Posts by Kristian Walsh

Re: There's nothing particularly wrong with it except for its hardware requirements.

..that’s Monty Python’s “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch, not the Secret Policemen’s Ball.

@Peter2 Re: Capacity

It is obvious, and that’s why what you’re describing is referred to as “Grey Hydrogen”, because it’s not really green. It’s actually very hard to find any reason to prefer grey Hydrogen to just shipping methane and reforming it locally if H2 is what’s needed.

The fossil-fuel industry prefers the term “Blue Hydrogen” for the same processes, but even they admit that in order to be environmentally acceptable, it requires carbon-capture, that most unicorny of unicorn green tech.

“Green hydrogen” is strictly hydrogen produced by a process that does not itself emit CO2. Currently, that’s electrolysis of water using renewable energy. It’s an okay backup for renewables, but it’s less capital-efficient that simply extending grid interconnections to ensure that there’s always somewhere that will take surplus wind or solar, and somewhere else that will produce it when you need it.

In theory, methane pyrolysis, where you subject pure methane gas to such a high temperature (1065°C) that it splits into H2 and solid carbon, is a carbon-neutral process (also illustrating the silent “dioxide” in environmental policy use of the word “carbon”). In practice, whether it is or not really depends on where you’re getting the methane: emissions from decomposition (e.g., landfill gas, bioreactors) are good, but drilling it out of the ground is not.

Re: The thing people forget is...

"April 2002". Do better.

Re: Punish criminals not manufacturers.

It’s a tool, but it’s clearly one without protections against misuse. It's a matter of personal safety, but it’s also a basic personal right: if the cops need a court warrant to track my movements, why are Apple AirTag purchasers so special that they do not? By default, the system needed to indicate to people that an unknown tag was sticking with them. When launched, It did not have this feature, and so people were able to use AirTags to track others without consent, and that's why Apple is being sued.

Apple did remedy the problem later once customers raised safety concerns, but I cannot believe that this use-case didn’t come up during product development, especially as the product was later advertised as being useful to locate your kids. Back when the original trackers like Tile first appeared, I remember discussing it with a friend, and within five minutes she offered the excellent question “but what’s to stop a guy slipping one into my bag in the nightclub and using it to follow me home?” It’s amazing that Apple could get all the way to release on a product without including a feature to inform people that they were being tracked.

Re: No doubt

“Karat” for metals is a unit of purity. 1 K = 1/24th part. 24K gold is almost pure (it must be 99.9% pure to be rated 24K ).

“Carat” is a unit of mass 1 ct = 0.2 gramme.

British English (like wot I speak) used to use the spelling “carat” for both units (relying on people to know that 18 carat diamonds are not a likely thing to see in the Argos catalogue), but the abbreviation “K” for gold is now commonplace on this side of the water too.

Anyway, to attempt to answer your question using the internet and sums... Published specs say the 18K Gold Apple Watch weighs 69 g (the rose version is 1 g lighter, but let’s ignore that). The same size watch in steel weighed 30 g. For easy sums, let’s assume that the steel casing weighed 11g, which means the 18K model had maybe 40g of 18K gold in it (30g-11g = 29g excluding case, 69-29 = 40g excluding case).

18K gold costs around €40 per gramme, so if that watch has 40 g of gold in its case, then it’s worth €1600. Or, €250 at your local Cash-for-Gold shop..

As a return on a $17,000 investment in a timepiece it’s not exactly a Patek, is it?

Re: web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

Well, it’s kind of a “pick your favourite venereal disease” proposition, isn’t it?

Apropos of nothing particular, isn’t it odd how people whose opinions lean heavily libertarian tend to have a shaky grasp the concept of individual freedom?

Re: "Musk’s changes at X are aimed at making money"

Also not an accountant, but yes, it’s on the path, but not very far down it. Debts exceeding assets would be Technical Insolvency; that’s not a bad thing if the business has enough income to allow those debts to be serviced, which may be why Musk is now so keen on raising revenue.

Elmo’s purchase of Twitter was a leveraged buyout financed by several banks: you take out huge loans, use them to buy the company, then make the company buy the loans from you. (UK football fans will recognise this pattern). This often creates a company that is technically insolvent, but if there’s an income stream there it doesn’t matter, as the company is able to service the debt from that income, although that comes at the expense of investing it in its own operations and services... this is why companies acquired by leveraged buyout often end up as such shitshows afterwards.

But once you can no longer pay your creditors, you lose the “technical” and become actually insolvent. Next steps downward from insolvency are either an examinership (“Chapter 11” in the US) where the court appoints someone to help you get your shit together in exchange for not allowing your creditors to sue for bankruptcy; or a bankruptcy order. Bankruptcy is basically an insolvency that has been legally formalised, accompanied by orders for the liquidation or transfer of assets and part-payment of creditors.

