It’s effectively the company saying that they believe the shareholders can get a better return by investing that money elsewhere. So when a company starts doing major buybacks it’s a signal that they have reached an inflection point.
If you want 100x returns - do you find a $500B company or a $5B one?
All ASML is doing is raising the share price. The investors that don't want a better deal somewhere else don't have to do a thing - they just have to not sell their shares. ASML is not deciding anything or signaling anything about future returns.
The market is the one sending the signal that there are better deals elsewhere. You can go from $5B to $500B. You can't go from $500B to $50T. There is no amount of R&D that will do that. If you picked a $5-6 billion company in 2008, and it was ASML, congratulations you now have >100x returns.
The inflection point isn't a point where buybacks increase, it's the slow/fast ride up to $500 billion.
The investors chasing 100x returns have already left. Whether the company buys its own shares or sits on its own cash, the net equity value is the same. The only signal it gives to investors is that they have more cash than they want to spend.
You can thank Microsoft for that. Intel architects in fact did not want to waste area on an NPU. That caused Microsoft to launch their AI-whatever branded PCs with Qualcomm who were happy to throw in whatever Microsoft wanted to get to be the launch partner. After than Intel had to follow suit to make Microsoft happy.
That doesn’t explain why Apple “wastes” die area on their NPU.
The thing is, when you get an Apple product and you take a picture, those devices are performing ML tasks while sipping battery life.
Microsoft maybe shouldn’t be chasing Apple especially since they don’t actually have any marketshare in tablets or phones, but I see where they’re getting at: they are probably tired of their OS living on devices that get half the battery life of their main competition.
And here’s the thing, Qualcomm’s solution blows Intel out of the water. The only reason not to use it is because Microsoft can’t provide the level of architecture transition that Apple does. Apple can get 100% of their users to switch architecture in about 7 years whenever they want.
> we have to be honest that there is no unquestionable source of meaning in life
Think about what you would like to remain in the world after you are gone. Then think how you can connect with and advance those things, and act accordingly in your life. To me this has been a reliable way to find meaning in life. But obviously I don’t claim this is unquestionable or works for everyone.
In the automotive industry, pretty much the whole point of standards like cybersecurity (ISO21434) and functional safety (ISO26262) is to let the manufacturer claim in court that they followed “modern best practices” and therefore are not liable when something goes wrong.
It is really incredible how Apple has obviously broken and buggy UX in many primary use cases on their devices, and fail to fix it for generations.
The iPad is particularly bad in this respect. For a decade it would not support the most obvious use case for a device like this: Have it in portrait mode like a notebook, show a video or book app on the top half and notes app on the bottom half. A use case that was solved by the original Macintosh. The most infuriating thing was that you could split the vertical screen into two useless, thing vertical strips---a configuration I have never seen any use case for. Even today now that there is some more configurability and you can vaguely put two apps in this configuration, there is still massive wasted space on the sides and the apps overlap.
Following the definition from the article, armed forces seems like a complicated system, not a complex one. There is a structured, repeatable solution for armed forces. It does not exhibit the hallmark characteristics of complex systems listed in the article like emergent behaviors.
not a fan of the article for this reason alone. good points made, but no reason to redefine perfectly good words when we already have words that work fine.
It was a life-defining piece of software for me too. As a teenager I found a server called “REALbasic Cafe” that inspired and helped me go from knowing next to nothing about programming to making my first money from shareware as a high school kid.
To this day I’m grateful I stumbled across the Hotline software and the server.
The REALbasic Cafe was huge for me, too. It was an amazingly positive community and I met so many awesome people. One of them sent me a link to this post! It's awesome to see other people still remember it, too.
I had an identical experience with the REALbasic Cafe as a kid, down to eventually selling a couple of shareware projects. I wonder if we were there at the same time.
The Café was my second home as a rural teenager into Macs and programming at a time when no other kids were. The 90s being what they were, my mom even let me fly solo to meet other Café members at the old MacHack conferences (in Dearborn, Michigan!).
I have nothing but fond memories of the 90s Mac community. It really was a special time and place. I hope my kids find their equivalent of these spaces.
Spent a ton of time on Hotline servers in the 90s. I wonder if any of them still exist. I'd dearly love to be able to pop back into my teen self and mess around on one.
Me too! I learn so much about coding from that server in high school, it was definitely a formative experience, learning to code with other teens all over the country.
I hung out there as well but I found REALbasic hard to understand at a young age. It just didn't align with my mental model. Later, I discovered Ruby and had great success.
As someone frustrated in a team of 10+ that is struggling to ship even seemingly trivial things due to processes and overheads and inefficiencies, I would really appreciate some insights on how do you organize the work to allow a single developer to achieve this.
How do you communicate with the rest of the organization? What is the lifecycle and release process like? Do you write requirements and specs for others (like validation or integration) to base their work on? Basically, what does the day to day work look like?
Well, the first thing to realize about scaling codebases with developers is that an N developer team will usually produce a codebase that requires N developers to maintain. So by starting small and staying small until you reach a certain critical mass of fundamental decisions, you can avoid some of the problems that you get from having too many developers too early. You can easily also fall into the reverse trap: a historical core with pieces that fit too well together, but most of the developers on the team don’t intuitively understand the reasons behind all of the past decisions (because they weren’t there when they happened). This can lead to poorly affixed additions to a system in response to new features or requirements.
As far as Rosetta in particular was concerned, I think I was just in the right environment to consistently be in a flow state. I have had fleeting moments of depression upon the realization that I will probably never be this productive for an extended period of time ever again.
Thank you for what you did with Rosetta 2. It is outstanding.
On your last point, I’ve felt something like that myself and I hold onto hope that it isn’t true for myself (and now for you in your future endeavors). But even if it is true, you achieved something superhuman in your niche and the vast majority of people throughout the history of time have no idea what that is like. Tasting Heaven cannot last too long while on Earth. Maybe AI will bring us a little bit closer to that Heaven.
Thanks for sharing. Do you have an estimation of LoC? I know it's a BS indicator but just curious. I'd imagine it's something difficult but not too large.
>How do you communicate with the rest of the organization?
I wonder if Apple's renowned secrecy is a help with this. If nobody outside your small team knows what you are doing then it is hard for them to stick their oar in.
For the record I was interning on Cameron's team while he worked on Rosetta 2 and didn't even know myself what he worked on (the rest of the team and I were working on something else). I only found out later after it was released!
Apple is like this, I have seen plenty of instances where you have one person carrying a team of 5 or more on their back. I always wonder how they manage to compensate them when it’s clear they are getting 10x more done. Hopefully they get paid 10x, but something tells me that isn’t true.
When I was consulting I saw that everywhere. A team of ten people would have one or two primary contributors and often one person who had a negative impact on productivity.
