CPU performance. Now compare GPU performance against a PC built out with eight GPUs to do parallel 3D rendering.

The trash can was thermally limited by its design, and could never be upgraded to hold newer CPUs or GPUs. Anyone for whom the trash can Mac Pro would work could just as easily use an Apple Studio, give or take, ignoring the lack of ECC (which the Apple Silicon Mac Pro also lacked).

Depends on what you mean by covered. Can they do their work? Yes. Are they negatively impacted by hardware limitations? Also yes. A lot of professionals would be willing to pay extra for ECC. The fact that Apple doesn't offer ECC makes their machines less than ideal for use cases where a crash would be expensive. The fact that a lot of pros put up with crashes doesn't mean they like the situation. It just means that they dislike it less than switching platforms and tools.

But the pro users I was specifically talking about here are the ones doing high-performance computing tasks involving GPUs. Their only real option is to change platforms, because even though the new Apple Silicon CPUs are great in terms of performance per watt, the wattage is really low, so if you genuinely need boatloads of GPU, to the extent that Apple was still in the game without NVIDIA support, they completely dropped out of the game when Apple Silicon dropped support for AMD. At that point, Apple computers became nearly useless for most modern high-performance computing/AI workloads, people doing large-scale 3D video rendering, etc., because they're underpowered as shiped and can't be expanded with more GPUs, and parallelizing work across multiple machines is way more expensive and not always practical.

The historical definition of "pro" is people who are running software beyond what a typical user would run. Web browsers and productivity software (word processors, spreadsheets) are not pro apps; they are business apps. Pro apps are mostly things like high-end photo editing (think Photoshop/Pixelmator, not iPhoto/Capture One), 3D modeling, audio/video production, etc.

Developers at least arguably fall into that category, though they are borderline, because they don't have huge storage requirements or huge compute requirements. Developers can do most of their work on laptops, though Apple's non-Pro laptops are pretty thermally throttled, so they will be miserable. And developers are probably the group who care most about ECC RAM, because they understand enough to know why it matters, but they still often use laptops because they don't want to be tethered to a desk. It's a tradeoff.

No, and they never were. While the users might have professional occupations, their computing requirements are indistinguishable from a high school student. "Pro" in this context doesn't mean "users with money". It means "users with needs that exceed typical requirements". :-)

Oh. Today I learned that FCP regained live multicamera switching support in 2024... four years after everybody stopped caring and started using OBS, vMix, or Tricaster.

And Apple's total lack of third-party GPU support on Apple Silicon (beyond a few kludges that use them for AI workloads, but no display), losing the current Mac Pro is no great loss. :-)

And yeah, the BlackMagic stuff I've bought lately is Thunderbolt. Also, most of the software for things like real-time switching runs on Windows anyway, so I'd imagine the market for that on Mac is not huge. And so much stuff gets brought in over networks these days (NDI, SRT, etc.) that HDMI ingest probably isn't that interesting anyway. You're more likely to use a dedicated encoder box that provides streams over Ethernet. My production work has been doing it that way since the pandemic.

Exactly this. Apple neutered the Mac Pro by making all of its additional functionality useless.

Years ago, they announced that they were killing support for kernel-space drivers. Then they announced a user-space replacement, DriverKit, that is basically half-assed when it comes to PCI, providing no support for any of the sorts of PCIe drivers that anyone would actually want to write. The operating system already comes with built-in support for USB xHCI silicon and most major networking chipsets, nobody builds PCIe audio anymore, FireWire support is dropped in the current OS release, and video drivers can't be written because Apple didn't bother writing the hooks.

That last one is the showstopper for PCI slots on a Mac. The main reason people bought Mac Pro or bought Thunderbolt enclosures was to support high-end video cards. With Apple not supporting any non-Apple GPUs on Apple Silicon, the slots are basically useless. I'm not saying that PCIe is useless by any means, just that the neutered, broken, driverless PCIe-lite hack that Apple actually makes available on macOS is basically useless.

