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> We wouldn't tolerate secrecy in the calculations used to keep our buildings upright, and we shouldn't tolerate opacity in the software that keeps our tractors, hearing aids, ventilators, pacemakers, trains, games consoles, phones, CCTVs, door locks, and government ministries working.

Construction industry if full of privately owned technologies and closed source software, from architectural drawing board up to the last glass panel in a window.

Building are staying upright not because of openness, but because of the enforced standards for construction. Same can be applied to software orders.

Want to prevent a government office suite to be bricked remotely? Put forth requirements for autonomous work, self hosting, multiyear coverage for critical patches and ability to export the data at any moment in the format of your preference. Whoever provides this will get the contract.

This seems to me far more realistic aim than trying to enforce global legal straight jacket to be universally applied to all software and hardware products available for purchase in your country


Legal straight jacket? Doctorow is arguing for abandoning the legal straight jacket, not creating one. It seems you severley misread the article.


He wrote “calculations”


For the major part BYD sales performance is dependent on government subsidies in the country where they sell three quarters of all the cars they produce. That is a high risk factor investors don't like.


Can you provide a source for the government subsidies you say BYD is dependent on?



nice article. excellent proof that the whole industry is indeed driven by market force and profitability.

> "11 out of 17 listed Chinese automakers were profitable."

> "93 of 169 automakers operating in China have market shares below 0.1%."


Can you please elaborate on how iPhones are instruments of mass surveillance?



Probably not, as the same rules were applied to Apple devices in EU earlier, and no third party browser engines appeared.

But right now you can use uBlock origin lite in Safari. Or any other of multitude of other adblockers.


And what's your opinion if the law would oblige the companies to remove features their products have like tracking transparency popups? Two countries' courts already fined Apple for enforcing a popup that warns users about tracking across third party apps (a feature Apple themselves do not use)?


My prior POV was that Apple would jettison the feature globally, but the discussion elsewhere in this thread suggests that salami slicing at the software-level is a cost larger companies are willing to bear.


What do you expect this law will to achieve?


Fewer teen suicides


I wonder why the author doesn't use IL2CPP and sticks to Mono. IL2CPP does produce much faster code, making Mono builds obsolete. This should be the very first step you do if you care at all about performance in Unity.


Just wanted to say thank you for sharing this view into entirely different world for many of us!


Thank you for the kind words! It’s been an incredible experience sharing this 'different world' with the HN community today.


After seeing Swift's result I had to look into the source to confirm that yes, it was not written by someone who knows the language.

But this is a good benchmark results that demonstrate what performance level can you expect from every language when someone not versed in it does the code porting. Fair play


Author here. There are actually 3 Swift versions in the benchmark:

  - Swift (standard): 893ms
  - Swift (relaxed): 903ms (uses fast-math equivalent)
  - Swift (SIMD): 509ms (explicit SIMD4)
The standard version uses x *= -1.0 which creates a loop-carried dependency that blocks auto-vectorization - same issue as Crystal, Odin, Ada. The SIMD version uses the branchless i & 0x1 trick and is ~1.75x faster.

Fair point that someone versed in Swift would probably use the better pattern in the standard version too. PRs welcome to improve it! The goal was idiomatic-ish code, but I'm not an expert in all 40+ languages.


Even in verbose Java it's barely 20 lines.

Makes the benchmarks game 100 lines seem like major apps.

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...

https://benchmarksgame-team.pages.debian.net/benchmarksgame/...


What do you think they could have done better in the Swift code?


Using overflow operators instead of the ones that check for that each iteration.


Reading https://github.com/niklas-heer/speed-comparison/blob/master/..., I think the only overflow checks could be in

  for i in 2...rounds+2
and I would hope/expect the compiler to be smart enough to know that it only has to check “rounds+2” once there. Swift isn’t exactly new anymore, and it’s supported by a large company.

What do I overlook?


There’s no way overflow checks are responsible for that enormous speed difference from C


The difference between this and "will have an option to enable AI features" shows what the development resources will be focused on. I mean, f** JPEG XL support; we have a bigger investment fish to fry


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