The language doesn't matter much if you have memory-hungry workloads. Whether it's Rust or C or C#, you can write quite memory efficient code in either.
Most apps don't need much at run time though. There may be a big database somewhere, but the majority of SaaS apps are just some form of CRUD with a clever twist that might change the data occasionally, but doesn't use most of it when you render a page. The user data required for any given page is dwarfed by the memory required to run the language that converts the data to an HTML view.
For example, if you're rendering a user account page that has 100 data fields (name, address, etc), that's a few kilobytes at most. If your code is using Node of PHP you're probably using tens or hundreds of megabytes, possibly gigabytes, to turn that into a stream of HTML to send to the user.
I suspect using Claude to turn all the Node and PHP apps in the world to Rust or Go would massively reduce the necessity for huge datacentres using terabytes of memory.
I have a feeling that the bloated frontend is one of the mayor problems. We should get rid of html, CSS and JavaScript and implement something that could mix all of the above in a single spec and could be implemented using a VM with limited memory/instructions and still render a page one can interact with and use for control of for instance appliances.
Yes, but that doesn't determine the technical stack. It only narrows it down. You could just as well use C, C++, Rust or even Go depending on the device the program needs to run on. The device may have constraints as well but those are technical limitations and still not the responsibility of the product owner.
I have never worked for a company where the engineers choose the technical stack. It’s always the architect, the CTO or the mother company that decides what technology to choose. Could be a German/Dutch cultural thing though.
Depends on a type of company, I work at a mid-sized startup and through lifecycle of this company there were times when we've had architects and there were times when we haven't. Rn we don't have and a lot of decisions is made within teams and we just try to keep communication about what's needed for business tight
Understandable. I worked mainly for 100+ people companies and the tech stack impacts team interoperability, hiring, licenses, life cycle management etcetera.
Platforms are often part of the business requirements.
If you're working on SAP or Salesforce, the language decisions are already made for you. If you're integrating with an existing Electron runtime, then you'll be using something in the JS family, like it or not.
> Choosing a programming language is not a business requirement; it's a technical one.
Technical decisions like this have to take into account a lot of factors outside of just the language itself.
Is the language you want to use easy to hire for? Will we have to pay a premium for engineers with a specialised background in the language? Do all our 3rd party dependencies maintain SDKs for the language? Do libraries that meet various certifications we might need (i.e. FIPS) exist for the language?
Something like Typescript or Java is going to win out over Rust/Erlang/FP-of-your-choice on a number of these criteria.
The programming language can have definite business impacts. It can impact hiring, salary costs (if the skill is rare), ramp-up costs (if it needs to be taught), etc.
Software engineering is an important skill to recruit for. Too many times I see "Java Developer"... Like, do they only know Java and are absolutely incompetent when it comes to something else?
I don't even want to recruit or be recruited with such a title.
Yes, but even then there are people who will ramp up faster.
If the company is using Common Lisp, do you have the 6-12 months to wait for them to ramp up, or do you hire someone who has done Lisp before? That is downstream from the technical decision to use Common Lisp, but it is a huge business impact.
For those of you planning to go to Japan, please make sure you actually calculate how much JR train trips would cost you. They upped the price a few years ago and, since then, it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets.
For one of my recent trips, I was actually more better served with a local pass (Kansai Wide Pass) than the JR Pass.
Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
> Too bad because it used to be a really good deal...
Considering the environmental woes & collapses coming down the pike, I'd like to see a trans-border effort to drive down the price of mass transit _everywhere_. Put it on the G7 agenda, the OECD agenda, the UN General Assembly agenda, ...
This is exactly the reason why in germany we have now a broad ticket for short distance trains.
Government realized they fail to meet EU regulations in reducing CO2, so they rushed to implement a cheap german wide ticket. Initially just 10€, now 60€ a month.
Still a bargain, you can go anywhere as mich forth and back as you want (just not the dedicated long distance trains, so going through all of germany takes a bit longer).
