I thought the message is “you might really want to find and encourage and promote and support your best programming talent though overt action, but such overt action might in fact have the inverse unintended outcome, often best to ensure you know such people are in the team and ensure traditional management does not get in their way or piss them off with traditional corporate thinking, which has zero idea what great programming talent looks like or is motivated by.”
Same. New ideas are like starting a fire. Piling too much on top or blowing too hard will stop it. You (together, however distributed across roles) do have to assess if you can handle one more fire, if it comes on top, replaces an old one etc. Getting to this decision in your specific setup is the tough and important part.
10x people can be like one-shot LLMs, your request is for sure wildly underspecified and what you get is 90% determined by the "smoothing term" applied by not you. This is why the right amount and frequency of interation is needed.
This is how I took it, and what I lived through. Both the supportive boss that let me do my thing without getting in the way, and those who tried to manage everything and make me shut down.
But did OP actually suggest their job is to “ensure traditional management does not get in their way”? I’m almost certain their point was not to interfere even at that level, which is why they didn’t hype it up the chain and let it land on its own.
Part of not hyping it up the chain is also that a lot of these projects are experiments. They may work, they may not, and some pivots may be required along the way. As soon as something is hyped to leadership, now there are feature lists, timelines, and expectations. All room for creativity and experimentation are gone.
I’ve gotten in the habit of not telling anyone about side efforts I’m working on until they’re done, and even then, I usually only tell the people who it might be of use to. I’ve been burned too many times by people trying to “help” or placing a lot of extra expectations and pressure on something. I don’t know if something will work until it works.
People wonder how to find great developers - what even IS a great developer in the world of AI, do they still exist or did AI level them all out with the playing field?
They’re still around - they can talk with you in great depth about software and how it works ……. same as ever.
He posts his articles to his socials,⁽¹⁾ along with the occasional quip like “Your life is going to be full of people sounding like they know what they’re talking about.” and “Your three-day response time to critical communications tells me exactly what I need to know.” and “You're either getting stuff done or talking about getting stuff done.”
On the .Net VM you’re describing F#, mostly by virtue of being based on OCaml.
Contrasted with TypeScript and C#, F# is smaller, more expressive, stricter, with mature pattern matching and type resolution baked in from the ground up. F# was years ahead of the major languages on what are increasingly looking like ‘the basics’ around ADTs and immutability in modern distributed computing. OCaml and F# capture the linguistic high points of VB, Delphi, and C# with a broad spectrum of OOP(-lite) approaches, and have led those languages by decades on functional constructs that result in meaningfully tighter code. With the benefit of hindsight some approaches clearly map better to cloud computing and system verification.
F# also sits parallel to lots of living C#, objectively we see ‘less is more’. Less code per line, fewer lines per solution, terser and more LLM-efficient language. Error rates and refactoring costs are also meaningfully better IME, but harder to quantify in general terms.
I want something that will bring productivity of Delphi to Web. May be I am old now, but I could have built applications in a weekend in Access or Visual Basic that will take weeks now in latest web stack.
Blazor is pretty cool if you are into that kind of stuff. Mind you, you still might need the slightest tiny dash of JS, but depending on your needs, you might be able to get away from JS entirely.
Eh. I admit I just use AI now when I want to quickly build a web app like that. I built a huge content management system in a couple of hours that way.
If you're talking Windows desktop apps like Delphi used to do, then Visual Studio WinForms is still just like that in 2026 and still getting updates.
I suppose it could have some kind of ARC. In theory some future languages could even have some hybrid approach? A high perf default but you can fallback to a GC allocation for hard things?
I'm pretty sure that there are multiple GC crates for Rust out there. But using them mixed in with non-GC variables presumably makes things more complex.
What you are looking for is called F#. You get native interop with C# and access to all .NET/C# libraries as a bonus. We use it as a daily driver for a complex B2B2C cloud platform.
Yes you are right, it does not properly support NativeAOT yet.
But it isn't a need for most use cases, unless you want to do mobile development and meet app store policies. But even then, mature F# frameworks like Fable transpile your F# code to React & Cie.
It will probably get there one day since all BCL is annotated. Perhaps this is not done because you can have parts of the library be completely safe to use in AOT while another part not be.
> C# doesn't depend on a VM these days when it is AOT compiled
Maybe I’m being pedantic, but this is an oxymoron. Also the premise is incorrect. It’s not like the VM is gone. Merely baked into the code at compile time. It compiles IL to native code. Same for IL2CPP. The VM is still there.
The term “virtual machine” is confusing. I think you meant to say JIT compiler :-)
You don't have to use all the features of C#. I make my living at it and don't touch a lot of them. The issue with C# is culture. They went full in on blog driven development so there's way too many people who will yell this is the way to do things this week.
