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Pretty sure greed existed long before capitalism was a twinkle in any economist's eye. The East India Company was rapacious and evil and full of greed. But it was mercantilist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism

"A linen shirt … is, strictly speaking, not a necessary of life. The Greeks and Romans lived, I suppose, very comfortably though they had no linen. But in the present times, through the greater part of Europe, a creditable day-labourer would be ashamed to appear in public without a linen shirt, the want of which would be supposed to denote that disgraceful degree of poverty which, it is presumed, nobody can well fall into without extreme bad conduct."

--Adam Smith (yes, that Adam Smith) _Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations_


It takes about 3-4 years to build a fab and ten-billion dollars.

https://download.intel.com/newsroom/2022/manufacturing/fab-f...

And even if someone were able to magically build one in half the time, that would certainly drive up the cost quite dramatically, and would still be two-ish years from production.

The history of the memory industry is jam-packed with booms and busts, and companies that over-provisioned capacity during the boom times, only to have the bust happen as the fab is coming on line, are the ones that fail.

=-=-=-=

"William de Gale, portfolio manager at BlueBox Asset Management, told CNBC’s Europe Early Edition on Wednesday that the industry tends to have “enormous ups and downs”.

“In the long run it’s a pretty dreadful industry,” he said.

“I suspect that’s still the case every time people make an argument that the memory cycle is gone, and it’s now a long-term value-creating industry – just before it all goes horribly wrong.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/25/memory-stocks-cyclical-boom-...


$10 billion dollars, 3 to 4 years, that’s less time to build a new modem chip that works. that’s less time to build a new M series processor that works. Google, Microsoft, and Meta We’ll spend close to $500 billion in 2026, just on their AI dreams, I would say having a supply of memory chips is vital towards your business if you’re someone like Apple or AMD or Nvidia, these days these days, if you want to design the devices you need to design, so who’s going to take it in house?

This really isn't true. I'm nothing special and have survived in the FAANG world for going on two decades. Excepting the very new in their careers, nearly everyone on my team has managed good length careers at the various FANNGS, possibly with stops at smaller companies.

It was the startups prior to those that were terribly unstable and where you couldn't be sure your badge would open the door when you came to work.

Meta may be a dumpster fire today, and the others have had bad layoffs, true. But they all have huge headcounts, and median employee tenure that is above average in the industry.

Of course, saving for catastrophe is wise, especially in these times, but that's true no matter if you work for a FAANG or a startup.


Pretty sure you can look at the median tenure and it's not long at most FAANGs. Most people who work there do not make it long. There are plenty who are there that do, but that's survivorship bias.

Someone from Google can quickly enlighten us. Look up the current tenure to be at 50% in percent, for Eng.

I think it was about 2 years 10ish years ago, but that was during rapid growth. Now that overall growth is down it is useful for this.


> median employee tenure

it's less than two years, probably well below average. maybe it was more previously


Chesterton's fence has two parts:

1. I want to remove a rule

2. Understand why that rule is in place before proceeding

This article deals with the second part, but not the first. So it is only about about half of Chesterton's fence at best.

In these examples, a rule (avoid blocking calls) is in place to guide the programmer to a performant system. Programmers apparently thought that if they found a way to avoid directly blocking calls, but managed to indirectly block, they had still obeyed the rule. And strictly by the most narrow reading of the rule they had obeyed it. But they had defeated the purpose of the rule.

So definitely Chesterton's Fence adjacent, but not Chesterton's Fence itself.


Whatever else music theory is, "immature" isn't one of them.

Western music theory has evolved over literally thousands of years. You can put a very rough start of it to Pythagoras, around 550BCe ish, which gives us 2,500 years of evolution and refinement.

But even if you want to start with the popularity and adoption of the major scale, that was around 1500CE ish, which gives us a solid 500 years. It handles many, many corner cases quite gracefully.

It undoubtedly has its quirks, but any notational system for this will also have its quirks (cf, the difference between systems of intonation). There is just no way around it.


Even before the internet, employees were making these kinds of criticisms at lunch, at the water cooler and during their car pools.

If the company forbids it on visible internal channels, it will just pop up on external, private channels. With less corporate control and less corporate visibility and more leaks.


If one is writing trailers and custom formatters, then probably the information that the formatter uses should be even more structured that sticking it in the subject line.


COMPANY-1234 in the title doesn't tell the reader all that much about the the feature or motivation. It does tell the client, but I'm not seeing why that is better than having it in the description as a tag, or some other nice way of extracting it.


Least of all when that ticket is older and so much of the code and the company has changed too. Like sometimes useful historical context sure but worth putting in the first line of a commit? I put it in the body with a link to the ticket or tickets as a footer, if someone wants historical context it's there.


SoA can be a big win. But so can plain AoS, just depends on the access pattern.

Profiling important workloads matters. Without that everything else is guesswork.


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