Given that Apple tend to have long periods of crud accumulating and releases becoming slower, buggier and more annoying they should revamp their entire release process and make quality a more prominent part of the release process. Linux did so with its odd/even version numbering to signal which kernels were considered stable and which were development versions.
For each major release cycle the longest part of the cycle should be focused on code quality and cleanup. So that people who depend on the stability of their operating environment can configure the software update process to just wait until a new OS release has gone through a bugfix AND cleanup cycle.
Why spend more time on cleanup that on features? Well, so far it seems to have been the other way around. Which means that everyone has to waste a lot of time while some experimental OS is making your life miserable. People who want to use bleeding edge features can upgrade as soon as a new major release is dropped. But people like me, who depend on their phone and computer to make a living, would rather not be field-testing buggy, slow experimental code.
And not to put too fine a point on it, iOS was crap. And from what I am hearing macOS Tahoe isn't worth the upgrade so I keep clicking away those annoying popups that try to get me to install it.
Yeah, I get it, the guy from marketing isn't going to like it, but we could also stop pretending that every new major release is a gift to humanity. We don't think so and Apple knows it isn't so. Every release comes with dread. What will stop working this time?
It isn't like Apple doesn't have the means to hire developers.
Berkeley DB is one of those things everyone respected, for some reason, but that didn't actually work if you threw a bit of data at it. And not just for us. I remember talking to companies that paid them lots of money to work on reliability, and it never got better.
But I do remember reading much of the source (trying to figure out why it didn't work) and thinking "this is pretty nice code".
Well, it worked for Amazon — Berkeley DB was used extensively there as the makn database, right from the beginning. I remember talking to an ex-Amazon engineer in 2006 who said BDB was still the main database used for inventory, and complained that everything was a mess, with different teams using different tech for everything. Around that time Amazon made DynamoDB to solve some of that mess — and it sat on top of BDB.
It worked well for Amazon because they kept it within a tight operating envelope. They used it to persist bytes on disk in multiple, smaller BDBs per node. This kept it out of trouble. They also sidestepped the concurrency and locking problems by taking care of that in the layers above. It was used more like SSTables in BigTable.
They phased out BDB before DynamoDB was launched. Some time between 2007 and 2010. By the time DynamoDB launched as a product in 2012(?), BDB was gone.
Can verify. When I started in the catalog department in '97, "the catalog" was essentially a giant Berkeley DB keyed on ISBN/ASIN that was built/updated and pushed out (via a mountain of Perl tools) to every web server in the fleet on a regular cadence. There were a bunch of other DBs too, like for indexes, product reviews, and other site features. Once the files landed, the deploy tooling would "flip the symlinks" to make them live.
Berkeley DBs were the go-to online databases for a long time at Amazon, at least until I left at the turn of the century. We had Oracle databases too, but they weren't used in production, they were just another source of truth for the BDBs.
That bit reminded me of someone who wanted us to design a patch the size of a small postage stamp, at most 0.2mm thick, so you could stick on products. It was to deliver power for two years of operation, run an LTE modem, a GNSS receiver, an MCU, temperature and humidity sensor and would cost $0.10. And it would send back telemetry twice per day.
The conversation went something like this (from memory):
- We can't do that
- Why not?
- Well, physics for one.
- What do you mean?
- Well, at the very least we need to be able to emit enough RF-energy for a mobile base station to be able to detect it and allow itself to be convinced it is seeing valid signaling.
- Yes?
- The battery technology that fits within your constraints doesn't exist. Nevermind the electronics or antenna.
- Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.
I distinctly remember that last line. But I can't remember what my response was. It was probably something along the lines of "if I were that clever I'd be at home polishing my Nobel medal in physics".
Even the sales guy who dragged me into this meeting couldn't keep it together. He spent the whole one hour drive back to the office muttering "can't you do something creative" and then laughing hysterically.
I think the solution they went for was irreversible freeze and moisture indication stickers. Which was what I suggested they go for in the first 5 minutes of the meeting since that a) solved their problem, and b) is on the market, and c) can be had for the price point in bulk.
That's so hilarious. I've had a couple that went in that direction but nothing to come close.
To be fair though, there is a lot of tech that to me seems like complete magic and yet it exists. SDR for instance, still has me baffled. Who ever thought you'd simply digitize the antenna signal and call it a day, hardware wise, the rest is just math, after all.
