abhibeckert
@abhibeckert@lemmy.world
- Comment on Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough 4 months ago:
Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.
That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.
Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).
TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air.
- Comment on Even Apple finally admits that 8GB RAM isn't enough 4 months ago:
This. My Mac has 16GB but I use up half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux software.
I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB.
- Comment on Apple Hits a Major Roadblock as EU Targets App Store 4 months ago:
You don’t need metaphors or comparisons.
The Spotify app should have a button that takes you to their website, where you can sign up for a premium subscription.
It doesn’t have one because Apple would kick Spotify out of the App Store.
Also - all other links to the Spotify website (support, terms of service, privacy policy, etc) take you to pages where the main navigation of the website has been removed so that you can’t find the signup page. Because again, Apple bans that. For the longest time apps have not allowed to have any way for users to find a signup form on a website.
Apple claims to be compliant now, because they have a new API - only available in Europe - that informs the user that they might be a victim of identity theft, fraud, etc if they continue, then would take you to Spotify’s signup page. Also if Spotify wants users to see that horror show… they’d have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year. Vs not taking advantage of the new API where Spotify doesn’t pay anything to Apple.
- Comment on Let's chat about these SEVEN nuclear power plants the LNP want to build ... 5 months ago:
Have they released who is going to pay for these power plants? Because if they put it on my monthly bill, I’m going off grid and I bet half the rest of the country will too.
- Comment on Intel's new Thunderbolt Share provides file and screen sharing without hurting network performance 6 months ago:
Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work?
Modern Macs can’t do Target Disk Mode. If you had the right cables (thunderbolt or firewire) it was really fast, just as quick as a high end internal PCIe SSD.
It’s been replaced with “Mac Sharing Mode” which operates while the Mac is running normally and is nowhere near as quick or reliable.
- Comment on Intel's new Thunderbolt Share provides file and screen sharing without hurting network performance 6 months ago:
I know iPads (and I assume Android tablets) can be a second screen over wireless using third party software but it’s not uncompressed video with disk access last I checked.
The video compressed (how much depends on your network speed, it’s only noticeable on low bandwidth connections). And it’s far more than just video - you can copy files over the connection. Keyboard/mouse/touchscreen/stylus inputs are sent over it, and video camera/microphone data can be streamed in real time as well.
And it’s not just iPads, I do it all day every day between my desktop and laptop Mac. iPhones and Apple TVs can do it too.
It works best over thunderbolt but it’s usually done with wifi — always a direct wifi connection that bypasses your router because the amount of bandwidth required is so high that if you sent it to a router and then to a computer… your wifi would collapse under the load.
- Comment on Bloomberg - Apple Says No Major App Developers Accept New Outside Payments 6 months ago:
If the EU finds apple guilty of “systematic” non-compliance, which will happen if they “continue their shenanigans for every judgement”, then the DMA doesn’t call for a fine. It calls for a TikTok style forced sale. Apple could be ordered to sell the iPhone to another company or face an outright ban in the EU.
- Comment on Bloomberg - Apple Says No Major App Developers Accept New Outside Payments 6 months ago:
again we can be sure a megacorp like apple is pulling every lever at their disposal
Sure. But as far as I can tell the only lever at their disposal is to drag their feet. Delay delay delay is clearly the overarching strategy.
- Comment on Hello GPT-4o 6 months ago:
I disagree. The real news is the free model will now search the internet for up to date answers, and for calculations it will write and execute a python script, then show you the result.
Paid users of ChatGPT have had that for months, and it’s a game changer.
- Comment on Hello GPT-4o 6 months ago:
you can run locally some small models
Emphasis on “small” models. The large ones need about $80,000 in RAM.
- Comment on Streaming is cable now | Seventeen years after Netflix and Hulu kicked off a streaming revolution, it’s looking more like cable than ever. 6 months ago:
Spotify pays more to artists than physical stores selling CDs ever did.
Sure - if you were one of he top 1000 artists in the world the old system worked well… but those artists are also paid pretty well under the current system (Spotify alone pays millions per year to those artists, and they also get paid by YouTube, Apple, TikTok, etc etc).
- Comment on Streaming is cable now | Seventeen years after Netflix and Hulu kicked off a streaming revolution, it’s looking more like cable than ever. 6 months ago:
The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.
- Comment on Streaming is cable now | Seventeen years after Netflix and Hulu kicked off a streaming revolution, it’s looking more like cable than ever. 6 months ago:
The real difference is you can watch what you want to watch instead of whatever they pick. Also, you can sign up for a month, watch a series, then cancel and sign up to some other service.
The fact most content is crap is irrelevant - there’s more good content available than any reasonable person has time to watch.
- Comment on Tesla is being investigated by the DOJ for securities and wire fraud by making misleading self-driving claims 6 months ago:
This. But I think it’s better to use marine autopilot system as a comparison - aircraft autopilots are closely monitored by three people (two in the cockpit, one on the ground as air traffic control). Not really comparable to a car.