I suppose you could theoretically provide DriverKit support for RAID cards, but really at this point everybody just uses external RAID hardware attached over a network anyway, so the number of people who would buy a Mac Pro for something like that is negligible.

And I guess in theory, you could port Linux video card drivers over if the only thing you're doing is using GPUs for non-video purposes (e.g. for AI model training or offline 3D rendering), but tying it into the operating system as a video output device is likely impossible without additional support from Apple, and nobody is going to bother to do that for the tiny number of people who would want that when you can just run Linux on x86 and not have to do all that porting work. After all, for those sorts of tasks, you probably aren't benefitting much from the OS or the CPU or memory performance anyway.

So basically the Mac Pro was dead on arrival because of Apple dropping support for very nearly every single thing that the Mac Pro could do that couldn't be done just as easily with a Studio (without even attaching a Thunderbolt PCIe enclosure). And once the Studio came out and had a comparable CPU in a much smaller form factor, the writing was on the wall.

More than that, the Apple Silicon Mac Pro is a sad toy that was never truly worthy of the Mac Pro name by any stretch of the imagination. It doesn't even have ECC memory or upgradable RAM. IMO, Apple really should have just been honest with its pro users and said "We no longer care about you," and then they should have dropped the Mac Pro as part of the Apple Silicon transition, rather than shipping something so massively downgraded that is so many miles from being a true pro desktop machine.

Anyone who is even slightly surprised by it being discontinued was obviously not paying attention.

What phrase would you use to describe that, other than "spoke incoherently"? I mean, I can think of some medical terms that might apply, but that's how I would describe his debate performance. He wandered off the subject, had trouble forming a complete thought... basically like a Trump speech, only he paused a lot when he lost his train of thought instead of rambling about illegal aliens eating pets or whatever.

Until it hallucinates and adds something that wasn't there or changes the meaning significantly. In my experience, AI is really good at screwing things up in ways that nobody expects. And if the people making the changes aren't subject-matter experts, but are just doing drive-by edits to try to make things more digestible, they might not notice the errors if they are subtle enough. Allowing any random person to do stuff like that could potentially cause a lot of damage really quickly.

Until it steals the chart blatantly from somebody's published book, and Wikipedia gets sued for copyright infringement. Wikipedia isn't just trying to protect itself from erroneous data. It's trying to protect itself from liability. With user-uploaded content, the user can self-certify that they have the right to upload it, and apart from user incompetence, that's usually going to be good enough. With AI-generated images, it is impossible for a user to know for certain whether what they are uploading is infringing, and would be hard to later prove which AI generated the diagram to transfer the liability to the AI company.

But the biggest risk, IMO, would be asking it to make a chart with numbers from some table. It could manipulate the numbers, and if someone isn't checking closely, they might not see the error, but the incorrect chart could easily mislead people. AI-based chart generation seems way more likely to introduce errors than a human copying and pasting the table into a spreadsheet and generating the chart with traditional non-AI-based tools.

And after a few months, people will complain that the content is constantly wrong, the editors over there will give up trying to keep the error rate under control, and anyone with a clue will come running back to Wikipedia.

Wikipedia is choosing to die. There is a lot wrong with a lot of what people are doing with GenAI but it is also super useful.

Even on for authors, of encyclopedia articles, and this notihing wrong with telling ChatGTP to, "take this list of bullets and write it up as a paragraph."

Nor is there anything wrong with asking it to make a diagram of some process etc.

Someone else is going to clone wikipedia and the authorship will no doubt migrate to where they are allowed to use contemporary tooling.

The conservative right wouldn't have voted for Harris anyway. That's not why he won.

He won because the Democrats care about whether their candidate stumbles across words and speaks incoherently, so Biden was pressured to step down, and Harris was forced to step up at the last second, with nobody really knowing who she was or who she stood for, thus limiting her ability to bring voters out.

He won because the Democrats weren't clueful enough to get Biden to fully step down and make Harris the next President immediately, which would have given the public months of seeing her actually lead the country.

If he really was struggling, then he won because Biden did not step down and let Harris take power before people started questioning whether he was fit to be in office.

