I don't think Apple has any special tricks for input loop.
Some Android phones really have input lag, but it is not caused by CPU load. For example, on my phone, there is approximately 100-150 ms lag between tapping the screen and registering the touch. The lag is not caused by CPU load, but by slow touch sensor.
I don't think Apple has any smart code optimization tricks. Either they have a faster touch sensor or just some people believe that if something is made by Apple then it is of a better quality.
Here is a comparison of input lag in games in iOS and Android [1] and it shows similar results: 80 ms between a tap and reaction on screen.
> You are half-way through a change. Your old motivations have lost their appeal.
I think I'm in the same boat as the OP, and this comment resonated with me. When I started programming nearly a decade ago, I had an abundance of intrinsic motivation. I was so excited to learn about software, how to build websites, phone applications, server applications etc. That drive was a genuine passion and love for computers and software and it carried me nearly a decade in this industry through some amazing challenges. I've grown more than I could have imagined.
Yet now in my mid 30s... that passion has really dwindled. When I wake up on a Saturday, I'm not rushing to get to my computer to code. I'm more interested in relaxing, getting outside, or just doing something else. Yet in the back of my mind is a constant pressure, a constant reminder, that I should be productive.
There's always more to learn, and didn't I struggle to write that regex the other day? Didn't I want to finally dig deep into Tensor Flow? Wasn't I going to bust out the breadboard and get into some hardware design?
Why don't I feel like doing any of that now? Why is the only motivation, money?
Like the OP, the only thing that seems like it could light a fire under my ass would be some big monetary opportunity. I could get excited to build a new app, or a new server project, or website, if I knew I stood a good chance of really changing my life for the better.
I think that as the novelty of programming wore off, the only thing left was money. Initially I was motivated by wanting to understand everything. I truly didn't know how to make a phone application, and now I've made many. I didn't understand how to build and deploy a website, and now I've done that many times.
What's left? Where do I go from here? I really have more questions than answers. With another 25-30 years of "work" to do, I'm really confused about what I will do.
I totally get it. You might want to read Kohn's Punished By Rewards. Extrinsic motivation, like money, can sap intrinsic motivation. It was helpful to me in understanding where my joy in the work sometimes went.
For me, that feeling of struggling to care can be an early symptom of burnout. My sustained interest in building comes from a cycle of small successes. Getting each little thing working can be a little victory. Putting it in the hands of people and seeing it benefit them, even more so. Each little victory is banking a bit of positive association for later.
But if I force myself to do the work past the point where I enjoy it, I start drawing down that positive association. That can be fine if it pays off in a larger victory later, or if I otherwise keep the balance positive. If not, eventually the work becomes joyless and then will-sapping.
I'm sure some will scoff at trying to maintain joy in the work rather than toughing it out. But I don't think toughness is enough to sustain a career in software. At this point I've changed my primary language 5 times, and I'm sure I'll do it once or twice more. And who knows how many frameworks and libraries I've had to learn over the years. To sustain that level of learning, I think we have to learn to preserve the curiosity that got us into the work in the first place.
A "mid life crisis" (which can happen at any time) is the moment when primary motivation switches from success to significance.
In our early working years we strive to become successful (for some definition of success) and this drives us to work hard, learn, experiment and so on.
Typically around age 40 you will have mastered the skills, and you will be "successful". So now you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning.
A very lucky few are already in significant jobs, and this motivation switch happens naturally and without fuss.
For the rest of us it's common to see if "playing with new toys" will satisfy. Like a motor cycle, sports car or boat. Sometimes this works, but often does not.
The happiest people I personally know seem to have found significance in seeing "others" rather than themselves. Family, community, young, are all candidates for our significance. It doesn't have to change the world, but changing the world of 1 person is deeply satisfying.
Financial freedom (earning more money in less time spent) allows more freedom in chasing this significance, and more means to do so.
Starting a business can deliver financial rewards (although mostly does not) but can also be deeply satisfying in other ways. When you look at the office carpark, and realise how many staff, and families, are being provided for because of your business, well, that's a good day.
I’ve had the last 6 months off and will be taking at least another few more off. I’ve been investing in myself in going through lots of therapy to get over emotional trauma of my past, and now am just turning to looking forward. I haven’t coded in a while - and I’m finding that’s okay, it’s still a thing I can do if I want. Toys aren’t gonna do it. A house that I have to spend tons of time keeping up also isn’t gonna do it. It’s not even about legacy or anything death related for me, its more about how to feel a bit more content with myself and maintain or generate a playful disposition to the universe.
Good for you! Extended time off has been the best thing for my long-term mental health. It let me recover from issues and reset patterns. Good luck with rest of your break!
