Man I'm really looking forward to this story blowing over so HN can stop being spammed with this flamebait.
2,366 karma · joined October 13, 2019
AR will be a niche product constrained primarily to industrial applications.
There, we've both made our blind predictions, now we get to see who's right!
By continuing to tap into supplies, you keep the cost of carbon-producing fuels (and their carbon intensive extraction industries) low enough that they remain price competitive with renewables; a price which is further subject to implicit subsidies in the form of negative externalities. This then helps buoy the demand side and slows the transition to alternatives.
One way to solve that is through carbon taxes so that the price of externalities is baked into the cost of the product.
But the alternative is to simply cut back on extraction in the first place and leave the carbon in the ground.
In either case the end result is higher prices at the pump which will push consumption toward renewables.
I'm starting to think the RIR's should just start charging increasing YoY maintenance fees on v4 address space for companies that haven't rolled out v6. Those companies, who already have an allocation, are really benefiting from a negative externality. Maybe it's time they start paying for the privilege.
LOL, that's practically every SV CEO. They all want us to believe that a) they were the underdog, and b) they were the hero in their own story.
What I can never tell is which ones are doing it deliberately as part of a PR strategy and which ones simply lack the perspective to realize they're doing it at all.
In that context it's clear this is a classic piece of religious propaganda, intended to set up an us-vs-them mentality so as to bind their community together in spiritual solidarity against those who would undermine their beliefs. You see similar tactics used in cults. Look closely and they out themselves right in the text:
> Propaganda is not self-labelled, it does not come to us in a marked package. We must each make an inference by our personal judgment.
> Luckily, such discernment is an easy matter (for a serious Christian); but we-our-selves must do it, nobody else can be relied-upon to do it for us...
Or: if you're a good Christian you won't trust anyone except your own in-group.
My advice: flag the post and move on.
Because unoriginal political flamebait is off-topic for this site. From the site guidelines:
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon.
Certainly this story is neither interesting nor new. It's just Sticks and Stones redux.
Given the quality of discussion associated with these topics they actively diminish my experience of HN and make me want to avoid the site.
> Do you have an example of one of these? (Genuinely interested in what you mean by this)
A very common sentiment I see around here and elsewhere is imagining some secret, organized sjw cabal that's out to get people:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28883427
"The context is there is a playground game being played at scale. In order to be accepted in certain circles, one needs to discern who the thought leaders are, display the proper deference to them, and above all adhere to approved talking points. "
I could probably find half a dozen comments in this thread alone expressing similar sentiments.
There must be some analog to "mansplaining" that fits, here. "Transplaining"? Hmm...
Anyway, just be aware you have allies. I've just given up participating on HN when these topics come up since it's gotten so utterly polarized and hyperbolic. I typically just flag the article and move on. I assume there's a pretty large silent audience of folks like myself who are simply exhausted by the whole thing and are done being exposed to the negativity and borderline conspiracy theories floating around here. I come to HN for cool tech stories, not to be exposed to even more American political food fights.
Of course, despite that, here I am... but, hey, I never said I had self-control...
And that might be true.
The practical reality is you can't both have perfect privacy/security, and enable state surveillance. It's one or the other.
The question is, what tradeoffs are we willing to live with?
It's an incredibly hard question with no good answers.
So this article explores the question: is the answer Apple come up with better than what we have today: either content scanning of naked data in the cloud, or total information opacity for law enforcement as a result of high quality, easy-to-use encryption.
Personally, I think the encryption cat is out of the bag and I'd rather have better privacy over enabling digital wiretapping capabilities, whether they're happening in the cloud or on my devices.
But that's just my opinion and I accept that it comes with a lot of tradeoffs, including much more difficulty in identifying and breaking up CSAM distribution networks.
Oh sure, has Debian testing or unstable resulted in a non-booting system for me in the 15-20 years I've been using it? No. But that's an incredibly low bar to set. Issues absolutely pop up that, while not that catastrophic, remain problematic.
Just recently (like, in the past 2-3 weeks) the move from pipewire 0.3.36 to 0.3.37/38 broke bluetooth audio for me, which is a dealbreaker as I use a headset every single day for work. No idea why, but I had to go pull the previous package versions from /var/cache/apt/archives (thank goodness I didn't run a purge!), manually install them with dpkg, then pin them in my apt policy until the issue is fixed.
Similarly, the wifi drivers that ship with the kernel have periodically broken and worked again across major kernel versions.
These sorts of intermittent surprise issues are far less likely to happen with a snapshot distro due to the stability of the package set and the additional testing those snapshots undergo before being released.
The problem is the Debian snapshot distro is stable which, again, has an ancient package set.
Ubuntu strikes an interesting middle ground, giving you up-to-date packages that are vetted and then the whole distro is snapshotted which minimizes the potential for surprise breakage.
Now, again, I use Debian testing. I'm fine dealing with the intermittent issues that pop up. I know the system well enough to diagnose issues, manually downgrade packages if needed, pull things from sid if I have to, or even build packages by hand when absolutely necessary.
But that certainly isn't for everyone.
If you run stable, which is released as snapshots ala Ubuntu, the packages are ancient.
If you run testing, which is a rolling distro ala Arch, they're a lot newer and pretty solid, but security updates lag.
If you run unstable, which is also rolling, things can (rarely) break.
