Because most people are working at Failure/Feature factories where they might work on something and at last minute, they find out something is now warning. If they work on fixing it, the PM will screaming about time slippage and be like "I want you to work on X, not Y which can wait".
The value for TFCDK was Developers don't have to learn another language, they can just continue to use existing language they already know.
Downsides are doing infrastructure in a programming language was always problematic unless developer was skilled at Ops which most who used TFCDK were not.
It is easier then smuggling drugs because US is not making it difficult to sidestep the sanctions. Hey, this random house in Delaware is buying a ton of GPUs, should we investigate? Nah, our donors don’t actually want Nvidia stock to go down so ignore it.
I don’t think the root problem is political corruption or donors.
If anything, the hundreds of millions of dollars from AI lobbyists would overwhelmingly support anything that would prevent anyone outside of the US getting their hands on computer chips.
The AI lobby in support of banning export of chips is way greater than anyone lobbying the opposite.
> should we investigate? Nah, our donors […]
The US government is a very slow moving bureaucracy. Slower to adapt than the slowest moving large public company.
The GPU chip issue came about suddenly, out of the blue, and caught the government unprepared. When that happens, it typically takes government years to catch up and figure out how to adapt.
Even in cases where incentives are aligned in favor of the government’s position, they still take forever to roll out meaningful change with effective enforcement - e.g. charging sales tax on software business, remember that Supreme Court case years ago? Or remember all the concern about engineer salaries being de-categorized as R&D? These are examples that are legally decided but gov is incredibly slow to enforce. The Wayfair supreme court case was back in 2018, right? Many years later, most SaaS companies are still getting away with not charging sales tax. Certain states are just now stating to enforce, 7 years later.
Investigate and do what? It's not illegal to buy GPUs, the sanctions have no power in this space. Who could a law even hurt here, the seller who is a single individual? If they made it illegal to individually export them out of the US the Chinese could just buy them somewhere else.
You can investigate buyers who have anomalous purchase patterns for sanction violations and convict them. DEA commonly looks at narcotic purchases by legal buyers for indications they might be funneling it to illegal market and investigates. NVidia could report "Hey, we are seeing massive purchases from entities we didn't expect so you might want to look into that"
Zoho is crap. Sure, on the tin it comes with 64 different things, but many are poorly integrated and feature set is just enough to be like "Yes, we have that feature."
Interesting. I know I'm not a very demanding user of word processing or presentation software. But I've been using zoho for basic business stuff for one of my businesses since 2019, and I wouldn't call it crap. It's not amazing, but I pay something like $12/user/year. And I get shared docs/sheets/decks + pretty decent email. And their transactional email service (zeptomail) is actually top notch IMO.
What missing integration makes you say "it's crap" and what do you consider a good version of that thing?
I am a home user, but I use Zoho's paid email service as a backup and alternative to Gmail and Outlook, and it is pretty decent and extremely affordable.
Probably been about 2 years since I was forced to last use it but with amount of slop being added, their development priorities would have to massively changed.
I mean, the law already holds shops accountable, but problem is regulators let Amazon get away with "We are a marketplace" despite them actually selling stuff as first party and allowing third parties use their logistics and warehouses.
The "marketplace" loophole which allows a few dominant websites to insulate themselves from consequences for illegitimate sales is at the root of the consolidation decried in the top-level article.
LineageOS doesn't customize the hell out of their OSes per device.
That's core of the issue. Samsung takes Android, customizes per device and then tosses them into the world. So now they don't have 1 OS to update, they have 100s of OSes to update.
Most companies I’ve been at that use Teams over Slack is not “We can’t get contract for Slack” but “We have Teams included, why would we pay for Slack?” - Accountant
I guess Microsoft lost this battle, at least at some companies, because I'm now at one that uses Slack and Google, with no dependency on Microsoft Office.
Microsoft won this battle if you check the numbers. Last I saw it was 85% Microsoft vs 15% Google which seems right with my experience. Current company is Google Worksapce while last 3 were Office365.
Teams was clearly never meant to be used as a standalone product. It was a pretty effective defense play. Block other competitors from gaining a foothold.
Thats the whole point. The only people using Teams are the ones who are already committed to Microsoft 365. Companies on GSuite mostly use Slack, I doubt there is a single one using Teams.
>Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
IBM has a ton of Enterprise software, backed by a bunch of consultants hiding in boring businesses/governments.
They also do a ton of outsourcing work where they will be big enterprise IT support desk and various other functions. In fact, that side has gotten so big, IBM now has more employees in India in then any other country.
Agree on the Kafka thing though. I've seen so many devs trip over Kafka topics, partitions and offsets when their throughput is low enough that RabbitMQ would do fine.
The people distributing software should shut them damn up about how the rest of the system it runs in is configured. (But not you, your job is packaging full systems.)
That said, it seems to me that this is becoming less of a problem.
2 Years later, you have hundreds of warning.
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