Another perspective from the other replies: lean into that motivation. I’ve found that there are few projects more rewarding than ones done for money - not necessarily because of the money itself - but because to convince people to part with their money you have to make something they really want. You’re solving a problem for them, making them happier, making their life easier. You get feedback about how much they appreciate it. You meet with others who are doing the same thing and want to work with you. You get noticed as being a helpful and competent person.
The money is just a proxy for how much value you make for people and that feels good and challenges you in ways you wouldn’t expect.
"Boudin was born in New York City to Jewish parents. His parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were Weather Underground members, both convicted of murder."[1]
I'm really confused as to what point you're trying to make with this comment.
In order to secure religious freedoms, religious rights, and LGBTQ inclusion, we need to have a filthy city, filled with homelessness, drug addiction, and absurd policies?
His/her comment was clearly in regards to Poland taking a pretty stark curve to the right. Which also has absolutely nothing to do with the benefits the person above mentioned, just as it isn't a "distraction" in San Francisco (what a ridiculous canard that should be pounded down into transparency).
Loads of places have all of those freedoms and inclusions, but also have little to no homelessness, crime, or police brutality. It is a complete non-sequitur.
San Francisco has loads of problems. A serious housing problem. A wealth disparity problem. An "activist" police force that is basically fundamentally incompetent and incapable of doing even a modicum of their job, intentionally trying to burn the city to the ground to make some right wing point. Mental health issues.
It isn't because they are inclusive or considerate.
It describes a very sharp increase in created money. The poster of the linked tweet is implying this is unique and we will see negative economic effects (like inflation) because of it.
Parent to that tweet is arguing we have not seen those effects despite past federal reserve action and so there is no worry.
The wider context to this conversation is that some people [who?] believe federal reserve policy is flawed and supported by systemic bias in the reporting of economic indicators like GDP.
It's not created money. We didn't just print this money. The money is printed on collateral, that is private industry traded assets for US dollars.
This graph also completely ignores that the US dollar is the de facto reserve currency of the world, so dividing dollars by US population is fairly meaningless in 2021.
You mean they are buying assets and thus the money is simply providing liquidity and has tangential value. They aren't just printing it and giving it away, this subtle but significant difference is one of the reasons that money supply and inflation have very little if anything to do with one another.
Yes, buying assets, but basically buying risk-free treasuries that come in inexhaustible quantities. When they make the purchase that money goes directly to the federal government to be spent.
And that money is in competition with others who are buying treasuries, driving down the interest rate (since it’s an auction) and presumably pushing that money to other uses.
So you are right, it’s not “given away”, but it’s a pretty frictionless way for “new money” to enter the financial system. It’s not like the money is put in a bank account and just sits there.
But your point is well taken. There is no “2 + 2 = 4” rule when it comes to money supply and inflation.
Yes, don't worry guys. The Federal Reserve has got you covered. And if things get too expensive, you can always just ask for a raise, amirite! :)
Anyway, here's a cash crop chart for corn that has more than doubled in price since last year. Once the cost of making finished products with these crops increase, you can be sure that shop prices will also reflect it. Some of these charts are even growing exponentially.
If you zoom out to 20 years it shows that back in 2011 the same thing happened; did we have hyperinflation in 2011 or huge price increases in food in 2011?
I didn't say we'd have hyper-inflation. I said we'd have inflation, and the banks are saying that too, btw. What we're seeing now isn't just some seasonal pump, but a huge across the board pump. Of course, if wages also reflect that increase, then there's not much of a problem. But what we're facing today is massive unemployment, and a massive amount of money sitting un-touched in banks, sometimes with negative interest. Negative interest plus more inflation equals less purchasing power for you either way you try to argue. So what we're witnessing now is a massive transfer of wealth. The only thing most normies can hope for, is a higher price on Doge. But yes, if the printing gets out of hand, we'll have hyper-inflation too. Some of these charts are already going exponential.
Since the massive QE is happening in economies around the world,vthere will be some flight to the dollar as well as gold. A lot of money could continue to sit at negative rates. There won't be much impetus for capital investment for a decade. It's hard to say exactly how this will play out month to month, but it is going to be a harrowing.
If the comparison is with 2008, the answer is that the "money" was created on different sides of the balance sheet for different purposes. (We all remember that banks are effectively statistically multiplexing asset cash against liability deposits, nu?)
2008 the Fed printed $2 trillion asset cash(M0) and used it to buy bad debt off the banks books, and put the debt in a runoff fund. No discernible impact on M2. (well, it stopped it imploding).
