Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
However, I live with Activity Monitor open at all times. The computer constantly grinds to a halt, and I have to force quit apps at least 10 times per day.
Not really Apple's fault though, just most apps use around 4GB of RAM these days even when they're idle. Some use upwards of 16GB.
I've watched the computer slowly get obsoleted over time, not because the hardware is too old, but because software just get's worse every year.
Install Linux to unleash the full potential of your M1 (or to liberate any other system with a BloatOs, like macOS or Windows).
I resucitated and saved from the landfill a laggy and almost unusable laptop with Window 10, 4GB RAM and a Celeron processor, how?... Installing Manjaro (Arch), XFCE and kernel 6.18.
ZSwap and MGLru do wonders with memory and cache management.
It's fast enough with Thorium SSE4. I can easily open 15-20 tabs.
I mean, you could make a better comment about it, but in my opinion the sarcasm is justified.
AI has greatly increased the number of security bugs found on a weekly basis (which is great) and we're getting one of those one-shotted and then immediately abandoned open source "projects" every day (which is useless).
And yet there is no indication that any of this new software development capacity is going into improving the quality and efficiency of the software we use on a daily basis.
Why is widely used professional software not getting better and more efficient if bug fixing is supposedly so much cheaper now? Is it not worth putting any effort into optimisation at all?
I think the reason could be that AI can only do more of what we have done manually before, i.e. more lowest common denominator code.
Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
> Or am I just too impatient and this is all coming?
I doubt its coming, at least not within the timescale OpenAI or Anthropic would like to believe. If we were close, then we'd see the fruits of that, which like you said, we are seeing the opposite currently.
The bottleneck was never writing code, and it still isn't. Writing code is like 15% of the job, but the labs can't tell investors "Yeah we make everyone only 15% more efficient" and still be able to raise trillions in capital. Whatever AI accelerates, the bottleneck is still code review, comprehension, and security debt.
Vibe coded slop gets abandoned because non-devs were never going to be able to use AI to make commercial software beyond an MVP. Once your app needs multi-tenant auth, session invalidation, concurrency handling, API changes, graceful degradation under load, etc. natural language prompts will fail. You still need a mental model of how things work.
When building a house, lowering the cost of bricks and getting them delivered faster does nothing to speed up the rest of the process that still relies on engineering discipline.
I don’t get it either. What are these people doing that keep saying that Mac OS is snappy. It’s the same slow garbage as windows.
One problem is that you need Firefox because safari doesn’t peppery do ad blocking. But once you have 20 tabs open or so, it uses 5GB GB ram. But perhaps your also need safari for something else. That’s another 5GB of RAM. Then once you count a finder replacement (2GB ram), and some office stuff (probably 1-4GB for each app window), 16GB of ram are almost as sluggish as an old windows laptop. Add MS Teams, and the thing is brought to it’s knees. And Mac OS has a lot of quirks and the window management is atrocious (alt-tab doesn’t switch between app windows, a bunch of apps to get alt-tab behavior don’t work properly either).
I feel like more and more that Mac Users are being forced by the atrocious window management to only have one window open per software, so then the system is fast. Problem is when you have multiple tasks going on in parallel, then you need many windows and desktops.
I don't really think it's all that much about macOS. I think it more has to do with the state of web development - claude.com or chat.com or grok.com all can use up to 5GB of RAM as an idle webpage in the background regardless of browser. Most apps these days seem to be electron apps which can fire off multiple 4+ GB node processes doing who knows what.
I think most true native apps don't have these issues. Unfortunately there is very little incentive to build on the macOS platform these days, which is where I point more of the finger at Apple. UX, UI, & DX are all quite a bit worse for Mac native.
I live with safari and finder and all my office ware is native (mail.app) or web based (Google Docs). Chat is via slack, but I use the website and not the native app. I've adapted to the quirks and I'd bet that's a lot of the reason why it doesn't feel slow to me. I feel I have plenty of windows open at once but likely less than you do.
If you have to use specialized software to make your system snappy, then it is, as a system, not snappy. The attitude about the MacBook is that it never slows down … what, unless you use MS office?
my point was I'm not using specialized software, I'm using the software shipped with the system. MS Office isn't Apple Software, so holding apple responsible for Microsoft code quality seems counter to your first point.
I have one of these too. I can’t believe how long it’s performed at very high levels of use including two external screens and 10-15 memory intensive applications running concurrently, including three different browsers with multiple tabs open on each. I installed a new video editing application today and was apprehensive it would stumble, but it worked like a champ.
