I like this take. I tend to agree.

You're looking at JPGs. PNGs do not have that dropdown.

This is a really neat idea.

This seems to take for granted that China and their foundries and engineering teams will never catch up. This seems foolish. I'm working under the assumption that sometime in the next ten years some Chinese company will have a breakthrough and either meet Nvidia's level or leapfrog them. Then the market will flood with great, cheap chips.

The worst part is the audiocore substack that is glitching. I waited to major subversions to upgrade and still got bit. I hate this.

Yeah, for me with a USB headset, the audio will go noisy about two minutes into a video / podcast. It clears up if I restart and doesn't happen when playing to the internal speakers.

sudo killall coreaudiod in the terminal will restart the audio stack without having to restart the full computer. Super annoying.

Ignoring the users is the correct solution. Defining company culture through software loading is ridiculous.

What about the second order effects?

Ignoring the customers becomes a habit, which doesn’t lead to success.

But then, caving to each customer demand will make solution overfit.

Somewhere in there one has to exercise judgement.

But how does one make judgment a repeatable process? Feedback is rarely immediate in such tradeoffs, so promotions go to people who are capable of showing some metric going up, even if the metrics is shortsighted. The repeatable outcome of this process is mediocracy. Which, surprisingly enough, works out on average.

Steve Jobs has a bunch of videos on creating products- https://youtu.be/Q3SQYGSFrJY

Some person or small team needs to have a vision of what they are crafting and have the skill to execute on it even if users initially complain, because they always do. And the product that is crafted is either one customers want or don’t. But without a vision you’re just a/b testing your way to someone else replacing you in the market with something visionary.

This requires correct vision + enough influence to execute.

This is not a repetitive process. It’s pretty hard to tell apart a visionary from a lunatic until after they deliver an outsized success.

First define who the real customer is.

Second define what the real problem is.

Third define a solution that solves 80 percent of their problem.

None of this is intuitive or obvious. It may not even be technically feasible or profitable.

Everyone's brain builds a model of the world.

One of those higher levels of maturity that some people never reach is to realize that when your model becomes incorrect, that doesn't necessarily mean the world is broken, or that somebody is out to get you, or perhaps most generally, that it is the world's responsibility to get back in line with your internal model. It isn't.

This is just people complaining about the world not conforming to their internal model. It may sound like they have a reason, but the given reason is clearly a post hoc rationalization for what is basically just that their world model doesn't fit. You can learn to recognize these after a while. People are terrible at explaining to each other or even themselves why they feel the way they feel.

The solution is to be sympathetic, to consider their input for whether or not there is some deeper principle or insight to be found... but also to just wait a month or three to see if the objection just dissolves without a trace because their world models have had time to update and now they would be every bit as upset, if not more so, if you returned to the old slow loading time. Because now, not only would that violate their updated world models, but also it would be a huge waste of their time!

Thoughtful people should learn what a world model violation "feels like" internally so they can short-circuit the automatic rationalization circuits that seem to come stock on the homo sapiens floor model and run such feelings through conscious analysis (System 2, as it is sometimes called, though I really hate this nomenclature) rather than the default handling (System 1).

> But how does one make judgment a repeatable process?

Principles can help scale decision-making.

Their bosses are likely happier for the lower downtime required to run the software anyway.

I think this is an interesting take that really reflects the saturation of the wider problem space of society. Much of the stuff that we could potentially need, we already have. It will be interesting to see what new products are released to the market in the next ten or so years which substantially change the way that we use technology.

Advertising for politics is absurd. The fact that countries allow this is incredibly dangerous.

When I read about stuff like this it makes me feel lucky never having had to do Windows development.

No worries, the same experience can be done with OpenGL or Vulkan, depending on the specific OS flavour and OEM drivers.

Vulkan even made this kind of targeted hack into a first class citizen by letting the application specify the name and version number of itself and its engine during initialization. There's no reason for that besides enabling per-app driver shenanigans.

Vulkan layers being system-wide feels like it's specifically asking for this class of bug. If you're lucky every system-wide layer ships with PDBs... but they probably don't. I've yet to find a bug in a layer, at least, but I've wasted time ruling it out.

System-wide Vulkan layers definitely cause chaos. I remember unit tests for our renderer crashing on some machines and not on other nearly identical ones. The culprit was a Vulkan layer installed by a video capture software. It had a hard limit of 16 Vulkan instances that it could keep track of before overflowing an array and crashing. But our tests would recreate the Vulkan environment from scratch for each test, which is fairly unusual for a Vulkan application, to be fair.

In the end, we added the list of loaded Vulkan layers to the diagnostic log of our software to help customer support spot fishy ones.

I've personally run into stuff like this on Windows but I want to emphasize that the vast majority of developers won't run into these problems. It's basically the equivalent of finding a compiler bug - yes, you might, but usually the problems you hit are not caused by the compiler or OS, as a general thing.

Are OS or compiler problems more common now than they were 10 years ago? Possibly, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're less common, either.

I have run into driver bugs multiple times though, perhaps more often than OS bugs. And that's really frustrating.

If you haven't run into a compiler bug you're not trying hard enough. If you support multiple compilers or your company has their own compiler team/patches it'll definitely happen.

Also happens when some pedantic people decide to turn on -Wall -Wextra -Werror because they think it's safer; now any incorrect warning bug is a fatal compiler bug.

Each operating system has such layers of cruft, they're sometimes just harder to debug.

Comes with the general perception of OS vs Software failure responsibility:

- On Windows, this is Window's fault - On Apple OS, this is the application's fault - On Linux, this is the user's fault

Of course exception do apply, but as far as I know MacOS I have noticed some instance of application patching by the OS itself (although I haven't dug deeper, I can confirm that the application did have a slight change of behavior even before applying vendor patches, and I doubt it was anything done by the anti-malware protection)

There are people who actually try to implement better APIs. (We can quibble over effectiveness all day long. Sadly, it looks like a losing battle.) This is the only way to find them.

EDIT: typo

LinkedIn rewards mediocrity in the same way that the rest of the world does. It does so for the exact same reason: good networking is more often than not more important than being exceptional.