cmatthias

The original M1 (I assume that's what GP meant by "at launch") uses LPDDR4x DRAM modules, the same as many x86 laptops that have soldered RAM. You can literally look up the part numbers based on the photos of the M1 CPU package. Maybe I'm misunderstanding but I'm not sure why it would be any more expensive than x86 laptops' memory, and it might even be less expensive just due to the volume that Apple is likely buying.

I don't think modern Apple Photos is built to handle slow spinning rust very well.

Apple's software is garbage so I'm sure you're correct, but modern hard drives can do several hundred MB/s of throughput. How is that not fast enough for a freaking photo application? For Apple not to test/support this use case is inexcusable.

Why would you not want an extra 8GB? The point is that it's dirt cheap to add, and Apple's refusal to do so is an insult to its customers.

This is whataboutism, but yes, the Surface Go 2 base model has 4GB of RAM. It's shameful, but that laptop is also half the price of the cheapest Mac laptop, and doesn't absolve either company of blame for ridiculously high memory and storage prices.

Did you intend to reply to a different comment? The speed of the memory has no bearing on the capacity, obviously, so I'm not sure how this is relevant to what I said.

I don't think this is correct.

https://www.macobserver.com/analysis/understanding-apples-un... is an article which describes the architecture. It's not on-die, it's next to the CPU, basically as close as it could physically possibly be without being on the die.

Here's a photo of an M1 CPU:

https://www.techinreal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/2feddf...

Those chips on the right side are LPDDR4x chips (which you can verify by googling the part numbers visible on them). They are "off-the-shelf" so to speak, not custom on-die memory.

Citation needed for your claims, please.

My understanding is that at least for the lower-end machines, there are no additional DRAM chips in the 8GB vs. 16GB machines, they just use chips that have double the density, so the power consumption remains the same.

Even if I'm completely wrong on the above, I seriously doubt that adding 8GB of memory to a machine that consumes 7W at idle in total[1] would add "several watts of mandatory 24x7 idle power consumption."

[1] https://9to5mac.com/2021/01/28/m1-mac-mini-power-consumption...

Yes, and? Apple's wholesale RAM cost is likely even lower than a computer with socketed RAM, due to economies of scale and fewer parts overall (RAM soldered directly vs. RAM on a separate PCB, plus a socket soldered to the main board).

Because the alternative is to add literally a few dollars to the bill of materials for the machine, double the memory, and give everyone a better experience. This also means the machine will last longer and likely not end up in a landfill as soon.

$200 to add 8GB of memory is _insane_, and framing it as "consumer choice" is bad when consumers are being gouged so badly. It's literally at least a 20x markup on the wholesale cost. You can buy 8GB of DDR4 at retail for $20 or less.

8GB of general-purpose RAM, regardless of form factor, is dirt cheap. In fact, not having the sockets might make it cheaper than socketed RAM in volume, since there are fewer parts in total.

Can you define "sweet spot" in this case?

Usually I see that term used when the thing being considered is a pricey upgrade, and you need to strike a compromise between price and performance.

In this case, we're talking about an extra 8GB of memory, which would add perhaps $10 in cost to the bill of materials for the machine (or maybe less in sufficient volume). Given that Apple is also overcharging by at least 3x current standard retail price for SSD upgrades, my guess is that there's some room to bump up the wholesale cost a bit.

Not doing so is, IMHO, insulting to users, and given the non-upgradable nature of these machines, bad for the environment, counter to all of Apple's talk about being environmentally friendly.

Almost certainly. The Thunderbolt spec requires any port labeled "Thunderbolt 4" to support dual 4k/60hz displays.

You'll note that, for example, on the Macbook Air (both M1 and M2 versions), Apple labels the ports "Thunderbolt / USB 4," which is confusing and IMHO downright misleading. Either way, the reason they do that is that those ports don't support dual displays, so they only meet the Thunderbolt 3 spec, which doesn't mandate dual displays.

A better label for the Macbook Air might be just "USB 4," or "USB 4 with Thunderbolt 3 support" (though TB3 is part of the USB 4 spec, so that's technically redundant).

USB/Thunderbolt standards are fun.

I think it's worth taking a step back here to say that IMHO regardless of whether the OP's previous comments justify his expulsion from the issue tracker, having the only other available "DDoS opt-out" mechanism be to email Russ Cox directly is _completely insane_ and unacceptable for an organization of Google's size and funding level. If they're going to ban members from the community (perhaps justifiably so), Google needs to either provide another public place to make one of these requests, or preferably make the DDoS feature opt-in rather than opt-out.

This is true but irrelevant to the parent's question -- in the article, it's made clear that Google's requests are happening over HTTP, which is the most obvious reason why robots.txt should be respected.

After reading this and your response to a sibling comment I wholeheartedly disagree with you on both the specific definition of the word crawler and what the "main purpose" of robots.txt is, but glad we can agree that Google should be doing more to respect rate limits :)

I'm taking the OP at his word here, but he specifically claims that the proxy service making these requests will also make requests independent of a `go get` or other user-initiated action, sometimes to the tune of a dozen repos at once and 2500 requests per hour. That sounds like a crawler to me, and even if you want to argue the semantic meaning of the word "crawler," I strongly feel that robots.txt is the best available solution to inform the system what its rate limit should be.

