A human using a computer can still beat a computer at chess.

- high performance CPU/memory bandwidth unavailable on x86 or any other ARM consumer product

This is true.

- Apple support warranty on hardware

Apple have worse warranty support options than Lenovo. Apple can't do on-site repairs like motherboard swaps.

- Apple quality hardware (ie it trivially lasts 6+ years of daily driving in most cases, vs 6mo-2y for any PC laptop)

Untrue. Decent PCs last yonks and won't age out software-wise either.

- Superior laptop keyboards + trackpad that aren't even remotely approximated by any other hardware vendor

Inferior keyboards. Superior trackpad, but a bit oversized.

- It's got modern package management (albeit, sidecar - brew)

I do hope brew has improved...

For several years my desktop, which I use every day, has been a ARM64 based Raspberry Pi running Gentoo Linux

Good!

There's way too many comments about "well my mac lasts so much better than my losdos machines". We're fucking slashdot. This is the shit I come here for. People actually running gentoo on a pi for real.

I'm slightly embarrassed about running mint now, but my laptop is 16 years old so I hope I get some credit for that.

Good to see that I'm not the only one who doesn't buy into the Overpriced Apple products. I keep my Macs longer than my Windows machines.

You don't keep them as long as I keep my Linux machines, at least not as vaguely functional macs.

Right now, you get much better hardware for significantly less money, and upgraded ram and storage in five years won't be enough to compensate for that.

The CPU is faster and lower power, but otherwise the hardware is on a par, in some cases worse. And the lack of a range of ports would really get on my nerves.

Customer service?

Worse.

Apple cannot offer the same level of on-site repairs because everything is soldered down, so a motherboard replacement loses all your data. Lenovo will send someone in a van to swap the motherboard and put your old drive in the new one.

My point about Chernobyl isnt a west-vs-east thing. It's a responsible-vs-reckless thing. Reckless+nuclear=Chernobyl. SV-types are reckless, because their entire ecosystem rewards the people who sprint forward with almost no consideration of safety, responsibility or the damage they might cause. Add nuclear into that mix, and things will end very, very badly.

Oh OK I completely misunderstood your point. The move fast and break things are about as well suited to nuclear power as the Soviets.

so the obvious conclusion is that nuclear accidents are nothing to worry abo*cough*CHERNOBYL*cough

Could you explain to me how avoiding nuclear power in the west will stop the soviets building wildly dangerous designs of the sort that have never been legal here?

More money is changing hands without more work being done. The GDP can increase without more wages being paid. Therefore it can be measuring something which says absolutely nothing about the economic health of the nation, which is not defined by the numbers in billionaires' bank accounts, but by those of the lower class... many of whom don't even have accounts except maybe Cash App or similar. You need that for begging these days, nobody carries cash.

The Switch doesn't do it at PS quality with PS-level games either. Even Switch 2 versions of games are generally inferior to other consoles. That's fine as it's expected but Sony can't beat that. If you want console power you need console hardware, not lightweight portable hardware. It can be portable, but it's got to be serious.

I would assume that the Xbox would spy on me. I would assume that anything Sony made would spy on me. Sony already rugpulled Linux once. The Steam machine being a PC is fine because I don't have any reason to believe Valve is going to spy on that stuff. Even the Steam hardware survey is opt in.

Making the next console a thin client is good for what? Jack shit, it's as powerful and expensive as a real PC, so making it a thin client when a TV can do that with an app would be a ridiculous half-step. No business is going to buy Sony gaming consoles for a grand to do what they could do with $200 mini PCs that use less power, take up less space, and come from a real brand. It's not like Sony has a good name any more. When's the last time you thought about buying a PC from them? I assure you that has always been a bad plan.

You're both right. His making excuses for them is sleazy, but it's also not wrong. Of course the military wanted to use it to hurt people. That's what they do. When all you're allowed to have is a hammer, naturally you want a bigger hammer.

It ain't that bad.

I've got static binaries from the early 2000s which still run (I checked). The main cause of compatibility problems is if the program has some dependency and doesn't ship that dependency then yeah it won't run. This was always the case (and hey I remember searching the web for random DLLs on Windows to get something old to run).