Autopilot in a boat traditionally just turns the steering wheel for you. And all it does is maintain a desired direction of travel. Not even a destination, just a direction. So if wind or currents blow you off course, it’s not going to account for that. It also doesn’t control speed.
There are more advanced systems, but that’s traditionally how autopilot works.
Having said that, Tesla hasn’t just used the word “autopilot”. They also repeatedly refer to their system as “Full Self Driving”. And it kinda does that, as long as there isn’t a fire truck in the way.
- Comment on New Laptop Memory Is Here! LPCAMM2 Changes Everything! - iFixit Video 6 months ago:
It runs at 120 GB/s…
As a Mac user that sounds pretty shit. A MacBook Pro has 400GB/s RAM.
- Comment on Stack Overflow bans users en masse for rebelling against OpenAI partnership — users banned for deleting answers to prevent them being used to train ChatGPT 6 months ago:
Every edit is reviewed by multiple people. If you have low karma, then your edit is reviewed before the edit gets applied to the current state of the database.
Even with high karma, your edit still gets reviewed and will be reverted if it’s a bad edit.
Too many bad edits, your account is going to be banned for wasting moderators time.
- Comment on FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole 6 months ago:
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
- Comment on FCC explicitly prohibits fast lanes, closing possible net neutrality loophole 6 months ago:
That’s fair, but personally I don’t think Net Neutrality was the right solution.
They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.
- Comment on Inside the Climate Protests Hell-Bent on Stopping Tesla 6 months ago:
TLDR - they don’t want a transition from combustion engines to electric cars. They are saying building electric cars is bad for the environment.
- Comment on How to opt out of the privacy nightmare that comes with new Hondas 6 months ago:
The headline photo for the article shows a camera over a road that likely is likely running number plate recognition software…
Honestly I’d be more worried about where that data is going than the tracking software in your car.
This needs to be fixed with legislation, and it needs to be fixed actively. For example by getting rid of number plates entirely and replacing them with something like the transponders used in aircrafts and ships, but with an encrypted rolling code that only shares your data with authorised parties.
It could work like the “Find My” feature on an iPhone, where your location is encrypted and uploaded to the servers anonymously… the decryption key is only provided when the actual owner of the device authorises a data lookup. E.g. in a traffic stop, police could ask you to tap a button on your car that sends the cops your insurance/etc.
- Comment on Apple introduces M4 chip 6 months ago:
They’re the ones using their devices all day for work or similar.
I spend about 10 hours a day doing “real work” - computer programming, on a desktop Mac with an M1 chip. It’s way faster than I need.
- Comment on Report: Facebook Parent Company Meta has been Censoring and Shadow Banning Pro-Palestinian Accounts 6 months ago:
I’m pretty sure Meta has been shadow-banning all news related content for years now, and anything related to Palestine is news.
- Comment on Apple introduces M4 chip 6 months ago:
Sure but my iPad already lasts a week on a charge.
- Comment on Powerful New Chatbot Mysteriously Returns in the Middle of the Night 6 months ago:
They’re not really - they’re just making it available to a small group of experts to kick the tyres and provide feedback.
It’s journalists who are hyping it up. Somehow making “company dedicated to AI research is working on AI” into a story.
- Comment on Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon 6 months ago:
Google doesn’t own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.
So even if Google gives a project a “special deal” it’s still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it’s better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to that.
- Comment on Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon 6 months ago:
It was great, in 2017
It hasn’t stopped being great.
We need better safe guards and checks so that some person can’t just delete France.
The map is updated millions of times per day. There are checks in place, but sometimes one is missed especially if it’s a minor contribution such as “this street has a bus stop”. Deleting France, yeah someone would notice that change and prevent it from taking place.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals Tesla software-locked cheapest Model Y, offers 40-60 more miles of range 6 months ago:
People sure have, but then your warranty is void. And with a Tesla, you’re probably going to wish you had that warranty one day.
- Comment on Elon Musk reveals Tesla software-locked cheapest Model Y, offers 40-60 more miles of range 6 months ago:
That’s different - it relies on having an active cellular connection in the car and older cell towers (5G has improved this dramatically) cell towers could only handle a hundred or so active connections at once, so Toyota is absolutely paying a monthly fee to access the cell network.
Those fees have gone down, since not only is 5G much cheaper per customer (for the cell network), everyone switching to 5G has taken the pressure off older wireless protocols so they’re almost never crowded anymore - so they can pretty much have as many cars connected as they want for near zero cost.
- Comment on Novel attack against virtually all VPN apps neuters their entire purpose 6 months ago:
Everything-but-Windows?
No. Any device that implements a certain DHCP feature is vulnerable. Linux doesn’t support it, because the feature is only useful for home computing/office workstations where Linux is rarely used. And Android doesn’t support it because it inherited the Linux network stack.
- Comment on Gen Z mostly doesn't care if influencers are actual humans, new study shows 6 months ago:
When I think of “influencer” this is the image in my mind.
… OK. But that’s not what the term “Influencer” means. The actual definition is basically just “anyone with a lot of followers”.
And there are plenty of people with a lot of followers who produce great content.