Not a lot against the guy, but he should be #5 .. he merely continued the trajectory set by the others.

For nearly 15 years.

Jobs passed in 2011. Tim Cook has been at the helm for 15 years since then. Even if he was coasting, Apple has done remarkably well in those 15 years just coasting alone. Most companies falter and die out by then. Heck, after Apple ousted Jobs as CEO, they were struggling by the time Jobs came back and he wasn't gone nearly as long as he is now.

Even if Tim Cook did absolutely nothing for the 15 years he was CEO, the fact that Apple is still around and still going strong is already a huge credit to his (non-)leadership in managing to keep the ship steady.

Tell me how many other CEOs are like that - because history is littered with failed companies whose leadership wanted to make their mark and then their companies imploded. Like Apple nearly did 20 years ago.

Tim Cook, by "doing nothing", managed to keep Apple on the up and up, and history reveals this isn't usually what happens.

The last time, it was likely Intel buying up AMD CPUs and dumping them. As well as forcing Microsoft and Sony to use AMD chips.

AMD has its ups and downs, and Intel was riding high, but Intel needed AMD to survive to avoid antitrust activity as well. Getting rid of fabs was one thing as they are expensive.

But Chipzilla is still very big and making a lot of money. And they released new chips that are surprisingly competitive. They're not fast against the top end 9860X3D CPUs, but are very cost competitive when compared to the midrange parts, or even faster than them. At the same price or lower.

They've also seen a bump in sales in chips supporting DDR4. So going into 2025 it was doom and gloom for Intel, but for 2026 so far, Intel is holding its own and maybe even starting a comeback.

And even after all these years there are still plenty of idiots who don't understand what the word "average" means. I always see them slowing down for a camera then speeding right back up again afterwards. How do people this dumb get a license?

There was a comedy troupe that posted 3 people along the first. The first one carried a sign that read "Speed camera ahead".
The second one carried a sign that read "Just kidding".
The third one carried a sign that read "Sorry".

The thing was, there was a speed trap between the second and third person. They'd slow after the first, speed way up for the second and get caught, then the third sign apologized.

There's a YouTube video of them driving and what you'd see and it's been reported a few times.

Also, many toll roads especially in Asia do this as well - you get a ticket when you enter the toll road, then you'd hand it in when you exit and they'll charge you the toll based on distance travelled. Problem is, they also note your average speed.

Though I do remember at least one having a rest stop with a restaurant on it - so stopping for a break and/or food would lower your average speed considerably.

Honestly, that's a pretty good spread for a small crew. And is much higher than any other population sample you could take. It only happened because these things are planned out so far in advance, that Trump's anti-DEI couldn't have taken effect without delaying it for at least a couple more years.

And the moon is not an easy feat - if you want a rough idea of scale, put a half inch sized circle on one of your wrists, Then put a dot on the other wrist. Then stretch your arms wide and you have a near scale representation of the Earth, the Moon, and the distance involved. Yes, it's that far apart and likely a lot further than books and school would have you believe. Or likely you would even believe.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

You don't. Because home internet connections, even the multi-gigabit ones, are terrible for things that need constant ping.

It's why people have been hosting services where they can get a dedicated IP, or likely one shared with similar services. Those hosting servers tend to have guarnateed connectivity.

Because direct IP connections sucked, and it's why booter services aren't so common nowadays. Because that's what happened in the past - if you got angry, you started pingflooding the host IP and making everyone's game terrible.

These days, you still have booter services, but they're services you pay for, and they're not used as much because the hosting server often hides the IP of everyone else.

I don't disagree with local servers, but maybe let's leave them on the local LAN plan. If you want to expose it to the Internet, then you can, and if you do, better have the expertise to know how to host it yourself.

And no, IPv6 won't fix this - because IPv6 only guarantees everyone gets a globally unique IP address. It doesn't guarantee that end-to-end connectivity will work. Thanks to firewalls and such which are a practical necessity these days.

The popularity of online multiplayer competitive play is driven in part by centrally hosted servers where there are people who do protect them against attacks meant to spoil the fun of everyone involved. Only a huge data center really has that ability. But if you want to host a small scale server on your own for you and a few friends, you should have the option as well

But what I think is really going on is dodgy attorneys have been putting fake citations in their briefings for centuries and we are hearing about it because they're using AI to generate the fake citations instead of just making them up on the spot like they used to. I suspect judges and defense attorneys are scrutinizing citations more too because they've seen the stories about AI.

But I do think it would be naive to believe that given how skeezy attorneys can be that they haven't been feeling their portfilings with bullshit long before AI slop was a thing

Fake citations are trivial to find. If sketchy lawyers have been putting fake citations in their briefs, you can bet it'll be found out. It's why AI generated briefs have been found out. All it would take is a lawyer competent in their area of the law, and if you cite some strange case they never heard of saying something they never heard of, they're going to look it up to see what's happening. So you might bamboozle some lawyer who doesn't know their work, but there are experts who know the case law inside and out who you can't surprise because they know all the case law and a strange citation they don't know about will be looked up just in case.