2020 Fed prints ~$4 trillion of liability deposits, and hands it out to all and sundry to pay their rents, and support the stock market.
M2 goes vertical. Which it has never done for the US in the last 100 odd years. So this time it will actually be different.
“Print” is a misnomer, as only the US Mint prints paper currency and mints metal coins which is a very tiny sliver of the M0 money supply.
So to rephrase what actually happens: “in 2008, the Federal Reserve decided to buy a notional amount of $2 trillion in bonds and debt securities, every time it bought some it created the same amount of new US dollars at the time of transaction which becomes owned by the seller. Increasing the money supply upon payment.”
Its primary mechanism for controlling the money supply and people’s behavior is by purchasing a predetermined amount and category of assets from people. Unless authorized by Congress to do something specific.
Congress does not usually touch the Federal Reserve Act, as the whole point of the Federal Reserve system was to remove politics from management of the money supply. But they obviously can and always could alter the Federal Reserve’s charter and in 2020 they let the Federal Reserve give money directly to individuals in some of the stimulus programs.
More about breaking down exactly how the Fed's digital dollar ledger updates actually result increasing the money supply.
Despite everyone knowing the "printer go brr" meme being just a colloquialism, I don't think people are really clear on what the reality is. It is Just-In-Time creation of dollars upon transaction.
There is no one definition of "money". M0, M1, M2, M3, MZM are various metrics which have been proposed over time for trying to track the supply of USD all with varying definitions. M2 is frequently used as the simplest and best general case proxy for "how much USD is out in circulation" in a way that tracks credit + currency.
So saying the M2 is high relative to population means that we have been "printing money" (increasing the USD money supply) at a high rate relative to population.
M2 is a measure of the money supply. There are different measures of the money supply, which roughly speaking are M0 (cash), M1 (M0+current accounts), M2 (M1+savings accounts) and M3 (M2+money market instruments). The fact that they have divided M2 by the population seems a little strange, but basically the graphic shows the amount of "money" (cash+current accounts) per person over a time period in the US.
> I just keep everything in memory in native data structures and flush to disk periodically;
Can you expand on what you mean by this? I am interpreting that to mean that you are actually writing to a file and reading from a file rather than using SQL?
They're storing their data in native Rust objects and read or write them in server application RAM. In case data becomes larger than available RAM, they have set up a large swap, which is a file or a disk partition that the OS uses when no more real RAM is available, while acting like nothing is happening (and everything gets 1000x slower). They periodically serialize these in-memory objects to a file on disk, and presumably (they didn't specify, but I feel it's implied) they're reading this file and deserialize it during initialization/startup phase.
Correct. Although I don't read everything on startup. Some of the data (e.g. per user data) is only loaded once it's needed.
Also, the swap doesn't make everything slower as long as my active working set is smaller than the available RAM. That is, I have more data loaded into "memory" than I have RAM, but I'm not using all of it all the time, so things are still fast. It's basically an OS managed database. (If I were using a normal SQL database I'd get a similar behavior where actively used data would sit in RAM and less used data would be read from the disk.)
The obvious difference is that swap files are not as optimized for disk io. There is a serious performance issue if you ever have to hit disk often. It all depends on how you structure your in memory/on disk data. But it might never be an issue, have scaled to tenish million user in memory there is so much else that can go wrong first.
The scary thing is how much ones phone number (a somewhat ephemeral thing) is actually bound to your IDENTITY.
Considering your phone number is more and more being used in 2FA ... if you were to ever change your number and someone else got it, this would pose a serious security risk if you failed to change over ALL of your internet accounts 2FA to the new number.
I've always thought the most scary thing about this practice is that your (unique) phone number is a powerful "foreign key" which could potentially join data from many other leaked databases, forming an even larger dataset on you.
There are plently of other places we give our phone numbers to, which might not have anywhere near the protections that Facebook say they provide.
Absolutely, and e-mail or Paypal account name too. Neither of them are trivial to change. If you try to create a new account for each thing at a generic mail provider such as Gmail, your accounts will be shut down by automatic abuse filters. If you roll your own domain, then, well... the domain becomes the foreign key.
The solution to this is unlimited true email aliases as e.g. StartMail [1] and Fastmail [2] provide. I wish this was more common place for email provider. Besides the front up cost of developing / setting up the solution, email aliases have the marginal cost of one small database row per alias. And it would be such a boon for privacy.
Would using a separate service email accounts help mitigate issues? seng-baking@gmail.com, then seng-banking+icici@gmail.com, seng-banking+axis@gmail.com, etc? That way my primary email would stay private and will used only for email, not for identity.
