Only for in app purchases of Robux. They are uniquely allowed to distribute their own app store (not based on HTML/JS applets) within the App Store, which is against the terms that every other Apple developer agrees to. And they are allowed to use a virtual currency that can be obtained elsewhere without an Apple Tax to pay for digital goods purchases inside an iOS app, bypassing the IAP system, again against the terms.
Them being let go "because they didn't meet 5x" is hearsay. The only source for that is in social-media commentary and opinion pieces. Microsoft described the layoffs as "organizational adjustments".
Wow, know you make me curious about the business processes at Microsoft. Did they see that they would earn more money if the interpreter had a 5x speedup, that they wouldn’t see with 1.5x?
Or was it trust broken?
Instead of generating more revenue, it would drive down costs. You will need less computers to do the same amount of work if the work can be done faster.
Python is slow due to design decisions in the language. For example operator dispatch is slow without some kind of static analysis. But this is hindered by how dynamic the language is.
It's hard to make Python run fast when it pervasively uses duck typing. It makes types only resolvable at runtime. JIT is the only thing that can work here at the moment, but I think that needs to make very similar assumptions to a branch predictor, plus it needs to identify lexical regions (is that what they're called?). People here have criticised PyPy, but I've forgotten why.
Obviously dumb microbenchmark, but here's ~17x on my machine:
$ time python -c 'sum(range(1_000_000_000))'
real 0m19.997s
user 0m19.992s
sys 0m0.005s
$ time pypy -c 'sum(range(1_000_000_000))'
real 0m1.146s
user 0m1.126s
sys 0m0.020s
I think some relatively simple math JITs and compiles nicely like that, but when you start using other parts of the language heavily like you would in a real project, it averages out to about ~4x due to the object, VM and locking model, I believe. It's been a while since I've looked into this.
I would surprised to see performance as good as V8, although that would be great. As I recall the v8 team performed exceptionally well in a corporate environment that badly wanted js performance to improve, and maybe inherited some Hotspot people at the right time.
I'd be quite delighted to see, say, 2x Python performance vs. 3.12. The JIT work has potential, but thus far little has come of it, but in fairness it's still the early days for the JIT. The funding is tiny compared to V8. I'm surprised someone at Google, OpenAI et al isn't sending a little more money that way. Talk about shared infrastructure!
JVM Python exists for the longest time now, where "exists" is purely technical. It's very cursed and bad, keeping in line with the rest of Java-adjacent stack.
Yet this "Java-adjacent stack" wipes the floor with Python and its ilk w.r.t performance and is what's actually running the world outside of some silicon valley ephemeral unicorns.
Has something changed that allows a more relaxed refcounting / less eager "gc"? Py_DECREF was what murdered any hope of performance back when we hooked up 3.3 to OMR... Well that and the complete opacity of everything implemented in C
It didn't "remove the GIL". It added an experimental free-threading mode which removes it, but is still considered experimental and not widely used in production yet.
I think some of the power user demand is fairly inelastic. I’ve seen developers who are allergic to spending money happily drop $200/mo on those new Claude subscriptions.
Yeah but if you push the price up, given that many users will cancel their subscriptions you will end up with still a tiny market segment relative to what is necessary, in revenues, to justify the valuations purported.
It's a tricky one, there is also a lot of push right now to use AI so developers are incentivized to drop money on subscriptions. I'd have difficulty justifying 1k/month for smaller shops - but corporations will be different. If the average engineer is just 20% more productive, then that is a 30-60k value to the company.
I don't have difficulty getting to a 20% productivity gain with AI just from automating the tasks I procrastinate on or can't focus on. Likewise the ability to code a prototype overnight/over the weekend is a reasonable extension of practical working hours.
The challenge I do see is that fully AI generated code bases devolve into slop pretty fast. The productivity cutoffs are much lower compared to human engineers.
Like… you’d expect a company to evaluate the potential for competition, right? But these AI companies are obviously not actual companies with any business model, most are just trying to grab some investors money while they can surf the hype.
> In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram
Insane take. Reddit hosts deep threaded discussions on almost any topic imaginable. In its prime it was the best forum on the internet. There’s a reason people commonly add “reddit” to the end of their search queries.
Unfortunately it feels like the community has gotten much dumber after they banned third party apps and restricted API access. It’s also lost almost all of its Aaron Swartz style hacktivist culture.
Reddit, in its prime, was incredible and beloved by almost everyone I know (most of which are far outside the HN sphere)
There are still many around - most of them die because admins give up or users leave - if you actually miss them it should be easy to find some for your interests
I would love to have some directory with all kinds of active (PHP) web forums. That was the heyday of the open web for me.
Do you have any tips on how to specifically search for these forums? Without just googling for topics and browsing hours to find some. When I think about it, just googling/searching might be the only way.
The reality is that modern (meaning LTE) public networks are more secure today, than they have been, its also trivial to bring an LTE base station with you now - with the hardware at this point being no more complex than a controller driven wifi network.
Indeed, I have an LTE base station in my office, on perpetual "loan" from T-Mobile for US$25, providing us with LTE service in an area where they have no service. It's roughly the same volume, or a bit less, as our modem/router.
