What's the downside of having one API to pre-allocate memory to be used by the GC, and a second API to suspend/resume GC operations? When you run out of pre-allocated memory, it will resume GC operations automatically.
I'm naively thinking, the performance bottleneck is not with tracking allocations but constantly freeing them and then reallocating. Let the GC track allocations, but prevent it from doing anything else so long as it is under the pre-allocated memory limit for the process. When resumed, it will free unreferenced memory. That way, the program can suspend GC before a performance sensitive block and resume it afterwards. API's don't need to change, because the change at all that way.
I think they're just too focused on enterprise billing. Someone at google doesn't get that individuals trying it out is how they go their work and recommend this stuff.
Googlers tend to exist in an isolated bubble. In the corporate world, Azure is the default and they have Azure OpenAI. Why would someone bother with Gemini? Unless the devs at companies have a good experience with it of course.
Googlers are awesome/mean well, if only enough of them lurked here :)
Developer experience matters. This is what Vercel figured out and why their admin screens are sooooooo much better than anything AWS or Google creates.
"Developer experience matters" and "Vercel" being the example is something I never thought I would see together.
I actually do agree that Vercel's admin screens are quite good compared to the other usual suspects. But I don't consider that to be on the development side of things. It's done decently well because it is geared towards the business folks who are paying the bills.
Developers writing code on top of the development solutions produced by Vercel have been completely forsaken.
None of those are development tasks. IT tasks, I'd buy, but anyone deeply entrenched in IT are more likely going to want more powerful tools (even if harder to use). Vercel is geared towards the small groups where there are some developers on staff, but the budget makers are playing double-duty in IT roles.
I support this greatly. But I think instead of debating whether this makes sense or not, or speculating, let's consider that it is already in effect and consider it an experiment. Let's see how Australia is doing in 10 or 15 years, will those kids be resentful or regret the ban when they're 30?
Extremes are bad on either end. unrestricted internet access, even to those who can't defend themselves against harmful content is an extreme, some balance is long due. Since most other western countries chose to risk their kids in the name of liberty, let's wait and see whose trade off works out for the best instead of speculating what will or won't happen.
I wish more countries would experiment like this, and even more countries would learn.
You can't argue for UBI or drug decriminalization because some country experimented and succeeded and then oppose this sort of stuff. In the US, states are supposed to experiment with laws like this, but they don't have enough power to regulate interstate communication or commerce.
That's an interestingly named product. Bloodhound is a well known/established security tool/platform. You're in for legal trouble I think. But legality and suits aside, you guys also use graph-db from the sound it, just like them. were you familiar with their product?
How does it compare to codeql (github), whitesource/mend? I'm used to just looking at the reports and validating things, is your main sell here that you auto-generate exploits and validate the vulnerability? Will your VS/IDE extension integrate in-line with the code, highlighting findings and helping you trace the execution flow?
Kindle/ePub and audio books are great, authors are publishing more content from what I've seen that would be prohibitive to do so with print.
Personally, I need to not stare at a screen at some point and need to use print. It would be great if Amazon or someone else had a service that would take pdfs and epubs print them as mass market paperback and ships it to you. A lot of content is kindle/digital only these days unfortunately. I would think it won't cost > $20 per-print, I'd be willing to pay twice that plus shipping. Even for older books, you can only get used versions, and even then if you're lucky. It would be nice if the digital versions were available for on-demand printing.
everybody wins. amazon, publishers, authors, they can all get more revenue. Especially for things like novellas, short stories, mangas,etc.. where mass market publication doesn't make sense. or to gauge interest prior to mass-market publication. But for existing works, you're right, that might be a pain, especially then the authors are deceased.
this type of stuff is generally for interviews. But it does tell you that the candidate has learned the patterns in question. That particular solution isn't important, but knowing good design patterns to solutions is. Knowing how a decent number of problems are best solves gives them a good intuition of how to tackle problems. Otherwise, they would tackle it using their intuition/vibes. There are books one can read to learn this stuff as well I'm sure, but how do you prove what knowledge you've retained?
