Hacker News: Maursault

New comment by Maursault in "Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 19:20:38 +0000

> I think a Mini of any spec is a great value.

My second suggestion for 16-core was M2, also. $100 less with 1Gb, and with 10Gb it would be $100 more than you paid. i.e. two of the 8-core M2 Minis with 24GB RAM each would do about twice as much work as the high end Mini M2 Pro alone, sometimes less than twice the work, sometimes more. The same is true of two M1 Max Studios vs one M1 Extreme Studio for the same price. 2 less powerful machines spank one more powerful machine every single time, and one M1 Extreme Studio is definitely NOT worth two M1 Max Studios, same as one 12-core M2 Pro Mini is definitely NOT worth two 8-core M2 Minis.

Everyone is drawn to "the best," and that's where Apple fleeces and makes its money. Pretty consistently forever, the best buys from Apple are never the high end configurations. We may feel secure in what our choices were, doubling down on affirming them, but we definitely pay for it.

New comment by Maursault in "Experts weigh impact of Intel-Arm collaboration"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 15:37:30 +0000

> legacy wins

20 years ago, probably. I don't understand why it is still the case today that legacy is important. Who is still running very old, 25yo software, and just how are they wagging the dog?

New comment by Maursault in "Experts weigh impact of Intel-Arm collaboration"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 15:34:34 +0000

Itanium was supposed to be powerful, not efficient, and it originated at HP. Atom was x86. If Intel designed something new from the ground up with high efficiency specifications, I don't think it could be too terrible, and I think it would advance SotA to have real competition with ARM designs. The i860 may be Intel's last innovative chip design solely designed in house. Every advance in x86 is just another ugly monstrosity.

New comment by Maursault in "Experts weigh impact of Intel-Arm collaboration"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 04:26:27 +0000

Why does Intel need Arm for collaboration, and what does Arm get out of optimizing "Arm’s IP for Intel’s upcoming 18A process technology?" Why doesn't Intel license Arm designs like anyone else, and optimize it themselves? I also don't quite get why Intel doesn't just design their own competing high efficiency architecture, after abandoning x86 and backwards compatibility, of course, something they should have done two decades ago at least.

New comment by Maursault in "Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 04:15:34 +0000

Not awful, but for $2K you could have had 16-core CPU, 20-core GPU, 32-core Neural Engine, 48GB unified memory, 512K SSD storage, Four Thunderbolt 4 ports, two HDMI ports, four USB-A ports, two headphone jacks, two Gigabit Ethernet.

New comment by Maursault in "Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 04:02:40 +0000

A lot can change in that amount of time and apparently has. Also, as you're very likely aware, KDE runs on macOS, though idky anyone would want to do that. It certainly wouldn't draw anyone back from FreeBSD. The best and worst parts of macOS are BSD — best because there is a BSD userland, and worst because it's inexplicably outdated.

New comment by Maursault in "Colossal Biosciences Aims to ‘De-Extinct’ the Woolly Mammoth"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 01:54:48 +0000

It's just such a waste of time, resources and talent, when it would be vastly better, and presumably easier, to stop the extinction of vaquita, black rhinoceros and other subspecies, saola, tiger species, leopard species, elephants and sub-species, gorillas and subspecies, orangutang, and hundreds of species of fish, frogs and insects. We don't need fake mammoth. Save the vaquita. And save the Amazon Rainforest, and whatever is left of every other forest.

New comment by Maursault in "Why KDE Plasma was chosen as the default desktop environment for Asahi Linux"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 01:36:55 +0000

> KDE is so great.

Funny, back in 2006ish, KDE development was stalled, and it was a janky, inconsistent mess. Everyone hated it and used Gnome, which had a simpler design and was far more stable and smooth.

New comment by Maursault in "Apple previews Live Speech, Personal Voice, and more new accessibility features"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 00:28:58 +0000

> Just yesterday I started using a new maxed out Mac mini and everything about it is snappy.

Really?! I didn't think anyone here would fall for that.

      Mac Mini 12-core M2, 19-core GPU, 32GB, 10Gbit, 8TB storage? $4500

      Mac Studio 20-core M1, 48-core GPU, 64GB, 10Gbit, 1TB storage is $4000. 128GB of RAM is $800 more

but either Studio RAM configuration obviously spanks the M2 mini. It's sacrificing Apple's expensive storage, but with Thunderbolt 3 it's pretty academic to find 8TB or more of NVMe storage, probably 32GB of NVMe RAID[1], for less than Apple's charge of $2200 above cost of 1TB.

[1] https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/express-4m2

New comment by Maursault in "Windows 2000 64-bit for Alpha AXP"

Maursault — Wed, 17 May 2023 00:10:57 +0000

SP1

New comment by Maursault in "Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 21:30:09 +0000

> Maybe. But graphics cards aren't the only thing people put into PCIe slots.

