Even if you have the source and build system to recreate the exact binary blob and can reload it with Jedec or whatever, there is another world below the firmware...called microcode. Some of the microcode comes from the FAB preloaded! Even if you can get the source code for the microcode and somehow read it out and verify it is the same, you guessed it...there is another world below that [1 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/380555600_Trustwort... ] [2 https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3579856.3582837 ] [3 https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7546493 also https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A2%3A-Analog-Malicious... ]

A long time ago Apple learned that even the very best software people in industry, those top-of-class graduates from the most esteemed universities with pedigrees like "invented malloc" were stumbling at learning to program the original Macs. Before Apple acquired NeXT, reading "Inside Mac" all day and all night would not help as much as owning Steve Jasik's "THE Debugger" a fridge full of Code Red, gaining "organic knowledge" in ways that are not taught in a textbook and impossible if you are mid-career with a family. The Internet wasn't really a cheat code yet either. You couldn't hire someone to teach you such things. While this obviously was very (very!) Bad to the Sales and Marketing organizations hoping to sell more Macs (as DOS was continuing to advance into large institutions), it was awesome for the Mac bros who had that organic knowledge. But Steve returned towing NeXT and Avi's team of actual computer scientists and the deeply entrenched Boomer Mac Bros were not down with most real computer science and "sluffed off" (to become painters or whatever) like old skin. So first the mid-managers saw that shifting the platform in undocumented ways caused unproductive people to quit, then they saw that shifting the platform in documented ways caused people to quit and they thought "What an awesome way to get rid of unproductive people that you don't want around." This was great until they became so bold as to produce "The Crusty Talk" for WWDC one year and put it in terms that EEOC could begin to understand. EEOC is more about retraining the experienced workers rather than laying them off and hiring less experienced workers to learn something New. (It sounds completely crazy to people that came after the Boomers, but accept that point as fact, for now.) One can begin to imagine why that video isn't on Apple's website anymore. Back to Liquid Sluff, I mean Liquid Glass: Wasn't the whole transition to SwiftUI supposed to be about enabling the less experienced (and cheaper!) New generation (I think they are called "blue hairs" though that seems counter intuitive) to takeover from the traditional seasoned professionals building in Objective C? SwiftUI doesn't seem to have worked if they can't flip a switch at the operating system and make all the apps built with it render in "Liquid Glass" without developer intervention! Now comes the quote "they'll find themselves in a tough position" and it all makes sense...it's probably more worker sluffing.

Who cares...at this point, Apple's whole operating system is going to be reduced to an API manifest for LLMs to ingest and WWDC will probably become even more of a non-technical VC event than it already is. (Oh wait, it's. a. video.) Maybe... just maybe, someday they will start to pick winners and losers in the LLM world by messing with the API manifest just like they messed with the SDKs for the human devs over the past 50 years :D I think SEC might be faster to catch that than EEOC ever would.

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Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47378917

Points: 75

# Comments: 26

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While there are other initiatives underway to make purchasing homes more affordable, they likely won't come to fruition before supply reaches a tipping point that causes rapid and sustained downward pressure on home prices. People buying now could be trying to catch a falling knife and end up owing more than their homes are worth.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47137360

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

Consider that back in the day, we once had a situation where the shared runtime library supporting a programming language on Megabank's PROD cluster was updated from something like 4.1.1 to 4.1.2 after months on its TEST cluster, plus lots of formal meetings, planning, pages of signatures, contingencies, extra ops people onsite, etc. --and Megabank still proceeded to loose more than ten grand per minute after pressing [Return] on that update. At least a dozen people lost their jobs at the following Friday morning meeting. It turned out that a subtle change in the vendor's implementation of a floating point function was not caught because testing didn't consider enough digits of precision. Mind you NO CODE WAS CHANGED, only a dynamically linked runtime library SUPPLIED BY THE COMPUTER MANUFACTURER --not a third party. Point being (no pun intended), when you go monkeying around with stable production systems that are doing On Line Transaction Processing (OLTP), "bad things" happen, treasure and careers are in jeopardy --and COBOL Life is all about what goes on inside of those systems.

Anthropic is great at gorilla marketing with all their PuRe BS and AI hype. Bottom line for the young peeps here:

1. There is really NO WAY IN HELL that any CIO at a credible Financial Institution will ever authorize a hallucinating chatbot to convert their core logic from COBOL to Python and Go.

2. The only way such institutions "escape" COBOL is through M&A (data --not code-- exported to the new entity's system).

3. As far as COBOL devs tapping out, that happened a very long time ago. (How many of you knew that COBOL was codeveloped by the late mathematician US Navy Rear Admiral "Amazing" Grace Hopper who also invented the first compiler?) COBOL is a simple computer language from a simpler time that enabled non-tech professionals from adjacent fields (like Accounting) to become application programmers (or "implementors" in the parlance of that era). Making minor changes to COBOL code such as PIC layouts and COMPUTE statements is no big deal that requires waking up a 95 year old, the problem is strictly related to production change control (like what version of the compiler and runtimes are you using to rebuild the production binary, etc.) and that isn't even specific to COBOL, except that it is better understood with more modern languages like C (but still remains an alien concept to almost an entire generation that entered the trade after 1997 due to all of the senior level people outside of a handful of tech companies being forced to crack open their 401Ks and move on to other fields during the dot-com crash).