10 programmers will write 10 different ways to solve a simple problem. and that code is tech-debt other programmers have to maintain at some point. Just having coders that have the same base-level memorized problem solving patterns can ease that pain, and it can make collaboration/reviews easier down the road.
I just realized that the netflix ceo is a big-time democratic party donor, and that paramount is supposedly being supported by larry ellison (big-time republican/trump donor) and saudis? I'm sensing a strong political/influence angle here by the billionaires.
russia doesnt have oligarchs for 15 years at least, it has the opposite of it. Oligarchs control the big chunks of economy, media and have a lot of political influence direct and indirect. What they have right now is some friends of the dictator who own something until dictator allows them.
The closest US has to olugarcha is Bezos and Musk, but they dont have each their own party and a few poket ministers in addition to owm bank and 20ish percent gdp.
I think we are well into uncharted territory. One thing's for sure - here be dragons. I'm sure the US version of oligarchy will come in its unique flavor. Probably people won't even fall out of windows! That mode of "suicide" is maybe distinctly Russian.
Yes you can donate (why did you add the word "directly"?). It just passes through intermediary organizations, such as the Friends of the IDF. There are even non profits that pay for "lone soldiers" -- international mercenaries -- to take part in the genocide in Gaza. Hundreds of thousands of "lone soldiers" took part, I believe something like 20,000 came from the US alone.
So we just blatantly lie now because "Israel=bad"? You can't donate directly to the IDF. US funding isn’t paying Oracle through some back door. If you’ve got a real source, show it—otherwise it’s just nonsense.
Thank you for asking! I thought I was just making funny comment on political situation. After quick search it turns out its not funny… just predictible.
“Larry Ellison donates $16.6 million, says, ‘Since Israel’s founding, we have called on the brave men and women of the IDF to defend our home’”
Oh and i know FIDF - Friends of the IDF (nonprofit through which these donations are going) are just that. Just friends.
That’s misleading. You can’t directly donate to the IDF—people give to NGOs that support soldiers’ welfare, not combat operations or weapons. And while Ellison has given millions to FIDF, there’s no evidence he’s “the largest donor,” and no public ranking shows that. You can dislike Israel without inventing facts.
Why do you have such an issue with the donation to the IDF? I understand disputing that he's the largest donor, but I doubt he has ever written a big cheque directly to Trump (or in fact anyone except his family) either, is it also unclear whether he's a Trump donor?
Even if there were no mechanism for donating to the IDF available to the general public, do you believe someone like Ellison couldn't easily give money to whomever he wanted?
It’s something I recently learned and has informed the way I think about him and his family. Seems others have appreciated the knowledge too.
As a Jew myself, I think the actions of Israel over the past 2 years are clearly ethnic cleansing and I believe anyone who supports that effort should be exposed for doing so.
My man, you don't have to mince words here. This hostile bid is backed by Jared Kushner, who is the President's son in law. One Rich Asshole owns Paramount, and is most certainly supporting the bid here.
This deal would also leave CNN in a very vulnerable position (they are owned by WB), which is exactly what Trump wants.
One thing that is remarkable is how fast American media companies are folding or getting scooped up by the oligarchs in order to bring the sacrificed carcass to the ruler. Even Putin did not have it this easy - took him years.
It took decades, this is the late stages of an organized and intentional process they've been working towards, and spending vast amounts of money on, since the 1990s if not earlier.
Netflix isn't buying CNN though, Paramount can just pick up Discovery on the cheap when its split off. There's no reason for them to even be trying to do a hostile bid either. I think this is just purely an ego/power trip thing.
It's scheduling. WBD was set to spin off Discovery Global in April --- after the March congressional primaries. The hostile bid creates leverage to get the TV networks spun off sooner, rather than later, to ensure that the Ellisons can pick them up Q1, in time to set the narrative for the congressional primaries.
Party X may have been planning on something, but party Y threw a wrench in the middle, causing party X to have to make some response. By implication, party X believes party Y to be throwing a wrench, hence, party X must act. Therefore, party Y also must be planning something that counteracts party X's desires. If it weren't so, party X would not act (as that costs money).
The thing that contradicts Party X's desires can just be not doing the thing Party X wants done, it doesn't have to be doing an equal and opposite thing.
