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I have been using an iPad Pro as my primary computing device for more than a year now. It works pretty wonderfully for my use case. I just finished writing my dissertation on it last week, actually. I have an old MacBook that I use for specific tasks once or twice a week, but otherwise my iPad, pencil, and keyboard/mouse/5k monitor on my desk works really, really well — better than a laptop by far for my workflow: Zotero/Markdown/MSWord/Logseq/Obsidian.

I’m very happy to not use a general purpose computer anymore, to be honest.

You know that RAM in these machines is more different than the same as "RAM" in a standard PC? Apple's SoC RAM is more or less part of the CPU/GPU and is super fast. And for obvious reasons cannot be added to.

Anyway, I manage a few M1 and M3 machines with 256/8 configs and they all run just as fast as 16 and 32 machines EXCEPT for workloads that need more than 8GB for a process (virtualization) or workloads that need lots of video memory (Lightroom can KILL an 8GB machine that isn't doing anything else...)

The 8GB is stupid discussion isn't "wrong" in the general case, but it is wrong for maybe 80% of users.

Worked in an engineering lab at the time of the G4 introduction and I can contest that the G4 was a very, very fast CPU for scientific workloads.

Confirmed here: https://computer.howstuffworks.com/question299.htm (and elsewhere.)

A year later I was doing bonkers (for the time) photoshop work on very large compressed tiff files and my G4 laptop running at 400Mhz was more than 2x as fast as PIIIs on my bench.

Was it faster all around? I don't know how to tell. Was Apple as honest as I am in this commentary about how it mattered what you were doing? No. Was it a CPU that was able to do some things very fast vs others? I know it was.

Your comment is literally more subjective, dismissive, and full of FUD than any other on on this thread. Check yourself.

... I think that the more correct assertion would be that Apple is a sector leader in privacy. If only because their competitors make no bones about violating the privacy of their customers as it is the basis of thier business model. So it's not that Apple is A+ so much as the other students are getting Ds and Fs.

The first major piece of code that I ever wrote was a publishing workflow management system for a major newspaper. It routed page images to presses and generated pdfs of each page in each edition of the newspaper and made pdfs of each day's newspaper editions and published them to a static website where they were archived.

I was only allowed to use perl 4 to write this software and I wasn't allowed to use a database, even though the datastructure for a day's publishing batch had tens of thousands of keys and values and required RDBMs style queries. It also features a configurable postscript parser that extracts all kinds of data from completed newspaper pages that informs the publishing system. When I wrote it I was told that it would run for a few months only while we figured out how to get a $5M commercial product to handle the work.

The whole thing was written in perl 4 style OO Perl and came in at about 16k lines of code in the end -- most of the code was for the postscript processor and tons of cruft that I had to write to made a relational DBMS in memory because I wasn't allowed to use mysql. It took me four months to write it. I launched it in January of 2002 and it runs to this day. I know this because I got a call about it last month where my replacement's replacement's replacement asked me a few questions about what OO Perl is because he wanted to make a few changes. Good luck! It still runs and is responsbile for about 80% of what it was originally built to do. It is used by hundreds of people daily, who by all reports absolutely hate it. There are people working at the newspaper today that use it regularly that were not born when I wrote it. I am twice as old as I was when I wrote it.

They have apparently tried to replace it several times over the last 22 years and have failed to do so... this is likely due to the blockheadedness of my old boss (who is still there) as much as the radically insane obscurity of my code, which is exactly how you'd expect 16k lines of 22 year old OO Perl 4 would be.

wow. just so, so many things that I didn't say and do not believe. Amazon fixed their DRM issues to a great extent and the gap is narrowing, Apple's Book DRM is currently unbroken, Overdrive's DRM bypass is only available via legacy versions of the app last I checked, etc.

You are the one that is asserting that 1. All DRM is inherently bypassable, which is simply not at all true. and 2. That anyone pushing for improvement is against lending, which is not true. This is what YOU are saying, not me. I am simply saying that if the IA wants to keep going (and I would like them to) they might close an unused http route. That is LITERALLY all I am asserting. Good lord, why even bother?

the logical conclusion here is that generation of reproducible content for profit or even for sustenance is innately impossible. this is neither true not desirable. enjoy pedantism on the internet!

The technical solution in this case is to not allow the ADE files to be downloaded -- they are not even available in the IA GUI -- there is a well-known backdoor that to my eye isn't needed to support any of the available features on the site.

Just to rephrase for clarity: the way that pretty much every college student that I know downloads many, many books from the archive is via an undocumented route on the website that isn't needed for the site's published borrowing functionality to work.