Additionally, Ubuntu has decided to incorporate non-free software and drivers right into the base product, which gives a better out-of-the-box experience. In Debian this is all opt-in and requires a bit more effort.
Now, I run Debian testing on my laptop, and I'm a huge fan of the distribution, not the least because Debian is the bedrock on which at least a half a dozen other distros are built. But I can acknowledge that their more conservative approach to packaging does have its downsides.
I've been using the Debian packages supplied by Ubuntuzilla (despite their being hosted on gag Sourceforge): https://sourceforge.net/projects/ubuntuzilla/
You can speculate as to why they can wring so many extra dollars out of their customer base, but it's not clear to me that the overall handset market, itself, is structured in a way that gives Apple an unusual advantage.
That the open source and hacking cultures of the 70s, 80s, and 90s weren't founded on an intentional rejection of the increasing balkanization of software and technology after the 1974 determination that software was copyrightable?
I understand, at an individual level, it might seem like throwing some code up on Github with a permissive license might not seem like a political act. But the history of open source is inseparable from the politics of intellectual property, copyright, and all those things that follow, including issues like the right to repair.
Open source started as a political movement.
Are you gonna ask me to keep the government out of your Medicare next? :)
(no, that's not an invitation to debate broader politics, it's just the first example that springs to mind)
Well, let's be fair: They could try, but again, that'd require those OEMs to cooperate. And you'd still end up with folks like System76 and Framework that'd go their own way because nothing can stop a vendor from creating an open x86-based design. They just wouldn't be able to ship Windows pre-installed.
Apple, by contrast, could just do it by fiat because they own the entire ecosystem, and no one could do a damn thing about it.
That's the difference between an open, interoperable ecosystem and a closed one.
I genuinely don't understand the debate, here. Are you seriously trying to claim that the Apple hardware platform and the x86 ecosystem are equally open/closed?
Tiger Lake (whose microarchitecture I just learned is Willow Cove) running Gnome via Wayland (damn HiDPI...), single external display via USB C dock plus an onboard.
More fully, previously I was running a Lenovo X1C5 with Intel integrated graphics. Again, no issues there. In that case I ran Xorg with TearFree enabled.
I'm currently running a Framework sporting an i7-1165G7 with the aforementioned setup.
It was genuinely a little shocking, having spent my earlier days manually hacking modelines in X, to see this hardware come up flawlessly on first boot with Ubuntu 21.04... amazing what a reasonably open hardware ecosystem will enable. jab jab ;)
> We're starting with one, and Apple has a much better track record of incremental change and avoiding hardware churn. This is unique, and we've literally heard from Apple employees that this is an explicit goal. It shows all throughout the SoC design.
Absolutely a fair point! I concede that the reverse engineering story with Apple may very well be less painful than it is with other vendors. Honestly, I hope for your sanity that it is! :D
So, other than for the intellectual curiosity (which is absolutely a great reason!), I have a simple question: why?
Edit:
By the way, thinking about it, I have my own answer to this question: So that this hardware can continue to remain useful long after Apple has ended support for it.
Of course, I continue to believe that it's better, now, to simply buy hardware that doesn't need this kind of reverse engineering to ensure longevity, and I steer my hardware purchases accordingly.
But the hardware exists, and people are buying it, so this project is a way to keep it alive after Apple eventually abandons it (which, granted, could be a long time; while I have a lot of problems with Apple, they are very good about continuing to support old gear).
What attitude? The attitude that Apple's hardware is closed and Apple should be criticized for building a walled garden? That we should, where possible, invest in open hardware and technology and put our money where our mouths are, so as to create the kinds of economic incentives that ensure that technology remains open in the future?
Do you really disagree with that?
> I am not the dewy-eyed idealist you seem to think I am, I believe what I'm saying here because I've seen it happen over and over and over again.
What "it" are we talking about here?
What do you think the end game is going to be?
I genuinely have no idea what your argument is, other than to tell me how I'm wrong without providing any specifics regarding how I'm wrong.
Please, enlighten me, I'm happy to listen!
And Apple is very far on the closed end of that spectrum relative to their competitors, and always has been.
There is simply no arguing this point.
> every bit of openness they enjoy was hard-fought for by pushing the boundaries of the platforms that existed beyond their original intentions, and now treat an effort to do the same on new platforms as some kind of windmill tilting.
Let's be real: Asahi isn't gonna change Apple's corporate culture. It's a super cool technical project and I absolutely applaud these sorts of efforts simply because they're cool.
But you're not the Jedi fighting the empire here. You're not gonna blow open the M1 and suddenly change Apple hearts and minds.
The PC industry became more open for one reason and one reason only: Money.
The IBM monopoly was destroyed because clones were cheap, not because of ragtag freedom fighters.
Linux won over in the embedded space because it doesn't cost anything, not because folks suddenly got stars in their eyes over the GPL.
Apple will only change their practices when economics force them to. But it's very clear that they view a walled garden of hardware and software as key to their financial success, and everything they're doing is intended to build those walls just a little bit higher.
So until you can change that financial equation, nothing in the Apple ecosystem will change.
But, honestly, keep plugging away! Have fun! I personally love repurposing hardware to make it do cool things for which it was never intended. When I see projects like this, I think of Everest: We do it because it's there.
But let's not pretend that you're somehow going to change Apple just because you get the Linux kernel booting on the M1.