Appreciate the balanced feedback. It echos what some of the longer tenured engineers have advised me.
One colleague whom I have worked with in a previous role and has a similar mindset to me said that he just does the 1 PR a day and spends the rest of his time on OSS for satisfaction.
I took that onboard and have been ramping up my PR count over the last week without making suggestions - but I suspect the reputational damage has been done and I have soured relationships as, contrary to the 1 PR a day metric, my manager quizzed me on what I was doing after submitting my PRs in our 1:1.
Appreciate it and will certainly keep that advice in mind for the next role
I think there is a strong case that "the right to repair" includes software. If that doesn't mean drivers must be open source, it should at least mean hardware is documented such that a driver can be written from it.
But the US still doesn't have the right to repair hardware, haha.
I hope the EU is listening. They won't get far with their sovereign software push if hardware cannot be used. Even on the Android side, you can't write an alternative to Android because all of the hardware has locked bootloaders and hidden drivers. Good luck reverse engineering the hardware/drivers on a Samsung Galaxy - let alone an iPhone or MacBook.
I agree that MacOS is more polished. However overall, Linux is a better complete package - especially for power users, gamers and engineers.
Linux GUIs are _fine enough_ though the jank is still present. The good news is they will get better with more users entering the chat.
The thing to note is that, we don't want to confuse "it's not as good right now" with "It's bad so I will never use it" because that signals a lack of interest.
There is a non-zero chance that Apple could be compelled to support it if enough people express interest (historically, they have with bootcamp).
Competition is good, even if the competition is bad right now. We must encourage it.
I take both. 500-1000mg acetaminophen, 200-400mg ibuprofen. Usually helps for headaches which I get frequently. I only take them for the worst headaches though, so probably once every couple of weeks on average.
Yeah if I need to I take both also. In addition I be sure to have a caffeinated drink also as caffeine has been shown to both speed the absorption and boost the efficacy (5-10%) of paracetemol over a multi hour period. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/17442681/
For inflammatory pain (most headaches, most pain from injuries), ibuprofen absolutely works better. For migraines, neither works at all on its own -- though ibuprofen plus caffeine (I generally drink tea) does a little. For overexertion aches and cramps, or fevers, I think either is generally fine.
>For inflammatory pain (most headaches, most pain from injuries), ibuprofen absolutely works better.
Unfortunately, for me ibuprofen doesn't seme to help at all with any of these. Like I understand that my pain are often inflammatory based, and i try ibuprofen, but the pain doesn't dull at all even if I take 800mg etc...
I take 1000mg acetaminophen and boom my pain is vastly reduced...
There seems to be some percentage of people that acetaminophen seems to do very little for. Ibuprofen has a much more pronounced effect, to the point that I take it at half it's recommended dosage.
Jokes aside, seeing as this person has created their own clean room in a shed, and is making RAM, what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?
I'd pay less for RAM that wasn't "certified" in some official way, at least it works.
It's really easy to set up a manufacturing process for basically anything if you can spend 100x per unit compared to the big optimized factories and you don't mind the product being a lot slower.
The clean room isn't the hard part about being competitive. It's using advanced lithography to cram billions of cells into a single chip. If you want make DDR2 chips on a 90 nanometer process, that is accessible to a whole lot of companies, but nobody will buy the product. And in the micrometer range you can DIY like this guy.
Correct, nobody will buy your 1GB stick of DDR2-speed RAM for the $100 it cost you to produce it.
> And what happens when smaller companies have to repair or scale their infrastructure and can't get affordable RAM?
That situation sucks but bringing up more obsolete fabrication isn't going to help. They can't compete with modern chips even when those modern chips have a 5x price penalty.
Ok sorry I misread you saying that it was easy with nm manufacturing but nobody will buy the product, you said it's easy to manufacture micrometer DDR2 speeds.
Single digit micrometer is really easy and makes toys and/or microcontrollers. 90nm is sort of easy if you have factory money, and is about what you need for DDR2. It gets a lot more difficult as you go beyond that.
In one of Dwarkesh's interviews, he mentioned that China is trying to replicate the entire stack. Ironically now that they have mastered all pieces of the stack for older nodes, they actually have an advantage in a collapse scenario. The US does not appear to have the ability to do all steps in the stack for any node. They still rely on other western countries that could go offline. China despite being behind does at least have top to bottom capability for older nodes. Combine that with their rock bottom electricity prices and they have a unique card that they can play.
Just imagine if electricity costs were trending towards 0. Instead of e-waste run all those machines till the chips burn out.
Well we have cool projects like CollapseOS the problem is that there is so much undocumented silicon out there that cant be used without massive efforts. I know several "gold scrappers" and its such a shame that they trash great classic chips just go get back a bit of metal. So much effort went into making those chips and its just a shame that many can't be reused. While lack of cheap electricity prevents open design from being reused, there is an even bigger world of undocumented chips that are trashed as well.