This seems like a variation on the fallacy of the excluded middle.
It's closer to so-far-unnamed fallacy of "the right has no agency." Everything they do is in response to something done by the democrats or the left or whatever and so they aren't responsible for their actions.
Netflix and those involved hasn't conclusively metamorphosed into a Larry Ellison-esque state of Lawn Moweriness.
Make no mistake, it (Netflix) is still a billionaire corp; on the humanity scale, it scores quite low, but not lawn mower low. They're still outside the Ellison event horizon.
More than that, Trump said yesterday that Netflix's purchase of WB "might be problematic" and that he would be "personally involved in the decision of approving it".
I am not a supporter of most things this admin is doing, but also wouldn't be too sure on this one. I found it interestingly odd that out of nowhere he makes a comment on the deal after attending an event dealing with celebrating music and film. A regular shakedown would have happened before the deal when he met with the Netflix CEO recently, which the added link article mentions and was a person who Trump liked.
And now we see the Paramount thing that leads me to think it fits more with the suggestion that he takes the side of the last person he speaks with, which was probably someone at the same event on the paramount side.
I wouldn't rule out that he now plays them against each other in order to get something from it, but don't think it was the original reason for helping to throw a wrench into it
I thought I read somewhere paramount is in survival mode, avoiding risky projects and focusing on reliable projects. This is surprising indeed.
Amazon took MGM, maybe netflix can take over paramount after it takes over warner bros?
I know people have strong opinions on this, but both from studios like warner and netflix, their quality has been subpar, i don't think this will change much in terms of risk taking. There used to be lots of more flops but lots of really good blockbusters as well. Now there are a lot less of both, it is profitable but enshittified.
Paramount sold themselves to Skydance who now get referred to as Paramount because Paramount is the older, stabler brand. That sale is generally considered to have pulled Paramount out of survival mode, though it will probably be at least a few more quarters before it the results are seen.
(Arguably, Skydance's ideas for Paramount are too similar to the weird Paramount and CBS divorce era, that I find it hard to believe Skydance is less wrong of a steward for Paramount than Paramount was before the consolidation. But a lot of that opinion comes from bias as a Star Trek fan and Skydance's approach seems to return to the semi-broken idea that Star Trek seems to be better as a film franchise than a TV franchise.)
Skydance owning both Paramount and Warner Brothers might be very concerning in terms of IP consolidation alone.
Skydance is also known as the then-obscure company that picked up Pixar head John Lasseter when his reputation for being overly affectionate got him pushed out of Disney.
It's one of the Ellison family's forays into media. David's sister/Larry's daughter Megan has Annapurna. Annapurna produced the Spike Jonze's AI romance "Her" and many of the the most prominent indie games of the last decade (Outer Wilds, Cocoon, Stray, Kentucky Route Zero, Sayonara Wild Hearts, Journey, Donut Country…).
Right. Also the weird part of the Skydance Lasseter drama is not just that is happened once, there, but that it happened at nearly the same time but worse at Annapurna. Annapurna games division that had done so well last decade got purged by rehiring someone to oversee it who had been fired the first time for the "overly affectionate" types of problems just before Annapurna's "Golden Age" and was hired as much to better align the games division with making movie knockoffs rather than producing indie darlings (which was a "distraction" for a company trying so hard to be a movie company). (You can almost excuse "hired someone Disney fired for this reason", but how do you excuse "we already fired once for this reason"?)
The Ellison family's willingness to be tied to serial harassers, and in the case of Annapurna in direct expense of being a beloved media producer, makes you wonder what worse skeletons that family has in its closet if this is already just the open awful stuff they want us to know about their close associates.
David Ellison was an intern at Pixar in college and has a personal relationship with Lasseter. Annapurna games was under his sister and has no management connection to Skydance.
I guess if there is any common denominator it’s a familial default to loyalty vs fear of public perception? Not the worst trait in the world despite leading to this outcome.
Also to be fair Lasseter’s “serial harassment” (while real and I’m not trying to discount) consisted of his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him. So while you can make the argument his firing had merit, his ”issue” is pretty easy to prevent at a new firm: No hugs policy
Do a quick web search for "lasseter harassment" before posting stuff about it, maybe?