When you get used to enough miracles like that without actually understanding any of it and suddenly the impossible might just sound reasonable.
> Can't you do something creative? We heard you were clever.
The purely digital neighborhood of the SDRs is much easier to explain than the analog rat droppings between the DAC/ADC and the antenna. That part belongs to dark wizards with costly instruments that draw unsettling polar plots, and whose only consistent output is a request for even pricier gear from companies whose names sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
The digital end of SDRs are simple. Sample it, then once you have trapped the signal in digital form beat the signal into submission with the stick labeled "linear algebra".
(Nevermind that the math may be demanding. Math books are nowhere near as scary as the Sacred Texts Of The Dark Wizards)
"Rohde & Schwarz — live at the VNA, 96 dB dynamic range, one night only."
> whose names sound an awful lot like European folk duos.
That had me laughing out loud, you should have left the name out to make it more of a puzzler :)
I apparently have been drawn to the occult for a long time and feel more comfortable with coils, capacitors and transmission lines than I do with the math behind them. Of course it's great to be able to just say 'ridiculously steep bandpass filter here' and expect it to work but I know that building that same thing out of discrete components - even if the same math describes it - would run into various very real limitations soon.
And here I am on a budget SDR speccing a 10 Hz bandfilter and it just works. I know there must be some downside to this but for the life of me I can't find it.
I like your sales guy. Might have punched them after a while but that's right up there with the time someone tried to tell me there was no iron in steel because it wasn't in the ingredients list. And this someone sold stamped steel parts!
(reference to a character in the Expiditionary Force series by Craig Alanson
Only a very small portion of his physical presence is in local spacetime, with the rest in higher spacetime. He can expand his physical presence from the size of an oil drum or shrink to the size of a lipstick tube. He can’t maintain that for long without risking catastrophic effects. If he did, he would lose containment, fully materialize in local spacetime and occupy local space equal to one quarter the size of Paradise. The resulting explosion would eventually be seen in the Andromeda Galaxy.)
Actually, video conferencing systems aren't that hard to build anymore. But it is hard to grow them as companies.
Just among my circle of friends there were two startups that made video conferencing systems. One generic, and one for uses that required a higher degree of security. If we move one stratum out, there are about half a dozen startups where friends of friends take part in developing smart cameras for video conferencing as well as industrial uses.
And then there was the Tandberg video conferencing platform which was acquired by Cisco in 2010. (That entire stack was designed and engineered in Norway. From low level DSPs to software).
There are dozens of companies that could make a video conferencing system in Europe today that would be no worse than what you find in Zoom, Teams etc. But since it is a crowded field, they haven't had the muscle to compete.
You are framing this as moral blame. It isn't about that. It is about strategic risk.
Why would we blame the US for our own inability to build a viable software industry? Europe has been painfully aware for years that this is self-inflicted.
The reason there is now serious talk about reducing dependence on the US is not resentment, it is risk. Dependence used to be a convenience. It is increasingly a liability. Trust in long-term stability, rule continuity, and alignment of interests is no longer something we can assume. That changes the calculus, regardless of who is "at fault".
From the perspective of someone who works in software, I’m glad this conversation is finally happening. It’s not about assigning blame. It is about taking responsibility for capabilities we should never have outsourced so completely in the first place.
If this looks like blame from the outside, that’s a misunderstanding of what self-correction looks like.
Nothing about moral blame. Just what I read about online as reasons various things are happening. European leaders told India that it was the main reason for the Russian war. I'm sorry thats ridiculous. Europe is ridiculous frankly
I don’t think you must be following European politics very closely and you are getting worked up about things that are not real.
No heads of state or government in Europe believes, or claims, that India is to blame for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
They blame Russia for Russia’s war on Ukraine.
I can’t know where you get your “news” from, but perhaps you should consider trying to follow more serious news organizations. AP, Reuters and BBC are highly factual with little or no political spin. For more analytical content you may consider The Economist, but be aware that they do publish opinion as well.
You seem to need a news diet that is higher on factuality and lower on spin.
leaders that ignored the potential to set up homegrown cloud providers, software suites or tech companies
Remarkable how it is the politicans who should have been doing this when it doesn't get done, and how everyone is quick to complain if politicians meddle in what the private sector should have been doing. This is a recurring theme in a lot of debates. And I think it has to do with our need to blame someone but ourselves.