The kernel itself has maintained a very high level of compatibility.

That's why I tagged that bit as the part that Marx would not have expected; and a historical period that (while it unfortunately has the look of having been an anomaly) ran counter to his thesis. To the best of my understanding he essentially considered the sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism stuff that gets called 'socialism' as either irrelevant or antagonistic to 'Socialism' as he had it in mind(though, admittedly, he was a much more interesting critic of capitalism than theorist of what would come after it, as a fair few of the people who tried to build post-revolutionary economies found out the hard way).

As I understand it; Marx's thesis was that the market value of unskilled labor would decline to more or less match its cost of production(very orthodox position on what a commodity in a competitive market will do) and that industrialization was steadily replacing jobs that were formerly artisanal and small business that was petit bourgeoise with capital intensive operations that required only unskilled labor; and sooner or later something would have to give because having your salary reduced to your cost of production is exceptionally miserable. He was either unimpressed by the likelihood, or saw as not ameliorating the 'alienated labor' concerns, any sort of welfare state/regulated capitalism arrangement that runs more or less straight capitalist economics but skims some of the (considerable, as he noted) productivity to ameliorate the plight of the laborers.

The post-WWII period was essentially one where precisely that happened; for some mixture of genuine cultural reasons and fear that, with actual communists about, it would be a terrible value to squeeze labor to the breaking point when the (very real) productivity advantages of industrial capitalism meant that you could offer them enough to keep them happy and get still get rich; along with enough fairly rapid technological changes that the ranks of 'artisan' labor were steadily refreshed with various white collar and skilled trades jobs that were not immediately amenable to automation.

I'm certainly not an economic historian; but it seems like the post-WWII period was a genuine anomaly in terms of labor relations and distribution of wealth, at least for the US; though seemingly one that was already starting to show cracks within a generation or two(though any 'marxist' analysis of it gets complicated by the fact that some of the cracking involved the substantial removal of the US industrial base; and I don't think Marx did nearly as much writing about service-sector economies with offshored industry, since that wasn't really a thing at the time).

On a regular basis, my employer sends me test phishing emails. I have to use my brain, including common sense, to determine which ones they are. Most of them are very obvious, but a few of them are sneaky. My employer would be very upset with me if I were gullible. I would have to do trainings about it designed to make me more suspicious.

Which of those is someone dumb enough to install software from an unknown source outside of a VM?

I suspect that he would and he wouldn't. The specifics of commodities used for popular light entertainment suddenly becoming an ultra-hot item as an ingredient in the means of production would probably come as a surprise: as though readers of penny-dreadfuls were suddenly rioting because mill owners switched to building factory equipment out of paper pulp.

The broad-strokes realization by formerly skilled laborers and petit bourgeoise that they are actually moving downward toward 'proletariat' status, rather than being the respectable junior partners of capital, though, seems very much in line with his expectations; and (depending on where you stand on what 'AI' is doing to programming and various sorts of white-ish collar data munging) may very much be what plays out.

The development that Marx didn't seem to have suspected(though, in the slightly-a-cop-out 'sufficiently long term', wouldn't necessarily view as relevant); is arguably the post-WWII period of backsliding on industrial revolution era labor relations. It certainly wasn't all roses; but out of some combination of genuine conviction and (ironically) competitive market pressure from more or less authentic capital-'C'-"Communists" there was a period where people where being GI Bill-ed into education in huge numbers, Western Europe was urgently Marshall Planned out of the ashes, state tolerated or even encouraged labor unions made industrial jobs at least steady lower middle class livings, and it was generally seen as a bad strategy, potentially even a bad thing, to say "fuck you, I've got mine" too loudly.

Wasn't really until the early '70s that the old ways reasserted themselves, wage/productivity numbers started to decouple, executive vs. worker compensation ratios started flying up, the various planned economies that had once had people running scared either collapsed into basket cases or turned into authoritarian market-capitalist operations; and so on.

I can detect AI style bullshit a good percentage of the time. There's just something about how it writes that's too much like ad copy. Worst case I run into a few false positives from writers who are insufferably full of themselves.

If more people were better readers, more people would detect more AI bullshit.

The literacy level in the USA is pathetic.