Topmost link on DDG starts with:
"John Lasseter was accused by multiple former employees and reports of a pattern of unwanted sexualized behavior at Pixar and Disney Animation, including persistent unwelcome touching, kisses, and leering that made staff uncomfortable"
> his insistence that everyone hug him when greeting him.
As far as I understand it, that's the least objectionable of the many stories about him. From a 2017 article [1], we also have:
> “He’s very tactile in a weird way,” said one former female executive who, like others, spoke with Deadline on condition that she not be named in the story for fear of reprisals. “He would rub my leg in a meeting … It was creepy and weird. It got to the point where I wouldn’t sit next to him in a meeting, because it undermined everything I said.”
> Lasseter was observed passionately kissing a female subordinate at a 2010 Miramax party,
> one person saw Lasseter pull the female executive tightly to him and move his hands over her body. The female executive later sought to laugh off the encounter, saying she didn’t think her job description included “being groped by John Lasseter,” the observer said. “But you could tell she was pissed.”
> who's gonna produce that once Paramount owns HBO?
Netflix.
If they win, they own HBO. If they lose, they have a beef with Ellison.
(Speaking out of my ass here. But I think there is broad underappreciation of how intensely a lot of Hollywood creatives do not want to work for a rightwinger. I imagine Netflix, Disney and others will have a bit of a bonanza over the coming years of picking up disaffecteds from Paramount et al, even assuming the latter don't wind up in bankruptcy.)
Don't sleep on the A24 or NEON model. I think we'll see a boom in independent film production and distribution companies over the next few years, especially with the inevitable dry powder from either deal.
This is so fascinating to me. I mean how IBM keeps taking over other companies, but they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products. Why do they keep doing the same thing again and again? How are they generating actual revenue this way?
Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools? They have a mature PowerPC (Power9+? now?)setup, lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work and lots of existing investment in datacenters and getting GPU-intense workloads going.
I don't disagree that this acquisition is good strategy, I'm just fascinated (Schadenfreude?) to witness the demise of confluent now. I think economists should study this, it might help avert larger problems.
Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised.
At one point we worked with a large energy company that was basically sold something LLM-like (large-scale indexing and searching/querying of documents) in 2016 or so. IBM had a team of 90 people doing full-time data ingestion for something like 26,000 documents. We got asked to do a counter-product in two weeks, which was literally just a TF-IDF search and some smarts around ingesting different types of documents. Both solutions performed approximately equally, except one cost something in the order of $185m and one cost $40k. Watson continued running for about a year until an external data science contractor realised they could query Watson for highly confidential board meeting notes, and it would provide full previews into the documents. The project was shuttered shortly after.
Yep, and I think they've already used the Watson brand for a good bunch of different technologies, and most if them have been retired for lack of success. In fact, seems like a couple weeks ago they've sold a good chunk of Watson Healthcare to private equity [0]. Edit: When I talk about the lack of success, I talk not only about market success, but the usefulness of the product.
Until 3/4 years go I was in healthcare for 15 years, a good bunch of them being partners with IBM in radiology imaging solutions. I've been in their IBM La Gaude (former) research/presentations lab a couple times and I've seen a lot of their Watson product come and go, without much success. I have to say that I've seen a couple that were very interesting, but were mostly statistical, with no AI/LLM/... involvement.
And don't talk me about Softlayer/Bluemix. Or their private cloud racks that I cannot even remember their name...
> Watson was a marketing exercise designed to sell a bunch of disconnected text and image processing libraries pulled together by consulting services. It did not function as advertised.
Okay, but why can't IBM enter the LLM business reviving the Watson brand?
Why in the world would economists need to study this? It's been known that large bureaucracies have been dysfunctional for over a couple of decades now if not centuries. The large reason is because 1) the incentives to do great work are not there (most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing) 2) politics usually plays a huge role which gives a huge advantage to your competition (i.e. your competition needs to spend less time on politics and more time on the actual product) and 3) human beings don't functionally work well in groups larger than 100-250 due to the overwhelming complexity of the communication needed in order to make this type of structure work. Incentives though I think are the primary driver - most people at companies like IBM don't have any incentives to actually care about the product they produce and that's the secret behind the ruin of almost every large company.
