I came into Steins;Gate completely cold. I watched it when it came out and I only just realised there's more to the universe. It's a ridiculously good anime, probably a top 10 for me. It's got a really cool storyline with loads of plot twists, interesting characters and deep mystery.

Never worked at a FAANG, but from what I read from their cultures I don't think a letter to the CEO from a senior engineer would go entirely unnoticed there. CEO's might receive crazy letters, but hopefully not regularly from their senior engineering staff..

Microsoft has a large PR department to put out such false impressions. The culture has changed, AFAIK you used to be able to email Bill Gates and be fairly confident he would read it, but you better be sure it was worth reading or he would fire you. Now they’re unlikely to fire you but they’re unlikely to read it either.

Senior leadership seems to be more far sequestered now, a bit like Trump, surrounded by lackeys giving them an entirely false impression of the world. That’s how they could legitimately believe they were going to bury the IPhone.

putting aside that MS is too huge to even just know about the names of your senior engineers across the globe and that the mail might have gone directly to spam

there is still the issue that this might have been classified as "a crazy letter"

a lot of the article reminds me of people which might (or might not) have competency but insists they know better and are very stubborn and very bad and compromising on solutions. The subtext of the articles is not that far afar from "everyone does everything wrong, I know better, but no one listens to me". If you frame it like that it very much sounds like a "crazy" letter.

Strictly speaking it reminds me a lot about how Pirate Software spoke about various EA related topics. (Context: Pirate Software was a streamer and confidence man who got complemented up due to family connections and "confidently knew" everything better while having little skill or contributions and didn't know when to stop having a "confidently bad" opinion. Kinda sad ending given that he did motivate people to peruse their dream in game design and engage themself for animal protection.).

Or how I did do so in the past. Appearing very confident in your know-how ironically isn't always good.

And in case it's not clear: The writing reminding me of it and having patters of someone trying to create a maximally believable writing to make MS look bad doesn't mean that he behaves like that or that the writing is intended to be seen that way.

It's more about how we have a lot of "information" which all look very believable, but in the end miss means to both: Verify many of the named "facts". And, more importantly, judge the sentiment/implicit conveyed information.

Especially if we just take the mentioned "facts" without the implicit messages and ignore the him<->management communication issues I would guess a lot of that is true.

A "Senior Software Engineer" at Microsoft is someone with a pulse and 3 years of experience (due to title inflation); so despite the "senior" in the title definitely not "senior engineering staff".

No we can't. In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed. Europe is not a federation like the US, worse many of the countries in Europe themselves are governed much like federations. We are easy prey for big American corporations. It's easy for Palantir to sell their product and then a thousand little government organizations will claim there simply is no alternative at the same quality level.

> In the early 2000s we desperately tried to get our governments to be less dependent on Microsoft and we completely failed

You didn't have the great unifying dislike of the orange man as a motivating factor then. Now you do and I would wager there is significant public support behind getting away from reliance on the US.

Now, the EU can, using the anti coercion instrument.

It would come pretty close, probably close enough that you wouldn't be able to tell the difference on 90% of projects.

Vague. What's pretty close? I mean, even for IO bound tasks you can pretty quickly validate that the performance between languages is not close at all - 10 to 100x difference.

Sure, within 100ms. Who cares what the performance multiples are?

That literally makes no sense. 100ms... out of what? Is it 1ms vs 100ms? 100000ms vs 100100ms?

Anyway, dubious claim since a Python interpreter will take 10s of milliseconds just to print out its version.

Do you have any evidence? I can point at techempower benchmarks showing IO bound tasks are still 10-100x faster in native languages vs Python/JS.

I'm saying that the Rust might execute in 50ms and the Python in 150ms. You are the one not making sense, we are talking about application performance, why are you not measuring that in milliseconds.

That is assuming Rust is 100x faster than Python btw, 49ms of I/O, 1ms of Rust, 100ms of Python.

> I'm saying that the Rust might execute in 50ms and the Python in 150ms.

Okay, so the Rust code would be 3x as fast. Feels arbitrary, but sure.

> You are the one not making sense, we are talking about application performance, why are you not measuring that in milliseconds.

I explained why your post made no sense already...

> That is assuming Rust is 100x faster than Python btw, 49ms of I/O, 1ms of Rust, 100ms of Python.

That's not how anything works. Different languages will perform differently on IO work, different runtimes will degrade under IO differently, etc. That's why even basic echo HTTP servers perform radically differently in Python vs Rust.

This isn't how computers work and it's not even how math works.

This conversation has become nonsensical. The thing we can agree with is this - no, uv would not be as fast if it were written in Python.

> That's not how anything works. Different languages will perform differently on IO work, different runtimes will degrade under IO differently, etc. That's why even basic echo HTTP servers perform radically differently in Python vs Rust.