It's true. You will incur the wrath of C#'ers if your simple ToDo list app doesn't have a ToDoListItemRepositoryServiceFactory.cs and a minimum of 4 separate layers in which one must update 20 files because you added a property to one class.
Don't get me wrong, I still love C#/.NET. I use it everyday, but my god, has Swift been a breath of fresh air. The Swift community, when not whining about Swift UI, has been much less dogmatic in my experience.
What would you suggest instead? I quite like the nullable reference types, but I do know many get annoyed. My brain is often a scurry of squirrels, so I grew to become thankful for the nullable refs overtime.
I don't mind NRT but I hate dealing with C# projects that haven't set < Nullable>Enable</Nullable> in their csproj. It's not perfect because I know at runtime it can still be nullable but it's nice when the compiler does most of the checks for you.
(not OP) I would take out mostly historic stuff, that is in there for backwards compat, that has been superseeded. But this could be achieved using linters.
And Google and Microsoft have huge distribution advantages that OpenAI doesn’t. Google and Microsoft can add AI to their operating systems, browsers, and office apps that users are already using. OpenAI just has a website and a niche browser. To Google and Microsoft, AI is a feature, not a product.
this is the argument i continue to have with people. first mover isnt always an advantage - i think openai will be sold or pennies on these dollars someday (next 5 years after they run out of funding).
Google has data, TPUs, and a shitload of cash to burn
I'm not sure because google was by far the best search engine for a long time in the early 2000s and there are a lot of models close to what openai has right now.
Name recognition only gets you so far. "Just Google it" happened because Google was better than Hotbot/Altavista/Yahoo! etc by orders of magnitude. Nobody even bothered to launch a competing search engine in the 2000s because of this (until Microsoft w/ Bing in 2009). There is no such parallel with ChatGPT; Google, Bing, even DuckDuckGo has AI search.
First mover advantage matters only if it has long-lasting network effects. American schools are run on Chromebooks and Google Docs/Slides, but these have no penetration in enterprise, as college students have been discovering when they enter their first jobs.
Picking it up is no problem for some specialists in the (ham) radio scene. They are mastering X- and S-band stuff so good that even the NASA asked them to join in some observations in the past.
But: Meteosat is very famous for encrypting their stuff.
ADS-B is packet data telemetry broadcast unencrypted and unauthenticated by aircraft on 1090MHz.
Anyone can receive it, and many do. FlightRadar and others have networks of people with receivers that forward all received packets to central servers.
The aircraft self-report location, heading, altitude, etc, so anyone can transmit packets making ghost planes.
I am somewhat surprised nobody has stashed an ADS-B spoofer near ATL or AMS that just broadcasts tracks of A380 tail numbers crossing the runways perpendicular at 500 ft AGL or something. They have primary radar, sure, but I imagine there would still be a temporary disruption until people figured out what was going on.
I think this is the first case I’ve seen of ADS-B spoofing in the wild.
EDIT: this was spoofed reports to the data aggregators via the internet, not broadcast on radio waves. I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.
> I’ve still never seen or heard tell of RF ADS-B spoofing.
Probably because the required expertise, effort, risk, and reward ratios don't work out. You can cause a minor disturbance that isn't particularly visible and in exchange get investigated by the FBI. Seems about as wise as attempting to graffiti the front gate of a military base.
Probably is not causing traffic issues. With that said I'm sure a number of TLA's are looking into it already, so whoever did it has hopefully took a number of infosec steps not to get caught and questioned.
No real 747 flew this. It was a prank using impossible flight data via ADS-B spoofing. Ground-based “software-defined radios” (SDRs) broadcast fake transponder signals to trick ADS-B Exchange. This works because both the ADS-B & AIS systems use unencrypted, unauthenticated data.
It’s only “other” at the very last point. Go earlier in the track and it shows as “ADS-B”, but every historical real flight in this plane is MLAT (it doesn’t broadcast its precise position but it can be inferred from receivers)
It lists other options. It also lists other operating systems that don't use systemd.
I think what I hate most about systemd is that it has seemingly indoctrinated so many into believing that there are no viable alternatives, only some random mess of unintegrated incomplete long abandoned half-baked subsystems.
Definitely had a hand in it. If you want to dime out the singular technical innovation that Woz contributed that really changed everything, IMO it was figuring out how to make the Apple II do color on the cheap. That was the real competitive differentiator at the time that made personal computers attractive to consumers, and cheap enough to contemplate for folks without a garage full of electronics equipment.
Some might say he gets too much credit. For example this Woz quote
“It was the first time in history anyone had typed a character on a keyboard and seen it show up on their own computer’s screen right in front of them.”
seems pretty believable, especially if you don't know the names Don Lancaster or Jonathan Titus. Woz might not have at the time, and indeed Lancaster was not first either.
That’s what I read.
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