I'm not really sure what you mean by "certified"; I don't think JEDEC are handing out stickers. Although I am reminded of the Bunnie Huang article about SD cards, where the Shenzen vendor would give you the same SD card with the manufacturer logo + holographic authenticity .. of your choice.
The real problem with the RAM business is that it was commodified; normally manufacturers make a relatively small margin. No incentive to build a factory for that. These are not normal times because (a) someone has bought all the RAM and (b) someone has blown up a whole load of globally critical infrastructure in the Middle East.
The risk the existing RAM manufacturers are being cautious about is the risk of normal: if you start building a factory now, will you be selling into a RAM glut?
He's producing semiconductors with a 1000nm (one micron) feature size. This kind of tech was cutting edge in the mid 80s. You might be able to produce a 32KB memory chip with it.
It would be difficult to break into the RAM business with that sort of product as most of the demand these days is for higher capacities.
EUV lithography is the state of the art. It makes far denser chips and is quite out of reach for the backyard fellow. Find a documentary on how ASML machines work: they're near the pinnacle of human accomplishment!
> what exactly is stopping any company from doing this themselves and breaking into the RAM business?
nothing, except the terrible yields that they would obtain, and the lack of scale making the entire enterprise not profit generating (as the amount of profit per sale is too low if it even is positive, but you can't set it higher as there's cheaper, "better" ram available from pre-established fabs that do have economies of scale).
You could play the artisanal angle, and market it as home grown, organic ram. Not sure how much real buyers of ram care, but might get a few hobbyists in the market.
The angle right now I think is pretty obvious, there is a massive shortage that might cause actual incidents.
OpenAI should do their own production, I say slightly bitter because I'm in a health care sector that might be affected because we can't scale up or repair our infrastructure due to their massive pre-orders.
You can make eDRAM using logic processes (which are currently less bottlenecked than RAM, at least for non cutting-edge nodes) but the cost is still prohibitive compared to specialty DRAM processes (even when considering the recent increase in DRAM prices). If you were doing that, you'd want to use it for compute-in-memory instead, which basically pushes NUMA to an extreme of having lots of tiny cores each with direct access to its own local DRAM.
i assume the reason is that this is a very competitive market and you need hundreds of billions in investment to just start producing at a competitive quality and price, with massive uncertainty that you will be able to make that money back
i mean, you'd think if someone is willing to through 60B (or 10B for an option to buy at a 60B valuation) at Cursor, then other people would give it a shot at starting a SotA semiconductor fab, but apparently the profit expectations are not there
My only hope, however unlikely, is that Apple will recognise that power users, engineers and gamers would really really appreciate running Linux on Macs and they write some drivers for it.
There are literally no PC laptops with the quality or hardware offered by even the cheapest MacBook - the software, while fine for general consumers, creators, and some developer workloads, tragically holds back its potential something fierce.
I doubt we'll see it, but one thing I'd really like is for them to release cleaner drivers or specs for the hardware in Intel Macs. Now that they're committed to removing Intel support from the OS, it would be really nice not to consign all of that functional, high-performing hardware to the bin.
At the moment, I have a 2018 Mac Mini with a 12-core i7 and 64GB of RAM that is more limited in OS choice and hardware support than the 2012 Mac Mini sitting next to it, because the inner workings of the T2 chipset in particular and various other components have to be reverse-engineered bit by bit.
Why would Apple writing some Linux drivers wipe billions from its share price? You can already install Linux on a Mac if you really want to. Back in the day, you used to be able to install Windows on an (Intel) Mac, and that didn’t seem to have any such effect.
No, but I think it’s unlikely that Apple actually has this information in a format that it could easily publicly release. They aren’t going to make any special effort to make Linux on Mac easier, but they also aren’t actively blocking it.
Well, I was more talking about the fact that you can still install Windows 11 on an Intel Mac right now; the drivers are still there for those few Intel macs still supported.
As for Windows on ARM, I'd bet that if Microsoft had managed to figure out their own product, Apple might have been tempted to support it. I mean why go through all the trouble of developing the most advanced firmware on the planet to support a fully secure macOS next to an unsecured OS if you do nothing with it?
Why would it wipe billions from their share price? Both Linux and Windows were available on Mac hardware prior to Apple Silicon.
If I play devil's advocate, the only reason I could think of is that supporting Linux signals to investors that Apple is offering a key to bypass their API moat, perhaps sacrificing a longer term vision of vendor lock-in.
By contrast, I can imagine investors would get upset if the iPhone had an unlocked bootloader and allowed Android to be installed - but that's because the App Store is a significant revenue stream for Apple. I don't think there is a parallel on MacOS that investors could point to as being upsetting.
If anything, optional support for Linux would lift the market cap for Mac hardware as it would close the only pull that other laptop vendors previously enjoyed.
In reality though, just like is historically true, 99% of people would continue to use MacOS. Only SWEs, enthusiasts, gamers and some number of Windows refugees would pick Linux.