If you look here: https://archive.org/details/lexicographyoedp0000unse you will see that downloading is not supported.

Yet if click "Borrow" and then you hit this URL while logged in: https://archive.org/services/loans/loan/?action=media_url&id...

You will download a ADE stub file that is trivially deDRM'd.

IA's "solution" to a previous issue with publishers was to remove this functionality from their site. They pulled the links in the UI but not the functionality... I don't think they operate in good faith.

But... far be it from me to expect any dialogue where to be anything but creator hostile. To my mind that is very much short term thinking. We need to make sure creators are paid for their work because we want them to keep creating -- and for others to also create. Just because things are legal doesn/t make them right and/or for the greater good.

This is not simply a legal issue. As an author of books myself I have very little problem with libraries and online lending and I feel there is mutual benefit. I do not feel the same way about the way that IA is hosting commercial titles, which hews very close to ZLibrary, which I do not think is beneficial for all of us in the long term as it disincentivizes the production of books even if it makes things available to more people in the near term. We might disagree about that but my belief is pretty set.

Regarding legality, the media company battle re: DVD-CSS is quite different in quite a number of ways such that it doesn't simply apply here. That said, I'm not making a legal argument -- I am advocating for a system that makes sense to authors (whom we rely on to write the things that we value) and the greater good.

It is basically the same with the books. The IA's book hosting system has DRM, yes, but it is Adobe's ADE which has been well and truly cracked. If you have a bit of patience and tech knowledge you can pull a full PDF of any book on IA in about 20 second's time. They could do a better job restricting access and I figure they wouldn't be in this much trouble.

Specifically of issue in this case -- there is a wide-open hole in the IA's book hosting system that allows anyone to easily download an Adobe Digital Edition of any book in the archive -- ADE's DRM has been broken for a long time. It takes 2 minutes to go from IA to a full OCR'd PDF. The result is that there are a LOT of decrypted PDFs in the wild that carry the Internet Archive logo on the very first page.

I am for DRM because it could enable something like the IA to host and lend books without violating author's privledge. The IA's implementation is foolish and, I think, carries the intent to allow exploitation.

Moderation is expensive and difficult and failing to do it well will kill your community dead. The evidence of this is pretty obvious today... only niche communities have active and positive engagement so far as I can see.

Cost: the demand was made to let the human moderators and the community team go after one of several aquisitions. The SEO advantage of having these threads had evaporated by that time so there wasn't a good argument against going with the free service provided by Facebook.

I worked at Huffpost through all three of these phases in a technical capacity adjacent to comments and moderation, as director of technical operations and eventually as head of engineering. This study has significant questions to answer about their methods and assumptions that is summed up here:

"Second, we know that HuffPo used both manual and algorithmic moderation in all three phases, but we do not know how the policies changed under the different identificatory regimes."

Given whay I know about Huffpo's moderation system and their statement that they don't have understanding of them I'd say that nothing reported in this study should be considered valid for a few reasons.

One is that Huffpost used many different systems of moderations following many changing standards throughout their days as a big news site (#3 in the US at one point) and the biggest news-based community, which they were for several years.

They started with no moderation, then human moderation with evolving standards and practices that were overseen by a brilliant community team. Then they bought Julia in 2010(? ish) which was a very early machine learning moderation system that was trained on millions of human made moderation decisions before launch and whose training and internals were constantly updated and improved for years. Julia was dropped for Facebook comments later on, at which point Facebook did most of the basica moderation but was still assited by human moderators.

My first critique of this analysis is that the authors have no data or understanding of the moderation actions that resulted in suppression of comments or users. How can an analysis make any claims without this data? So far as they know the comment-flow was more hostile during the periods they observe as more civil, but there were just far more comments suppressed. Just one of dozens of other internal details of the operation that would invalidate their conclusions would be that Huffpost quiet-deleted comments for a significant period of time -- meaning that you could post, and you would see your posts in context when you were logged in but no one else would see them. They also silent-banned users. This and other details of implementation create a great deal of complexity and secondary effects.

I can attest that moderation was very, very active and that lots and lots of comments were moderated down and out of the comment threads... again indicating significantly less civility than any retrospective analysis would be able to discern without all the data.

I also find it interesting that this study chose Huffpost for the analysis. At the site's hights of success and profit the comment threads were the reason for their SEO dominance and were considered to be the most important secret sauce. Huffpost moderation was the best in the business by a long measure. With the methodology presented it would make sense to me to say that Huffpost would appear to be the most civil of the big sites of the time. So it is interesting that this study focuses singly on Huffpost and reports that their theories indicate this differential.

