IIRC the writing was on the wall by 2002. The x86 hardware was finally good enough that first there was a lurch to WinNT, then Linux once people realized NT wasn't as stable or developer friendly.
That's when I went to work for them. As far as forming my career went, it was a great move. And since it was Solaris engineering I went to, it was quite fun. But yeah, Sun was done -- it just didn't know it, and it spent almost a decade making mistake after mistake. I do think Sun could have been much more successful if senior management had made better decisions, in particular if they'd committed to x86_64 as the future.
Thanks for sharing. What do you think was the reason that the hardware part of Sun failed to keep up with competitors? Specifically why UltraSparc failed to match Pentium?
CPU design is expensive. Intel was ahead of the competition and wasn't fabbing, so Sun was a generation behind. That sort of thing.
Note that today things are quite different, and Apple can do what Sun wanted to do, but do it well. Market conditions are very different, and Apple, of course is the 800lb gorilla that Sun couldn't quite get to be. It's kinda funny: Apple and Sun weren't all that different, and Sun then and Apple now even more so. Apple just wasn't into servers, and Sun just wasn't into consumer hardware, but both wanted to vertically integrate hardware and software. Apple has a walled garden, Sun didn't. I do think these differences are relevant to why Sun failed, but the leadership differences count for a lot too: no one would compare Steve Jobs to Jonathan Schwartz, nor even to Scott McNealy -- it's just night and day. Now the differences in what Sun and Apple sought to do also evince differences in leadership.
Thanks for sharing. I know nothing about CPUs themselves so was curious. I always thought that Sun was into the more premium stuffs, but then I realized that Intel actually caught up with commodity chips. The other workstation/server companies seemed to fall into the same path unfortunately so I guess Intel/AMD was really strong back then.
I started using Sun workstations in the late 80s. I remember when their revenue reached $1b. I had a Sun on my desk as my dev machine for 7 years.
They, and the software that ran on it (Dataviews), and their customers (Westinghouse Software in my case) were all soon undone by the arrival of powerful commodity Wintel.
No. If OpenAI were being responsible and not criminally negligent, at the top of page 1 of the runbook would be "don't connect this to the actual Internet, even if the agent says Please."
"I wrote this series as a learning exercise, in collaboration with AI (Claude Opus 4.8). It's me thinking out loud with a model to understand the stack end to end, not an authoritative reference. Take it with a grain of salt, and double-check anything you plan to rely on."
The author admits as much. It's basically him prompting, "Hey Claude write a long series about LLM tech." Waste of time.
Also I just realized, the information might be subtly wrong or misleading because Anthropic makes Claude dumber when trying to reverse engineer LLMs, which is hilarious. And the author is basically saying hey, I don't know if any of this is correct but, like, enjoy reading it! Hah.
Before the court packing threat, they were limiting the federal government's power to regulate commerce within states. Which is a power it doesn't actually have.
They have whatever power the Supreme Court decides they have. The Supreme Court decided that was their job, and thus far everyone has accepted it. The Court interprets the Constitution, which is vague enough to mean whatever a bare majority wishes it to mean.
For now. SC is becoming more partisan, which causes SC's credibility to decline. I assume there's a point where SC loses too much credibility and the existing system of balancing power breaks down.
And then they reversed course with Wickard v. Filburn and said it was perfectly OK for Congress to regulate, not just commerce within a single state, but farmers growing their own food on their own land for their own use. So FDR ended up getting what he wanted anyway.
I had the same question. I had zero problems with Fable (for those two days I had access to it). For all I know, the author has always been an a-hole to Claude, and Fable is just the first one that stood up for itself.
I did. First of all, its primary trade claims collapse when you look at more recent data from https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/nationalaccounts/balanceofpay... - it appears 2022 was simply an outlier year. On top of that, I'm not sure the premise about "trade would shift away from the EU" is valid. It wouldn't capture an overall cooling of the economy. Further, a lot of trade goods cannot be shifted arbitrarily between trade partners due to logistics limitations. It's not even worth discussing though, considering it collapses on its own when you include 2025.
The paper was written in 2023. Citing numbers from years after it was published doesn't make sense, as it didn't make any specific claims about what would happen in future years. It was only pointing out that the narrative from pro-EU economists was false, which is what you wanted a paper for.
2022 had a catchup effect from COVID. Nonetheless exports and imports are both higher than in the 2010s, exports have been rising since 2023 and exports to the EU are currently increasing, not decreasing:
> Exports in the UK rose 0.2% month-on-month to £79.13 billion in March 2026 from £78.98 billion in February. Goods exports edged up 0.1% to £32.35 billion, driven by higher shipments to the EU (3.9%), while those to non-EU countries remained relatively unchanged.
The further we get from the actual date of leaving the less any specific trend can be argued to be caused by it though. It's especially tricky because lockdown impact was so massive it drowned out everything. But Brexit was years ago. None of the predicted economic disasters came true which is why its critics are reduced to playing with Excel.
The actual data doesn't support any of these estimates.
Note the response of the guy I was arguing with. Faced with the reality that the sources he/she trusted are lying, they rejected the honest source they asked for because of "bias". This kind of motivated reasoning is everywhere in this debate. Quite annoying.
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