... so there’s your summary from someone who failed Commerce in school, but I’ve had to learn a bit about business since (thankfully I’ve no first-hand experience of bankruptcy).

Re: It's not whether the App Store is good or bad...

Not really the same thing... The Chromium libraries got to their position of dominance by being pretty good, and by being easy to adapt. Nobody forced Chromium onto browser-devs - they used it by choice. If Mozilla gets better again, people can ship browsers based on that instead, and none of the desktop OS vendors will bitch about it. (And most browsers are forks of Chromium, so can change anything they want to)

The situation Apple gives you on iOS is different. There, Apple’s stack is dominant not because it’s better overall, but because you are simply not allowed to use anything else.

If you increase supply of any currency, the currency as a whole becomes less valuable (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution for a textbook example that pre-dates fiat currencies). This is just as true of a finite-resource currency like BTC where that resource limit has not yet been reached, as it is of a fiat currency like the 1920s Reichsmark or the gold-backed Spanish Escudo.

This explains why the hashrate has not changed. Making it easier to produce BTC at a time when the buying power of 1 BTC is very low means that you further erode that buying power, because, unlike previously, there are no inward flows of value into BTC at present to prop up its value. It was those inward flows, from investors and speculators, that caused the price of BTC to rise faster than the currency-supply via mining could keep up. Incidentally, it is at this phase in a boom that a true currency would increase its supply, to rein in the value before it overheats or sets up a crash; but when you subject it to the duck test, BTC isn’t really a currency: it neither walks nor quacks like money - it’s more like a stock: worth whatever number of dollars the last person has paid for one.

Mining speculators who misread that short-term trend as being the dawn of a super-valuable BTC invested large sums of money (crucially, not BTC-denominated - shovel-makers are no fools) into mining hardware. Now that they’re carrying that sunk cost the only options they can see are to abandon ship and crystallise their losses or double-down and hope for a recovery on the basis that previous collapses were followed by rises. This is called the Gambler’s Fallacy for a very good reason.

Re: Smoke and mirrors

You’re assuming that TSMC’s roadmap is AMD’s roadmap. Looking at how N5 went, AMD isn’t going to N3 any time soon - leaving aside that Apple pre-booked a whole year of production, AMD tends to wait until the process has a mature high-performance version and they can get it at a good price (i.e. high yield). On that pattern, expect Apple and the other mobile SoC vendors to gobble up the N3 capacity for the next two years, and AMD to move over to it only when TSMC intros N2 to keep the mobile makers happy in 2025.

Yes, 2025. N2 is not coming until 2025. TSMC has been warning customers and the industry at large that the days of a new node every 18 months are over, but the message is taking a while to sink in. It recently announced an extension of its existing processes to 2.5 years, and the delivery date for N2 is now set by TSMC as late 2025. That’s still a good schedule, but Intel’s competing 20A can now overtake it, having been pulled back in by Intel by about six months to mid-2024 (it had slipped out to 2025 from an original early-2024 timeline). The fact that Intel has publicly brought the date for 20A forward again suggests that they have very high confidence in bringing this process to market.

Intel had an almighty clusterfuck on getting “7nm” (now “Intel 4”) up and running, but from what I’ve heard about it, the issues were organisational and financial rather than a lack of technical ability, and the delay has created a backlog of technologies that were blocked by an inability to fabricate them at scale. That fabrication blockage is now clearing, and clearing quicky, so it’s very likely that Intel will meet its roadmap targets - at least up to 18A, after which we’re into another step-change of technology and the game resets again.

Re: Jira is the single source of suckage

Your use of the present tense worries me. I had hoped the scourge of Rational had been wiped out by now.

Re: This is bonkers

If the science is “settled”, why do we need so many climate scientists? Because it’s not settled. Only denialist morons say that positions are definite and unchangeable, because they wish to keep the status-quo (which isn’t that static if you just look back a few decades; but I suppose history also wrong). Nothing is ever settled in science - that is the point. For global warming, the phenomenon is known, the best-fit explanation is human CO2 production, but the system by which these effects occur is complex and finding the best bang-for-buck from reductions is something that’s worth discovering. This isn’t unique to climate research: we know how gravity works well enough to aim spacecraft at rocks hundreds of millions of miles away, yet we’re still researching it. And if you think there’s big money in climate research, you have no idea of the actual figures: $500M annually out of a total global estimated spend on academic R&D of $1,920,000 million (that total is a low estimate).

And to correct your misunderstandings: a rise of 3.0ºC (current trend-line) is the failure case, 2.0ºC was the agreed minimum limit that would avert major damage; 1.5ºC was the desired target, including a margin of safety. None of these numbers has changed. Do you have this much difficulty understanding spec-sheets too?