He won because Biden did not recognize that he would have a hard time running again and allow an open primary.

He won because the Republicans were able to paint it as a coverup of Biden's feeble-mindedness, and the Democrats weren't able to show people that struggling mentally when you're physically fatigued isn't inherently a sign of dementia.

He won because Democrats had too much class to use the dementia card on Trump, either first or in retaliation.

He won because too many people conveniently forgot what a disaster he was during his first term, and too many people gave him a pass for the economic damage he did, and the folks prosecuting him for crimes were way too slow so it was still going at the next election.

He won because Kamala Harris was a center-right Democrat who tried to put on progressive clothes to get votes, then swung back towards the center again to get votes. Her time as a prosecutor draws into question her progressive bona fides. That meant the left didn't come out to vote.

I really don't understand why the only two women candidates that Democrats have run have at least appeared to be at the authoritarian end of their party. That doesn't win the presidency unless you're running as a Republican. Both of these candidates were mistakes. There are plenty of women in the Democratic party who would have been better choices.

In short, there were so many things wrong with her candidacy that it's hard to count them all. Gender and race were likely not a meaningful part of why she lost, or at least there are so many other confounding factors that it would be impossible to pin it on either of those.

Imagine expecting an organization to have real plan and concrete assets in place to meet their defined benefit contractual obligations to employees.

I mean they should be able to use rosy predictions about asset performance and when it does not work just dump the bill on the taxpayers like state and local pension funds for teachers, police, etc do! Or maybe they should be like the cool kids in corporate American declare bankruptcy, sell all the assets to an other entity that just happens to be owned by the same people and again leave the problem to the tax payers with PBGC..

Nope congress is required to establish a post office but the post office is not an agency, constitutionally I suppose it could be but the model is more like Fanny/Freddie. Congress takes a supervisory role.

You don't. That's what parents are for. Parents taking care of their own kids scales easily, because the number of parents is linear in the number of kids being monitored. Facebook taking of everyone's kids scales exponentially in the number of users, because anybody could be talking to any kid.

What they should be suing for are better tools for parents to monitor their kids' activity on Facebook. If you give the parents that, and if you force child accounts to have an associated parent account, then the responsibility falls on the parents, as it should be.

Any other approach would be insane beyond reason.

There are two articles on the home page right now about Meta losing a court case. I think you meant to post this in the other one. This one is about social media addiction.

What does age verification have to do with social media addiction? Did you mean to post this in the *other* article on the home page about Meta losing a court case? :-D

What, exactly, do they think the alternatives are?

Facebook has over 3 billion users. If they output an average of twenty artifacts (posts, replies, direct messages, or images/videos) per day, that's 60 billion outputs. If 1% of those are videos that are an average of three minutes long, that's 1.8 billion minutes of video, and if the other 99% take thirty seconds to moderate, that's another 29.7 billion minutes, for a total of 31.5 billion minutes per day to moderate.

That's 65.6 million workdays of content to moderate per day. Adjusting for people working only 5 days per week, that's about 92 million people required to moderate it.

For context, that is approximately the entire adult population of Mexico. The entire country. They would literally have to employ an entire moderately large country to do this without AI.

So what, exactly, do these lawyers think is the alternative? For Facebook, IMO, the right answer is to require anyone under 18 to link a parent account and give the parent account updates on what their kid is doing every day. Shift the responsibility to the parents where it belongs. The idea of Facebook parenting your child is idiotic and is an intractable problem (because the social graph increases exponentially as the user count increases linearly), so if that's what they actually want, then I fully expect this to be overturned on appeal.

Indeed, which raises the question especially in the cause of this court's prevailing theory that the law should be read in the context of Congresses other positions at the time, if PLCAA's existence should imply the congress did not believe liability would not extend to product manufacturers otherwise.

This is the right decision here, because to decide any otherway really would invite chaos. I mean what if drive some nails partly into a baseball bat, and beat someone half to death, are the hardware and sporting goods stores liable, how about the manufactures of the bat and of the nails, there is no rational place to draw any lines, except around the principle actor who formed the intent to do the unlawful act.