This is a very humane way of thinking about the mindset of people who implemented solutions that don't quite work for your needs.
Too often people turn Chesterton's Fence into Frost's Fence: "Good fences make good neighbors" and refuse to think beyond that.
Seems the source is overloaded or down.
It feels like a hopeless endeavour to learn technical skills in later stages of life, reading the article helped me believe in maintaining my focus.
I never got to interact with him directly but he was a leader worth following. This is a sad day.
If you are ever looking for someone to aspire to as a software engineer, you should aspire to be like Luiz.
This a million times.
I only interacted with Luiz a few times. They were eye-opening. He was so bright and, at the same time, so kind and supportive!
My team has improved some algorithms he and Jeff Dean popularized. When we presented to him, he asked us excellent questions. But, even though he was far up in our management chain, we never felt attacked nor judged, rather supported and empowered. I told my friend that it felt almost like talking to my grandfather when I was a young boy.
I also really appreciate some of his documents. They dealt with fairly general/philosophical topics (on the nature of software). They were so succinct and yet ... so deep and far-reaching! They left a long-lasting effect on me.
I admired Luiz's ability to connect with others. He showed me how not all truly smart people need to make a display of it.
I'm truly sad he died. And just after Bram...
This is the second time i hear about a company building its own power supply, the first being apple for the apple 1.
As i know "nothing" about electricicty, i wonder : isn't power supply a solved issue at this point ? What could have they done differently that justify having its own production line for a power supply ?
Yes, low-voltage power supplies are commodities. But they're also complex and critical to a product's operation (look up "glitching attacks" to see how squirrely power can influence behavior). If running hardware reliably at scale is part of your company's core competency, then your core competency will likely also include understanding the power being supplied to that hardware.
Here's a Google presentation about changing to a 48V architecture: https://www.opencompute.org/files/External-2018-OCP-Summit-G...
Google has also used new circuitry for the DC-DC conversion. Here's a paper on their switched tank converter to drop 48 volts to 12 volts: https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Delta makes tons of money on satisfying the "reliable, and available" points, but not the "cheap" one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_f0BYADR7B0&list=OLAK5uy_mVO...
Luiz Barroso - Before Bossa (feat. Sergio Reze & Zeca Assumpção)
