If you have Apple Intel hardware, I strongly strongly strongly recommend you migrate to Linux. It works amazingly on MacOS, except I guess the sound drivers aren't perfect. Too many security holes in old, unpatched software.
I second that. I wouldn’t buy an Intel Mac specifically to run Linux, but my T2 Mac Minis work well for me on Linux. I did have to copy some Broadcom firmware from macOS, and I keep a small macOS installation in order to access recovery mode settings.
My Macbook Air 2021 M1 flies circles around my 2014 MBP. I got a new battery for the 2014 but the rubber bezel is disintegrating. I'm thinking of turning the 2014 into a TV driver but that's about it.
People want computers to take on new jobs and the hardware is a limiting factor on that. And even if it can take on a job, that doesn't mean it does it as well as a newer machine.
Depends. I'm surrounded by people who just need light web browsing and emails. They don't really like computers, they want to use them only when absolutely necessary. A Mac from 2012 with a 256-512 GiB SSD and 8 GiB of RAM is plenty.
Hell, last week I was on holidays without my computer, and I have borrowed such a machine. The battery has been replaced so it still has a long battery time. It was as fast as I could hope (and I'm quite sensitive to this stuff!), the only thing slowing me down was the keyboard layout, the window management of the OS, and the touchpad gestures not responding as well as what I have on Linux (notably swipe for back in Firefox, I was quite surprised).
This thing can't be updated anymore though and even Firefox gave up, so I advised switching to Linux to keep things safe.
Aside from the OS, this thing does 100% the job it needs to do. Recent hardware won't do better because that's not the limiting factor.
Even if money is not an issue, replacing hardware has environmental costs, and that's in this spirit that I answered no, not necessarily better.
People like computers to work fast. They don't like when their computer sounds like a jet engine. Especially among other people whose computers don't do that. People like not having to worry too much charging their computer.
If it already does the job it needs to, does it really need a bleeding edge version of Java?
The environmental cost is less than ordering a pizza. A product that someone uses for years is not going to be an environmental issue.
People don't like to wait for their computer. The nuance is quite important.
> They don't like when their computer sounds like a jet engine. Especially among other people whose computers don't do that. People like not having to worry too much charging their computer.
But the 2012 Mac I'm talking about does all that for what it's used for: completely silent (and trust me, I'm quite sensitive to that), lasts on battery long enough, as fast as possible (of course a new machine would be faster, but it would not be meaningful for the use case).
> The environmental cost is less than ordering a pizza. A product that someone uses for years is not going to be an environmental issue.
Well, you should send this ‘yeah, I can bring my personal laptop while my machine gets set up - when will my company issued device be available?’ Oh and yeah, bring a comically old laptop running an obscure Linux distro. DSL would be best.
I'm a full-stack product engineer who's been coding since 2017, and uses all the latest in AI-tooling to accelerate my output. You can find my Github at https://github.com/mikhael28 to see some of my open-source work & personal projects. My portfolio website has my resume, and some visual examples of the personal projects mentioned as well as my emerging blog at https://michaelnightingale.dev
Something I built last month in February: https://10xcardgame.com - a multiplayer card game for software engineers, inspired by Magic the Gathering, to help engineers bone up on their DSA knowledge. Full streaming netcode & WebRTC-enabled chatrooms self-hosted on my Rasberry Pi, where my OpenClaw agent hangs out as well.
Crazy to hear how much spam & straight up liars are applying nowadays. Not being able to pass a technical interview is one thing, but sending a fake resume and then expecting to not be exposed as a fraud is just crazy, sociopath behavior.
Maybe a startup could work on this problem - HN has two moderators, I’m not sure it’s realistic to ask them to track more than what they already do. How would they even track and verify such hearsay anyway?
I'm mostly just spitballing un-implementable ideas. At the end of the day, the HN "Who's Hiring" tradition relies on people acting in good faith, which cannot be assumed anymore. There is nothing to stop a "hiring" company from lying about every last thing in their job ad.
HN has two moderators but the YC Job Opening ads are not just part of HN, they're part of YC as a whole.
I expect YC to do due diligence if one of their companies receives several reports that they heard no replies (it's not that many companies). If it's found to be more than hearsay, they lose HN ad privelleges.
