As of a few years ago, most of China's GDP was dedicated to things like Thousand Talents and wooing foreign talent to their shores.

Apple has had over a decade to tune APFS. APFS was announced around ten years ago, in 2016 WWDC. Back then, it was an advance because it allowed for snapshots, as well as immutable filesystems. However, APFS just (from what I see -- I may be wrong) hasn't really had anything major added. Even if checksumming is an option shipped off, it should be in place. Same with compression and maybe even deduplication, preferably a passive style like btrfs rather than active like ZFS, because Macs tend to be running low on RAM, so an active deduplication system would definitely affect performance, while passive would slow down when the dedup task is running, but not anywhere else.

Maybe some tweaks on encryption would be nice. I'd like an option for a pre-boot PIN, and after "x" number of times, the Mac DFU resets itself, and waits for activation if it is iCloud or MDM locked. This way, one can have some solid assurance that a Mac lost or stolen while powered off isn't going to allow a complete OS boot, ensuring protection of data. I can do this with Windows and Linux.

I do not like the fact that APFS doesn't have bit rot protection, which is why I wish Apple went with ZFS. For phones and devices, maybe ZFS isn't optimal, but it should be an option.

I also wish APFS had the ability to scrub to catch the issues the parent poster mentions. Looking at fsck_apfs, I don't really see anything that not just checks the filesystem, but the actual data itself... and this isn't really acceptable for a modern filesystem. Many Linux distributions use btrfs as default, which does have scrubbing, and if one is doing any storage, ZFS is used, even with the issues of CDDL/GPL kernel taint. The scrub not just checks for bad stuff, but refreshes the drive and data on it.

The problem is that APFS is designed for SSDs. It isn't great for spinny disks, and HFS+ has had a lot of improvements since the HFS/MFS days. It would be nice to have a filesystem with less overhead, especially because APFS doesn't provide any bit rot protection by checksumming.

It would be nice if Apple could "bless" FUSE-t or maybe make some type of IFS that doesn't require kernel extensions and weakening the OS security just so one can use another FS. Or, maybe Apple could offer some filesystems like ext4, xfs or $DEITY willing, OpenZFS. This way, Apple only needs to support a few filesystems, but if someone wants to use ZFS, that option is available.

Other operating systems still work with old filesystems. I can use FAT12 on a Windows Server 2025 machine. I can use the old `ext` or Minix filesystems directly on Linux, and xiafs. If I want to run the original MFS, I will need to jump through a lot of emulation hoops.

I personally don't care who made the space based data center concept. Overall, it is fraught, other than edge computing or a way to create a mesh network.

It still has a lot of issues. Space is an extremely good insulator, so heat has to be dealt with via radiation. Power can be handled via solar, nuclear batteries and betavoltaic panels (assuming that tech has moved since being at best a prototype in the 70s). If something breaks, it isn't like you can send a L1 tech to go yank a hard disk, replace it, and run a ZFS resilver.

Then, there is one issue nobody wants to touch. Kessler Syndrome. We are already having issues with the ISS due to this. Wait until some rogue state launches a bag of sand in LEO and MEO. This doesn't take much other than getting the rocket inserted into an orbit, which many countries are able to do fairly reliably Then, all those high zoot data centers will just get perforated and turned into dangerous space junk, where the only way to deal with that is to wait until they burn out, or see if one can use concepts like lasers to slow down velocity..

Overall, constellations for communications are a good thing. However, lets keep those as edge nodes. For actual data centers, lets look at northern climates where we can cool data centers with relative ease.

We have absolutely zero socialists in Congress, except maybe Bernie. Everyone else is right of center, pretending to be left of center. The only real difference is that the Dems want to fight on the hill of gun control, while there are far more important fires to put out, but they ignore, such as either expanding the job market or finding a UBI, all the while dealing with external threats.

Also, "socialism" is a word that is so diluted, it becomes a dog whistle. People point towards Venezula as "socialistic". Not really... they just spent insanely, not realizing that demand for dino juice is contracting. Had they watched their assets more, they would still have been an OPEC-tier producer. People deride China as "socialistic"... but that is definitely not the case, but if it were, bringing a billion people out of the rice paddies to the middle class jobs is pretty impressive.

You can have social safety nets and basic infrastructure without "circling the gaping maw of socialism."

I used to be hesitant about Chinese EVs. I'd say they would have kill switches, always on tracking, parts would be hard to come by, and they would be of horri-bad quality.

Well, IMHO, why buy Chinese when we can get that from domestic makers? /s

Vehicles are so expensive, and even with all the stuff about the Slate, I don't think it will hit the market below $30,000. I am reminded of the F-150 Lightning, which was going to be a low priced, simple, but yet drivable EV. That, it was... but in the 60k range, especially now, it makes no sense for towing.

