Yep, and it was completely just fluke too, because within 5 years of that they'd butchered/tamed the whole concept of 20% and that kind of independent project wasn't a thing anybody at Google could do, even if 20% still nominally existed [re-routed to be "you can add 20% to some project at Google that already exists and is approved by corporate already, etc. and btw you'll still be doing your normal work for most of the time, too"]
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
> Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
You know, I've never looked at Valve in that light before.
Once you have a money printing machine, of course any corporate hierarchy becomes antithetical to creativity, because there are huge financial rewards for climbing up. And the primary way you climb up is by turning direct reports to complete tasks you get rewarded for.
Really when people say x86 now tho they don't mean that. They really mean the variant introduced with the 386 which has a linear memory model, memory protection, etc. Or x86_64 which is philosophically akin to the 386 but really a new ISA.
So it's really more like mid-80s or early 2000s, not late 70s.
You can't run a COM program today. Not without emulation. Recent PCs can't even run DOS EXE because they're missing the BIOS interrupts most DOS programs use.
UEFI switches the CPU into 32bit v86 mode or directly in 64bit mode and you can't go back to real mode without a CPU reset, which v86 won't allow (you don't have ring -2 privileges) and 64bit mode can't do at all. I don't have a UEFI system, so I might be wrong (I even hope I'm wrong - it would mean slightly more freedom still exists), but from what I read about it, I'm 90% certain it's not possible.
You're confusing several things here. The only x86 processor that didn't allow returning to real mode was the 16-bit 80286 - on all later ones it's as simple as clearing bit 0 of CR0 (and also disabling paging if that was enabled).
Nothing more privileged than ring 0 is required for that.
"v86" is what allowed real mode to be virtualized under a 32-bit OS. This is no longer available in 64-bit mode, but the CPU still includes it (as well as newer virtualization features which could be used to do the same thing).
Even if you could/can it is an anachronism. Architecturally there's just a huge difference between 8086 and even 80286 and the 386. Before the 386 I wouldn't touch a machine with an Intel processor in it. Once the 386/486 penetrated the market and became cheap it was game over for everything else because it was good enough (linear address space, memory protection, larger address space, 32-bit etc etc), smart enough, gosh darn it it was cheap and everywhere.
No, you are wrong. DOS COM files if 16 bit can't be run on 64 bit CPU's but 32 bit DOS binaries can be run under 32 bit GNU/Linux installs with DosEMU straight by just emulating the BIOS part, the rest is native.
Set seg_32bit=0 and you can create 16-bit code and data segments. Still works on 64 bit. What's missing is V86 mode, which emulates the real mode segmentation model.
50/50, because once you boot a 32 bit os you can run 16 bit binaries :)
I'm pretty sure that if I make a dual-kernel 9front (9pc and 9pc64 available at boot) in a 64 bit machine and I compile emu2 for it, DOS COM binaries might be trapped enough to run simple text mode tools under the 386 port.
Trump doesn't care who went bankrupt or lost money, he was able to create a whole pile of red number buying opportunities for his friends in the know. And for himself.
It's now an age of oligarchy, stable corporate capitalism and gentlemanly bourgeois behaviour and the appearance of "rules based order" and equally brokered commerce is out, schoolyard bully attitude and "give me your lunch money" is in.
If you still want to profit, you make friends with the right people, kiss the ring, and get permission to become a highwayman or parasite like the rest of them.
At the bottom, is us. I don't think any election can put the cork back in this bottle. The only thing that will end this decline is an angry non-compliant populace that is sick of getting a very bad deal.
Sure, but the difference is that while the Chinese state is measurably awful on all sorts of human rights things within their own borders... they're not currently dropping bombs on foreign cities, starving a neighbour of critical petroleum shipments, or heavily funding an ally to slowly exterminate a population.
My point is as a non-American I feel no allegiance to either state, and current events don't make me sympathetic to the geo-political aims of the USA. So I don't see a strong moral case for this tech being an especial purvey of either party.
If you'd asked me two years ago my answer might have been different.
And to the original point, yeah, I would feel entirely justified in the critique of engineers in providing tools to the US defense apparatus at this point.
At least the Chinese shops are giving their weights away for free, and not demanding that any government ban the rest.
Why did Meta release theirs? The better question is, why not? If you aren't at the cutting edge and don't have a moat then releasing them is pure reputational upside with zero downside.
The research costs are not free. The businesses need to recoup the cost in some way shape or form, even if in the long term. Seems expensive as an anti-moat to detrench competitors
It's a winner take almost all competition. Baring a moat, if you aren't at the cutting edge you won't be able to recoup the cost regardless. At that point you might as well release it to the public for reputation.
You might even get lucky and someone else does the same. If you manage to learn from their example you might be more competitive in a future round.
For China it's an existential threat. They cannot let US corporations have exclusive control over this. And they are unlikely to catch up. So by tossing open weights model (note: not open source) out there for the public to use, they are destroying the possibility that Dario and SamA can build a monopoly/duopoly.
I think we are now in the era of oligarchies, and oligarchies maintain power by being highwaymen and extracting tolls, in a kind of rentier capitalist structure.
By throwing LLM models out into the commons, China is disrupting the possibility of this taking hold there.
Anthropic has gone out of their way to make a point about how much they love and admire the US state and its defense sector. Only drawing the line at a very far point and even when they drew the line it was with a big thing about how they believe in the American defense sector blah blah blah.
In any case, there's no way Anthropic's investors in Silicon Valley would countenance such a move.
Also, I'm biased the logical place is Canada, not Europe. Much of the fundamental/foundational research on LLMs, and a large part of the talent, came from universities in Canada anyways.
The unstated but obvious (to me?) goal of what ICE is doing is not to get large numbers of people out of the country, but to drive costs down for migrant labor by further disenfranchising them, making them scared, marginal, etc.
If they actually thoroughly evicted non-status migrant workers they'd have a outright revolt on their hands from farmers and other businesses that depend on them.
Instead those businesses can now take further advantage of the fear of harassment and/or deportation to drive down compensation and rights.
Contrast with countries like Canada that have a legal temporary foreign agriculture worker program that provides a regulated source of seasonal migrant farm worker labour under a non-citizen temporary status, but with some rights (still often abused). It's notable to me as a Canadian that I don't see this being advocated on any large scale by either party in the US.
Anyways, all this just to say that the jackboot clown theater is the point, not a side effect.
Limiting the supply of migrant labor drives costs up, not down, and the ICE raids have had a significant negative effect on businesses reliant on illegal immigrants.
Do you have numbers on how many migrant farm workers have actually been deported or detained?
Because going around and harassing and deporting other or non-essential non-status immigrants would drive labor costs down because of the chill it would put through those who are grudgingly tolerated.
And besides, given the quality of personality ICE seems to be employing even (especially) at its highest levels, I simply assume there's corruption such that if I'm a large orchard or whatever I simply pay ICE to stay away.
"There was a significant drop-off in entries to the United States in 2025 relative to 2024 and an increase in enforcement activity leading to removals and voluntary departures. We estimate that net migration was between –10,000 and –295,000 in 2025, the first time in at least half a century it has been negative."
Honestly think it’s just a matter of resources and they would rather play theater for their leader than actually do the job. However, the effect has been felt.
My only hope is that all of this push leads in the end to the adoption of more formal verification languages and tools.
If people are having to specify things in TLA+ etc -- even with the help of an LLM to write that spec -- they will then have something they can point the LLM at in order for it to verify its output and assumptions.
When I was there from 2012-2022 it really wasn't a thing. Once Google found its money printing machine it swallowed everything.
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