I haven't had an Apple product in a decade but the shear efficiency of their CPUs is pretty impressive. Been thinking about picking up a MacBook Pro or Air (which doesn't even have fans) for travel because I'm getting really tired of lugging around my relatively heavy and inefficient Windows laptop
As mundane and common as the information I’m about to share may be, it’s the reality of MacBook ownership for many - dare I say most?
I don’t buy new MacBooks. I get them refurbished from MicroCenter, Apple, or elsewhere.
In 2024, I picked up a 2021-released 14” M1 Max MacBook Pro w/ 2 TB and 64 GB for $1800 from Microcenter. Because Apple is so hostile to repairs, I have been paying for AppleCare+ and will continue for some time. But I don’t see myself truly needing to replace this machine for another 2-3 years. It’s my daily driver for BBedit, some IDEs, music apps, Firefox with dozens of tabs, Mail, Messages, iTerm2 with half a dozen tmux sessions.
True - my computing needs are not demanding. But for those of us who offload commuting to remote servers and mostly use thin clients, the computer is a joy to use.
I’ve been dabbling in Ableton Live Suite 12 Lite, which came with my Native Instruments Komplete Kontrol S88 MKII midi keyboard, and this machine never breaks a sweat.
The M-series are seriously as close to BIFL as a consumer laptop can be.
Meanwhile, my wife’s daily driver is a 2013 13” MacBook Air w/ 128 GB SSD and 8 GB RAM. And an Intel i7 from that era. I won’t defend this though. She’s insane, and I don’t know how she lives with herself. I purchased it used from a Craigslist seller to be my daily driver 14 years ago, and it lasted until I upgraded to a 2020 M1 MacBook Air base model, which I later donated to a friend in need.
The article says a human SHOULD NOT do those things. Much like a human SHOULD NOT smoke, since it's bad for just about everything, and do it anyways, people will do these 3 things too. But they shouldn't.
Arguing that they should because many will strikes me as a very strange argument. A lot of people smoke, doesn't make it one bit healthier.
The next spiritual successor should allow us to customise the species, and let us deal with whatever consequences that might bring!
Like, you might have a aquatic space-faring species, which requires you to bring lots of water into space. More rockets (and struts!) will be needed, but at least you get really good radiation protection out of it!
Tardigrades ought to be a cheat code, you can just glue your crew to the outside of the booster and they'll probably be alright so long as you don't glue them to the fiery end!
Indeed! The law needs to include firmware in some way. I'm not smart enough to come up with how exactly it should be dealt with, but it does need to be dealt with.
Currently Qualcomm decides when your phone stops getting updates, pretty much regardless to who actually made your phone.
Shoutout to fairphone who actually updated the firmware themselves, surely a loss leading project, but a very respectable dedication to end users.
Shoutout to fairphone who actually updated the firmware themselves, surely a loss leading project, but a very respectable dedication to end users.
I am not sure how much of a shout-out they deserve. For example, Fairphone 4 is still supported until this year. They ship with firmware from 2023 and with a kernel patch release from 2024. Every one of their phones is full of holes because their software lags so much.
Even on their most recent model, they are frequently more than a half year behind firmware updates, ship 1-2 year old kernels, and are late with major Android releases (meaning you miss out on security patches not classified high/critical).
Good examples of software longevity are iPhone, Google Pixel, GrapheneOS, and to a lesser extend Samsung flagships.
Nixos has a pretty solid solution to this issue: key your dependencies with checksums of the content. That way you get the best of both worlds: you always get the exact version you want, and you can share a copy of that exact version with other software that wants to use that exact version too!
Curious, what is your software doing that it depends on specific metadata in your dependencies? What metadata do you require? Most files metadata is stuff like created timestamp, last edit timestamp, read/write/execute permissions..
I'm just trying to think of a case where metadata would be relevant in a dependency?
Hash of a normalization of the derivation, so this roughly means source, dependencies and the ‘build recipe’. The exception are fixed-output derivations, which are typically content-hashed.
That said, a lot of work is done in content-addressed hashing, but AFAIK it’s not the default yet.
Doesn't really seem fair, I'm gonna be a old white man some day, ain't really that much I can do about it...(Well, I suppose sex changes are a thing now, but really?)
Are you going to be wealthy, with your head buried in the firehose of an algorithmic feed? Those are things you can do something about.
Alternatively, you could take a crack at deconstructing whiteness. Depending how young you currently are, you might be able to make a dent by the time you're an old man. That's trickier though, because it involves serious social reform. Or if sociology isn't your deal, maybe you could become a biologist, and cure old age?
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