In simplest terms: if you don’t tell the kernel that you’re waiting, the scheduler assumes you aren’t and will wake you up and let you spin, to the detriment of other threads that aren’t waiting.
If the OS knows that a thread is waiting for a lock, the scheduler will not bother to schedule it until the lock is available.
In general, it’s tempting when you’re bound by lock latency to skip the syscall overhead of sleeping. But a lot of the time that’s a code smell that there are other inefficiencies in the system and you should rethink how you’re scheduling work.
> from a business perspective AI is a legit threat to Amazon because headless Amazon makes it more difficult for Amazon to sell ads, which is a large part of their revenue.
The dystopian part of me suspects that this is just a temporary blip as Amazon pivots from ads designed for humans to ads designed for agents. Which, in its truest form is just Amazon being a middle-man for bribing or poisoning agents.
In the end, it’s hard to not view everything through a lens of back dealing and anticonsumer enshitification.
Or maybe I’ve watched just one too many influencer videos on how the AI bots are either going to destroy humanity or take all the jobs.
There are a lot of companies and academic institutions working on genomics. Most don’t do self promotion at the scale that Google does. And most aren’t on the HN radar.
My job hasn’t completely changed. It’s changed, but fundamentally I solve problems. Sometimes LLMs help me do that now.
The job market sucks, but there are so many confounding factors: pandemic over hiring, the loss of ZIRP, an economy that would be recession if it weren’t for data center investment, and may be in
recession soon even with it.
This industry has been in down cycles before. It’s just been a while. So far it feels like a down cycle, not the sky falling.
It’s not clear what the future will hold, but I’m 100% sure it won’t evolve the way Anthropic predicts. Both because they have strong biases and because there's just no way to predict how this technology will play out. Humans are, if anything, remarkably adaptable.
> one academic lab getting scooped by another lab (usually by coincidence).
I was with you up to “usually by coincidence”.
There’s a long and sordid history in areas of chemistry and areas of biology of holding up a competing paper in review so you can scoop them. I’m sure it exists in physics as well. Certainly biophysics, but probably most subfields.
Often it’s a famous labs that can steamroll review or even just dump the work into PNAS as a “member contribution.”
At least one author of a famous inorganic chemistry textbook was rumored to do this routinely.
And I know of at least one National Academy member who swore off arxiv prepublication after getting scooped.
None of this makes it all right. But plagiarism and academic theft is old and definitely not always accidental.
I know this happens, but my impression during my phd was that many labs use popular methods to test popular questions, leading to a lot of simultaneous work. You see this in history as well.
There’s a reason that many CEOs have a stint in sales.
In a stable, profitable company, you need sales to keep the business solvent. And understanding the sales pipeline is pretty essential to effectively running a business.
Where this breaks down is when the C-suite forgets that you also need a product, and you need to keep innovating on that product in ways that bring value to current and future customers. This seems to happen pretty frequently.
> we've had Superhuman Intelligence for at least hundreds, if not thousands, of years in the form of corporations and institutions.
It’s true that collective groups of humans can accomplish tremendous things, but I hesitate to use “superhuman intelligence” for corporations, governments, and institutions.
So much of what they do ends up being very focused on process for the sake of process. And is often so very dumb.
They're de facto superhuman. Even with the friction and stupidity, they still have more agency than an individual human and process a much bigger entropic footprint for both information and physical resources.
You occasionally get Great Leaders who build these systems as personal affordances. But even then these system are far beyond any one person's ability to manage the details. And they often take on a life of their own.
Our individuality is actually a myth. We're more like a colony organism that self-organises into different sub-organisms. The sub-organisms compete with each other, which is why we're not a smart colony organism.
If individual intelligence was aligned along colony goals at shared planetary scale we'd be something else entirely.
The biological systems that support human intelligence are notoriously messy and work together only tenuously with a great many failure modes, including "process for the sake of process"
> And by the mid 80's the moats were already very deep.
You raise some good points, but I don’t think the idea of moats from the 80s really holds up. None of the obvious moats in the mid-80s are still dominant players. In the mid-80s the PC market was still pretty new. Business was still run on IBM mainframes, DEC VAX, and other systems that were overtaken by forces in the late-80s and early 90s. These seemed unstoppable until they weren’t.
I think the strongest counter example, though, is probably Linux. If your thesis was correct, an early-90s hobby operating system by some kid at a uni in Finland would never be dominant in cloud server spaces by the 2000s.
> Amiga couldn't over come the PC.
This is probably your best example. I would add BeOS to this.
On the other hand, Apple managed to attract a core audience and stay alive (even if barely) through the 90s. Sometimes you don’t have to overtake; you just need to have a solid niche.
> IBM couldn't over come the moat of Windows with OS2.
OS/2 originally lost to Windows as a successor to DOS due to execution, not because Windows had a huge moat. OS/2 Warp was a bit later.
The story of OS/2 failing is sad and as much about IBM internal politics as about Microsoft succeeding.
> Intel couldn't overcome x86 with the i432 or Itanium.
Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s (and possibly today) and didn’t seem to understand that most business applications at the time were limited by branching and integer computations. That stuff doesn’t vectorize well. The arch might be better-received today, although moving pipeline concerns to the compiler still seems like a bad choice to me.
As a counterpoint, consider the rise of ARM in the 2010s. An arch known mostly in the embedded world has become a real player in the desktop and server environment. All because of the rise of phones, reasonable licensing, and better perf/watt at low power than x86.
> Intel bet on compilers being far smarter than they were in the 2000s
Funny Intel didn’t just fell for this once, but twice. I wonder what was Microsoft’s role on Itanium’s failure - it would be in their best interest for it to succeed with Windows running on it.
What you’re saying is that they should be charging $2000 or more per month then.
Perhaps that’s true, but it’s a price tag that’s a lot harder to swallow for many orgs than $200/mo, and would require some hard justification for how your increased productivity contributes to the business bottom line.
I’ll agree that you can probably do that with hard numbers. I am skeptical that most $200/mo users could.
I think the rapid improvements in local models will make a $2,000/mo price point completely impossible to sustain. This feels like a race to the bottom.
If the OS knows that a thread is waiting for a lock, the scheduler will not bother to schedule it until the lock is available.
In general, it’s tempting when you’re bound by lock latency to skip the syscall overhead of sleeping. But a lot of the time that’s a code smell that there are other inefficiencies in the system and you should rethink how you’re scheduling work.
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