Hacker News: _ph_

New comment by _ph_ in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

_ph_ — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:59:58 +0000

I wonder what the market price of 1.5 TB RAM today would be and if selling that off would pay for the whole Mac Pro :)

New comment by _ph_ in "macOS 27 won’t be supporting Intel anymore"

_ph_ — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 08:58:45 +0000

A bit, but then, it was sold by Apple and some people saw a need for it. Like having tons of memory and of course, being x86-compatible also has its uses. That is, why Rosetta 2 exists. Applying the 7 year support window, they should support it till 2030. Especially, as it was the most expensive hardware sold.

New comment by _ph_ in "Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)"

_ph_ — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 13:46:01 +0000

The comparison with "primary energy" misses the inefficiency of the usage of fossil fuels. If you electrify the main uses of fossil energy, the efficency goes up by like a factor of 3 - electric cars vs. ICE, heat pumps vs. burning fuels.

Yes, it is a long journey until the whole energy consumption is moved to renewables, but running the electric grid of a country like Germany to way over 60% on renewables is an important point on the way there.

New comment by _ph_ in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

_ph_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:48:24 +0000

Over 40% of the German landmass is currently used to produce food for farm animals. The space requirement for solar is far off from that. And you can use rooftops etc.

New comment by _ph_ in "Has electricity decoupled from natural gas prices in Germany?"

_ph_ — Thu, 09 Apr 2026 11:46:46 +0000

Heating with heat pumps is highly efficient and already the cheapest way of heating your home. The grids are ready for it - especially considering the amount of residential solar.

New comment by _ph_ in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

_ph_ — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 13:31:53 +0000

Absolutely. But for many things, denial is easier than fixing. See climate change. We knew about the problem for a long time. At latest after the oil crisis in the early 70ies, it would have been the perfect moment to reduce fossil fuel usage. Of course we know, how this has not happened and so we just entered the next oil crisis last week. And everyone is to blame for that.

New comment by _ph_ in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

_ph_ — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 12:14:38 +0000

The SSDs in the Studio are on modules, you can exchange those. They are in a custom format though.

New comment by _ph_ in "Apple discontinues the Mac Pro"

_ph_ — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 10:05:08 +0000

The latest Mac Pro really didn't make much use of its size, as there were too few useful things to put into. Especially as the GPU is now part of the package anyway. Also, the Mac Studio is the perfect workstation for the desk.

Still, there are a few things which could be improved relative to the current Studio. First, the ability to easily clean the internals from dust. You should be able to just lift the lid and clean the computer. Also, it would be great to have one Mac which you could just plug in a bunch of NVMe disks.

On the other side, they might replace the Mac Pro with a rack mountable machine as the demand for ARM servers in the cloud raises.

New comment by _ph_ in "LaGuardia pilots raised safety alarms months before deadly runway crash"

_ph_ — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 16:05:43 +0000

Yes, they should all have taken actions. But also, it is much more difficult to fix something broken once the damage has settled in. I guess none of them was willing to risk the disruption a fix would have caused. And the system seemed to have held up for quite a while. Weren't there some mass firings of ATC personal at the beginning of the Trump presidency?

The bottom line is: don't break things that are difficult or impossible to fix.

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:06:05 +0000

Nothing seems to be close to the MB Air. I would definitely be interested in buying a comparable hardware, if Linux is better supported than on the Air.

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:03:18 +0000

ARM servers definitely seem to get more popular. Seems that for a lot of tasks they are the more economic option. Consequently, you want more and more development for ARM. That would be one reason. The other is, that developing for ARM is more fun, whenever you touch parts which are architecture-dependent.

For the computer: the Air is a great laptop. I am very happy it doesn't have a fan, so it can never get a clogged fan and it works great. Currently, I am running Linux on it via VMWare, so I get the best of two worlds. And Linux really flies on it. Once it is no longer supported by macOS, I am certainly going to go native Linux. As it is an M2, that probably would work already today.

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:17:20 +0000

There are reasons beyond pure power efficiency to use ARM processors. It is a nice architecture to work with, especially if you plan to write low-level code. Also, you might want to deploy on ARM servers.

Also, there is the question who in general makes Laptops as nice as a MB Air? Who makes a fan less laptop of roughly comparable power?

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 17:14:57 +0000

Which Snapdragon laptops can I buy which run Linux?

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 16:03:28 +0000

The problem is, many "nerds" have little other options in hardware. Which ARM laptop would be the alternative? Even if you allow x86, which ones are as nice as the Macbooks? Then, there is the problem, that not everyone wants to be Linux-only in their setup. I definitely prefer macOS to W11.

New comment by _ph_ in "Asahi Linux Progress Report: Linux 6.19"

_ph_ — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 15:57:35 +0000

Like which, especially with an ARM processor?

New comment by _ph_ in "X offices raided in France as UK opens fresh investigation into Grok"

_ph_ — Wed, 04 Feb 2026 12:40:56 +0000

I think a company which runs a printing business would have some obligations to make sure they are not fulfilling print orders for guns. Another interesting example are printers and copiers, which do refuse to copy cash. Which is partly facilitated with the EURion constellation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EURion_constellation) and other means.

New comment by _ph_ in "Tesla’s autonomous vehicles are crashing at a rate much higher tha human drivers"

_ph_ — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 13:29:52 +0000

As far as I understand, those Robotaxis are only available within Austin so far. That is slow city traffic, the number of miles per ride is very small. However the number for human drivers seem to take all kind of roads into respect. Of course, highways are the roads where you drive most of the distance at the least risk for an accident. Has this been taken into account for the evaluation?

It would be ironic that people are claiming the Tesla numbers for Autopilot are to optimistic, as it is used on highways only and at the same time don't notice that city-only numbers for the FSD would be pessimistic statistics-wise.

New comment by _ph_ in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

_ph_ — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 21:05:55 +0000

Tried with a cleaned new battery. It beeps when I put the battery in, that is it. When I scan for unknown objects, I get shown an air tag, but it doesn't tell me anything about it. So probably I should just remove the battery - I must have gone through a heap of them debugging this - and just smash it.

New comment by _ph_ in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

_ph_ — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 20:18:51 +0000

I think I unpaired it, but I cannot pair it again, as it isn't recognized by the iPhone at all.

New comment by _ph_ in "Apple introduces new AirTag with longer range and improved findability"

_ph_ — Mon, 26 Jan 2026 16:53:01 +0000

Just found out that the one active remaining tag on my keychain stopped working in September without me noticing.