Yes, one could solve this through procurement rules that favor domestic or regional products. And there are sometimes procurement rules that state that domestic vendors should be preferred. But I have seen that in practice and it doesn't actually work. One one project I worked on decades ago the military was sourcing a system for "local administration". A company that was effectively bankrupt, had the weirdest OS I have ever used, and the worst office support systems I've had the misfortune of trying to use, was the only domestic candidate. Yes, it did check the boxes in the procurement process, but everyone knew it was never going to happen.
I think we have to realize that this has almost nothing to do with our political leaders and everything to do with our inability to create software businesses in Europe. We need to figure that bit out. And perhaps this is the kick in the behind we needed to get our act together.
I don't think anybody expected EU politicians to create the software companies
When we speak of the failure of EU politicians, it has been in removing the barriers in their own market to even develop successful technology companies given all the highly educated local talent (they have a larger population than the US!).
The lack of a single capital market, no single regulatory market, no single language market, hilariously wide variance in taxation/labor/corporate law, etc. is why the EU can never compete in each tech wave (from the transistor to mainframes to the PC to the internet to ecommerce to social media to smartphones to AI etc. etc.)
Trillions in tax revenue is missing from the successful companies that were never built and the income tax from high-paid employees that don't exist. The last 60 years of growth in the digital realm could be funding the EU's various rotting social welfare systems and instead be providing countries across the region with a higher standard of living. Instead they are stuck living off the tax receipts thrown off by dying industrial-age giants. Which China will soon kill.
This is absolutely a policy failure, and regardless of the historical reasons why we ended up here, to paint it as anything other than a policy failure is to not live in reality.
That is the fundamental flaw of the EU model - a lack of leadership and authority at the top level.
They will have to change that. There were some small steps during Covid to create EU level funding mechanisms.
I'm not saying they have to grow a monstrous bureaucracy at the EU level - in fact they could probably do it less. But they definitely need more regulation to promote self-grown technology.
EU inc is worthless without alignment on a single capital market for fundraising and ultimately going public, sane/interoperable labor laws for hiring, and a single language market over the long term.
The last piece is extremely important. Being able to raise money and hire across the EU with no friction would be fantastic, but it means nothing if actually selling into different EU markets has massive language barriers (average people in many neighboring EU countries cannot communicate with each other beyond the level of a 4 year old). English fluency is massively overstated by people who only have visited European tourist capitals.
Political tidal forces in Europe have, for quite some time, pointed more toward fragmentation than toward strengthening common structures. What makes this particularly ironic is that this impulse is often strongest among the same voices that most loudly lament Europe’s failure to build globally competitive industries—software foremost among them.
That tension has always struck me as deeply paradoxical. In the post-Brexit era, we have had a very visible case study in what happens when shared European frameworks are removed. The UK has spent years scrambling to recreate institutions, regulatory mechanisms, and coordination structures that had previously been provided at the EU level. One might expect that experience to have clarified the value of those structures. It largely hasn’t.
A significant part of the problem is deep lack of understanding. "EU bureaucracy" is a common target of criticism, yet it is remarkably rare for critics to have any concrete sense of what that bureaucracy actually does. The EU tends to appear in public discourse only when politicians argue, or when a regulation is framed as an intrusion on national sovereignty.
The everyday, unglamorous work of harmonization, reducing friction, enabling cross-border activity, and making markets function at scale—remains almost entirely invisible.
This creates a structural communication failure. The benefits of integration are mostly preventative and cumulative: things that don’t break, costs that don’t arise, barriers that quietly disappear. These effects are hard to convey through headlines or sound bites. Dry institutional reports are a poor match for a public sphere with limited patience for complexity. The result is a persistent undervaluation of the very mechanisms that make large, integrated markets possible.
Language barriers are often invoked in these discussions, and while they are real, their relevance is frequently overstated in this context. In white-collar professions, English proficiency is generally passable to good. This is especially true in software engineering, where English is effectively the working language of the field.
That said, proficiency is often domain-specific: people may read and write technical English fluently while still struggling with more active uses such as negotiation, persuasion, or conflict resolution.