You can tell this is a true success in Germany because 95% of local passengers now use it. It also caused a significant increase in ridership, putting the already overloaded rail system under a lot more pressure while taking away income from the rail companies (after making it cheaper).
Well yes, the idea is to have more people use the trains, so yes also more trains are needed(and more investment and replacement of the Bahn management) in general, but as far as I know there is no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level.
> no income taken away, as it is subsidized and compensated on the federal level
Only 50% of the relative loss of transit agencies is subsidised by the federal government, the other 50% gets subsidised by the respective state. And since the compensation is calculated in relation to the prices of monthly subscription tickets on routes in the respective transit area, transit agencies are left with even less.
Additionally, a lawsuit determined that the train network price cap for public transport is illegal, further increasing costs for the states.
This already has caused service reductions in multiple states, e.g. just now in Berlin additional overground Metro services during commuter peaks got halfed. With the results of the lawsuit and now interest from the federal goverment to put more funding into public transport, a lot more services will get axed in the next 3 years.
That is a problem as since the introduction of the ticket there are constant talk from the car lobby politicians to remove it again. So bad for planning for the smaller rail companies.
But the biggest problem for the german trains remains the management of DB (Deutsche Bahn). Who are in charge of the network.
Who paid themself heavy bonuses all the time, while failing on all the metrics that mattered (they succeeded on making a new useless info page go live, that was the official justification for the bonus).
And they could do this, because the job of the ministry of transport was to make it easy for the car industry. And the german train is in theory privatized, in reality not so much.
The current ministry might be better though, so maybe something is happening. But I believe it, when I see it.
Inconvenient truth: It is a bad use of taxpayers' money to highly subsidise train tickets when (1) people can afford to pay more (2) huge structural investments are needed in the country, (3) economic growth has stalled for years.
That's a fallacious argument because roads are the universal, basic transportation infrastructure. You cannot have no roads. Your point has some relevance regarding motorways, which are not free in every countries and may be considered part of the universal road network, too. So mentioning the cost of roads is trying to deflect via "whataboutism" without addressing the point.
One can have a roadnetwork as primary means of transport .. or a railnetwork. With roads mainly for the last mile.
Where society here and now should invest, what direction to go from from here, is totally up to us. What makes the most sense - preferably in the long run.
Cars are pretty shitty for long distances. Rubber tyres wear down the road and create unhealthy dust, way more friction and noise than metalwheel on rail. And they can be directly powered with electricity.
Not carry a heavy battery around and waste energy with charging and discharging.
Or well, have the noise and dirt of combustion engines.
Those are all pretty strong arguments to invest at least equally into a well functioning train network.
Every car that can be replaced with a train (in the simple often case of a person riding the train not moving his vehicel for himself) is a net profit for society. Cleaner air. Less or allmost no pollution.
(The electric trains here next to my home are really silent and still fast)
Note that I did not claim that we shouldn't invest in train networks. I questioned the use of taxpayers' money to make train tickets extremely cheap or free when there is no affordability issue to begin with, both in itself and when compared to everything else that public money could be spent on, and the overall situation in many European countries.
Personally I think this is having our priorities very wrong.
(I also think that rail as a primary mean of transport over roads is totally unrealistic and impractical, but that another issue)
You can definitely have no publicly owned or maintained roads though. There are none in my area of town and $0 tax/public funding. It's private property all the way down. The only reason why public roads look like barely competed against monopolies is that you can't compete with "free" (at the point of use), which creates the illusion that the public element of roads are more crucial than they are. But if you just shit-can all the public transport private transport will emerge organically.
Given that many commuter-rail (and frankly, other) transport systems operate well below capacity during off-peak times and in counterflow directions, such pricing could well increase ridership and revenue.
So when we get riots due to mass unemployment and societal destabilization can iredirect them to you. Im so tired of call for actions without even an attempt to discuss the fallout.