LLMs don't need fake citations to generate fake citations. All they are is a statistical text model - this token follows this token, repeat ad nauseum. Basically the AI LLM just takes some text, looks at the context to adjust the weightings of the model, then looks at say, the top 10 words that follow and depending on the settings, picks one. Then it repeats the entire process again.

Citations being fake are thus easy - the citation looks a certain way, usually a year, followed by the state or something representing the court, then a case number, and so on. And naturally those things can have weights that are random because cases span all sorts of things. Cases that have been cited more often might have a heavier weight, while lesser cited ones are less probable.

Almost nobody actually laid of employees because of AI, that was just an excuse to downsize in slow markets. If sales were growing, the same number of employees could do more work via bots such that they wouldn't actually reduce head-count. The proper business move under gained efficiency in a normal economy is to chase market share, not lay off.

Yeah, AI layoffs were layoffs to avoid the stock price from going down. Just like RTO mandates.

What it really means is despite the numbers, the economy is in far worse condition than what it appears to be. It turns out lots of things are hiding the truth - Uber, Lyft, and delivery services are skewing unemployment numbers, for example. Because instead of applying for unemployment, most of those laid off people are picking up gig work. And it doesn't show up in the unemployment numbers - either by applications for unemployment, or in the unemployment rate. It doesn't even show up in the labor participation rate numbers because for all intents and purposes, gig workers are employed.

No one wants to admit it but they see the slowing numbers. It's just that what traditionally was a hard cliff is now muted due to complex effects of things like gig work.

They need to implement BitTorrent or something. There's no reason everyone has to compile this shit themselves.

Technically it has to be done for every graphics card model out there.

Shaders are real programs, and your graphics driver ships with a compiler (usually based on LLVM) that takes those shader programs and produces the final binary from it for your specific video card. Now, usually the source code to the shaders are not given - instead they are in IR (intermediate representation) which is basically the binary parse tree of the shader (hence why LLVM is generally desired because the front end compiles down to IR, and the back end then translates it to the actual architecture).

GPU makers almost never retain binary compatibility so different GPUs will almost always require a different binary. Developers generally don't have access to every GPU so they can't ship with everything precompiled. And besides, compilers can get better so a later driver might ship with a better compiler that gives you better performance.

Steam attempts to fix this - they started by doing shader caches on the Steam Deck - since the Steam Deck is identical they simply capture the results of compilation and distribute it with the game. Later on they added support to their PC client to do same but you have to have the same GPU model and likely driver version.

The problem is climate change caused by a warming planet. Everyone thinks that means winters get more pleasant, maybe summers get hotter.

What it really means is the trend line goes up, but weather gets more unpredictable. There are no error bars here - you average the temperature over the surface of the Earth and it's going up.

But weather has no part to play in it - one region can be extremely cold. It just means another region will be extremely hot by the same amount, or if it's a bigger region, warmer by a smaller amount. It's just how averages work.

The only truth we know is that the weather will get wilder. We will see winters where huge dumps of snow and record breaking cold will happen far more than normal. And winters where it wouldn't snow a single day. If an area used to reliably get snow every winter, well, it's a whole lot less reliable. Heck, we can expect with some regularity spring or summer like weather in winter. And summers will be scorchers, but there might be a day you have to break out the winter clothes because it suddenly drops. Rare, but it will happen. You might see spring have 100+F weather for a week be the new normal. Or it can dump snow and be -10 in May.

That's what happens with climate change. The usual weather patterns that we've had just became a lot less usual. Weather will just be a lot more extreme and the 100 year floods might become the 10 year floods (even though that's really not what it means - it just means if you graph the average height of a river over the years, the "100 year flood" means it's the 1 percentile height - the height at which there's a 1% chance of happening).

If you can't, or won't work from home, having work from home still benefits you.

First, if people around you are working from home, suddenly rush hour stops being such. You benefit because the roads are less busy so you get a smoother commute. Less traffic on the roads means you get to your destination way quicker and time spent commuting goes down.

Second, if you have to fight for parking, well, less people to fight with which means you probably can find a parking space much quicker or it's just less packed overall so you're not hunting for that one empty space.

Third, if you're packed in the office, fewer people means more space.

All this means everyone saves on gas - working from home people save on gas. Everyone having to go into the office means gas isn't wasted in traffic jams of hunting for parking as well.

It's just like how improving public transit options helps those who have to commute by car as well - someone taking the bus means one less car on the road. A full bus means several blocks worth of cars are taken off the road making the road less congested overall.