Read the OP; it's obvious based on the references to robots.txt, the User-Agent header, returning a 429 response, etc, that most (all?) of Google's requests are doing git clones over http(s).

Why does the Go team and/or Google think that it's acceptable to not respect robots.txt and instead DDoS git repositories by default, unless they get put on a list of "special case[s] to disable background refreshes"?

Why was the author of the post banned without notice from the Go issue tracker, removing what is apparently the only way to get on this list aside from emailing you directly?

Do you, personally, find any of this remotely acceptable?

Wow, what an absolute moron. If this is how he runs his other companies, it’s amazing anyone stays for more than a month.

I still think Elon is a smart guy.

Plus I don't think he realizes that the techniques that work for cars and rockets don't work in social media.

Given his behavior and the results over the last ~month or however long he's owned Twitter, how can both of these possibly be true?

Agreed re: Tesla, but heads up that there are very few Twitter shareholders now, since, you know, Musk bought the whole company.

Got a citation for those claims?

As far as I’m aware, journalists were only referencing ElonJet, which, as OP established, is only re-publishing already public information.

Despite this, even if you want to somehow argue that it’s against the rules, I reject that claim as well. Twitter’s policies[1] explicitly allow “location information related to commercial property or places of business, where this information is publicly available,” and all of “Elon’s” jets are owned by commercial entities.

Edit: citations showing “his” jets are owned by an LLC:

https://flightaware.com/resources/registration/N628TS

https://flightaware.com/resources/registration/N272BG

https://flightaware.com/resources/registration/N502SX

[1] https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/personal-info...

Mastodon will not die in the same way Napster did; it’s decentralized and there’s no way it can be completely shut down since anyone can run an instance.

This is great info, thank you! I agree that it’s strange that Finney wouldn’t have posted this message to the blockchain. Unfortunately I think most people superficially familiar with bitcoin don’t understand cryptography deeply enough to realize that the most likely explanation for all of this this is that Shkreli or an associate is in possession of Finney’s private key.

Thanks for the clarification! I didn’t explain myself well at all, but what I was getting at was that Shkreli claims the sig “decrypts to” the message given, when it does nothing of the sort.

I realize not all signatures are on the chain, that’s obvious if you know what a signature is. That’s why I’m asking whether it appears on the chain. :)

If it appears somewhere associated with that transaction, that’s pretty strong evidence that Shkreli is correct.

If it does not appear on chain at all, then Shkreli is wrong and his post proves nothing about the identity of Satoshi.

Unless I'm grossly mistaken, it seems Shkreli doesn't understand the basics of cryptography because he's using incorrect terminology here.

The signature isn't encrypted at all, it's just a piece of data (a hash, if you will) that was generated using the private key associated with the wallet in question.

In order to generate the signature, you need to have a message to sign, and a private key. All Shkreli has shown is that the signature he posted is valid for the given message and the wallet (which is in fact an old wallet of Hal Finney’s). I’ve posted elsewhere in this thread about this, but so far I can’t find any evidence that the signature he posted actually appears in the blockchain associated with that January 2009 transaction. Until we have proof of that, the most likely alternative explanation is that the wallet’s key is compromised and someone is signing random messages with it that say whatever they want.

I know next to nothing about the internals of bitcoin, but based on a high-level understanding of public key cryptography:

- 1Q2TWHE3GMdB6BZKafqwxXtWAWgFt5Jvm3 is the wallet address but can also be thought of as a public key. The owner of the wallet also has a private key corresponding to that public key.

- HM7vpPSUbNsfDHRX6gv8xx...[etc] is a cryptographic signature generated by signing an arbitrary message using a private key. To generate the signature, you need the plain text of the message, and a private key. To "verify" the signature (i.e., confirm that it was generated by the private key you expect), you only need the message and the public key (or the wallet address, in this case).

- Shkreli claims (and it has indeed been confirmed) that the signature he posted is valid for the message and the wallet address. In other words, someone in possession of the private key for the wallet in question, has signed the message given using that private key.

What I don't understand is where the signature came from -- I do see a Jan 2009 transaction involving that address on various blockchain explorers, but that particular signature is nowhere to be found. This could absolutely just be me not understanding how all of this works, but in order for this to be "really big news" I think you'd have to show proof that the signature given was posted with the transaction back in 2009. Otherwise, it just means that Hal Finney's wallet is compromised and someone has been signing random messages with it.

Can someone who knows more than me about the internals of bitcoin help me understand:

1) Is there a place on a blockchain explorer somewhere where I could find the signature that Shkreli has posted? I tried looking up the wallet address and found the transaction from Jan 2009, but I don't see that signature anywhere.

2) The reason I ask the first question is that I believe that if the private key is compromised, then whoever has it could have generated a new signature corresponding to that wallet address and any arbitrary message, correct? So if Shkreli is in possession of the private key, he could just be banking on people not actually verifying that the signature he posted appears on the blockchain?

You can verify yourself here: https://reinproject.org/bitcoin-signature-tool/

Use the Bitcoin-QT tab, and don't include the "---- BEGIN" and "---- END" comment lines. It checks out.