Edit: you also seem to be giving too much credence to Watson. Watson was actually mostly a marketing tool designed to win in Jeopardy and nothing else. It was constructed specifically to compete in that use-case and was nowhere near to the architecture of a general transformer which is capable of figuring out meta-patterns within language and structurally understanding language. You can read about Watson's design and architecture here if you're curious: https://www.cs.cornell.edu/courses/cs4740/2011sp/papers/AIMa...
More like we need psychologists to ask "why are companies still working with IBM's efficiencies 30 years after its peak?" The workers don't have to care but the businesses dealing with IBM should.
I may be wrong but I think it's mostly for things like enterprise support in case something goes wrong. IBM has had a large footprint in enterprises (WebSphere MQ, etc). People don't want disruptions in case your own kafka cluster with in-house engineers accountable for everything. So having enterprise support for product/ infra gives a sense of safety. At times rightly so. Depends on a lot of factors- risk appetite, capabilities of in-house engineers, what's at stake, and mostly psychological safety, etc.
> most of the credit for a huge company's success goes to the CEO who gets 100X the salary of a regular worker while delivering usually pretty much nothing
Well, in Confluent's case I'm not so sure that's true given that their CEO is also the company founder as well as one of the original authors of Apache Kafka.
Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company. They don't care about building great products. In fact building self-serve products will directly take away from their consulting revenue. They instead need to be good at marketing and selling their services. Watson was exactly that - a marketing demo that got them in the news cycle and helped them sell a giant wave of contracts under a single brand to unsuspecting CIOs of legacy non-tech companies. Every acquisition helps with this goal. Red Hat - locking companies into licenses and support contracts for the OS. HashiCorp & Confluent - locking companies into support contracts for their cloud infra.
>> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? [...] Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?
> Everything will make sense when you realize that IBM is a consulting company.
This and.
The 'and' being that consulting companies, in their DNA, build solutions for their customers.
Which is a very different business than building products for all users.
Not least because the former is guided by understanding a customer's requirements, while the later is having a strong intuition (backed up by market fit) about what all users want.
I'm pretty sure there might not be a full end user capable (in the sense of design-build-iterate) product team in IBM at this point.
Mostly because I don't think they've any middle/upper management that can think that way. They've got the engineers!
The service part you are likely referring to is now Kyldryl, a separate company. IBM now focus on software and cloud. There are still services but are much less prominent.
- the pure consultancy is another company now
- the IBM portfolio of software "products" are being packaged in ways that emphasize professional services and elaborate licensing schemes (rather than turnkey software)
> they consistently deliver low quality/bottom-tier services and products
I worked with IBMers. The main priority for a lot of them is to ensure continuous employment for themselves and their buddies. They'd add unnecessary complexity to a product to stretch out the development for another couple of years. And they work at leisure pace for tech. Actual 9 to 5, many coffee breaks. They can't compete.
Well, I don't know anyone who takes a full 1 hour lunch break -- back when I was in the office, I reckon it was more like 30-45 minutes? But people at all 4 office jobs I've worked did a standard 9-5 schedule.
But yes, "out the nose" is qualified by your particular situation. For me, that might be 2-3x my normal salary, which would mean I could take breaks for a few years or retire sooner.
I worked with IBM several decades ago for a customer project, and the solution suggested by an IBM'er for backing up a NoSQL database (Lotus Notes) on a daily basis was to translate and migrate the data to a relational one (DB2), then use a DB2 tape backup system to back it up.
When I pointed out that this was a stupid way to do it, they openly told me that they just wanted to sell DB2.
Aside from having like 9 managers, 8 of whom are totally purposeless in your professional life, then yeah it’s not bad. The benefits are good.
I worked with some pretty talented and dedicated people at IBM. The “hop on a 2am call to put out a fire because they happened to check their email and they owed the person on pager duty a beer” kind of people.