> This isn't how computers work and it's not even how math works.

What are you disagreeing with? There's some baseline amount of I/O that the kernel does for you, that's what I'm assuming is 50ms, and everything else like runtime degrading is overhead due to the language/platform choice. I'm saying Rust is upwards of 100x faster in that regard thanks to its zero cost abstraction philosophy. You can't just include the I/O baseline in a claim about Rust's performance advantage. You'll be really disappointed when Rust doesn't download your files 100x as fast as the Python file downloader.

Anyway, I'm sorry I provoked your antagonism with my terse messages, I wasn't trying to be blase. I believe uv is the sort of tool that wouldn't suffer much from the downsides of Python and that in most situations the reduced runtime overhead of Rust would have a negligible impact on the user experience. I'm not arguing that they shouldn't build uv in Rust. Most situations is not all situations, and when a tool is used so widely you'll hit all edge cases, from the point where the 10s of milliseconds of startup time matters to the point where Pythons I/O overhead matters at scale.

I think a missing piece here is that you think that Rust won't download a file faster than Python but it absolutely can. This seems to just be a misconception people have about IO, like "download a file" is a thing that exists wholly outside of your process.

I know it can, but it can't download it faster than the network card can write it into its buffers. That's the part I would count as the 50ms that both can't improve upon.

Of course. But why would that matter if Python can't get there to begin with? You're not going to hit NIC bottlenecks with Python, not without a ton of work and tradeoffs at least.

> IO is executed by kernel, file system or network drivers. IO performance is not dependent at all on which language makes the syscalls.

I think your posts on this topic can not possibly be worth responding to if you're coming to the conversation with this level of not understanding things.

Your post is a combination of not understanding computers and then hand waving about fake numbers and user expectations. IO is not magic, it is not some distinct process that you have no control over from userland, it is exactly the sort of thing that Python does very poorly at, in fact.

I'll just reference techempower again, or you can look up those system calls you referenced like how epoll works and then look into what is involved for Python to use epoll effectively.

What is more expensive, copying the message, or memory fencing it, or do you always need both in concurrent actors? Are you saying the message passing overhead is less than the cost of fragmented memory? I wouldn't have expected that.

Why couldn't a machine that identifies relations between tokens be AGI? You're imposing an arbitrary constraint. It is either generally intelligent or its not, whether it uses tokens or whatever else is irrelevant.

Also, languages made up of tokens are still languages, in fact most academics would argue all languages are made up of tokens.

Anyway, it's not LLM's that achieve AGI, it's systems built around LLM's that achieved AGI quite some time ago.

Less than 5% of the population knew what it meant to install an app when the iPhone launched. I believe Steve Ballmer ridiculed the idea when asked about it.

A great many amount of people use Android to this day because of its more open nature, and that's despite Google's involvement. If Motorola could go back to its native roots, shake the idea of Chinese influence, and do open source proper, I bet there's a lot more than 5% of the market ready for it.

My company helps companies do migrations using LLM agents and rigid validations, and it is not a surprising goal. Of course most projects are not as clean as a compiler is in terms of their inputs and outputs, but our pitch to customers is that we aim to do bug-for-bug compatible migrations.

Porting a project from PHP7 to PHP8, you'd want the exact same SQL statements to be sent to the server for your test suite, or at least be able to explain the differences. Porting AngularJS to Vue, you'd want the same backend requests, etc..

The Falcon Heavy is $97 million per launch for 64000 kg to LEO, about $1,500 per kg. Starship is gonna be a factor 10 or if you believe Elon a factor 100 cheaper. A single NVidia system is ~140kg. So a single flight can have 350 of them + 14000kg for the system to power it. Right now 97 million to get it into space seems like a weird premium.

Maybe with Starship the premium is less extreme? $10 million per 350 NVidia systems seems already within margins, and $1M would definitely put it in the range of being a rounding error.

But that's only the Elon style "first principles" calculation. When reality hits it's going to be an engineering nightmare on the scale of nuclear power plants. I wouldn't be surprised if they'd spend a billion just figuring out how to get a datacenter operational in space. And you can build a lot of datacenters on earth for a billion.

If you ask me, this is Elon scamming investors for his own personal goals, which is just the principle of having AI be in space. When AI is in space, there's a chance human derived intelligence will survive an extinction event on earth. That's one of the core motivations of Elon.

Depends on what you want to hear. The Iranian family in my neighborhood whose father was a doctor fled after Islamist police cut their daughter to pieces in their own home for dressing inappropriately. That's the sort of non headscarf wearing Iranian elite you'll find with an opinion critical of the current regime. I don't know about ostentatious clothing.