I guess you can think of this as my retirement from Hacker News. Thank you kind stranger.

$150 billion is bullshit as well, R&D spending they have committed to is actively going down year over year. No details at all on how they came up with that number and nothing at all has been signed.

So don't think my hostile opinion towards developers that are involved in using AI to abuse their fellow humans is going to be remotely rare in the future. All the necessary preconditions are already there and the only reason it hasn't been noticed yet is because the people that fucked up are still able to get jobs at companies riding AI funding to do AI work.

Look what happened to a lot of the crypto bros. Now multiply that by 10 and the amount of nasty shit they were doing to other workers by 10 and I don't think people are going to take it as lightly as a lot of the crypto bros got off, which was usually just a black mark and severe down leveling when they came back to work at actual companies.

This is good in the long run since the behavior they were engaging in puts them at odds with nearly half the population. Not only is it anti-social behavior, it's mind numbingly stupid and likely to backfire in ways that make their lives worse.

~43% of the cell phones out there in the US are Android phones. To follow their conviction against Android at all convincingly and thoroughly, they would be missing out on a lifetime of opportunities and would live a significantly diminished existence.

iPhone is not even close to being a dominant enough platform to be able to enforce this kind of social pressure against anyone but people significantly under the age of 18. Shame them, make sure they feel bad and spoiled (they should feel spoiled for being a child with an iphone), and watch them grow out up to be pro-social adults.

I don't live in such a bubble, and whether or not somebody has Apple or Android is not something I have ever heard an adult bring up as a serious thing. The most I've ever seen is as an observation about why some sort of thing in a group chat didn't work, but then everyone moves on with their day and the chat continues with the types of text and media that do work.

Take a look at the cache size on the Telum II, or better yet look at a die shot and do some measuring of the cores. Then consider that mainframe workloads are latency sensitive and those workloads tend to need to scale vertically as long as possible.

The goal is not to rent out as many vCPUs as possible (a busines model in which you benefit greatly by having lots and lots of small cores on your chip). The goal for zArch chips is to have the biggest cores possible with as much area used for cache as possible. This is antithetical to maximizing core density, and so you will find that each dual chip module is absolutely enormous, and that each core takes up more area in the zArch chips than in x86_64 chips, and that those chips therefore have significantly less core density.

The end result is likely that the zArch chips are going to have much higher single thread perf. Whereas they will probably get smacked by say a Threadripper on multithreaded workload where you are optimizing for throughout. This is ignoring intricacies about vectorizatiln and what can / can't be accelerated and whether or not you want binary or decimal floating point and other details and is a broad generalization about the two architectural general performance characteristics.

Likewise, the same applies for networking. Mainframe apps are not bottlenecking on bandwidth. They are way less likely to be web servers dishing out media for instance.

I really dislike seeing architectures compared via such frivolous metrics because it demonstrates a big misunderstanding of just how complex modern CPU designs are.

That's my biggest pet peeve with people that want to ditch mainframes, which is that they seem to care very little about the quality and performance of the software in my experience or they would only be thinking of replacing COBOL and Assembler code with an equivalently performant modern language and dialect. The desire to migrate is often driven primarily to have cheap, easily replaceable developers.

Of course we are talking about encryption here. TLS and AES etc etc. Not Bitcoin mining, which would indeed not be very cost effective.

Many of the big existing mainframe customers already have multiple max capacity models and are pushing them to their limits as web and analytics and AI/ML and a bunch of other factors increase the overall amount of workload finding their way to mainframes. IBM wouldn't be making those brand new generations of 4-frame models with a new larger max capacity if there weren't customers buying them.

At the end of the way we dont need to argue about this. The truth should be empirically knowable. If it's as useful as people say, it will show up in the GDP numbers (I wonder what's taking it so long...).