I am not sure if you mean me, as I just asked a question. I wonder what the best way is to handle this disparity for international software. It seems like either you punish the Latin alphabets, or the others.
The demo has brilliant pacing. When it starts with the sprites moving in a big circle, initially I'm not impressed at all, because C64 has 8 sprites per line, and changing the sprites to be drawn when the screen is halfway drawn is pretty much the first trick you learn. Then the sprites move to the top of the screen, where they are all on the same line together, and my jaw drops.
What is the cost per bit of a laser link to the ground over the total lifetime of the system? What is the typical availability? Lasers don't work very well through thick cloud layers.
Do note that with modern compilers it's surprisingly hard to accidentally do something that is always guaranteed to write to 0. Because it is UB, and an optimizing compiler is allowed assume that it doesn't happen. This can lead to seemingly crazy things like a variable that is set to zero, and when you deref through it it gives you something completely different instead. Because if a variable is first set to zero in all code paths, and then complex logic usually sets it to something else, after which it is dereferenced, the compiler is allowed to notice that the path where it is accessed without being first set to something else never happens, and then it is allowed to notice that the first write to the variable is dead because it's never read before being set to something else, and thus can be eliminated.
I assume this is a product of sufficiently advanced compilers. Other LLVM languages almost certainly suffer from this too, including Zig, Swift and unsafe rust.
Because programmers are in general worse at managing them than the basic LRU algorithm.
And because the abstraction is simple and easy enough to understand that when you do need close control, it's easy to achieve by just writing to the abstraction. Careful control of data layout and nontemporal instructions are almost always all you need.
Precisely. People are questioning the wrong things, I find it really easy to believe that Donut has a 400Wh/kg battery that can do 11C charging. Because that's something that can be easily externally verified, and they are sending that battery out to testers, and also because the existence of such a battery isn't new or shocking, many labs have prototypes in roughly the same performance envelope.
But that doesn't mean they have a winner, if the battery was ridiculously expensive to make. Their claims about cost are much more suspicious, and they have shown no proof about them.
Cobol is an extremely verbose programming language, and it was used in an era when the practice of programming was much less developed. Calls into libraries were often not used, and instead any re-used code was copied, essentially inlined by hand. (With all the obvious problems that caused.)
The combination of automating complex processes, requiring embarrassing amounts of code to do simple things, re-use by copy and the fact that it was dominant in it's field for such a long time (4 decades!), the amount of COBOL code that exists out there is just staggering.
And more to the point, if you want to use synthetic fuels, why on earth would you pick hydrogen?
Yes, it burns to clean water, but if the carbon feedstock is renewable, synthetic hydrocarbons are renewable too. The efficiency loss from doing the additional steps to build hydrocarbons is not large compared to the efficiency losses of using hydrogen, and storage can be so much easier with something denser.
I'd assume because it is complicated. Capturing enough carbon, splitting it, generating enough H2, combining it with the carbon to make long enough chains. That all sounds complicated and expensive and probably needs even more surplus green power that we don't have. It also doesn't solve the problem of local pollution when burning carbon based fuels.
Methane has good energy density, doesn't demand cryogenics or diffuse through steel, burns very cleanly, and can be used in modified gasoline ICEs - without even sacrificing the gasoline fuel capability.
Isn't the point that it is as simple and convenient as normal gasoline and also that you can use your gasoline car? If you are using gases it is a hassle for everyone and you need a new car or a full retrofit. At some point we have to ask ourself why we would even do that. Is it really worth it compared to just using a battery?
Without cryogenics, methane has such low energy density that a low-pressure fuel tank would still have to be as big as a bus for your compact methane-powered vehicle to go as far as you could on a few gallons of gasoline.
> I believe used M1/M2 machines will be favored by young developers as their personal fun laptop in a few years
I doubt it. For one, the SSDs have limited lifespans, and are soldered on the mainboard. They'll be fine enough for the planned life of the laptop, but eventually secondary market laptops will start seeing waves of failures, at which point people learn that purchasing one is a gamble.