I have a hot take on the price of JR Passes. For those unaware, they are exclusively for foreign visitors. In the "old days", travel to and in Japan was considered very expensive, so JR Pass was envisioned as a way to encourage more travel on trains and in Japan. Now the script has flipped. Japan is no longer expensive for people travelling from other highly developed nations. Quite the opposite: It is now cheap. The era of cheap JR Passes is dead. The primary purpose now is convenience. With the exception of Nozomi super-express Shinkansen between Tokyo and (Shin-)Osaka, every JR train is included in a single ticket.
> it's basically impossible for the JR Pass to be more affordable than single tickets
Not true. It really depends on your use case and blanket statements like this aren't helpful.
Yes, the pass has doubled in price since few years ago but it still does make sense in many cases, especially in multi-week multi-city Japan trips
What is long distance in Japan? A day trip from Kyoto to Hiroshima and back? Fukuoka to Kumamoto and back? Tokyo to Nagano and back? Osaka to Kanazawa and back? Tokyo to Nara and back
These are all "long" but really not that time-long distances. Shinkansen and regional trains work pretty well for these.
And yes, a lot of tourists move between the cities quite often, even some metros accept the JR pass.
I was there twice in last 3 years and for our calculation it took 5-6 return shinkansen trips to justify new jr pass price (2 weeks jr pass). And let me tell you shinkansen are experience on their own so there was no lack of will to find daytrips using them
But the regional passes are still a good deal. If you are in Osaka or Kyoto, and want to take a day trip to Hiroshima, it more than covers the cost, in addition to granting access to various museums plus other benefits.
The Kansai Wide area pass that I'm talking about doesn't include access to museums. But some of the smaller passes (like the one of Osaka that you mentioned) do. Those passes don't include Shinkansen, though.
From what I see[1], that is an umbrella term that encompasses a few passes, including the Wide Pass. Maybe some do include attractions; I didn't know that!
I also looked up Tohoku JR passes for an upcoming trip and it wasn't affordable at all. I'm better served using single tickets even when riding the Shinkansen.
Pension funds are perfectly capable of switching to a different product if they don't want index funds that reflect the market. But they do want index funds that actually reflect the market, so they want these rule changes.
The management of those indices is just doing exactly what the vast majority of their customers want.
>What? Absolutely not. They are doing what the President is telling them to do.
This is a paranoid delusion.
These rules were never on particularly solid ground, it's only natural to see them gone when you have significant upcoming IPOs changing the structure of the market. It is the job of these indices to keep up with that.
I'm sorry but you're very naive. The rules were changed because it was advantageous to SpaceX and the richest man on Earth.
Those rules were implemented to protect the index from being skewed when an IPO happens because the IPO is exactly the moment where the stock may be overvalued and very volatile (compared to all the other stocks that are in the index). We especially don't know at IPO time if the company is changing the structure of the market because it's too soon. And in fact, we won't know for a couple more weeks or even years; but by that time the price will have stabilized.
The index is supposed to be slow at rebalancing to minimize costs and make it practical for providers as well.
And as I write this comment, I've just read that they cancelled the changes[1]. Which completely proves your last sentence wrong.
>I'm sorry but you're very naive. The rules were changed because it was advantageous to SpaceX and the richest man on Earth.
The rules were changed in the mid-90s because of a significant amount of big IPOs which did not have a reasonable path to profitability. That's not even close to the situation we're in right now. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly solid businesses.
> We especially don't know at IPO time if the company is changing the structure of the market because it's too soon. And in fact, we won't know for a couple more weeks or even years; but by that time the price will have stabilized.
This is largely magical thinking. How many more weeks should I wait before $TSLA will stabilize?
>And as I write this comment, I've just read that they cancelled the changes[1]. Which completely proves your last sentence wrong.
Or maybe deranged Americans just turned this non-political issue into a political one, and S&P global thought this was not a hill worth literally getting shot in their office for? I don't know, that'd certainly be my primary concern in their place. Wouldn't it be yours?