Though I am 100% behind legislating Linux support - EU are you listening?
Apple went out of its way to make Linux on Mac a reality. They did a lot to allow third-party OSes when Apple Silicon came out, it's up to the Linux community to do the rest.
There were a couple of people (the Asahi team) that made this work for M1, but as I understand it, the effort has stalled since. This just goes to show how few people truly care.
Apple helped by not locking the bootloader. I'd don't know if I'd call that going out of their way to make Linux a reality.
If they wanted to go out of their way, they could spend a weekend writing Linux drivers - Apple have written Windows drivers in the past, so it's not unprecedented.
I believe the real hurdle is that Linux doesn't do well with modular (closed source) drivers. Unlike Windows, drivers can't practically be added to a kernel, they must be compiled into it.
Apple would not want to make their drivers open source or so they would want to distribute their drivers as binary blobs.
That would necessitate either maintaining an Apple-fork of the Linux kernel with their drivers hidden within it, or contributing shims to upstream Linux + binary blob drivers.
If they wanted to help, the bare minimum would be to publish documentation on their hardware so drivers could be written without reverse engineering from schematics and microscope photos.
> This just goes to show how few people truly care.
Most people just want to sit down and eat a nice meal. They don't want to go through all the difficult back breaking work of farming, animal husbandry or fishing/hunting to eat.
That is how I look at people writing OS drivers and core components. It's boring back breaking work no one wants to think about. People pine for it, even romanticize about it. But the fact is that it's dirty annoying work and I have never heard anyone thanking the farmer for the meal they just ate. Yet we still have farmers. Few, yet they exist.
Why would it? Shareholders of the major stocks are generally vibes-based, and I'm sure that if Apple undertook that, they would find a way to build hype around it.
The Mac has never been more popular in its 40 year history than it is now. The recently released MacBook Neo broke all previous Mac sales records. Needing to sell more Macs isn't an issue these days.
i can think of absolutely zero publicly traded company boards of this size that would opt for "we're already selling enough devices, we know there's more demand we can't meet, let's not scale up we're really happy with these numbers"
Due to the RAM shortages, Apple isn't able to meet demand as it is.
Apple's Mac revenue last fiscal year was $33.7 billion. I suspect the number of Linux users that might buy a Mac if it could run Linux natively is probably in rounding error territory.
Apple has been around for 50 years and has a market-cap of around $4 trillion. All without supporting Linux. I think they're okay with that.
Linux on Mac is absolutely a reality [1], and Apple specifically supported it by deliberately leaving a documented/supported mechanism for another OS kernel to be loaded.
I don't want to take away from the hard work put in by the Asahi project because it is amazing.
Linux on Apple Silicon is not a reality on my M5 Pro. I run Asahi on my M1 Pro, but I cannot use my USB-C dock with it and, while amazing, cannot practically use the GPU for gaming or local LLMs.
This limits my ability to practically use it for work and play.
the bulk of their sales is, in fact, hardware sales. there is a strong case to be made that such developments wouldn't land people in squarely linux-as-the-only-OS-on-the-device territory either, but rather dual boot ie those users also participate in the walled garden on the mac os side. we've seen this before in the intel mac era.
I also hope they recognize power users it’s very limited customization they offer unlike Linux and windows . The only thing holding them back is their software . If they could try make games compatible or introduce more customization options and more options other than Xcode for swift it would be the most amazing OS
ha, i use both. i don't even need to write any platitudes on if linux came to mac, utm or parallels has linux going at near native speed actually happier than it runs on my thinkpad t. i get to enjoy all worlds on my mac and its probably the best multi-target development environment ive ever had, and the hardware is still leagues above literally anything else on the market. dont get me wrong i want more options, im still just waiting for options that deserve to be in this convo. i have zero allegiances to who made it, whoever comes forward with the best hardware gets my money. and my orgs money since i pick the teams hardware.
I also have a Thinkpad, but an X1. I'd trade it and my first-born child to get to run Linux on a modern MacBook.
No offense to Lenovo, it's a great laptop. But Apples build quality is on another level, plus if I want to run local LLMs, AFAIK there is no better option.
There's no way I'm going back to macOS though, that shit was bad 5 years ago when I switched and it sounds like it's gotten way worse.
Same here. I've had two generations of X1, my latest one (laptop, not child) is almost 5 years old and I honestly don't know which hardware to pick next in order to run Linux.
At work I have an M4Max 128G, and it's hard to beat that amount of compute, with that build quality.
One colleague whom I have worked with in a previous role and has a similar mindset to me said that he just does the 1 PR a day and spends the rest of his time on OSS for satisfaction.
I took that onboard and have been ramping up my PR count over the last week without making suggestions - but I suspect the reputational damage has been done and I have soured relationships as, contrary to the 1 PR a day metric, my manager quizzed me on what I was doing after submitting my PRs in our 1:1.
Appreciate it and will certainly keep that advice in mind for the next role
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