Your private email that you don't use for signing up anywhere is irrelevant except for phishing and spam. Your secondary email address will become the foreign key that is used to correlate the datasets from everywhere you signed up with it. The +tags can just be removed since it is known how they work. Might give you a small protection against attackers who don't know about email address tags.
- largest electric vehicle manufacturer and adoption
- 5G (still no SV grown solution there)
- Most advanced solar manufacture
- biggest investor in renewable energy and nuclear
- biggest investor in space based technology and delivery
If you’d like more I can keep going. I was responding to: “they steal everything”... I pointed out the most widely used social network that was homegrown and unique.
Is this a real thing that anyone cares about? There was a lot of marketing from Samsung and Supermicro for a few months about how everyone needed "5G AI cloud infrastructure", but it seemed like an especially bad strain of bullshit. I certainly haven't figured out what it was supposed to mean yet.
Selling infrastructure to ISPs is not an amazingly high margin business.
5G FR2 is certainly fast but we already had "fast" (5Ghz Wi-Fi or wired Internet), and it's pretty harsh on mobile batteries. 5G FR1 is somewhat better than LTE but not really enough to enable new uses.
The real issue preventing new consumer uses is that wireless plans are expensive and have data limits. Driving that down presumably involves investing in the wireless ISP backend, which doesn't have much to do with the radio technology.
I do share your skepticism overall, 5G is being pushed more aggressively than its value would warrant. But there are parts of 5G suite that are indeed valuable and go beyond the mere "moar speed" mantra.
Network slicing is not consumer facing, but is a big deal in business-to-business connectivity, likely enabling business models that just aren't possible today. It's a bit like renting virtual machines in the cloud, but instead you're renting connectivity, tailored to your SLA needs.
Higher bandwidth, lower latency and lower power consumption are not exciting in isolation, but improving all of them at the same time does bring notably better user experience (see the raving reviews of M1 Mac for the same phenomenon).
This list includes no genuinely new innovations except for maybe 5G. You are listing that China is a major manufacturer, which is true. The OPs point was that China has a record of stealing IP from the US, which is also true. Listing manufacturers in China doesn't disprove this point.
So please, if you'd like, a list of genuine technologies who's origins can be traced to China... I'll be waiting.
So WeChat, and 5G. Should be discounted because they don’t support your point, and you will wait for others? Got it!
- Facial recognition on banking transactions.
- Tele Health rolled out via their ubiquitous home grown social network
- AI drones policing temperature and mask wearing
- real-time automatic translation hardware and software.
- Chinese based text input via keyboards
- Chinese voice recognition (a different problem to tonal languages)
By all means point out where they stole those things from
Then when you can’t do that, check out their space program, their capability easily surpasses NASA and is competitive with space X. Which given they are banned from even the iss where did they steal that from?
Most of the things you've listed here use WESTERN TECH just re-applied for a Chinese market, and you're calling that innovation? The fact that you had to list "Chinese based text input via keyboards" as a genuine Chinese innovation is telling.
Done with this discussion. You can't seem to come up with even 2 genuine Chinese innovations and instead refer to the reapplication of tech developed in the western world.
Nobody is saying China can't take what others have done and improve on it. That is happening more and more. It used to be China just straight up copied and stole intellectual property. I'll admit that line is beginning to blur. But genuine novel innovation is still very lacking.
I started with 5G. I know it's devastating to your case so you'll ignore it, but that is where I started.
The great firewall?
Social credit system?
Automated J-walking tickets based on facial recognition?
Tell me where those were copied from in the west.
Everyone just straight up and copies and steals intellectual property (Xerox, Apple, Windows)... But when china does, it's some how "china just steals everything".
Also there is piles of innovation in the "boring stuff" like "how to actually make a battery" or "smart phone manufacture" that is almost exclusively in Asia (and predominantly china). Or in BYDs case (the company that was making mass produced electric cars long before Tesla "innovated"), making batteries that are environmentally friendly when disposed of.
But hey, you're done with this discussion. So enjoy the blissful ignorance.
From what I can find, 5G wasn't invented in China, nor was the concept of electromagnetic information transfer. Nor were transitors. Nor were micro processors. Nor were personal cell phones...
The list goes on, and it goes DEEP right down to the fundamental physics of these innovations which all did NOT come out of China.
Devistating as this all is to your point, you'll probably never accept it. China has a long history of stealing from the West, where the true innovation has occurred over the years.
Yes, I do think this is starting to change and I applaud China where it has introduced improvements to technology instead of raw copying (which it has a long, long history of doing). The unfortunate reality is that cheating for years has tainted their image, and try as you might to point out one or two examples of how it's changed, doesn't make it so.