---
I wouldn't do a startup but I certainly could see myself creating a bunch of fake developer profiles of varying skill levels and sending them to companies en masse. If they don't reply to anything even though they have had a job opening, they get placed on the (public) name & shame list.
Would also be interesting to automatically keep track of which job openings a company has and how long they've been open for.
Fantastic! A great proof of concept on Linux - lots of AAA gaming is already possible on Mac with Crossover and/or Parallels or VMWare Personal, which is free! While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.
I know it's an extremely un-Apple-like thing to do, but I really wish Apple would team up with Valve to work on Proton, and bring full Proton support to MacOS.
Bringing Proton to Mac would involve either Apple making amends with Khronos and supporting Vulkan, or Valve making the substantial effort to port Proton to Metal natively, or doing DirectX-to-Vulkan-to-Metal translation with MoltenVK. None of those sound very likely or optimal to me.
Besides, the main reason Valve is investing so heavily in Linux and Proton is so their destiny isn't tied to someone else's platform. MacOS is just another someone else's platform like Windows is, with the same threat of getting rug-pulled by a first-party app store that spooked Gabe Newell[1] into investing in Linux in the first place.
Apple already provides their Game Porting Toolkit which includes a D3D12 to Metal translation later for Wine, and it has been integrated into user-friendly Wine distributions like Crossover since last year. There's not much Proton has to offer over what's already available.
My understanding about the game porting toolkit is that it requires developers to specifically modify their game in order to make their game compatible.
The magic of Proton from a consumer point of view is that it just works for basically every game, sans those with Kernel-level anticheat stuff. This means thousands of old games that haven't been updated in years will work.any games that don't have active developers.
So Apples solution works for new games but isn't a practical option for compatibility for existing games.
The stated intended purpose of the game porting toolkit is to enable developers to modify their games. But the software actually being shipped includes what is literally a Wine GPU backend, which is usable by (and already used and bundled by) consumer-facing Wine applications like Crossover. If you go to Codeweavers, download any Crossover for Mac from the past year (Sep. 27, 2023 according to their release notes), you're getting a tool that includes the D3D to Metal layer from Apple's Game Porting Toolkit.
Also note that Codeweavers, Crossover's developer, is a major contributor to both Wine and Proton, so there's a great deal of, um, crossover between these projects.
Don’t forget Apple’s GamePortingToolkit based on Crossover/Wine and the open source client for it Whisky. I think it supports most games Linux Proton does now.
BG3 is the only RPG I would play on a controller, it's very well done. You can also connect a keyboard and monitor to the Steam Deck, BG3 runs at 1080p high locked to 30FPS
>While I have a Steam Deck, gaming on Mac works for me - I refuse to play Baldurs Gate 3 on a controller.
Personally 99% of my Steam Deck usage is with it docked. I do mostly use a controller, but also have it hooked to the same USB switch as my PC so I can hit a button to move my keyboard and mouse over.
Baldur's Gate 3 is the first game I ever ran on my Deck that did not run very well, though. Most stuff I've played runs at 60fps at my external monitor's 1920x1200 resolution. That in addition to not liking the gameplay on BG3 much made me not continue with the game, though I may revisit it someday.
Suits can be very comfortable to wear, even with neckties and dress shoes. The first monkeys probably though shirts were hot, stuffy and uncomfortable too. They are not ridiculous items.
Really? I want to be able to flexibly move my arms and legs into all kinds of directions, I want to sit down on grass or generally on the ground, stretch my legs out, sit cross-legged, crash on couches, snuggle into various types of chairs, cuddle with people, play with kids on random/unplanned occasions, etc. Suits restrict a lot of movement or would look like bags, compared to eg stretch jeans and a tshirt and hoodie. I often use hoodies as makeshift pillows or seat cushion (and offer that to others), not so sure how that would go for a suit jacket. And I can squeeze them into a backpack when warm, or throw into a random corner or on the floor. It’s also easy to lend them to other people when they are cold, where jackets really only fit people of the exact same stature. All that and more means „comfortable to wear (and use)“ for me.
You can do all of that with a properly tailored suit.
If it’s expensive you probably don’t want to roll around in the dust, but if you look at images of workers from hundreds of years ago they were essentially wearing suits (trousers, shirt, jacket, hat) most of the time, even for manual labor
