if the voxel behind is shorter than the current height.
So once you're done rendering front-to-back, you've got a y-buffer of highest-writes you can slap your blue sky across from highest-to-screentop on each line, avoiding the need to clear by write the sky to the full screen before starting the render.
> The assumption is that if you send people checks, they’ll find meaning in hobbies and community. They’ll paint. They’ll garden. They’ll finally write that novel... This is ahistorical bullshit.
I think this part of your theory is unsupported. Yes, we have historical evidence that when you suddenly layoff a large percentage of the population without providing replacement income, things go very, very badly.
However we also have quite a bit of evidence at this point that if you give people no-strings-attached support, they do figure out how to fill their time with art and other hobbies (for a concrete example, Ireland's very successful UBI-for-artists pilot).
> I feel like everyone else is running dark factories and producing millions of lines of code
If they are, they aren't producing anything useful with it. Just look around - do you see a sudden increase in actually useful software alongside the AI boom?
What they are mostly doing is a snake-eating-it-own-tail million lines of code LLM harness to burn tokens faster to write more code... to write a 10 million lines of code LLM harness. Or endlessly bikeshedding the perfect LLM-powered bespoke personal knowledge base.
In normal software engineering jobs, we're debugging problems a bit quicker, we're writing boilerplate faster, we have a lot of questionable new test suites... but the game is more or less the same as it was before
My strong feeling is that the firms who get too deep into this and have lost the ability to engage deeply with their minds (necessary requirement for imagination) are long term fooked and will get destroyed by those who preserved the ability to imagine and create and recognise the subtleties, nuances etc of product development.
The AI cartel's hope is that the market will stay irrational longer than the naysayers can stay solvent both financially and intellectually.
Putting it a different way, it won't matter if the firms who went too deep at the very beginning are fucked if the rational are forced to succumb to the market pressures created by the irrational and thus are reluctantly pushed to adopt AI-first workflows for appearance's sake in order to survive anyway. Because then everybody will be likewise fucked and completely dependent on AI, despite it being a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness of the systems under development. History has taught us that it is adoption dynamics not capability that determines the winning paradigm or technology (Betamax vs VHS is one historical example. Javascript vs everything else is another one).
(We know it's a subpar development paradigm with respect to robustness because the entire coding agent paradigm turns the most knowledgeable programmer into a person "who doesn't know what they don't know" because development speed far exceeds their ability to reason about the codebase and the underlying SOTA models that they depend on to fix the bugs that the model itself has introduced are at best unreliable narrators with no objective evidence of correctness or deterministic behavior.)
Those of us without a medical dependency are lucky that catching one of the many tech failures modes won't actually kill us - but you'll still want to throttle more than a few folks if you ever have to recover from your Google/Apple ID getting banned, or PayPal running off with all your money, etc.
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