jdub

you don't deserve your user name

You reckon large language models run by this mob of billionaire boot-licking dweebs will lead to a Star Trek style utopia? Come on.

Take a look at how modern PCs enumerate all of their non-PCI hardware. I'll put a bucket over here.

Because they're designed for different things.

Ampere's primary focus is running lots of simple tasks concurrently, at relatively low power, with lots of I/O. So, many tens to hundreds of cores, not too fast, at lower power draw than amd64, with lots of PCIe lanes for storage and network.

Apple's primary focus is user experience and power efficiency. That's why you'll find a handful of fast performance cores and low power efficiency cores, along with graphics acceleration to drive high resolution displays.

"first principles" and "from scratch" are predictable failure modes... he had very good reason to pursue a Python-like language given the circumstances and objectives

(It feels very grumpy-old-man to complain about "low effort", but I think it's more culturally relevant than ever before...)

... not investigating your field is a massive low effort failure mode. You don't have to know your field, but you have to investigate it, appreciate it, draw upon it... even, or perhaps especially, if you're standing in opposition to it.

(This is also why "first principles" twits like Elon are so annoying...)

Whoa, I just mentioned GURPS in a completely different context in this very comment thread. :explodinghead:

Cheat: "That's in GURPS. Uh huh, GURPS. Seen it: GURPS. Good idea, really nicely executed in GURPS. You'll like how GURPS did that." :-D

zig makes cross-compiling easy for a single project - but not everything is zig (or supported by zig cc)

the various embedded build systems make cross-compiling easy at scale, which means you often don't need to think about it when adding a new package

I doubt it's that complicated, motivated, or considered...

It's probably just garden variety disrespectful behaviour.

Purposeless agent spam won't be cheap entertainment forever, but you're right that later stages of industrialised abuse will be scary and unpleasant.

That's a less efficient protocol than 9pfs and virtiofs, even if you subtract the encryption.

An example of improving efficiency: virtiofs has a relatively recent feature to map pages from host memory directly into guest memory, but that's a lot of risky acrobatics if your priorities are reliability and isolation...

... but it's not supported by Virtualization Framework's built-in virtiofs "folder sharing". (sad face)

... but someone could build it on top of the new macos 27+ custom virtio device support. (intrigued face)

These are all security boundaries of a kind, some more effective than others, balancing priorities according to threat model. Running every app on your phone in a hardware virtual machine would be... an expensive choice.

It's not substantially different from previous approaches (9pfs vs. virtiofs).

My suggestion: Don't use the host filesystem from the guest at all. It'll be faster, and better isolated. It's a false convenience.

Different threat models. Your typical Android device (and Linux server for that matter, at home or at scale) is not usually running security-sensitive general workloads for multiple tenants in the same OS instance. :-)

Containers (those popularised on Linux by Docker) are built on Linux primitives like cgroups and namespaces, so they're running directly on the same kernel, same VFS, often the same FS, etc. Their isolation properties rely on (a) all those Linux features working as expected, and (b) the container runtime setting them up properly.

Depending on your threat model, that's fine, but a lot of people (including me) will say that containers are not a security mechanism.

But macOS requires[1] virtualisation for containers anyway; the security is just a bonus.

[1] at least for a real Linux kernel...

The underlying Virtualization Framework works on Intel Macs, but they'll miss out on new features landing in macOS 27 and beyond.

You can run amd64 binaries inside an aarch64 Linux virtual machine. Although they're not supporting Rosetta for macOS apps from macOS 27, the Rosetta support in Virtualization Framework will remain.

Very different: Linux running in a virtual machine can't bind mount into a macOS host's filesystem. So they use virtiofs.

MacRumors always delivers.

https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/08/wwdc-2026-live-coverage...

Perhaps one day...

A few things contributed to its demise: less industry money sloshing around for travel and sponsorships, a growing sense that "Linux" didn't represent the entire community, and a pandemic.

Which left "Everything Open" launching weaker in every sense.

But I don't think Linux or Open Source feel sufficiently radical or inspiring to sustain that kind of community-building (local or global) these days... maybe a "Fuck AI" tech conference. :-D

When confronting confusion between film and video, I wasn't about to get into FIELDS per second. :-D

Alan Cox had a pre-netbook netbook smaller than a VHS tape at linux.conf.au 2001, and milled about chatting with colleagues and fanboys while his kernel builds scrolled by in the background. Everyone would gawk at the strange little machine.

It was Japanese, naturally.

At linux.conf.au 2007 we chose a smaller conference bag, designed to carry your electrical accessories and nick-knacks... it turned out to be the perfect size for the new EeePC (and later the MacBook Air 11").

Nah, not film rates [1], video: NTSC is 30fps and PAL is 25fps because the cathode ray tube scan rate was built around AC power cycles. When low fps truly Hz. Sorry.

[1] generally 24fps because that is culturally what film looks like and people get very weird whenever anyone tries to fuck with it

Reinforcement learning perturbs the model such that the token prediction process (inference) tends towards the desired result.

Ah, it seems like the architecture was designed by a slop machine. OK.

Oh, and:

I must apologise that I haven’t so far open-sourced any part of this that I don’t have to.

With some blather about commercial opportunities. Which is a weird thing to say without linking to the bits that must be shared (under the terms of the various licenses).

Hrm, yes-we-scan and printervention are built on SANE and CUPS respectively, which makes sense. But running them in a whole wasm-emulated Linux kernel and userland seems... like a lot.

Giving someone in government the ability to block someone's payments and trusting they won't abuse it might be fine as long as good people remain in power, but do you really want to bet the entire nation's ability to live life on that?

Banking and finance companies honour foreign government sanctions. Ask Francesca Albanese.

Libertarian comparisons of government and non-government behaviour always devolves into angel counting.

I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.

A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:

"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."

I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...

Most people won’t settle for a product if it’s not the very best and incredibly convenient.

... uh?