“Cadova builds on the ideas of OpenSCAD, but replaces its limited language with the power and elegance of Swift. It’s inspired by SwiftUI and designed for developers who want a better way to build models through code. It's cross-platform and works on macOS, Linux and Windows.”
This comment was illuminating. It would indeed have been more accurate to say "we could really use people like that today." Where they're located is a secondary concern.
Are there still regularly ground-breaking innovations (which ones e.g. in the last decade) coming out of the same lab today, whatever its owner or name?
It's more difficult to innovate today on a similar scale, or with similar impact. It also seems that big budgets don't really help.
Graphene chips are an insanely exciting (hypothetical) technology. A friend of mine predicted in 2010 that these chips will dominate the market in 5 years' time. As of 2025 we can barely make the semiconductors.
Apple makes chips that have both excellent performance per watt, and overall great performance, but they make small generational jumps.
On the other hand, startups, or otherwise small-but-brilliant teams can still produce cool new stuff. The KDE team built KHTML, which was later forked into Webkit by three guys at Apple.
Paxos was founded on theoretical work of three guys.
Brin & Page made Google. In the era of big & expensive iron, the innovation was to use cheap, generic, but distributed compute power, and compensate for hardware failures in software. This resulted in cheaper, more reliable, and more performant solutions.
But yeah, most of the "moonshot factories" just failed to deliver anything interesting. Maybe you need constraints, market pressure?
> But yeah, most of the "moonshot factories" just failed to deliver anything interesting. Maybe you need constraints, market pressure?
It's funny you say that because to me it seems like bell labs was the exact opposite. Because of the antitrust ruling, there was a cap on profits, so many monies were instead funneled into green field R&D. The facility was run by people who knew how to manage a large group of capable people: put them in close proximity with other cross discipline stars, get out of their way, let their imaginations dictate the path.
I can't quite put my finger on these changes in the landscape. Shuji Nakamura invented blue LEDs in his garage. Meanwhile, graphene. I just don't think there's a universal rule.
For a lot of people the benefits show up because they have more devices sharing that connection. Before our kids moved to school we had 5 people on our home connection. Each with multiple devices, all trying to work or play games or stream content at the same time.
For one person with one computer it’s probably delightful overkill. For a modern family unit it can make everyone happy.
But even for your 5 people, a gigabit is plenty to all stream content at the same time, right? How often are all 5 people trying to download a 5 gigabyte file at the same time such that they collectively really benefit from more than a gigabit?
The content.lanl.gov server is hanging indefinitely and never serving the images. So it seems the images should be there on the server, the server is just dead in a weird way.
I have emailed the journal and told them about the bug.
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