Since macOS went to a yearly cadence, I usually upgrade during Christmas break, this allows for a couple of point releases to work out the kinks. I won’t be upgrading this year. I hope macOS 27 fixes this abomination. Otherwise, this 30+ year Mac user will be moving on…

You would do well to avoid 26. I upgraded to be a Guinea Pig for a few colleagues and I regret it. Things like apps and scripts work in the technical sense, but it is worse because the myriad of graphical and interactive issues.

I know, the repairability isn’t great, and they’re not upgradable at all. macOS can be annoying and restrictive. But life is short, so I just buy MacBook Pros. I wasted too many hours in my 20s getting Linux to work on the desktop (not to mention a laptop).

Quick, buy a Mac with higher-specced memory while the price is almost reasonable.

I'm wondering if Apple will need to adjust their prices to maintain their margins. Given the scale of price rises I'd say yes.

There's no way that Apple pays spot. They will have contracts directly with the manufacturers, guaranteeing them a given supply at a given price. Their whole business kinda depends on it.

Sure, but eventually the contracts will be renewed at possibly a much higher price. It depends on the details of the agreement whether the price is adjusted based on market price periodically too.

If I have a potato field, the cost to me of a potato is whatever equipment and labor it takes to farm one, divided by the yield of potatoes.

If there's suddenly a potato famine, then the cost to other people who don't have a potato field is however much they are willing to pay to avoid starving.

Apple doesn't have a potato field, but what they do have is a ton of negotiating power, market share, and enduring relationships with the manufacturers.

There's also the implicit threat when negotiating with Apple that they might enter your market if you fuck around with them. If Apple perceived DRAM/NAND prices to be a significant threat to their carefully curated pricing structure, they might decide that they need to vertically integrate.

*only slightly less reasonable than market prices before they adjust it in order to stay at 2x less reasonable

What? Apple's memory upgrades are never reasonable.

Last time I checked going from 16 to 32GB in a Mac Mini was more expensive (or as expensive) than buying two 16GB Mac Minis.

Right now in this environment, they look reasonable. Not that they are

The writing is laughably bad. I can’t tell if it’s someone that over relied on AI or if they just mimic the structure and mannerisms of AI produced writing because that’s what they see.

A few choice examples:

> Checkout part one of this series for an intro to HipKittens and checkout this post for a technical deep dive.

> Unsurprisingly, making AMD GPUs go brr boils down to keeping the “matrix cores” (tensor cores on NVIDIA) fed.

> These two patterns tradeoff programmability and performance, where 8-wave and its large tile primitives lead to compact code and 4-wave fine-grained interleaving expands code size. Surprisingly, the 8-wave schedule is sufficient to achieve SoTA-level performance on GEMMs and attention forwards. For GQA non-causal attention backwards, 8-wave also outperforms all AMD baselines by 1.8 × 1.8×, and our HK 4-wave further outperforms by 2.3 × 2.3×.

And I could go on. And on.

But overall besides the overuse of cliche/memespeak places it doesn’t make sense, the entire section that deals with the hot loop describes something that should be explained in a graph and instead explained in 100 lines of source code.

Am I crazy what is wrong with any of those quotes.

AI is breaking more than interviews. I recently overheard someone who is studying to be a psychiatric nurse practitioner (they are already a RN) via an online program say “ChatGPT is my new best friend.” We are doomed.

Looks more sensible than having to use XCode and Apple's atrocious developer documentation.

I don’t get the hype either. Every time I’ve tried to use tools like pyenv or pipenv they fall down when I try to install anything that doesn’t provide wheels (GDAL), so I give up and stick to pip and virtualenv. Does uv let me install GDAL without hassle?

Pyenv's a different animal. It's meant for installing multiple Python versions at once so that you're not stuck with whatever dog your base OS happens to ship.

Pipenv tried to be what uv is, but it never did seem to work right, and it had too many weird corner cases ("why is it suddenly taking 3 hours to install packages? why it is literally impossible to get it to upgrade one single dependency and not all the others?") to ever be a contender.

This sounds similar to AWS services depending on DynamoDB, which sounds like what happened here. Even if under the hood parts of AWS depend on Dynamo, it should be a walled-off instance separate from Dynamo available via us-east-1.

There should be many more smaller instances with smaller blast radius.

Awesome, nice write-up, thanks. TLDR: use PostgreSQL. Only use Oracle under extreme duress.

Also, Windows containers are a thing (not that I’ve ever used them). Shouldn’t it be possible to containerize old games bundled with versions of win32 libraries that were stable when the game was released? Then the games could be run in perpetuity so long as the low-level interfaces needed by the container runtime is maintained.

Windows containers are definitely a thing, but I think the implementation is at the "how to draw an owl: draw two circles..." stage and needs a lot of "...now draw the rest of the owl" in terms of being usable to the general consumer audience where their eyes are likely to gloss over if you say "go and install docker desktop". Having a simple method to maintain old software as usable would be beneficial, but it's hard to see what organization would want to do work to make it happen.

Legacy compatibility is one of windows biggest strong points, neatly containing 'old windows' and providing the best experience for it would solve the puzzle of why users should stick with windows if MS did want to prune the core OS without giving users reasons to move away.