The battery indicator is starting to show a decrease in performance. It won’t hold a full charge, but even when I’m without a direct power connection, I can still have it running for nearly 4 hours with Wi-Fi, 6+ without.
I'm baffled why anyone would think you wouldn't be able to record multi track audio on a modern laptop with SSDs as if it was a difficult task. I had an Alesis HD24 once and that recorded 24 tracks on hard disks, not SSDs.
Hmm same one but mine is clearly deteriorating lately. Lots of beachballs. I think I abused the SSD pretty badly though if I’m being honest. Loading and offloading large media files almost daily for five years lol
MacBook is great hardware, but I really hate MacOS. It feels perpetually cellophane wrapped, and I don't like any of the window management. Finder is particularly awful too.
You should be able to deeply tweak how window management works, but Mac won't let you do that.
I'd run Linux on the hardware if it wasn't a hack.
This is a solid summary of Apple to me. Generally great hardware (outside of when they fuck up the keyboard or for ~5 years or something), and you have to piece general usability in from a myriad a third party apps while hoping Apple doesn't generically decide to lock out whatever API they're relying on unceremoniously.
When I had to use a Mac for work, Rectangle was a life saver since it basically let me replicate manual window management pretty closely to how I've done it on Linux forever, between that and iterm2 it wasn't a terrible experience but man was I happy when Linux was an option again.
I just don't get on with OSX, I can use it, it's "fine" but it never feels like home the way Linux always has, mostly because I generally run with defaults for everything but when something does bother me I can poke it on Linux until it's how I want it to be.
Linux simply assumes you know what you want and lets you have it, Apple assumes they know what you want and based on how much love OSX gets from some folks they seem to get that mostly right for those people.
I can't speak for others, but my preference for macOS basically boils down to "it's a *nix system that can run the commercial software I need, with a lot of nice little attention to detail features" I'm trading friction in some areas, for the removal of friction elsewhere.
Plus macOS has little niceties like readline key bindings in every text field OOTB, pleasant font rendering (on retina quality displays), and all the "ecosystem" features. I use universal control between my mac and iPad daily, AirDrop, universal clipboard, and airpods auto device switching, etc.
I don't pretend it's a perfect OS, it's far from it, but I willingly accept the tradeoffs and find ways to work around them to get the other features I want.
What in particular do you find hacky about Asahi? I've been daily driving Asahi Fedora for about 8 months on a 13" M1 MBP, a significant portion of the project has been upstreamed to the kernel at this point, so the bar is set very high. The most significant compromises I've encountered have to do with Fedora's aarch64 repos, nothing to do with Asahi itself.
I love Typescript, I think it's a fascinating language with a great runtime. It's already very fast to execute, but the compile times have been awful. Especially when you start to run production builds with minification and whatnot.
So I'm interested on what exactly has been sped up here. I can see compile times have been, but is that it? I suppose the runtime itself was always native code, and already very fast.
What do you mean by runtime? The JavaScript runtimes, like V8? Yeah those are impressively fast for a dynamically typed ”scripting” language, but that has little to do with TS. TypeScript’s work ends at compilation.
The TypeScript compiler is (was) slow, but you don’t need it to minify code. This sounds like some other problem with the tools in your project’s build. (There are faster tools available these days.)
A faster type checker will help with performance problems in text editors since type info is needed for a lot of queries.
It sounds very slightly AI in some places, but I think this is an example of AI tropes turning up in human writing.
Which is a shame, because it makes those constructs less pleasant to read than they used to be. If you squint, and pretend AI doesn't exist (imagine!), then maybe you might be able to enjoy them again.
Slaves generally get room and board, and always have the opportunity to quit (although the other option is often death, so slavery is preferable.)
I'm not trying to be facetious, I'm trying to tell you that your criteria are not meaningful, and you're pretending like they're obvious. It's why many US slaves moved directly from slavery into sharecropping for the same masters. The only thing that changed was the paperwork. Now they were renters, who could quit (with no assets and no means to feed themselves.)
I once ham-fistedly tried to allude to a similar concept. That slaves were at least "kept" while today's wage slaves have more responsibility, and de facto less freedom due to 'The Matrix' that is our financial and legal system that benefits so few.
We have lords of land. A monetary system based mostly on trickery hidden behind boring math that inexorably erodes the purchasing power of what we receive as compensation for our finite time alive.
So let's just jump to the interesting bit: how do we fix it? Got any ideas?
The solution has always and will always be to respect the laws of thermodynamics and rising entry.
