I'm amazed to learn that Tesla normally disables parts of the battery on cheap models, but was able to remotely enable the full battery during hurricane Dorian!
https://www.economist.com/leaders/2019/09/12/how-the-world-will-change-as-computers-spread-into-everyday-objects
A car is turning into a computer with wheels, and that computer is sometimes a thin client.
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I find it really interesting how some areas of tech are widely expected to improve radically (e.g. LLMs and smart home tech), others gradually (CPU speed, battery capacity) and others very slowly (e.g. compiler optimisations).
Predicting the future is hard.
It's so strange that we talk about languages being slow, and have done for years. Computer performance has increased so much in this time.
https://hbfs.wordpress.com/2009/11/10/is-python-slow/ (shared on HN in 2009) discusses Python being slow. My underpowered Thinkpad has 20x the single-threaded performance! https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/73vs3766/AMD-Athlon-64-4000+-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5-PRO-4650U
Maybe *relative* performance of languages matters more?
Difftastic has been cited in a paper!
Modernizing SMT-Based Type Error Localization https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09034
The authors use difftastic to work out which parts of a buggy program have actually changed, a great use case :)