That company was a red tape rats nest, but that’s management’s fault. And you get lazy people or shit departmental culture at various points in nearly every company, but painting a tens-of-thousands strong workforce with that brush is ridiculous.
I do advisory for pre-Series A startups as a last ditch effort to save them.
I do not get the unified industry delusion about "why X company has a bad product". It is usually either one of two things: comfort or ego. Everyone knows that but do not want to say it out loud.
I have seen these happen time and time again. Companies that are cash cow, do not care to do a better job. There is no incentive to do a better job. Moreover, the recurring thing is that if I did something different, I wouldn't have been this much successful in the first place.
The rest of the smart consultants walk on eggshells. They hint at stuff but never want to bite the hand that feeds them because the clients would rather fire you than be challenged.
It is not an IBM thing; it's generic business thing to some degree. I really have to call this a delusion. Good consultants submit generic reports that just tell them what they want to hear. It is not you; it is the economy. Stupid consultants that are well-meaning tell them they should be the best on competitor intel. Do you not think some stupid person did not approach IBM to do what Oracle or AWS is doing? Of course, they did, and they were fired immediately.
The best consultants are less of a consultant and more of a therapist.
After doing only four-month projects for the entire year, this year's realization was that nobody in the industry wants to do better. Everyone is in their place because of ego or a perceived sense of success. Or because of a grand conspiracy theory. IBM has a significant number of government contracts, so they are set for life because the vast majority government IT systems are pigeonholed into IBM systems. The acquisition is to tell the shareholders that we are so successful that we can literally buy companies. We do not even care to do things. Whatever the new thing is, we will buy it at some point.
I'll say this about IBM: because it's so old, it was the most diverse company I ever worked for- including age, nationality, race, sex, and any other category you can think of. Basically you had all types of people in all stages of life, not just young white workaholic tech-bros. The founders are long gone, so everyone there (including CEO) is a professional- meaning nobody has any kind of personal attachment to the company. We were all in the same boat, as it were. When your older coworker suddenly disappears due to a stroke, it puts things in perspective.
The fast-paced startup is really the hack, combining the energy of youth with the ego-mania of their founders. Ask yourself, is it healthy?
Anyway, IBM's customers tend to be other fortune 100s and governments- basically other similar organizations, and my experience was that we took care of them pretty well. The products were not pretty (no Steve Jobs-like person to enforce beauty), and rather complex due to all the enterprise requirements. But they were quite high quality, particularly the hardware.
The awe induced when standing in front of a brand new, kitted out x95 frame with all its drawers full and that special shade of IBM blue on everything is definitely something. Pull out the HMC and just think about how many decades of R&D and experience and tears went into the entire system.
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house
I do. I remember going to a chat once where they wanted to get people on-board in using it.
It was 90 minutes of hot air.
They "showed" how Watson worked and how to implement things, and I think every single person in the room knew they were full of it. Imagine we were all engineers and there were no questions at the end.
Comparing Watson to LLMs is like comparing a rock to an AIM-9 Sidewinder.
Watson was nothing like ChatGPT. The first iteration was a system specifically built to play Jeopardy. It did some neat stuff with NLP and information retrieval, but it was all still last generation AI/ML technology. It then evolved into a brand that IBM used to sell its consulting services. The product itself was a massive failure because it had no real applications and was too weak as a general purpose chat bot.
The reason LLMs are viable for use cases that Watson wasn't is their natural language and universal parsing strengths.
In the Watson era, all the front- and back-ends had to be custom engineered per use case. Read, huge IBM services implementation projects that the company bungled more often than not.
Which is where the Palantir comparison is apt (and differs). Palantir understood their product was the product, and implementation was a necessary evil, to be engineered away ASAP.
To IBM, implementation revenue was the only reason to have a product.
> Read, huge IBM services implementation projects that the company bungled more often than not
Well this is _not_ what they wanted to sell in that talk.
But the implementation shown was über vanilla, and once I got home the documentation was close to un existent (Or, at least, not even trying to be what the docs for such a technology should be).
>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.
Your fascination seems hinged on the fact that IBM has "lots of talent to make ML/LLMs work" which judging by what they've put out so far and talk publicly about, is very far from the truth. Anyone who has a clue seems to (rightly) have left IBM decades ago, and left are business people who think "Managed to increase margin by 0.1%" is something to celebrate.
