How often do the AZs matter? - I feel like there's a major global outage on every cloud provider of choice, at least every other year, yet I don't remember any outage where only a single AZ went down (I'm on AWS).
Fighting said outages is often made harder is that the providers themselves just don't admit to anything being wrong, everything's green on the dashboard yet 4 out of 5 requests are timing out.
While I wouldn't argue that Russia is richer than Germany, I think GDP is a rubbish figure - at least it clearly doesn't translate to anything I would consider meaningful.
For example, can the person of today afford a higher standard of living than one of 20 years ago - unclear, food has become disproportionately more expensive, housing cost has by far outpaced the wage growth, tech has become cheaper, but big-ticket items like cars are proportionally not cheaper.
From this, the person of today is poorer in tangible terms.
Did the infrastructure improve? - some, but I'd say it was a (sub)linear improvement in absolute terms - we certainly didn't build as much stuff as we did in the mid to late 20th century, and what we built before was the more important stuff, so the new stuff has marginal utility.
Did European industry and technology improve? I'd say in terms of relative importance, we regressed - there are huge gaps in European technological capability for which only foreign options exist - this didn't used to be the case.
Were there some big ticket innovations like Concorde or the Moon Landing or whatever - clearly no, the world seems to have lost its appetite for these kind of hugely ambitious projects.
This 'number go up' style capitalism is clearly not to the benefit of the individual, but I can't for the life of me think who does it actually benefit.
>For example, can the person of today afford a higher standard of living than one of 20 years ago
Forget 20 years ago, you can just back 6 years is enough. Ask any person when life was more affordable and job security better, in 2019 or today and everyone will say 2019.
Graphs like GDP or the stock market going up, mean jack shit to the average person when they can't afford a house anymore.
A lot of our economic growth was just on paper through financial instrumentation.
And weirdly enough, most of the sanctions have been softened, or rolled back - there's been little effort on the US side to build up domestic production capability outside of semiconductors - a process that began well under the Biden admin.
Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's
Turns out even if you have as much power as the US president with their executive orders, if you start making stupid or insufficiently well-prepared policy decisions, you have to roll them back or your country will crash into the ground.
Kind of makes me think that supposedly autocratic leaders of powerful countries have much less power than we thought - once they make a couple stupid decisions, their countries start going down the drain.
> Another curious thing is despite how the US has been acting in this manner, their stock market still continues to outperform everybody else's
Only a tiny fraction of the S&P is performing, and it's because it's either part of the AI bubble or because people have memed extreme value into poorly run companies that now have absolutely insane EPS numbers. There's nothing about the US stock market that's even slightly connected to it's financial or economic performance, right now.
They literally went from an exoskeleton based truck bent into shape to an aluminium truck whose interior frame shatters on impact instead of the panels absorbing the hit - so instead of having to replace cheap plastic trim and collision absorbing metal bars, the energy gets dissipated inside the (almost unrepairable) aluminium frame.
Additionally, they didn't manage to find a satisfactory solution to attach the steel panels to the frame so they glued them on.
I suspect the 'parts falling off' has something to do with the inflexibility of both materials as well as the different thermal expansion coefficients.
On normal cars, bodywork is either made of flexible plastic, or is attached via spring joints so that the vibration doesn't damage them - that's why you have panel gaps - so they can move around a bit.
If you fix them rigidly, they're going to shake off eventually.
I personally think $90 per year is reasonable and not 'milking' - I don't think it's large enough to suspect Apple making bank on this, but does represent a certain level of commitment from a dev and prevents users from spamming developer accounts.
The only scenario in which I think it's excessive is broke student devs, not sure if there's a scheme to waive the fee for them.
Not allowing regular folks to run unsigned apps is something I also agree with -though I would love if Apple allowed us to trust third-party root certs so that apps would be both signed and free of Apple's control.
I find it hard to believe that charging people is the only way to stop people people from making multiple/spam accounts. It seems like it's just the easiest and most profitable. And, if it is the only option, then why does an account that has been paying Apple $90 a year for a decade still need to keep paying them: it's seems unlikely to be a spam account at that point.
>Not allowing regular folks to run unsigned apps is something I also agree with -though I would love if Apple allowed us to trust third-party root certs so that apps would be both signed and free of Apple's control.
Rolling up the ladder much? Most who can program nowadays in one form or another owe the learning experience to the fact we could write and run unsigned apps without nannery measures like Gatekeeper.
I flat out refuse henceforth the do anything that encourages mind share on fundamentally anti-user, gatekept platforms.
The reason you can go anywhere on the internet and trust at least that the website you're viewing is in the form the creator intended is that HTTPS exists - which requires that a trusted entity has issued a cert that proves the domain is indeed held by the person and what goes on in that domain hasn't been tampered with externally.
That is the default on the internet, and even enforced. I'm merely saying that for average users (or power users even, who understand the risks) the default should be that the same guarantees apply to desktop apps as well (especially considering those usually have far more access).
HTTPS shows that such a world where people live with this restriction is possible and practical, and far from the jackbooted tyranny you describe.
I think the distinction is meaningful - for example many compilers used to have C backends (GCC for example did) - so you code went through almost the entire compiler pipeline - from frontend to IR to backend where the backend did almost everything a compiler does, it only skipped target machine specific stuff like register allocation (possibly even that was done), arch specific optimizations and assembly generation.
A transpiler to me focuses on having to change or understand the code as little as possible - perhaps it can operate on the syntax level without having to understand scopes, variable types, the workings of the language. It does AST->AST transforms (or something even less sophisticated, like string manipulation).
In my mind, you could have a C++ to C transpiler (which removes C++ constructs and turns them into C ones, although C++ is impossible to compile without a rich understanding of the code), and you could have a C++ to C compiler, which would be a fully featured compiler, architected in the way I described in the start of the post, and these would be two entirely different pieces of software.
So I'd say the term is meaningful, even if not strictly well defined.
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