> The rules were changed in the mid-90s because of a significant amount of big IPOs which did not have a reasonable path to profitability.
Could you give me a link to read up on that?
> Both OpenAI and Anthropic are clearly solid businesses
Maybe you're an insider so you have more information than me; I'm not so I don't know.
> How many more weeks should I wait before $TSLA will stabilize?
TSLA is mature enough since their IPO to be included in an index.
> Or maybe deranged Americans just turned this non-political issue into a political one, and S&P global thought this was not a hill worth literally getting shot in their office for?
No, it's probably because major fund providers and other market participants (including retail) saw through the subterfuge. Indexes and providers and retail investors have nothing to gain from the former proposed changes. It was very obviously a play by SpaceX to force passive investors to buy into the stock, therefore pumping the price up.
I suggest trying out AMD. Not an evangelist by any means but on Linux there's really no choice. I have one myself since I moved from Nvidia and don't regret it.
Once or twice a year, for the last 20+ years, I am doing a one week full immerison in Linux desktop for my work. I keep a separate laptop for the Windows-only activities.
Between malfunctions on a multi-screen setups, audio problems with applications, issues with sleep recovery on some monitors, etc. -- Winodws is much more polished
Sure YMMV but I am making active attempts at moving, with the will to move, but it is not as good yet.
If by "thousands of virus" you mean software shipped by default in Windows, then I agree with you. Everything feels so sluggish on Windows 11 compared to any Linux distribution even if you run it on an HDD... it's ridiculous.
Apple has never really cared about games unless it's on the iPhone or iPad. It's worked out well for them though. Mobile gaming is a $100 billion dollar market, PC gaming and console gaming are each about half that.
They stumbled into the perfect spot with the iPhone, then IAP sweetened it.
Since they found money they support it. But in the process they’ve really destroyed gaming on the platform unless you want casino games or candy crush/clash of clans things designed to extract money and show another ad every 12 seconds.
Yeah they show Resident Evil VIII and Assassins Creed Whatever but they don’t sell much. And the race to free IAPs created mean good games can’t sell even at a single $2 purchase.
Apple Arcade is the only sanctuary. I haven’t heard good things from the dev side, and it’s 80%+ old games from before things were destroyed or IAP riddled games with the IAPs removed, at times not even rebalanced.
I use it because it’s about all that’s left. But iPhone gaming is a shadow of what we had in the early years.
And at this point there is no competition left. The smart phone ate everything. And as far as I know Android games are in the same mess.
Comparing mobile games to PC and console games is like comparing film buffs to someone who only watches the latest summer blockbuster. They are technically the same on some level, but so different that they really shouldn't be considered the same category.
Well sure it worked out great for Apple. By preventing users from sideloading emulators or playing real games, you force them to purchase gambling apps and low-quality slopware to entertain themselves. "Real world" game developers like Nintendo outright gave up on iOS/mobile gaming because it wasn't a comparable gaming experience.
A good example of this is the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters, which were so lazily ported that most fans advocate for pirating the originals instead. Why should anyone pay $14.99 for the bad version of FFVI?
In good faith, you can't really say "[x] is shit" if you don't have an usual setup; X11 is no longer the default on most distros. Even when I was also using it, it never crashed.
I don't know whether your GPU is older than mine or not but I have the RX 7700XTX. Maybe it had a software defect...
That's good to hear. When I was troubleshooting this, I kept seeing forum posts screaming about how they're sticking to X11 cause Wayland is bad. Uh, idk idc, ship has sailed already.
> They've essentially gotten roped into maintaining a huge chunk of internet infrastructure, for free.
Lol, what? One of the biggest company on Earth is being pictured as a victim for creating services that siphon data out of half the planet's people? Don't take it personally but I can't fathom how you think this is FREE. It's literally the most lucrative business there is and it's only going to get worse—and not for them.
With LLMs, it's faster to ship even in a more verbose language like Go or Rust.
reply