It’s a shame because people forget how good IBM research was back in the day. I do wonder if they still have great people in those r&d labs, or if they all left.
There are good people in IBM. But they don't have the resources behind them anymore. Look at the market cap of ms, Amazon. Google, meta et al, compared to IBM.
To be a bit more candid, they have lots of employees outside of the US (particularly in India). and both in the US and elsewhere, people need to eat. They may not have the talent to innovate new tech like OpenAI and others, or do cutting-edge R&D, but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt. They could have competed with many of the B-Tier LLM services out there with the right leadership.
> but they certainly have the talent to take LLM breakthroughs and adapt
I'll believe that when I see it. They had a decade headstart with all of this, and yeah, could have been at the forefront. But they're not, and because of the organization itself, they're unlikely to have a shot at even getting close to there. Seems they know this themselves too, as they're targeting the lower end of the market now with their Granite models, rather than shooting for the stars and missing, like they've done countless of times before.
> Ok, so does anyone remember 'Watson'? It was the chatgpt before chatgpt. they built it in house. Why didn't they compete with OpenAI like Google and Anthropic are doing, with in-house tools?
Leadership in IBM also thought that Watson was like what what OAI/Anthropic/Google are doing now. It wasn't. Watson was essentially a ML pipeline over-optimized on Jeopardy, which is why it failed in literally every other domain.
Sure, but they were doing that stuff. They had ML people, infrastructure, marketing, branding,etc... already. Their product sucked, but they could have copy-catted OpenAI in 2022+ like everyone else.
I don't think that would have gotten them much of anywhere. They already spent a decade trying to find markets for Watson to fit and generally failing at it. The problem with Watson wasn't technology, it was that it had no direction.
They gave up on watson about 18 months before llm's popped up, and they have simply just not got enough cash on hand to compete. While the big boys grew fantastically bigger over the past 15 years as cloud happened ibm fumbled time after time and shrank ever smaller, and is now desperately hoping it can stay relevant. but in the end they just haven't got the resources to compete on that stage anymore.
The recent interview with Arvind had the “grapes are too green, anyway” energy. They missed the train because they were licking their Watson wounds. Then sorta regretted it but it’s too late.
Same thing happened with their cloud offering. They laughed at AWS, then tried to catch up, then missed and pivoted to “hybrid” (cloud and local).
I’m pretty convinced there is a bell curve of “understanding what IBM does” where idiots and geniuses both have absolutely no idea.
It really is probably that strangest company in tech which you think could be mysterious and intriguing. But no one cares. It’s like no one wants to look behind the boring suit and see wtf. From my low point on that bell curve I can’t see how they are even solvent.
There are entire niches of us that make a living (not at IBM) making certain IBM products actually do what they're supposed to. From my vantage point I see essentially zero maintenance going on with their products. I sincerely don't understand the market (why do people keep paying hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars for non-existent support?) - but whatever.
To add to that i think their R&D labs along with HPE were one of the few to innovate on the memristor and actually build some fascinating concept machines.If i rememeber HPE's was 'The Machine'.
Athough i think they just di/dont know how to adapt these to market that isnt a enterprise behemoth , rather than develop/price it so more devs can take a hold and experiment.
HPE's advanced technology constructed "The Machine" from Plexiglas, not known for its high switching performance. It was a total scam of moron management by their revenant R&D lab management. I saw this close up.
Yes it really was quite good despite all the hate it seems to get in internet comments. I used it for several years. The feature set, particularly config specs and dynamic views, was brilliant. The product was pretty mature and complete 25 years ago. I agree that administration was complicated and performance could be slow if misconfigured. We configured right, it was very intuitive and pleasant to use. IBM has effectively killed it by continuing to charge an excessive premium while adding nothing significant since they bought Rational (for Clearcase, DOORS, Apex etc.)
They have some real money printers that most probably haven't heard of. IBM Maximo for example dominates some industries the way SAP and Salesforce does.
