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Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

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Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#751
post #720

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brazilian Favelas spring to mind. Yeah, like that.

Did you mean that in a negative way? The way I see it, favelas are more of a government problem, not enforcing rules and standards leads to people making up their own (just like Internet standards). Going with my analogy, someone who built their own house in the favelas is, in fact, "house literate". Their home might be sub-standard, but they can take care of it all on their own.

"housing illiteracy" was your example not mine. I was just suggesting a possible parallel with how great the divide is now compared with the days when the vast majority of the world was lucky to lay their hands on a Z80.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can attest that structs use less memory however IIRC they don't have methods so no GetHashCode() which made them way too slow to insert in a HashSet or Dictionary You can and should implement IEquatable on a struct, especially if you plan on placing them in a hashset - the default implementation will use reflection and will be slow but it's easy to override.

I just checked, apparently structs can have methods. Is it a new thing or me that was ignorant?

You could always have methods (for as long as I can remember at least, I started using .NET in 3.0 days), you just can't inherit structs or use virtual methods because structs don't have virtual method table. You can implement interfaces however and override operators - it's very nice for implementing 3D graphics math primitives like vectors and matrices, way better than Java in this regard which was what got me into C# way back then.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#753
post #718

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. For now.

People have been making these comments for years. Every new macOS release. Except here we are and things are the same. I run whatever I want. Here’s to having this same silly “argument” in 2021.

I just got a new MBP this summer from my workplace, running Catalina.

Getting it to run software not approved by Apple is a pain.

They may always leave a door open somewhere, but I wouldn't want to count on that.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#754

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've completely changed the scope of what's being discussed, though. Retain/release being faster would just surface as regular performance improvements. It won't change anything at all about how an existing application manages memory. It's possible that apps have been completely overhauled for a baseline M1 experience. Extremely, extraordinarily unlikely that anything remotely of the sort has happened, though. And…

From the original article: Third, Marcel Weiher explains Apple’s obsession about keeping memory consumption under control from his time at Apple as well as the benefits of reference counting: >where Apple might have been “focused” on performance for the last 15 years or so, they have been completely anal about memory consumption. When I was there, we were fixing 32 byte memory leaks. Leaks that happened once. So not…

But again that didn't change with M1. We're talking MacOS vs. MacOS here. Your quote is fully irrelevant to what's being discussed which is the outgoing 32gb macbook vs the new 16gb-max ones. They are running the same software. Using the same ObjC & Swift reference counting systems.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#755

I understand the machine is great or going to be great for most use cases. My mbp is my main workhorse, but as a freelance SRE "devops" guy, the Apple ARM platform won't be suitable for my job any time soon, if ever. Docker is not yet available - but even when it would become available, emulating virtualised x86 code is explicitly not going to be supported. That in many cases means pulling a docker image built in a c…

Docker has QEMU built in. You can run ARM docker images on x86, and I believe you can run x86 docker images on ARM.

This is not very widely talked about, I stumbled across it by accident: I was working on an x86 emulator on my Chromebook, and was going back and forth between the ARM Chromebook and an x86 laptop. I was working within docker on both machines. At some point I was running a test binary saying "this is an ARM-binary" and forgot to run it using the emulator - but it still executed directly on the x86 machine. It was very confusing and took me a while to figure why my x86 cpu was executing this little static ARM binary just fine - QEMU inside Docker.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#756
post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if they simply decided that they didn't care for that part of the market? At some point we should just accept that.

Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.

I'm a developer and haven't had a desktop in 15 years or so. It's been a mix of Thinkpads (IBM then Lenovo) and MBPs.

I'm guessing very few developers need the extra power a desktop offers over a high-end laptop.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#757

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the developers and power users that still use desktop machines/towers are either very cpu-power-hungry niche exception, or the more backwards ones, and thus least likely to influence/be imitated by anyone...

I care to differ (as a developer on a desktop). The reason for developing on a desktop is that my productivity is much higher with 3 screens, one of which is a 40 inch, a full 101 key keyboard and a mouse.

Laptop user, I also have 3 screens. I do use the MBP's keyboard, but never felt like that cost me productivity. I use a normal mouse as well. The only reason I can think of the need a desktop is the extra CPU/GPU capacity you can get.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#758
post #708

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers and power users will eventually hurt them when they leave whole ecosystem.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

>The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

* in very specific places and conditions.

Actual numbers from every single credible survey puts macs at a grand maximum of 25%.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#759

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Okay, but offering no machine suitable for developers You mean... software developers? The same people who almost universally use a Mac?

>The same people who almost universally use a Mac? * in very specific places and conditions. Actual numbers from every single credible survey puts macs at a grand maximum of 25%.

Well, most corporations don't give developers a choice in what computer they use. I doubt that makes them unsuitable.

Re: Apple Silicon M1: Black Magic Fuckery

#760

PSA: however impressive the M1 hardware is, you're still going to be stuck using OSX, playing in Apple's walled garden and being subjected to their awful policies. I'll gladly join the groupie crowd once Linux runs stable on it.

> Apple's walled garden Apparently over the years the definition of "Walled Garden" has drifted a lot. The iPhone has a "Walled Garden", unless you jailbreak, it's very difficult to run anything outside the App Store. My Mac? Almost nothing I run is from the App Store. Nothing needs to be from the App Store. Most of what I run doesn't even go through Gatekeeper and it certainly never touches software I build or compi…

Customer shouldn't be required to mess up with the system files in order to gain full access to the product they paid for. Such restrictions should be illegal if they are not "opt in". Customers should have a right to install alternative app stores without the need of "hacking". We desperately need regulation to stop greedy, tax shy and privacy violating giants from exploiting the consumers.
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