In typical blue collar-type professions, by contrast, language barriers are substantial and unavoidable.
Where the problem becomes genuinely self-defeating is in the insistence that using English as a shared working language represents some form of cultural submission or imperialism. This view, rooted more in nationalist romanticism than in economic reality, adds pointless friction. It is beyond stupid to waste resources publishing official documents in 24 different languages. But eliminating this waste is a hard sell when you ask the muggles.
It brings us back to the central contradiction: the same people who regret Europe’s inability to produce globally dominant software companies often support attitudes and policies that fragment markets, raise transaction costs, and make such outcomes far less likely.
Europe cannot simultaneously expect to realize the benefits of scale and reject the mechanisms that make scale possible.
Trump and Putin are giving a golden opportunity to revive European integration. Alas, nationalistic populism with a badly hidden sympathy for the US (on the right) and Russia (on the left) seems to catch more votes these days.
Definitely agree, this is the classic left/right contradiction that has always existed.
In the past, center-left and center-right coalitions were able to find win-win compromises out of this contradiction. But now that everyone has moved outward on the political spectrum and gone populist on both sides, it's a stalemate.
The pro-central planning folks are now anti-business and anti-growth since private capital represents a threat to their utopian authoritarian dreams (this truth will be masked with religious appeals to the poor and the environment of course).
The pro-business, pro-growth folks are conversely anti-central planning, since government represents a threat to their utopian libertarian dreams (central planners might kill the unfair arbitrage opportunities they've found, and central planners tend to overspend and expect the private sector to pay for it).
While central planners are terrible capital allocators, strong central planning is the only way to create well functioning markets. For example, the US Federal government wields total control over US state governments in basically everything.
What Europe needs is a center coalition of pro-business and pro-government wonks (basically what the neocons were), but the phrase 'neocon' has become a bizarre internet meme for conspiracy theorists and there exists very little interest in moderate viewpoints these days.
I'm guessing we'll all be dead before any of these issues are solved in Europe (if ever), absent a full-scale Russian or Chinese invasion forcing the EU to integrate.
It's true that the progress on clock speeds has slowed. Now we have to address the parallelism problem in order to keep moving forward. And we haven't done a very good job. Progress on that front will get us back on the acceleration curve. Saedfly, the current framing of 'who buys the most hardware', while I providing a nice marketing story, isn't netting us that much progress except what Nvidia spends internally.
It is easy to argue that it is expensive and complex. Since it is. And lots of people have made that argument. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone argue in favor of AWS while skimming the threads here.
So this is your opportunity to make the case for AWS.
It _used_ to be great and free tier made it easy enough to migrate most personal use cases to their infrastructure. But they have enshittified the free tier to a point where it’s unusable without forking over obscene amounts of money.
Plus their support is non-existent unless you are one of those big corps.
Plus for a 1T+ company. You would think that their infrastructure would be top tier, never go done, best practices?
Nope. us-east1 continues to be dogshit and their typical response is to fork over more money for multi region and zone support.
And yes, the scale at which aws advertises is largely overkill for many companies. Even some Fortune 500.
But technology is driven by clueless C-level executives that get easily impressed by deck presentations from aws marketing.
Instead of investing in workforce. They invest in cLoUd.
It is risky to believe that the development gap alone makes for higher economic efficiency when manufacturing things in China. There are very real structural differences in how various industries are organized. Not least in terms of geography.
This is an aspect the west seems to have missed entirely as there are no attempts to learn from it or emulate it.
Everyone knows about Shenzhen. Not everyone knows that this is how every major manufacturing industry is clustered in China in various cities and regions.
My point was that the development gap is what lead to the current situation, not that it's just cheap labor that makes Chinese stuff cheap.
My point about maintaining higher economic efficiency is actually the same point you're making. How can the globe (not just the west vs the east) learn from the past and build for the future. We live in a magical world with translation services available to billions of people, how can we empower them to organize around the right ideas. How can we preserve culture and art while flooding ourselves with technologies developed globally? Who pays for security and research? Intellectual property law in general?
So many big issues and questions still need a lot of work.
I think Congress is actually the biggest obstacle to efficient manufacturing in the US. It is a body where the primary motivation of representatives centers around what they can get for their constituents, not what makes sense nationally. So any government spending (eg procurement) will actually tend to drive fragmentation as representatives fight for their states.