I asked who benefits, and you gave me a hazy maybe-group of people who lack any kind of cohesion between them. Scientists? You don’t know any scientists (as was already clear from your postings)

you can’t get those fuckers to agree on anything, and you expect them all to band together into a cabal? NGOs? You have a warped idea of how much cash and influence these organisations have... nobody in Greenpeace is able to send judges on private cruises, that’s for sure. As for the people building wind-farms and solar arrays, I wonder why you have such an irrational hatred of engineering companies building wind-farms: they’re the same engineering groups who build airports, highways, railways, and power stations... this is an opportunity for them, but it replaces other work. Incidentally, you cannot build an efficient wind turbine without modern aeronautic theory, composite materials, magnetics and electronic controls, but go ahead and put another one of your dreary quote-marks around it and call it pre-industrial if you want to demonstrate a lack of knowledge. (Why was it NASA that was tasked with developing wind generation systems by the US Government in the early 1970s?)

The oil companies as a group, are the losers, and the reason they won’t benefit from “advanced CO2 capture” is the same way I won’t benefit from selling perpetual motion machines online.. That’s what this article was pointing out.

The other dude who says the Chinese are ignoring climate change has been swallowing too much American propaganda - the Chinese are well aware of climate problems, as most of their population lives close to sea level. But despite a nasty coal habit, they’re pulling their energy generation and transportation away from fossil-fuel at a faster rate than the west - even if they’re run on coal-electricity all those rail lines and electric buses are lower CO2 transportation per passenger trip than gasoline or diesel passenger cars. It’s been clear for a while now that, China, as an industrial latecomer, is aiming to skip the remainder of the petroleum age and instead secure an unassailable position as a technology leader in the post-oil economy (solar panels, wind turbines, energy storage, electrical vehicles). Meanwhile, half of the US’s politicians are happy to hand that future to the Chinese, because their buddies in the oil business buy them boat-trips, hookers and blow...

Re: Titanium frame

55~60% is actually a pretty good yield for a process at this very early stage of production. But, processes don’t have heat problems, they have density limits- if the designer tries to pack high-power sections of the IC too close together, then you get heat problems. Maybe TSMC fell short of their promised density, or maybe Apple has been too ambitious, overspent the increased capability of this process-shrink and then needed to live on the ragged edge just to fit everything in.

My stab in the dark is that Apple’s new GPU cores are at fault - the reported heat issues all have video-heavy tasks as a common factor. That could be software (drivers pushing the GPU beyond its specified safe envelope) or it could be hardware (hardware not living up to the agreed thermal parameters), but really the only way to fix it is software throttling. If it is hardware, it must be pretty dispiriting for the SW Eng teams to once again be publicly blamed for a problem that isn’t of their making; but as consolation to them, I don’t think the general public really believes that this is due to a software problem.

I know you’re American, and so have been told “freedom is enshrined in the Constitution” since you were in grade-school, but the document has very little to say on the subject, and the 9th Amendment even goes as far to say that the Constitution does not enumerate the rights of citizens.

On the other hand, the word “shall” appears throughout the text, and it has exactly the same meaning as was later codified in that other great American legal text of 210 years later, RFC-2119. Basically, the constitution defines a contract: you enjoy freedom but promise to take on the responsibilities of citizenship when required.

Only one freedom is explicitly named: the freedom to speak against the government without fear of reprisal - that is, of course, the 1st Amendment. (What it does not give is “freedom to mouth off to other citizens without having to live with the consequences”). The only other appearances of the word “free” in the entire text of the US Constitution are in Article 1, to ensure slaves don’t contribute to population counts for taxation purposes; and, later, in the 2nd Amendment, to describe the USA as a “free State”. The irony of that juxtaposition is left to readers to ponder.

But don’t think I’m pissing on your flag here - the US Constitution is one of the great achievements of human civilisation, a huge leap forward in the rights of the ordinary citizenry, and is—rightly—a model for independent states everywhere on Earth since. My only small complaint is actually the same as the one you stated: Americans assume that whatever argument they want to make is supported by the text, when that text is coming up to being a quarter of a millennium old. The practice of amendments kept the document up to date, but there seems to be no political will to do this anymore - the last amendment to the Constitution was in 1971, and you are now living in the longest period without amendment in the USA’s history.. given that, I suppose it’s just as well nothing has changed significantly in the world since 1971, isn’t it?

If you actually cared about performance, you would have bought the cheaper iPhone 15 Pro - it’s faster than the one you got. It appears that the Max may be thermally throttled versus its smaller sibling.

