I value effectiveness in manifesting change in the world. This takes many forms. I think one of the most depressing and myopic views that hackers have is that code rules everything, when in fact social movements live and die upon their accessibility and impact. If you think that laboring in a cave and writing the next Free text editor is going to bring about free software, the reality is that three proprietary editors have already eaten its lunch, the latter two of which are VC backed and soon to require cloud registration, and the last which was written using AI trained on your code that you very carefully structured to be unusable to build non-free software on top of.
You are right, it is not about writing a code. That's the common problem when discussing free software among geeks.
Of course it is about political action, putting pressure, being loud etc.
But now look at the current state of affairs and tell me - how successful were all those orgs, with more professional management, PR people and proper gender representation? We don't need another man or lady in suit, giving generic word-salad speeches, full of currently fashionable words. Those on the other side of the fence have easily can have much more of those.
They have both but it's mostly billed per click/app install/follow/video watch. The "brand awareness" advertisers already left except for like, Saudi Arabia.
The master private key used by the system is generated locally and never leaves your Apple devices in a state that anyone except your devices can read it.
The master key is used to derive an AirTag specific private key which is provisioned to the AirTag and is in turn combined with an increasing counter which generates a third private key that's never stored anywhere. The ID broadcast is the public key of this third key. It changes every 30 minutes or 1 hour, I forget which.
Other devices see this key, use it to encrypt their own location, and upload that encrypted blob along with the public key to Find My, and in order for Apple to even know which account the encrypted blob they can't decrypt belongs to I have to actually request the location of my AirTag by locally deriving the keypair it used for a certain point in time.
My understanding is that the only reason dGPUs generally don’t use system RAM isn’t that they don’t have access, but that the supporting software doesn’t use it out of choice because the of the speed hit (iGPUs, of course, do generally use system RAM as VRAM.)
> My understanding is that the only reason dGPUs generally don’t use system RAM isn’t that they don’t have access, but that the supporting software doesn’t use it out of choice because the of the speed hit
It looks like one of the advantages of Apples put-everything-on-the-package strategy is that they can have a very wide bus to ram, which makes using system ram for the GPU much more palatable.
Isn't the main difference that Apple is building something like 4-16 channel memory controllers in a mobile device while you normally don't get more than 2-4 channels even on a desktop? That's a lot of transistors and (potentially) power usage but if you can get on the latest node and have a market willing to pay for giant chips it lets you get impressive amounts of bandwidth.
I don't think you need the RAM to be on the same package for that, it just makes the timings easier.
The "Apple tax" isn't really a thing for midrange specs any more, but they will absolutely charge you out the nose to max things out. The top-end macs are targeted at people who won't even notice if the laptop's price is doubled.
We notice… but grumble and pay it because we’ve justified it to ourselves. There are of course outliers with heaps of money that don’t care about the cost, but few businesses are so cavalier with cashflow as to not notice and check why someone is buying a $7k laptop or $25k desktop
They charge you out the nose even to do small upgrades. $200 for bumping the SSD from 256GB to 512GB and $200 to go to 16GB RAM. You can easily find brand name good PCIe Gen 4 2TB NVMe drives for less than $200 now.
Yes, I am not exaggerating. The Framework came to around $1.8k and the Macbook Pro came to ~ $3.9k. The only compromise with the Framework is that it is a 13" screen and the Macbook pro is a 14". But that's because Apple only offers up to 24GB ram on the 13".