While the authors do cover some of this in their section on Limitations, they don't cover near enough to justify their results... instead this reads as another cherry-picking study where authors had a theory and found a dataset that confirmed it while being unaware of fundamental reasons why that dataset was an outlier, making it impossible for them to build in the needed controls in their methods.

I don't think so. Here is the first sentance of a highly-cited (secular) piece on the same kind of data:

"Premarital sex predicts divorce, but we do not know why."

That last part makes all the difference in the world.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0192513X231155673

agree -- all this reminds me of a study that indicated that people that used LSD even one time were like 5x as likely to suffer from depression later in life. I've always thought that it was very interesting that the conclusion drawn was that LSD made you depressed vs. asking questions about the correlation.

it is funny, really how obvious the angle is in these kinds of analysis. There's no way you could even start to draw conclusions from these kinds of data sets unless you already knew what you were going to report -- there's less than no information in the numbers being used... the only rational analysis would result in nothing but questions and absolutely no conclusions.

I would like to see these stats compared to the average age of marriage by state. The top states regarding divorce are, overall, rural and relatively poorer (except for Delaware.)

I'd also like to see the marriage rate by state for comparison, too. Arkansas has more than 2x the marriages per capita of California (lowest divorce rate), for instance, but only 20% fewer divorces...

Again, this article is a bad conceptual and statistical analysis of the data.

Conservative leaders are very likely to only cynically perform their supposed values. For money.

People that authentically hold conservative values work differently. I suspect that the lower divorce rate among this cohort has a lot to do with another statistic: that 65-70% of divorces are initiated by women. Conservative values would seem to inhibit a woman from initiating divorce, resulting in a lower rate.

also: this article is poorly thought out junk top to bottom, imo.

causation? correllation? one will never know from reading this article.

I think people (and the market) make this assumption but the correction isn't Apple doing something differently it is the market and public assumption seeing that when you sell something that lasts longer than a year and works really well you need to accomodate the ebbs and flows of sales across a 5 year period instead of quarterly and YoY.

Something's not right. I say "hey siri 10 minute timer" or somesuch like five times a day. I'd play with your timing and word order. For instance my kid has trouble making music work with siri in the car, but if I say "hey siri play the album technique by the band new order" just like that it works 100% of the time.

Not sure what you're needing that you're note getting -- there is certainly a lot that it doesn't do -- but Siri works like a champ for me these days for maybe 70% of the things that I would do with my phone or ever computer without it. I initiate all calls with it, do tons of texting with it, cue up all my music in the car with it, constantly add things to reminders lists ('hey siri... add soy sauce to the grocery list' results in soy sauce on my grocery list... in the condiments sublist)

I hadn't noticed the improvements until I started using my apple watch a lot... I had given up on it a few years back, I guess.

i don't think that I'm alone is wishing very much that there was a setting to make spotify into a streaming music app. I hate having podcasts and now books shoved into my POV when I want to listen to music. It sucks.

they are saying that you can literally install the OS start to finish it (and configure it for sightless use to boot) without being able to see at all. As in blind. This was part of the point they were making about accesibility features and UI consistency in MacOS.

sure, there are inconsistencies, but with some global shortcuts in your muscle memory and a few years of using spotlight under your belt... OSX out of the box is fast and efficient as hell.

But I will relent and acknowledge that your arguments ring very true. How do I get my Messages window back if I accentally close it? Very good point.

The ribbon though? I think your memory is optimistic. It was in my memory ugly, clunky, slow and had some, but few system settings. But I must admit that in my heart OS 7.1 was the high water mark of usability and I resented all subsequent innovations... which it sounds like you might be able to empathize with.

Also... Preview is not available on any other platform and is, imo, the single best executed application of all time.

that's a pretty wild assertion. I'm immediately thinking of music software: 99% of all plugins, the #1-4 DAWs, drivers for 2/3 of all hardware, at least... not on linux.

click on app, command-c, shift-command-A, command-V

if you find yourself looking for faster routes to an end, MacOS almost always has several levels of shortcuts waiting for your muscle memory.

testing how a DAW handles 300 identical low-CPU consumptive tracks is not at all appropriate for a music CPU workload assessment. No one except Charlie Clauser or Hollywood cinema post production uses projects with 300+ tracks -- it is a really idiosyncratic test that exposes the optimization liabilities of the DAW vs the CPU.

A Better test would be to set up an intensive real world 20 track project, assess utilization and overhead, and then find a real-world way to increment that stress upward to the breaking point.

Most computer music forum wonks use some kind of test based on softsynths or reverbs or a combination and stack them high on a smaller number of tracks.

I mean... 300 tracks? You're basically testing the DAW's thread management at that point, not the CPU as it would be used.