erichsu's comments

When it works, it’s a dream. Fast, cool. Rosetta 2 works quickly and well. I’ve found M1 builds for things like ffmpeg, VS Code, TeX.

The #1 problem is external monitor support. I use a Seiki 4K monitor. If you unplug it, the laptop regularly becomes unresponsive and kerneltask eats all your cycles. If it sleeps with a monitor on and wakes with it off, that’s almost a sure beach ball.

Rumors are that a fix is coming, but you never know. You can see from the other comments that in general external monitor support is erratic, and that’s very bad for a 13” laptop. I’ve taken to rebooting between monitor unplugs. Very obnoxious and I’m infuriated having to do it.

But then when it all works, it’s pretty sweet, so all is forgiven. So basically, it’s a slightly abusive relationship. Buyer beware.

Enjoying this! Other than the bug about instructions not showing right in landscape mode due to noted css issue.

Wait a second. The Wikipedia page first says that microwave do not cook from the inside out because the microwaves do not penetrate beyond 1 cm. but then it says that microwaves really cook by oscillating the magnetic field which jostles around dipoles like the water in food.

So does the magnetic field only penetrate very close to the skin, or are all the water molecules inside the food being excited, resulting in the food being cooked indeed from the inside?

In my opinion, they buried the key point... the dead end of Perl 6.

Up until last year, I did a lot of web development in Perl. Its strengths were CPAN & community, ubiquity and top-notch text processing. Its acquired taste was very elegant expressiveness once you grokked the grammar.

Then all the Perl leadership focussed on the black hole of Perl 6 which was solving a problem no one had but CS linguists. So Perl users like me felt there was no future in Perl. Perl 6 would have to be relearned for no tangible benefit so why not learn something new with a growing rather than stagnant/declining ecosystem? No one was forced to leave, but like a trap door, as soon as a Perl programmer learned something new, they were only going to continue to decrease their use of Perl.

The rise of Python and Ruby (and Ruby on Rails especially) and even PHP, were grave wounds to the health of Perl, but Perl 6 was the self-cutting that bled the community beyond the point of self-repair.

I generally agree with people who want more infrastructure to reduce car traffic in SF.

However, if you're forced to drive and park in SF, what's extra frustrating about the wasteful driveway situation is that a good percentage of the garages are not even being used for cars. Many have been converted into bedrooms or storage. I wish there someway to identify such conversions and allow parking in their driveways.

I tried very hard to pay the NBA to stream its games online. I bought NBA League Pass Broadband two years running and found:

1. Many games I wanted to see were under local blackout

2. Many games I wanted to see were blacked out because they were the Tuesday NBA TV game.

3. I tried time shift games and found that whenever the game ends, the stream ends and snaps you to the final score. No matter where you are in the stream.

4. I found replay was flaky.

For all these reasons, I found myself often watching games on atdhe despite having paid to watch them. I also found myself really enjoying watching random TV commercials in Polish or Czech or Arabic, depending on atdhe source. I also really was impressed with the quality of the Veetle software.

Anyway, issues 3 & 4 could be solved by competent programming. Issues 1 & 2 (blackout) are likely to be with us for a long time due to the idiotic history of profit divvying in the industry.

I would still love to pay the NBA to watch the games, as long as all the games are viewable!

Of course it's a business decision by Google. It would be negligent to their shareholders if it weren't a good-faith business decision for Google. It makes plausible strategic business sense for all the reasons others have outlined. (I think it's a bad move, but hey I'm not running the billion dollar company.)

Same with Apple. It is too simplistic to say "Apple dumped Flash". There were three great business reasons for Apple to not have Flash on iOS. (1) A decent speed/energy Flash didn't exist, and Apple had no leverage to get Adobe to make one, (2) Apple does not want to depend on any outsiders to advance their platform, (3) Apple wants to differentiate iOS, so they want to have software target advanced iOS features and be exclusive. Cross-platform tools like Flash defeat that.

Folks, these are the biggest tech players in the world. I don't think either one gives a crap about standards or the free software movement any farther than it advances their business model. We've been in a lucky stretch where both Apple and Google want to commodify web access, so they've support (mostly) open standards. Now they turn their guns on each other and will seek to commodify each other's core products (for Apple, hardware; for Google, advertising).

First, my compliments to any prophet who goes back to actually audit his predictions.

Having said that, I think Ray is grading himself on a pretty generous curve. Many predictions of the form "X will be Y" are counted as correct if somewhere in the world at some cost there is technology available allowing X to be Y.

As a neutral reader, those predictions sure sound like they are supposedly to be widespread rather than merely existing.

These are rational arguments for non-ObjC developers to be pissed at Apple. None of them are arguments for APPLE to change its policy. In the medium term it is clearly better for Apple's interests to implement 3.3.1, to maintain control over platform and encourage differentiation of its hardware (the way it makes most of its money!). In the medium term, they have more great developers than you can shake a stick at, so they won't cry about losing a few thousand more.

The only real argument that makes sense is that long-term, enough developer goodwill will be lost that they will go flock to a better platform and eventually tip the balance against iOS. That certainly will not be for the next 3-5 years, which is an eternity in tech.

I am not an iOS developer nor do I own Apple stock, so I'm just calling it like I see it. In short, it's a great business decision for them and I really doubt developers will make them pay for it, either short or medium term.

Work on computer problems to break out of melancholy. In my experience, many such issues have a specific solution arc. One tries different things to fix the issue and same error, same error, same error... then DIFFERENT error. Then suddenly it works.

Example. I was very depressed over a relationship ending, and had been for a few months. Then I was was trying to get a Linux server working and trying to get the Ethernet card recognized (this was 1999 so this was non-trivial) and failed, failed, failed... NEW failure, WORKING! Wow, that shock victory was enough to snap me out of the depression, where gradual victories had not.

Good luck though, and be sure to eat well and talk to others...