I'm talking about huge, billion dollar institutions like banks, financial services, governments, logistics, manufacturing, software, etc. These are the companies run by the "golf executives" who want guaranteed database dependability and are willing to pay for it.

In this case, you'll use Oracle or IBM DB2.

For example, if you're TikTok dealing with billions of interactions, or Boeing, maintaining critical databases of millions of parts, you'll be totally willing to spend huge amounts of money to make sure your data is rock solid, even if it's overpriced (Apparently, Microsoft is one of Oracle's biggest customers of all companies!)

That said, power consumption is one of the reasons I think pushing this stuff to the edge is the only real path for AI in terms of a business model. It basically spreads the load and passes the cost of power to the end user, rather than trying to figure out how to pay for it at the data center level.

Apple has always seen RAM as an economic advantage for their platform: Make the development effort to ensure that the OS and apps work well with minimal memory and save billions every year in hardware costs. In 2026, iPhones still come with 8Gb of RAM, Pro/Max come with 12Gb.

The problem is that AI (ML/LLM training and inference) are areas where you can't get around the need for copious amounts of fast working memory. (Thus the critical shortage of RAM at the moment as AI data centers consume as many memory chips as possible.)

Unless there's something I don't know (which is more than possible) Apple can't code their way around this problem, nor create specialized SoCs with ML cores that obviate the need for lots and lots of RAM.

So, it's going to be interesting whether they accept this reality and we start seeing the iPhones in the future with 16Gb, 32Gb or more as standard in order to make AI performant. And if they give up on adding AI to the billions of iPhones with minimal RAM already out there.

As a side note, 8Gb of RAM hasn't been enough for a decade. It prevents basic tasks like keeping web tabs live in the background. My pet peeve is having just a few websites open, and having the page refresh when swapping between them because of aggressive memory management.

To me, Apple's obvious strength is pushing AI to the edge as much as possible. While other companies are investing in massive data centers which will have millions of chips that will be outdated within the next couple years, Apple will be able to incrementally improve their ML/AI features by running on the latest and greatest chips every year. Apple has a huge advantage in that they can design their chips with a mega high speed bus, which is just as important as the quantity of RAM.

But all that depends on Apple's willingness to accept that RAM isn't an area they can skimp on any more, and I'm not sure they will.

Sorry for the brain dump. I'd love to be educated on this in case I'm totally off base.

The problem is that so much of our culture is tied to specific hours on the clock (e.g. "9 to 5"), even though it doesn't need to be that way. China has one time zone and it works fine. Most of Spain is west of Greenwich, yet remains on European time. People there just adjust and don't insist that certain times of day have universal meanings.

Standard Time vs Daylight Saving Time is exactly the same as Big Endian vs Little Endian. Jonathan Swift is laughing at us from the beyond.

And of course, there was instantly a heated debate about whether to permanently choose Standard Time or Daylight Saving Time, with passionate, almost religious arguments for both options. I feared sectarian violence was about to erupt at the dinner table.

Our collective relationship with time is truly unhinged.

#teamdaylightsaving

Artemis II is a disaster in progress.

I'm flabbergasted. I had no idea that robotic movement had gotten so incredibly agile. I've seen some Boston Robotics videos and thought that was pretty much the cutting edge.

The Chinese robots are astounding - they're so fluid! Also, the synchronization shows how precisely controlled they are. Crazy cool.

These projects have been around for literally decades and really haven't changed much during that time. I think what you're noticing is that Linux desktops are as good as they always have been, but since Apple and Microsoft keep messing with theirs for marketing reasons, in comparison it seems that Linux GUIs are improving.

Your various devices track everywhere you go, who you communicate with, what you search for, what you buy, what audio you listen to, what videos you watch, what games you play, who your family is, all your pictures and video you take, who comes and goes from your house, when you sleep, your health data, and much more.

And as a fundamental part of Big Tech's business they accumulate, aggregate and analyze all that information in various ways to increase profits. They don't keep this a secret, but wisely they normally don't brag about it to the general public.

Consumers have shown that are totally willing to give up privacy for convenience. Just don't remind them of it.

Then everyone realizes there are only a handful of things that are actually useful and worth the screen space. Clock, calendar, weather, stocks. Maybe one or two more like todo list, post-it note, battery level, search bar, alerts, messages. That's about all I can think of.

From DOS PCs to smart phones, the idea is resurrected again every few years. A company will decide widgets are an awesome idea, create an over-developed "open" widget platform, excitedly add it to their UI, only to later decide that maintaining it isn't worth the effort and it quietly goes away. Then a few years later the cycle starts again with better widgets this time! And so it goes.

At this point it seems like it needs to be some sort of fundamental law of computing: Any device with a GUI will inevitably have some sort of widget capability that is added, removed, redesigned and added again at least once during its lifetime.

A few years ago, I exported my HN and reddit comments along with my personal blog and private notes into a SQLite database. It was millions of words. I had a vague plan of pulling out long, insightful bits and editing them together into a book of essays. I also thought it would be cool to be able to look up my previous thoughts on a topic. Neither ended up happening.

I've been meaning to do the same thing to train an LLM, but I'm not sure I particularly need a digital version of me. Though it would be interesting to ask it to write a book for me in my own style.

In theory, it'd be the best book I have ever read.

Every new generation deals with growing populations to one degree or a other. World population has doubled in my lifetime for example. But human society just isn't made to have so many long lived people hoarding wealth and power decades beyond what they historically have.

GenX finally outnumbers the Boomers, but that should have happened a decade ago. The damage they've inflicted on the younger generations is really incalculable.

I think as time goes by, we may have to decide that people over a certain age are to be legally treated the same as those under 18.

(I'm sure people will disagree with this, but Rust is also a horrible name but we're stuck with it. Nothing rusty is good, modern or reliable - it's just a bad name.)

If I'm Samsung and I'm trying to compete in the market against Apple, I want to provide as much as possible to my customers, without needing to rely completely on a third party.

Also, when the OS or app on a Samsung has problems, customers don't blame Google, they blame the company that sold them the phone. If I worked there as a product manager, I'd make the same choices to help the company maintain as much control as possible.

Honestly, I'm not sure I care enough to worry about it. If I've never noticed in the past 5 years, then they weren't adding much "bloat".

When I think of that sort of useless software, I imagine all the OEM crap that Windows laptops come with that usually cause instability and hog resources.