Demurrage [0]
Consider the following: You have a zero lower bound constraint on the interest rate in your economy. The real interest rate falls below zero. What happens? Deflation. Deflation ends up forcing the real interest rate into the positive range even when the nominal equilibrium interest rate would be negative to reach a real interest rate of zero. So in the deflation case, equilibrium simply doesn't happen.
If equilibrium is not possible below zero, then the currency must be operated in the positive interest range. Hence you need eternal inflation to force the interest rates back into positive nominal territory. Since positive nominal interest is still a net inflow of money from consumers (interest is priced into consumer prices) to money holders, the end result is that money flows to those who already have money and way from those who need to fulfill their basic thermodynamic maintenance even in the case where the real interest rate is 0%. Turns out lying about thermodynamics doesn't work in the end, so you get the worst of both worlds: inflation and inequality.
Another way to conceptualize it is that cash is a guaranteed 0% bond and the real interest rate can be negative due to thermodynamics. The government is obligated to pay the difference between the 0% interest rate on money and the real interest rate in the physical economy. It's like the savings that should normally be effected by thermodynamics turn out to be financial garbage and the government obligated itself to buy off the garbage. Of course what happens is that more people produce financial garbage in response to the government's minimum price floor. Eternally rising government debt is a foregone conclusion and it has nothing to do with political incompetence (ok not introducing demurrage or abolishing the ZLB is a form of incompetence, but its a binary matter of doing it).
If you want debt loads to shrink, then borrowers need a form of leverage to reduce the durations of debts. If the contract says the debt must grow over time and holders of money have no duration restriction on their holdings then you would have to be stupid to not expect this output. Note again, its the duration of the positive balances being decoupled from their negative counterpart. The interest payments are just a side effect that accelerates the problem.
Oh and those who obsess over non-money financial assets: Money is a utility and a monopoly. Capital markets have various types/forms of formal agreements based on contracts. People with money would never accept conditions that are worse than the conditions on money, so in the end the capital contracts are just mirroring properties of the money that the original investor is handing over. Debt contracts have fixed terms and payment schedules and liquidation preference/rights upon bankruptcy, whereas most investments do not have that, which is why a risk premium is added on top. An economy without ZLB money but conventional capital market contracts are mostly be fine since thermodynamics/reality are reflected through failure of the investment.
Who is this person. A beautifully written and illustrated explanation of a fascinating machine. A website filled with other explanations of other things, also wonderfully written and clearly explained.
An instagram filled with beautiful landscape photographs, an "X" page consisting only of links back to this blog, and a Patreon with hardly any more information that that.
I love this. Fantastic content. Zero ego. And if there was any AI use, it's invisible. Certainly there is none in the writing.
There is no AI use here. I'm somewhat offended by the suggestion even though I have no relation to the author. Bartosz has been shredding for a long time now. His javascript is also unminified and perfectly readable, making it a great reference for study despite not being advertised on his pages. The animations are all hand-made. The guy is cooking. To suggest that any of it is AI is an utter blasphemy. AI is for noobs, grifters, and low-effort content farmers and Bartosz isn't any of those things.
I agree completely, and if you re-read what I wrote I didn't exactly suggest that it was used. But if he's reading this I'd hope he'd nevertheless accept my apology for even the hint of a suggestion.
Happy to find someone else who hates that infernal technology as much as I :)
The article is AI slop, obviously, like practically everything on the internet these days it seems. Awful writing, circling endlessly around the same point. The entire article could have been a single sentence. Which of course, is how it began. As a prompt.
The article is also wrong. Or, at least, indicative of a broken relationship between management and engineering. If you have an engineer who can decide to rewrite the entire product without management buy-in, then that's an organisational and a discipline problem.
Added to which, of course, maintainability and build-ability both matter an enormous amount. Work to improve both of those things will improve the business.
What I'm curious about is why all AI written articles try to hide they were written with AI vs being open about it. I'd actually be far more willing to engage with an AI written article if the author shares the chat transcripts that lead them to the finished piece and I could load that context into my own session and ask additional questions/interrogate my own ideas branching from it.
Instead, people always try and pull the illusion as if the AI didn't exist.
The paper states that the results are in vivo, not in vitro. The bacteria seemed to literally have cured colorectal cancer in mice. Mice are apparently strikingly similar to human beings in ways that matter, and so this research is very encouraging.
Likely too late for a particular person in my life, but hopefully not too late for others.
Feels as snappy and impressive as the first day I got it. I never need to close apps, or reboot. I record multitrack audio on it without any perceptible latency. I write code on it. It's the best computer I've ever owned by a significant margin.
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