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Ken Lay died an innocent man --he had a heart attack before his sentencing. He was brought down by whistleblowers. Hang tough peeps. Fight. Back. Against. AI. Bullshitters. https://youtu.be/qJiALpiqpk8

If OpenAI were one of many companies generally promoting the increased use of GPUs in industry, thereby developing the market that nVidia operates in, that would be one thing, but $30B, to one company, that then gets spent on nVidia purchases? Just, No. nVidia will get into a lot of trouble for doing this kind of deal that undermines confidence in the entire stock market.

2. but Perception is Reality in business

3. and FOMO is real.

Hence, the AI money machine https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1ppla7o/oc...

Even though many of these players are not publicly traded, they're clearly manipulating the public equity markets with their funky receivables and equity swaps, inadvertently creating what has become the largest "company" in the history of the World and setting us all up for a Greater Depression. https://d0k5l7l4820swi.archive.is/3GCs7/463302388f7f218ff374...

Like the USSR before it, China is a force to be reckoned with and certainly we need to increase national productivity and workforce participation in order to keep up with our debt, but this is not how we countered Sputnik as the memories of the 1930s and two World Wars were still top of mind. Look your children in the eyes and ask if the risk that's being put upon us is worth ...them. https://youtu.be/lNXTKVxOmfk

But all things aren't equal. Our country is deeply in debt and it is no longer clear to me that the government will reign in that stock manipulation activity before it crashes the market because it still believes, almost in desperation, the false narrative that by spending $600b on capEx, the grifters are going to exponentially increase GDP with magic AI productivity gains, thereby keeping the national debt at bay. This kind of setup could lead to a Greater Depression when they're proven wrong. Greater in the sense that people no longer know how to be that poor, not that they were particularly good at it in 1929. Way worse than 2001, and let me tell you...

"I'll take one." --watt hour that is :D https://youtu.be/5Bt_QVQexnI

@2:44 https://youtu.be/eegOQ3ErbFk those are bank owners .. don't (ever) ask me how I know

https://youtu.be/umJsITGzXd0 (I cannot find any of the old ATG videos featuring Agent Pierre online which was the same concept only shorter, less boring and funny.)

PS: One of the first things Steve did upon returning to Apple after a decade was to reciprocate by KILLLING OFF Sculley's baby (Apple Newton). As far as its replacement (iPad) that reportedly was developed (but not released) before iPhone, it really has always been a dumpster fire software wise (but the same can't really be said of the iPhone variant, which was brilliant for a phone form factor, at least for a while there), not because Apple didn't have capability to do a tablet right, but because of Apple's INTERNAL POLITICS (like https://youtu.be/J7al_Gpolb8?t=2286]) FWIW, I sense now that Apple is finally about to unify macOS and i{Pad}OS for its upcoming generation of devices and shift to multi-modal UX, getting us back to Sculley's original PDA vision.

There was also a Western paper on embedding hidden circuits (and thus functionality/ISAs) into CPUs and activating them in the field (after deployment) by executing a sequence of opcodes resulting in something akin to blowing a fuse on the processor die, thereby making the circuits invisible (to even a microscope) until activated. Those secret opcodes could then disable the chip or jump into a block of secret microcode and alter the program counter to behave in a non-standard manner so we might not easily be able to see what's happening, even if we knew to look. One still would have to deliver that secret sequence of opcodes to trigger such a stealth mode...that could be done via microcode/firmware updates from the manufacturer's website or an OS update, or similar techniques. Interestingly, an unexpected iteration of Chinese SoCs began flooding the markets just as the rest of the World was sustaining a "chip shortage" in a timeframe perfectly aligned with what would have been required to implement such a system after that paper was published.

Air-gapping the customer's devices during installation (to prevent the activation opcode sequence) might not work either. Many Chinese SoCs are used as embedded peripherals simply to add WiFi, Bluetooth and Thread capabilities onto existing designs via a simple UART or doorbell interconnect. This makes it too easy for these Chinese SoCs to also be listening for a Morse-code-like activation signal on a low-frequency band, triggering the backdoor to open (enabling a more conventional remote code execution port or logic debugger exposed via WiFi or BLE for example, or causing malfunction or damage to what's on the GPIO or UART pins). Such low-frequencies could be disguised (think Blue Whale signals) so they might be sent slowly over great distances (or even from floating weather balloons or low earth orbit) without drawing too much suspicion. https://youtu.be/E-gbYjLd93g