Right, so there will be PCIe slots for expansion, they just won't support PCIe GPU, just like Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis for Thunderbolt now. It isn't the PCIe slots that break compatibility, its the difference in architecture between x86 and Apple Silicon that makes them incompatible.

New comment by Maursault in "Windows 2000 64-bit for Alpha AXP"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 20:48:58 +0000

> I remember some PC vendors selling Alpha based workstations running NT in the mid- to late 1990s.

AGFA sold Alphas (DEC-branded) running NT4.1 in the mid-1990s along with their Apogee film imaging equipment to run their Apogee RIP software (which may have been G4-TIFF based at the time). I worked at a commercial printer as a prepress operator in 1996, and the Alpha/NT AGFA RIP just stayed on until 1998, at least that's when I moved on. The Mac workstations saw the RIP as an ordinary printer. There was never any reason to touch the RIP, it just did its thing and shot to the imagesetter. What I saw later was RAMpage equipment, an AGFA competitor, and which was 100% PDF, that separated the RIP from the shooter into two machines, both RAMpage-branded PCs.

New comment by Maursault in "Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 20:20:31 +0000

> It could be that Apple does away with it entirely and the Mac Studio is the new Pro.

Or the Mac Pro will be released without PCIe GPU support, and Apple will be able to leverage increases in Apple Silicon GPU performance to eliminate any need or desire for PCIe GPU, drawing away high end GPU customers from nVidia and AMD and locking them into Apple Silicon and the Apple ecosystem.

New comment by Maursault in "Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 19:57:11 +0000

Not really. Software drivers alone will not get it done, at least not adequately (Asahi-related developers may come up with a software solution for Asahi, but it will necessarily degrade performance, so the effort is likely to be abandoned).

Thunderbolt supports PCIe, and for most devices Apple Silicon does also, but GPU is different enough from audio interfaces and NVMe that it isn't just a "load the driver and plug it in" situation. GPU is vastly more complex than other PCIe devices. Apple Silicon and x86 architectures are not compatible, so GPU for x86 is not going to work with Apple Silicon with merely a software driver.

It's going to take hw translation and other technology that is not yet available for Apple Silicon, thus Apple's recent patent applications,[1] showing that Apple is either exploring supporting outboard GPU or locking anyone else out from their method of doing so, but either way is no guarantee they'll complete development or release, because it seems just as if not more likely the roadmap for Apple Silicon GPU performance will outpace nVidia and AMD GPUs.

But, again, claiming, "it just doesn't have a driver for the GPU" is a staggering oversimplification.

[1] https://image-ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloa...

New comment by Maursault in "The endless uses for an always-on Mac"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:41:49 +0000

Automatic transcoding is the last thing I'd want wasting processor cycles.

New comment by Maursault in "The endless uses for an always-on Mac"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:40:36 +0000

You are mistaken. Plex is really just a dedicated web server with a bunch of annoying feature creep.

New comment by Maursault in "The endless uses for an always-on Mac"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:34:49 +0000

> I save media into the corresponding folders, point Plex to the folders and Plex takes care of the rest. It’s a ten second process.

Unnecessary step, and if it only takes you 10 seconds, you really have no media to speak of: when it is TB of media, you're fucked.

> Thanks for the script.

Not a script, just a few loose commands.

New comment by Maursault in "Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 17:06:21 +0000

To suggest it is merely lack of drivers is an oversimplification. There is a chip errata that prevents PCIe GPUs from working properly on Apple Silicon: the architectures are not compatible. Apple Silicon GPU drivers are deeply integrated into the system. Due to this integration, only graphics cards that use the same GPU architecture as Apple Silicon could be supported, and there just aren't any, and I don't see how there could be unless Apple developed one and released it.

New comment by Maursault in "The complicated history of how the Earth’s atmosphere became breathable"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 16:54:15 +0000

> Life began in that alien environment, and at some point between 3.2 and 2.8 billion years ago, cyanobacteria began to use sunlight to split hydrogen from water, discarding oxygen as waste.

David Attenborough brilliantly explains the beginning of life and the role of cyanobacteria in the first episode of Life on Earth (1979), "The Infinite Variety,"[1] (in less than 20 minutes; doesn't need to be that long, but I wanted to catch him riding the mule, sooooo... strap in and enjoy).

[0] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2i43qc?start=673

New comment by Maursault in "Apple to occupy 90% of TSMC 3nm capacity in 2023"

Maursault — Mon, 15 May 2023 14:40:55 +0000

There are two issues.

     1) Apple Silicon won't support PCIe. 

     2) Apple doesn't want it to.

#2 means Apple is taking nVidia and AMD head on in the GPU space. Apple wants to control everything, and allowing these competitors on their platform is giving away too much. Because Apple Silicon scales better than competitors' hw, the desire for third party GPU is probably going to evaporate within a few generations of Apple Silicon. I mean, we'll see, but that is my best guess, because it seems like that was an intentional decision rather than oversight.