Take for instance the space sector. It is fragmented by design. By Congress. Not only is it spread all over the country, making collaboration expensive, time-consuming and clumsy: there are essentially six different federal space agencies of which NASA is just one. This is terribly inefficient.
I remember when reading about the Apollo missions it was astonishing just how much time they lost by different parts being built all over the US and then shipped across the country to be integrated. Utter engineering madness that was only made to work because one could pour immense amount of cash on it.
This is why companies like SpaceX was able to run more efficiently: they do a lot more in vastly fewer locations. Ditto for Lockheed during their golden years: Skunk Works was famous for having "everyone under one roof and within walking distance of each other". (That Skunk Works neither exists anymore, nor can it exist, but that's a longer story which is also about extreme inefficiency).
It is reasonable to assume that Europe wouldn't do any better. Or any setup where politicians are inclined to optimize for regional gain. You'd probably end up with the same political fights over who gets what if the EU were to push towards more of the kinds of manufacturing that you find in China.
We know we're inefficient and we have some idea of why. We like to blame factors that are easy to politicise or evoke emotion (environment, exploitation of the poor etc), but I don't think they are as important as people tend to think.
We just don't want to change. And there are legitimate reasons for that. Chief among them that we're uncomfortable with strong central control. (Well, we used to be. It only took a majority of republicans about a decade to turn 180 degrees on that question and prefer an all-controlling federal government dominated by the executive branch)
I think Susan Collins is a great example of this. Her support of Kristi Noem is based on deals she finds acceptable for Maine residents. The fact that other states suffer at the hands of ICE doesn't effect her decision's. Collins feels she only is responsible for Maine and not humans that live outside of Maine.
I find this sort of compartmentalization offensive to the common good.
That's representative democracy for you. Heck, even China faces the same issue, but they get to make it a competition between provinces, on who can win the favor of the emperor. Helps for them that the emperor has supreme authority though.
No, that's the incentive this specific system creates. There are democratic systems which do not suffer from such hyper localism. Such as the German mixed member proportional system.
Sounds like a narrow interpretation for representative democracy:) Maybe I'm stretching/mangling the golden rule but "do unto others as one would like others to do onto Mainers."
That's only in peacetime. During WWII the Government directed US industry to gear up for war production and the transformation was not only remarkably swift but also the largest retooling effort in history.
In these fraught times it's worth revisiting that history to remind ourselves of what's actually possible. By today's standards, the US's industrial response to war was truly remarkable.
The US did this with automobile and steel industries concentrated around the Great Lakes. It's not some kind of profound insight on the part of the Chinese.
The downside is that it decimates entire regions if/when the demand for what they produce drops.
Yes, it has its risk, but that isn’t why the US or Europe don’t cluster industry to create higher efficiency. The risk can be mitigated. The political willingness and ability to do it deliberately just isn’t there.
Yes, modern cars are superior when it comes to safety. But the daily experience is orthogonal to this since most people have serious accidents very infrequently. In your daily experience reliability and economy is more important.
And in computing, having a bit of downtime 1-2 times per year is often a price worth paying if avoiding it requires 90% more cost and effort. (Of course, people end up having downtime anyway because they have something so complex that they have 100x the number of ways something can fail).
For each major release cycle the longest part of the cycle should be focused on code quality and cleanup. So that people who depend on the stability of their operating environment can configure the software update process to just wait until a new OS release has gone through a bugfix AND cleanup cycle.
Why spend more time on cleanup that on features? Well, so far it seems to have been the other way around. Which means that everyone has to waste a lot of time while some experimental OS is making your life miserable. People who want to use bleeding edge features can upgrade as soon as a new major release is dropped. But people like me, who depend on their phone and computer to make a living, would rather not be field-testing buggy, slow experimental code.
And not to put too fine a point on it, iOS was crap. And from what I am hearing macOS Tahoe isn't worth the upgrade so I keep clicking away those annoying popups that try to get me to install it.
Yeah, I get it, the guy from marketing isn't going to like it, but we could also stop pretending that every new major release is a gift to humanity. We don't think so and Apple knows it isn't so. Every release comes with dread. What will stop working this time?
It isn't like Apple doesn't have the means to hire developers.
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