The entire Apple silicon lineup is designed for limited lifespan.
SSD can be resoldered and that service is actually becoming popular and inexpensive. It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered. This will become a totally normal thing in a few years from now.
Soldered storage is extremely uncommon for laptops not from Apple. You pretty much only find it in very low-end Chromebook type hardware that's using eMMC for cost reasons, and a small fraction of more expensive Qualcomm-based laptops that use UFS for no good reason. All mainstream PC laptops use M.2 NVMe storage.
> > It's not just MacBooks, nearly all laptops have SSD and RAM soldered
> That's simply a lie. No other laptop have soldered SSD. An increasing number do have soldered RAM.
That's simply a lie. Pretty much all laptops using eMMC or eUFS for storage are soldered directly to the mainboard. These are often budget devices and many are things like x86-based tablets or chromebooks but there are models that are very much laptops. I do concede I am unaware of any non-apple laptops with directly soldered NVMe storage, but your claim that no other laptop have soldered SSD is patently false.
I think it's a little disingenuous to try to compare high/er end Apple laptops with soldered storage to $2-300 Chromebooks and budget devices with soldered eMMC (which is much more like a CF/SD card than anything else) in your argument in the first place.
As you acknowledge. When you look at actual competitors to Apple, you're forced to acknowledge that yup, no other manufacturer solders storage.
But yes, with due pedantry, the statement that "no other laptop has a soldered SSD" is technically wrong.
You could get into additional debates on whether eMMC and eUFS would map to most people's understanding of "SSD", but...
Neither the ram nor the ssd is on chip. The ram is on package, the ssd is on board.
On chip means literally on top of the silicon, like how AMD X3D cpus mount the SRAM chip. On modern Apple devices the ram is mounted on the organic package substrate. The difference is significant, and it's shitty that Apple outright lied about it.
I think that particular definition of "on chip" is entirely your invention. I've usually seen it broadly used for anything on-package, whether it's on-die or on a separate die within the same package.
"On chip" definitely does not have much if any history of referring specifically to stacked dies with TSVs, because that has been a very niche packaging technique until recently, and "on chip" is a much more broadly used term.
It’s really a shame. May last “favorite” MacBook was from 2013 where everything was upgradable. I bought the fastest Core processor with the lowest everything else and upgraded to 16GB of RAM, SSD (granted at SATA speeds) and a second data drive in the optical drive bay. What luxury!
I've yet to see a desktop SSD wear out from writes. The only dead desktop SSDs I've seen have been due to buggy firmware (early drives or that recent batch of Samsungs) or well before their wear level is down (cheap noname drives off amazon).
My first SSDs were from Intel and I have completely worn them out by writing their specified maximum writable amount of data, in a couple of years or so.
After that, I have been careful to always buy only SSDs with the maximum amount of writable data that exist on the market. I have not worn out others yet, but those that have been used for many years show in their SMART counters that a large fraction of the permissible amount of written data has been reached and not much has remained until their end of life.
My point is the vast majority of desktop users do not write much. My experience is not just my own computers but the network of extended family and friends' small businesses I'm the informal tech support for. This includes video editors who edit large video files.
I do wear out SSDs but they're on servers I run with different use patterns.
Hah. Yes. Couple of drops of water on an an MBA... laptop worked fine. Battery, fine. Healthy. Charging circuit would not work. Perfectly functioning laptop on AC, but unable to be on battery because 0% charge.
Me, at Genius Bar, expecting you know, maybe $300 with parts and labor?
"Here's a quote, sir, we're looking at $850+tax, perhaps we should talk about getting you into a new Mac today?"
No. The laptop was primarily connected to AC anyway and only 18 months old, if that. Sorry, Apple.
Same here. Bought an Apple Keyboard a long time ago. Spilled some juice on it. Some keys stopped working. That's when I learnt that a $200+ Apple Keyboard isn't even water resistant unlike the previous $25-50+ keyboard I had. That was the first major red-flag about Apple I had. The soldered RAM and SSDs, and locked bootloaders on the Mac were the last straw. Will never purchase an Apple device again.
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