Decade
Joined 13 years ago
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930
Submissions
470
Member since
May 17
Recent submissions
Comment · 4 years ago
Comment · 5 years ago
In short, Apple does things in non-standard ways without explaining how to get another OS to work.
Apple doesn’t prioritize lack of binary blobs. The EFI firmware is all proprietary. All their Wi-Fi have been switched to Broadcom.
They do weird non-standard things to the Thunderbolt controller, e.g., you have to lie to the firmware and claim to be macOS in order for it not to disable the Thunderbolt controller.
Newer MacBooks hide a bunch of hardware behind the proprietary T2, and whatever embedded OS runs the Touch Bar.
MacBooks are not ideologically pure, and sunk efforts to get an OS working on other machines are often wasted on MacBooks because Apple does things in bizarrely different ways.
Comment · 5 years ago
It’s Wired.co.uk. British humor is less reverent than what’s practiced in the US.
Comment · 5 years ago
To expand on that:
The design challenge of high-performance CPUs today is heat. Too much heat induces throttling. Putting low-priority stuff onto efficiency cores reserves the power budget of the SoC for high-priority tasks.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05/apples-m1-is-a-fast-...
Comment · 5 years ago
My impression was more than a little regionalism. KDE came from Europe. GNOME came from America. Most distros that I know come from America.
In addition, Richard Stallman made lawyers nervous of KDE by claiming that using GPL libraries with Qt (which at the time was under a proprietary license with source code available via FreeQt, definitely not a FSF-approved license) meant the KDE developers had no legal right to use GPL programs at all, even after KDE and Qt were relicensed under GPL.
Stallman eventually relented and granted permission to use the FSF’s own software, but the KDE project didn’t ask for it and didn’t bother to get forgiveness from other GPL license owners. Whether they need to go through that ceremony was never tested in court. GPLv3 switched to a much more reasonable standard, just provide the source under a compatible license.
By the time the license tempest-in-a-teapot reached a conclusion, GNOME and KDE already had substantial-enough installed bases and corporate sponsors to keep going indefinitely.
Comment · 5 years ago
Those negative effects were not necessarily linked. Prop 13 was written by a lobbyist for commercial landlords, and corporations have always benefited the most from it.
https://www.pbs.org/video/the-first-angry-man-lnpy07/
There are other ways to provide relief for rising property taxes. For example, Washington has a property tax deferral program, so seniors don’t have to pay the increased property tax until they or their heirs sell the house; the capital gains that increased the property tax will pay for the deferred property tax.
Comment · 5 years ago
It’s not the will of the market because the people with power pass laws to funnel resources even more to people with power.
https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten...
When we have developers building luxury condos amidst squalor, that’s a second-order effect of policies intended to create such contrasts. The market is constrained by the laws.
Comment · 5 years ago
Difficult? Yes, a billion times yes.
Most of the stress on land comes from exclusionary laws. People with power don’t want poorer people (and especially people of another race) to live near them—attributing their success to their efforts and labeling their own servants as parasites[1] and deadbeats—and pass laws that make housing affordability impossible. Thus, people need to drive long distances to jobs and live in disinvested communities in order to participate in regional economies.
The worst offenders are actually not cities, but the inner suburbs surrounding cities. Cities are filled with guilty settlers who want to help less fortunate people but are unable to let go of the systems of power, while their suburbs are usually created for the purpose of segregation and repeatedly reaffirm their desire for segregation.[2]
[1] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/272/365/
[2] https://www.greenbelt.org/blog/vote-no-on-measure-y-to-provi...
Comment · 5 years ago
> Also, doing burnouts and donuts on public streets sounds fun but it leaves the road covered in tire rubber and I imagine it smells awful while they’re doing it.
It indeed does smell awful, and the tire dust is filled with toxins that you probably don’t want in your system; that have already been implicated in the deaths of salmon.
It’s also very loud, well over 100 dB. That’s enough to cause permanent hearing loss.
I don’t believe the moral high ground is with the car club. Their behavior harms people outside of their in-group, with the most severe harms falling on people less privileged than themselves.
Comment · 5 years ago
There’s a very good chance that the MacBook is outdated or otherwise broken by the time the SSD fails. I’ve been using SSDs for about 10 years, and I’m not the heaviest user, but so far I’ve never had an SSD fail from wear. Thumb drives, sure, but not SSDs yet.
Comment · 5 years ago
The mortgage interest deduction was an accidental side-effect of pro-business regulation, and it doesn’t advance any reasonable societal goals. It’s effectively a regressive tax break, the richer the beneficiary the larger the tax break, up to ordinary 7-digit millionaire.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/magazine/who-needs-the-mo...
Comment · 5 years ago
That’s sort of a broken window fallacy. A direct stimulus doesn't take away people’s time and materials producing things that nobody wants.
Comment · 5 years ago
My knee-jerk reaction is this doesn’t seem like a great idea. I’m pretty sure Android would never have gotten so big without Google’s cash infusion, and even so they depended on Microsoft, Blackberry, and Nokia’s missteps leaving such a big gap in the market.
Success for startups is never certain. I’m not sure that removing exits would make success more certain. Not everybody has the luck and determination to go alone. FAANG were uncertain startups not that long ago.
Comment · 5 years ago
It’s not just a California issue. Pretty much all of post-war (World War II) American development is functionally insolvent. Actually, not having enough residents per square mile is a leading driver of the need for more tax $.
Comment · 5 years ago
One difference, as highlighted by the YIMBY Action lawsuit against the California Department of Housing and Community Development, is that both Beverly Hills and San Bernardino are included in the Southern California Association of Governments, and thus they are considered together while planning for housing needs.
Whereas Stockton is excluded from the Association of Bay Area Governments. The housing shortage in the Bay Area is not accurately assessed, and not accurately planned for.
https://www.sfweekly.com/news/yimbys-sue-for-even-more-housi...
I first set it up with a Ryzen 5 3600 and Radeon HD 6750, running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS, because I thought I didn’t really need that much processing power. After un-blacklisting the driver for such an old GPU, I discovered I was using upwards of 80% CPU and dropping frames while streaming at 1440p, so I decided to upgrade.
Then, I tried a Ryzen 7 5700g with integrated Vega 8. First, I needed to upgrade to Ubuntu 21.10 for such a new GPU, and then OBS Studio was randomly crashing while switching between scenes. Also, hardware video encoding wasn’t working well, so it was still taking upwards of 80% CPU while streaming at 1440p. And the video outputs were finicky, sending windows to the wrong screen on power up. Random crashing is unusable, so I switched to Windows.
With Windows 11 on the Ryzen 7 5700g, the hardware video encoding works well, so the same scenes are taking less than 50% CPU while streaming at 4K (2160p) and not dropping any frames. Now I can do other things on the stream.