thoughtsimple

Does it still give an error trying to log in with your Apple ID?

I had a version of this working months ago but it was pretty useless without iCloud or my developer account.

I guess I should test it.

It’s fixed in the release candidates for iOS and MacOS. The release of those should come next week.

"Bored now"

According to the conclusion in the white paper, they tested for endurance only to 10^7 with no degradation. Obviously that is not enough for a real system.

The number of transistors produced in 2021 is a bit mind boggling if you do the math. These are nanotechnology produced at a rate by humans that rivals any large physics number. By my calculation, Apple alone via TSMC produces something like 1x10^18 transistors per year. Add up Intel, Samsung and the rest of TSMC's customers and the number goes far higher. We are so used to it, we don't boggle at the concept any more but we should.

He started off well with the history of civilization collapse but then he got the heart of his presentation with the misguided idea that modern software is more broken recently. He showed some incomprehensible bugs in Visual Studio.

All I have to say is that on Windows the Blue Screen of Death was a prominent problem for many years. On the original MacOS that was non-preemptive multitasking and no memory hardware protection, any program could cause a denial of service or take down the whole computer. These are 30 year old technologies that were clearly worse in many ways than modern equivalents.

Has software improved recently? No, I would say it has gotten somewhat worse recently but if you look at where we are today versus say 1998, things are clearly better. It isn't really possible to know if we are in a major decline or a minor local minimum.

I have a Roku that I block from the internet. It blinks an obnoxious red led to complain it can’t phone home. I need some gaffer’s tape to cover it up I guess.

Where is the function is_halting() ?

Neither Apple, Microsoft, nor Parallels is planning to support x86-64 Windows on Apple silicon. You can run emulation software like QEMU and it works but it is very slow. UTM uses QEMU.

Apple uses the Arm Aarch64 instruction set with Apple silicon which is Arm IP. I don't believe that any Apple silicon uses any other Arm IP but who really knows since it is likely Apple would have written any contracts to prevent disclosure.

Mind blowing progress! So impressed with the Asahi team.

At the time PC was generic for personal computer. Only later was it associated with the IBM PC.

My favorite is the 8k static memory board. It has 64 RAM chips which means each one comes in at a whopping 128 bytes or 1k bits.

I think you meant: https://xkcd.com/1244/

I can't remember, did that ever actually ship?

M1 MacBook Air

Apple M1 OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Azul Systems, Inc., 16+36

parsing random integers in the range [0,1)

=== number of trials 32 =====

FastDoubleParser.parseDouble MB/s avg: 492.324205, min: 479.57, max: 516.26

Double.parseDouble MB/s avg: 111.509085, min: 110.63, max: 114.65

Speedup FastDoubleParser vs Double: 4.415104

Apple M1 OpenJDK 64-Bit Server VM, Azul Systems, Inc., 16+36

parsing integers in file data/canada.txt

read 111126 lines

=== number of trials 32 =====

FastDoubleParser.parseDouble MB/s avg: 483.642065, min: 420.43, max: 502.15

Double.parseDouble MB/s avg: 104.347746, min: 99.03, max: 116.91

Speedup FastDoubleParser vs Double: 4.634907

No M1 Mac has replaced any Mac with a discrete GPU. Not yet anyway. The Mini, 13" MacBook Pro and MacBook Air never have had discrete GPUs.

Now that Homebrew is up and running on Apple Silicon, I haven't found too much that doesn't work. MacPorts seems to mostly working too though at this point brew seems more up to date.

If you want to get an M1 Mac for development, I haven't found too many things that don't work and most work very well. The compile speed on even an M1 MacBook Air is incredible.

Docker tech preview seems to work pretty well so I'm not sure what you mean "especially docker". The Docker M1 preview also supports x86_64 emulation with QEmu reasonably well.

https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/apple-m1/

The A12x and A12z don’t have hypervisor support. So the hvf accelerator isn’t going to work.

S100 was also a widely used industrial bus. My first job out of college (1980s) was writing software for a machine tool where the controller was a custom s100 80186 motherboard and a bunch of ROM and static RAM s100 boards. We used a ton of static RAM (probably 4-6 64k boards, I can't remember exactly) that were battery backed up. You could power cycle the controller and just start back where you left off.

How does Moore's law figure into this? I suspect that TSMC runs into the wall that is quantum physics at around 1-2nm. Considering that TSMC has said that they will be in full production of 3nm in 2022, I can't see 1nm being much beyond 2026-2028. What happens then? Does a stall in die shrinks allow other fabs to catch up?

It appears to me that Intel stalling at 14nm is what opened the door for TSMC and Samsung to catch up. Does the same thing happen in 2028 and allow China to finally catch up?

VMs work. Qemu is working with patches. You have to build it though. None of the releases seems to be patched yet. There is an early preview of Parallels. Both Linux and Windows on Arm are working. Docker has an early release as well. There are few prebuilt projects on Github too:

https://github.com/evansm7/vftool

https://github.com/KhaosT/SimpleVM

https://github.com/ubenmackin/ACVM

Is there some reason why the origin of the experiment is relevant?

The title of the article is "Physicists in China challenge Google's 'quantum advantage'. And the article does refute Google's claims of quantum advantage with references.

"But some quantum researchers contested the claim, on the grounds that a better classical algorithm that would outperform the quantum one could exist3. And researchers at IBM claimed that its classical supercomputers could in principle already run existing algorithms to do the same calculations in 2.5 days."

I'm not sure what you would change the title to. This one seems to accurately describe the article.

For most of their existence, DEC had very aggressive IBM like sales people. They sold large systems. When they tried the Rainbow, they pretty much did everything wrong. They didn't have a sales staff that knew how to sell a $2000 computer. You'd call them about the Rainbow and they wanted to send a sales team. Also, the Rainbow alienated the hackers at the time by its closed nature compared to the IBM PC. For example, you could only use DEC floppies that cost significantly more than normal ones.

As far as I know, Apple doesn't manufacture anything. All manufacturing is outsourced. So it isn't likely that they will want to build a fab for several 10's of billions of dollars even thought they probably could.

It seems very focused on Python (not that there is anything wrong with that.) I tried to see if I could run a very basic Java Servlet application and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it work. Again, nothing wrong with that but it isn't as flexible as having a working local development environment.

You can get M1 native Java JDK from Azul.

https://www.azul.com/downloads/zulu-community/?package=jdk

I have the Azul JDK working but I haven't really done much with it. Been side-tracked by ffmpeg, QEmu and SimpleVM. But I plan to do some testing soon.