I think this is something like that, https://github.com/webhdx/PicoBoot.
RP2040 for the Gamecube. Mostly they are using it for booting homebrew but I don't see why you couldn't edit the code and do anything you want with it.
The title for this post seems very incorrect. How can you have "lost" something you never had? He chose to not invest in Microsoft and live his life how he wanted and that somehow makes it out to him making poor choices. Notch is still a billionaire; is the person that wrote this a billionaire?
Notch made his choices: beautiful home, flash cars, fun parties, etc. What is there not to like?
When you have $1.3B "left over" it will fund a lavish lifestyle for decades to come.
In my view, the article reflects the ills of the hustle culture that values money over all factors. He who dies with the most money is still dead. I'd rather my check to the undertaker bounce and have a massive wake with the few friends who outlive me.
The article doesn't go into why building the Macintosh or the NeXT machines in the USA failed. I can see the problems of bringing manufacturing back to the USA but why did it fail in the first place?
When I started programming in the early 80s, it was on an in-house manufacturing system, so I got to know many of the managers and line workers.
* Many mid-level managers were heavy drug users, doing cocaine.
* High level managers had no clue their direct reports were addicts
* I would say about 25 to 40% of the line workers were very drunk after lunch.
* Numbers at Month/Quarter end was everything, not quality. That means as Fiscal End approached and numbers were bad, some managers would "cheat".
* This cheating would alienate our customers.
By the end of the 80s, the company was in bad shape, going chapter 11 in the early 90s.
That was my experience in a rather large company. And from talking with friends at other manufacturing companies, things were pretty much the same there too.
Now here is hardly no manufacturing taking place in my area.
I cannot speak to how things are in sat China, but I kind of doubt it is even close to what I describe above.
this lines up with my experience in America where you can go so far if you just show up sober and put in 8 hours. ive never seen a more socially mobile country
Infamously, he caused a ton of issues for both factories when he demanded that the machinery be painted to colours of his liking.
> When Jobs took a tour, he ordered that the machines be repainted in the bright colors he wanted. Carter objected; this was precision equipment, and repainting the machines could cause problems. He turned out to be right. One of the most expensive machines, which got painted bright blue, ended up not working properly and was dubbed “Steve’s Folly.” Finally Carter quit. “It took so much energy to fight him, and it was usually over something so pointless that finally I had enough,” he recalled. [0]
> Jobs demanded that all the robots in the NeXT manufacturing plant be painted in coordinated shades of gray and black. 2 of his top manufacturing engineers worked through a weekend to paint the assembly line, repeating the process 4 times until they got the finish just right. [1]
Ultimately, even that significant automation investment couldn't overcome the core challenges that other commenters have pointed out. I find the culture aspect ironic. Deming was American, yet American manufacturers largely ignored him until the Japanese applied his methods and began outcompeting everyone.
1) Because Apple never had any volumes even remotely large enough to move the needle.
The Commodore 64 moved way more units than anything Apple ever did until the iPod and the PC dwarfed even the stuff Commodore did. Apple doesn't even move a half-million laptops in a year today. Everybody caters to Apple's low-volume stuff solely in the hope of getting access to the iPhone volumes.
China's current "supply chain expertise" is a result of massive, long-term support from the Chinese government. And I say that with envy! There is nothing in particular stopping that from being formed here in the US other than that long-term support. We have all the pieces, but nobody is going to take the risk to expand significantly beyond their current demand without guarantees from the government (and that's just smart business).
2) Because nobody in the US wants to manufacture
Everybody in the US wants to be "fabless" because that optimizes profit. The problem is that somebody has to do actual manufacturing, at some point. As we found out with Covid, "fabless" translates to "last in the queue" when things go wrong.
Nobody in the US wants to do the capital outlay and risk to do physical manufacturing. See: the current grief with Intel or the Chinese-owned steel mills in the UK. By contrast, if those were Chinese companies, the Chinese government would be pouring money into them as they would regard them as a strategic asset.
The way I read it, the article identifies two problems: the first being the lack of a strong manufacturing culture, and I think that was an issue that the U.S. had been developing by the 80s for sure. The other problem is simply that neither the Macintosh nor the NeXT machines really had the volume needed to make it make sense. Who knows; had they managed higher volumes, maybe the landscape of manufacturing would look different today... Maybe not.
I mean, look. I think we all get it, to some degree. Everything from the land to the labor to the materials is pricier in the U.S., for reasons. It will also continue to get pricier in China. We also know that people don't want to do menial factory work for minimum wage, and that automation isn't quite solving that problem as quickly as everyone hoped. So even if we wanted to bootstrap everything in the U.S., from raw materials to advanced electronics, it's all going to cost more and we're not going to have the labor necessary to do it at the scales needed.
I think we should absolutely work on this problem, but it's a tough one, and it seems like it only gets harder over time.
There's not much to understand. These policies aren't thoughtfully considered or intended to be helpful. They're chaotic exertions of power by an imbecile & his cronies.
> there's also a very tight labor market. it's hard to square "we need to bring more jobs back" with "it is so hard to find workers right now"
This is insanity. When was the last time your looked for a job? People literally send hundreds of applications to companies and don't hear a peep or are automatically rejected.
Maybe those two issues are connected, though. For some jobs, it seems like people cheating job applications and interviews with LLMs are making it hard for companies to actually fill jobs even when there are tons of applicants. In other cases, it may just be that the wages the employers are willing to pay doesn't overlap with the wages the prospective employees are willing to work for. I suspect it's partially both.
Right now, the unemployment rate seems to be relatively low, despite people reporting widespread difficulty applying to jobs. Not 100% sure what this suggests. I think we can reasonably conclude the application process for software developers in particular is hopelessly broken. (Or at least, moreso than it was before.)
Tech also swung particularly super hard from "everybody is hiring" to "nobody is hiring", but tech workers aren't that big a share of the general economy, and also let's be honest, would the tech workers here accept menial factory work?
My understanding is that it's a tech thing and not the general economy. The unemployment rate is still lower than at any time during the pre-2007 boom.
I still often use a TI-89 I bought in 1999. I also bought my daughter a used TI-86 and she uses it daily. Both are way nicer to use than the calculators on our phones.
I agree. I have my TI-89 from college that I use at work. Unfortunately I work in a lab and spilled a solution on it after nearly 2 decades of use and now the + button doesn't respond most of the time. What a drag!
I was diagnosed with Delayed sleep phase disorder and have the same issue where sleep aids only work a few days at a time before stopping with diminishing returns everyday. Nothing but just letting myself sleep when my body wants to sleep has worked.
I worked a computer store back in the mid 2000s. We got an iMac in that had a busted CRT and the owner just wanted the data moved to a new machine and then gave us the old one to get rid of. I pulled it apart and installed Linux on the 233 Mhz PowerPC. It ran for years with just the power board and motherboard sitting open on my desk. I used it for a server and development environment through ssh. I finally turned it off and I recently pulled it out of the box and the PRAM battery had exploded and ruined the entire thing. Good memories though.
I use an Apple USB full-size keyboard from 2008. It is actually my favorite keyboard ever. After years of mostly using laptop keyboards I don't like full height keys anymore.
We use 100 Gb EDR Infiniband to each host in our HPC clusters and with a combination of file system access, message passing, and general network traffic we actually use that bandwidth.
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