_ph_

Eventually it might. We don't have any good ideas about what would help without things getting much worse.

What we do need now is finally the determination to fight climate change. We have all the tools at our disposal to eliminate any fossil fuel burning within some years. We should finally take this as the priority it should be.

I think the best explanation, how Lisp macros are different from most other macro system is, that a Lisp macro is a function executed during compilation. It gets fed the parameters passed to it in literal form and then computes the source to actually compile by the compiler.

The power of this is that this function is also written in plain Lisp and it also sees all definition already existing in your Lisp image. Also, it is completely unlimited in power. So while being run, or as it is called "during macro expansion" the function could google for one of the things passed and use the result to create the output. Of course, this is not a practical example, but shows how flexible the system is.

That might be, on the other side, I consider Lisp highly readable, but quite a few modern languages quite unreadable. For example parsing type signatures with a complex syntax.

Any style of writing you are not familiar with will require a lot of training. Try reading anything written in the Greek alphabet for example.

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 :)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Which Snapdragon laptops can I buy which run Linux?

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.

Like which, especially with an ARM processor?

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Thats worth a try, because if the batteries have that, trying several ones of the same brand would produce the same results.

Now, do I try to test this by licking the battery or should I try to sand the surface without pre-testing? :)

I had the thought too, but there is no way anyone else could have gotten physical control over this and shouldn't I see that AirTag when I scan for things in my surrounding as an anti-tracking protection?

Changing the battery was the first thing I did. No change. But if that is the official signal for "battery low", I can try a few more. Thanks.

I have an older AirTag, which cannot be seen by my iPhone any more but gives a slight beep whenever it gets shaken. Anyone ever heard of the behavior?

I once bought 4 air tags, never got to work them in any useful sense. I keep getting warnings about leaving my keys behind, which are in my pocket. I don't recall any time being warned about leaving things behind when I did. Can't really locate things a few meters away.

The world is full of "head scratchers". But that makes it more important not just to yell "aliens!", but to exercise scientific curiosity. This is what makes me most angry about his works, he discourages people from trying to work out solutions for mysterious phenomena.

Yes, I got the 13" M4 Pro mostly because of the display. I use the iPad Pro as my photo album and its just fantastic for that. The M4 flies of course. Thanks to more and more multi-windowed support on iPad OS it gets more useful for light tasks.