Just the set the record straight on how and why these acquisitions go at IBM. This is a first hand account working at and with IBM and competitors and being in the room as tech-guy accessory to murder.
IBM lives off huge multi-year contract deals with their customers, each are multi-multi-million dollars worth. IBM has many of these contracts, maybe ~2000 of them around the planet, including your own government wherever it is that you live. This is ALL that matters to IBM. ALL. That. Matters.
These huge contracts get renegotiated at every X years. IBM renewal salespeople are tough and rough, in particular the ones on the renewal teams, and they spend every minute of every hour in between renewals grooming the decision makers, sponsors, champions and stakeholders (and their families) within these big corporations. Every time you see an IBM logo at a sports event (and there are many IBM-sponsored events), that's not IBM marketing to you the ad-viewer. They are there for grooming their stakeholders, who fight hard to be in the best IBM sponsored-seats at those venues, and in the glamorous pre and after party, celebs included. IBM also sponsors other stuff, even special programs at universities. Who go to these universities? Oh, you bet, the stakeholder's kids, who get the IBM-treatment and IBM-scholarship at those places.
But the grooming is not enough. The renewal is not usually at risk - who has the balls to uninstall IBM out of a large corp? What is at risk is IBM's growth, which is fueled by price increases at every renewal point not the sale of new software or new clients - there are no new clients for IBM anywhere anymore! These price increases need to happen, not just because of inflation but because of the stock price and bonuses that keep the renewal army and management going strong, since this is a who-knows-who business. To justify the price increase internally at those huge client corps (not to the stakeholder but to their bosses, boards, users, etc) IBM needs to throw a bone into these negotiations. The bone is whatever acquisition you see they make: Red Hat, Hashicorp... Or developments like Watson. Or whatever. They are only interested in acquiring products or entering markets that can be thrown at those renewal negotiations, with very few exceptions. Why Confluent? Well, because they probably did their research and decided that existing Confluent licenses can be applied to one (yeah, one) or many renewal contracts as growth fuel for at least 1-to-N iterations of renewals.
Renewal contracts correspond anywhere from 60% to 95% of IBM's revenue, depending on how you account for the the consulting arm and "new" (software/hw sales/subscriptions). I particularly have not seen lots of companies hiring IBM consultants "just because we love IBM consultants and their rates", so consulting at a site is always tied to the renewal somehow, even if billed separately or not billed at all. Same for new sw sales, if a company wants something IBM has on their catalog from their own whim and will, then that will just probably be packed into the next renewal because that's stakeholder leverage for justifying the renewal's increase base rate. Remember, a lot of IBM's mainframes are not even sold, they are just rentals.
Most IBM investment into research programs, new tech (quantum computing!) etc are there just to help the renewals and secure a new Govt deal here and there. How? Well, maybe the increase in the renewal for the, ie, State of Illinois contract gets a bone thrown in for a new "Quantum Research Center (by IBM)" at some U of I campus or tech park that the now visionary Governor will happily cut the ribbon, photo op and do the speech. Oh wait! I swear I made this up as an example, but this one is actually true, lol:
having worked in a government agency that ditched IBM, let me offer a view of what that looks like from the customer side:
IBM bought a company whose product we'd been using for a while, and had a perpetual license for. A few years after the purchase, IBM tried to slip a clause into a support renewal that said we were "voluntarily" agreeing to revoke the perpetual license and move to a yearly per-seat license. Note: this was in a contract with the government, for support, not for the product itself. They then tried to come after us for seat licenses costs. Our lawyers ripped them apart, as you can't add clauses about licensing for software to a services contract, and we immediately tore out the product and never paid IBM another dime.
I tell this story not to be all "cool story, bro", but to point out that IBM does focus on renewal growth, but they're not geniuses...they're just greedy assholes who sometimes push for growth in really stupid ways.
I'm naively thinking, the performance bottleneck is not with tracking allocations but constantly freeing them and then reallocating. Let the GC track allocations, but prevent it from doing anything else so long as it is under the pre-allocated memory limit for the process. When resumed, it will free unreferenced memory. That way, the program can suspend GC before a performance sensitive block and resume it afterwards. API's don't need to change, because the change at all that way.
reply