I really hope Chinese EVs do make it to the US market. We have the absolute shittest selection of vehicles offered in the civilized world. People ask why don't Americans drive small cars? Because nobody sells them, while a quick trip to Mexico, has VW Saveiros, which are an awesome little runabout pickup. If Toyota sold the Hilux here, it would be an insane hit. Oh, and the US is overpriced as well. Especially with the entire dealer thing. I buy a car in Germany, they advertise 75k Euros, I pay 75k Euros. In the US, a car dealer will be wanting $1000 as a deposit before even offering a test drive, then selling a vehicle $10,000 over sticker because they think you are stupid, demanding you sign a NDA before they provide pricing... or just swipe your license and not give it back.

Chinese EVs would be welcome. How can they be any worse than the crap we have now?

Overall, I wouldn't mind seeing this technology in the US, because it would cut down the lines at the relatively few chargers there are, and when RV-ing, I could "top off" the 144kWh battery which is used to run the air conditioner when camping.

I worry about stuff like that getting vandalized. Someone with a knife will just slash the coolant pipes, just because. In fact, it is amazing that vandalism of EV chargers is as low as it is, because the copper in the wires is worth something.

I'm also surprised the EU has the power grid to support these everywhere. Maybe because they are not having all their power allocated to matrix multiplication + carry (AI) or SHA256 hashes (Bitcoin mining).

I think the US car industry will likely just hike prices and add monthly subscriptions, until they are pretty much bankrupt, and then get a bailout from the government. This has worked in the past, and the execs get fat bonuses.

IMHO one of the core things the US industry seems to care about is keeping Chinese cars from getting in the market. The BYD Shark would put other full size pickups to shame for a fraction of the price. US carmakers seem to be be not interested in the bottom part of the "K" shaped economy, which creates a market vacuum, but regulation keeping players out ensures that vacuum wouldn't be filled.

A microcosm of this played out in the "B" market when people said there are too many Cadillacs and too few Chevies for RV brands, where to even buy a base model, you are looking at $150,000, and for a decent one, that is a quarter mill. The RV makers know there is a market, and other regions of the world like Australia and Europe have companies like Hymer which service the "Chevy" market. But not in the US.

I've been debating this. The absolute biggest thing in my favor for an EV is that the previous owner of my house had 240 volts, 50 amps wired up to an outlet by the driveway. This makes it very easy to just plug in a level 2 charger. Charging from home is what (IMHO) makes or breaks EVs. Mainly because in-town charging where I live sucks for the most part.

I mention this probably way too much, but I'd like to see more EREVs sold in the US. A friend of mine had an i3 with a range extender, and it was pretty much the best of both worlds. No worries about charging, just stop and get gas. If at home, or find a charger, use that for more range. There is so much improvements that can be done to make the range extender part lightweight and give better fuel economy, just because it only needs one RPM range to work effectively, rather than a large power band. To boot, the drivetrain is just an EV drivetrain which is a lot simpler.

I'm surprised EREVs are not used in heavy duty pickup trucks, where you need the insane amount of torque at low speed. This is how trains work, and even if the battery has a limited range, the simplicity of the EV drivetrain will make up for that, for ease of repairability.

This is a good point. Europe wants separation from the US. Why not fund open source projects? Everyone wins when this is done.

Unless Microsoft is moving to a new CPU architecture (Harvard architecture would be nice, but the NX bit does almost a good enough job with machines,) we are going still have hardware, the ISA, the hypervisor, the mysterious stuff that runs in ring -1 and -2 placed there by the local governments, maybe a hypervisor, the OS, then apps. Yes, we can merge an app with the OS, but even in the Apple 2 days, that was a lot of work, especially with dealing with low level I/O.

So, this means we have an OS created that has a fast path to the matrix multiplication (with carry) on the cores, with the OS as small as possible. Assuming that they will turn their noses up at BSD and Linux kernels, there is always QNX.

At the filesystem level, TernFS is what some banking industries are using at the exascale. It doesn't have permissions and such as a normal filesystem, but designed to handle data on a large scale. Might as well go with this.

For RAM, I've seen some devices that actually use the GPU's VRAM as a swap device and balloon into that.

Overall, the "AI OS" may not be true realtime, but it can help, but it needs to be able to reassign resources as need be, be it using Optane-tier storage (if it exists at all), and the OS is focused on quickly getting software requests to the cores that handle the matrix and tensor manipulation.

If it were up to me, I'd not bother writing another OS. Just using Linux and contributing mainline kernel patches would more than pay for itself, especially when the mainline patches become part of LTS distributions. If designing a hardware architecture just for AI was fundamentally so different that conventional OS kernels couldn't be used, then see about a Linux emulator so people could port tools to the OS and cross-compile. An OS needs to be able to run gcc natively, or it is not going to last long.

I'd daresay even Pages is a good alternative in some cases, and it is a free download. I prefer LibreOffice for reliability, because it works everywhere regardless of platform.

The H-1B project needs killed. Now. If someone is that important that they muscle out an American worker, they need to be given a permanent resident card with a short path to citizenship.

Surprisingly many. IUST (Iranian University of Science & Technology) wrote the SMP code for Linux in the early 1990s, IIRC. They are truly world class in their expertise.

Note -- Iranian people != IRGC.