Benefits all around. Even better, it doesn't actually cost taxpayer money to implement - no one has to build new roads. Heck, make it so employers who want people in the office should provide electric cars to their employees or pay a gas tax and RTO will suddenly reverse.

An AI data center can replace a legion of human workers. So the heat emissions can be offset if those humans cease to exist.

A human operates at anywhere from 75-150W of energy. At 150W, a MW of energy is 6666 people. A rack in a datacenter right now consumes around 5-15kW, so a megawatt is around 100 racks.

AI datacenters are attempting to scale that up to 100kW per rack.

And none of that includes cooling and ancillary - this is just pure compute power consumption.

Jobs gets all the accolades and fame but he was just a pushy sociopath in a suit, plenty of others could have done what he did. VERY few could have done what Wozniak did and its a damn shame that not many people outside of the tech world have heard of him.

That is false. Jobs and Wozniak actually are the yin and yang of Apple. Wozniak by himself, left to his own devices, would still be working at HP. Jobs by himself, would have been a has-been engineer. Jobs was actually competent as an engineer (unlike say, other "engineers" like Musk).

Jobs though, was more tuned into the business side of things than the engineering side of things, while Woz was the opposite.

Woz and Jobs got started by making a blue box - Jobs had read about them in the Esquire article, and Woz built one of the first digital blue boxes. Both of them went around Berkeley selling them to college students for $150 or so and they made a few thousand.

Jobs knew about computers, Woz built a computer. Woz was basically giving the Apple I away at the Homebrew Computer Club and it was one among dozens of others doing the same. Jobs had the business acumen to recognize he could do one better and sold it to a computer store and get the production of it going (requiring Woz to sell his HP-35 calculator). They'd build 10 (all they could afford), sell them and use the money to build 20 and so on.

Wpz designed the hardware. Jobs saw the potential and could leverage the confidence he had to not just sell it, but to get it produced - arranging the suppliers to give them 30 days credit.

These days it's a lot easier since if you want something built, China can handle the production if you meet the minimum order quantity. But back then, it's not like there was a huge electronics supply chain, production lines, or anything else.

Both Jobs and Woz were soldering Apple Is in that garage too - like I said, Jobs was an OK engineer, but he knew talent. Woz was an excellent engineer, but was happy at HP and didn't really have the desire to start his own company.

It's Yin and Yang - you need both, which is how Apple got started. Woz would likely have kept this computer as a nifty prototype then bought a Commodore when they came out a few years later whilst still at HP. Jobs would likely have drifted among various electronics companies (he was at Atari) once the crash happened.

You have to remember Jobs went and found NeXT after Macintosh got the Apple board to oust him. He sold his Apple stock and basically created NeXT. He used the earnings at NeXT to basically backstop Pixar (who was struggling and about to go under) and eventually fund Toy Story.

And he brought the second coming to Apple, recognizing talent in Jony Ives to design a computer so unique everyone knew what it was.

Doesn't excuse Jobs being an asshole, though. The only redeeming personal quality Jobs had is that he managed his RDF (reality distortion field) to push the people who work for him to do their best work. He was a pain to work for, but if you actually do good, he did reward you to encourage you to do more great work.

I didn't know about that before.

That's always a big factor in early experimenting. Who pays for all the components and test equipment? Even when the labour is free, if you don't have the R&D resources you're forever dead in the water.

It's odd because it's a pretty well known story. Wozniak loved experimenting and HP had a policy that lets engineers have access to HP's parts to produce a product. The only restriction was that HP had the right to your invention if they wanted it.

Wozniak presented HP management with the then Apple I computer, but they rejected it because they couldn't believe anything using a standard TV would meet HP's quality. The reason being that TVs from random manufacturers will have different visual quality and there was no way to control it.

I found the book underwhelming. The Martian was a great book, and I read it long before I heard of the movie. Project Hail Mary I found was much more formulaic book and much less compelling a read than The Martian. I haven't read Artemis - in fact, I didn't know of it until recently.

It was my friend who introduced me to Project Hail Mary and said it wasn't as good. After getting my own copy at a local indie bookstore and reading it, I have to agree. It's a nice book, but honestly it lacked a lot of the surprise and wonder of The Martian.

Still, doesn't mean I don't want to see the movie, but i probably would get it on disc since I can't really justify seeing it in IMAX. Unless it was in 3D I suppose. 3D at home is basically dead which makes it impossible to see anything in 3D outside of theatres.

I can imagine Apple later removing the "paste anyway" option and requiring you to go to Settings > Privacy to confirm the action, like how they've done with running apps downloaded off of the internet

It's a function implemented in the shipped terminal.app. If you use a third party terminal app, it won't have the protection. Chances are if you're using a third party terminal you're probably sophisticated enough to not blindly run shell commands