There seems to be due to a thermal problem in general with the A17 Pro phones, and I think the blame for that is in Cupertino, not Taiwan. Apple may be trying to squeeze too much onto the chip. The rule about density versus performance holds true at every feature size, and the A17 Pro is a very dense design, even at a “3 nm” process. The root cause seems to be the desire to squeeze in

more GPU cores, given that users are reporting the device getting extremely hot whenever it does anything graphics-intensive.

Re: Nuclear is the best option if you look at the facts

“Nuclear” what, though?

Fusion? Definitely a hope for the future, but as of today, there’s exactly one fusion reactor on the planet that exceeds its energy input, and it only exists in a lab.

Fission of Thorium isotopes? Maybe, but Thorium reactors don’t exist outside of experimental facilities... and that’s after a research history that’s almost as long as Uranium’s.

So that leaves the existing technologies. Uranium and Plutonium fission. Well, a cursory glance at the half-life values of the most common waste isotopes produced by these provides a sobering rebuttal of the definition of “long” you just used there...

Yes, 10.6 was definitely peak Mac. It was the last OS release to be developed before iPhone overtook Mac as Apple’s biggest product line. (It was also the last release overseen by Bertrand Serlet, who had led OSX from its very beginnings). After 2011, the desktop OS was pretty much ignored for five years, then when it was given some attention, it got filled with lots of misfeatures intended to make your Mac into an iPhone accessory, plus lockdowns on the root user’s privileges.

That said, for me WSL2 is better than a Mac for development. I can’t abide any of the Linux graphical shells, and some of the hardware and software I use isn’t supported on Linux anyway, so my choices were only ever Windows or Mac. Actually, now I think of it, when I used a Mac, I mostly ssh’d into a Linux VM anyway, rather than use the native user-space (while I do believe that BSD is a better-written OS than Linux, my customers have only ever paid me to develop services that get hosted on Linux...)

Re: It cuts Apple’s costs, so they do it.

The “by value” statistic is skewed by pharmaceutical imports, which have enormous value-to-volume metrics, but yes the point is taken that in general, light and expensive things tend to go by air. The difference is that Apple is in the rare situation of having a product with high value per kilogram that it also sells in huge volumes (230 million last year). For this reason, Apple also uses surface freight for iPhones - sending every phone by air would cost a fortune, especially when manufacturing capacity exceeds demand after the first couple of months on the market.

The product stays on sale for 12-24 months after launch, with reasonably high demand after the first 3 month peak, and is sold into a price-fixed market, so the depreciation argument does not apply either. This allows Apple to send shipments, by ship, leaving China at the same time as the initial air transports, to arrive later to fill in demand. When you’re moving 200+ million units of a product whose pricing is not time-sensitive, the low cost and high capacity of shipping containers is hard to overlook.

That volume means that if Apple had large manufacturing bases in the USA or Europe, rather than China, it wouldn’t need to rely so much on air-freight. China’s advantage for Apple has been that its very low wages and short supply-chain (especially for displays) more than overcome the higher transport costs of finished goods out of the country.

Never forget that Tim Cook’s path to CEO of Apple was via Logistics.

Re: An idea

HTTP is a content delivery system; HTML, on the other hand, is the input format to the very popular document typesetting system we call a web browser.

The performance gap between Intel’s P-Cores and E-Cores isn’t as big as the difference in die-size and power requirements. In Alder Lake, the E-Cores provided about 50~80% of the performance of the P-Cores, depending on workload. On the die, the P-Cores are about 4x the size of the E.

E-Cores are perfectly capable of running any HTTP-borne service at a couple of thousand connections per second, so from a data-centre’s point of view, it’s far more desirable to have 250 of those in a rack than having P-Cores and dividing them using software... after all, there's not much use for the P-Cores’ fancy matrix maths or hyperthreading when all your applications are sitting inside single-threaded runtimes like Node.

In a datacentre, it makes perfect sense to specialise hardware like this. On a desktop, where the one system has to handle all workloads, then mixed-core designs are the way to go.

I use Edge in preference to Chrome because Edge at least controls the CPU usage of Javascript tasks in background tabs, and yes, the constant insinuation from Google that not using Chrome is dangerous gets really old. Edge Chromium is objectively a better browser than Chrome, with the exact same HTML support and protections against malicious sits as Chrome, but Google keeps telling users of Edge that they’re unsafe if they continue using it. If it walks like a FUD and quacks like a FUD...

As for Bing... I’m disappointed: for a little while there, it was actually getting pretty good. Its big advantage over Google was that the SEO dirtbags pretty much ignore Bing’s algorithms when they try to game search rankings, which means that for general queries it tended to produce better results than Google. I gave up on Google when I realised that with the single exception of API documentation searches, most other queries produced a half-page of paid insertions and junk links, with the useful ones at the bottom of the first page.

But, we can always rely on Microsoft to hamstring anything half-way decent that it produces, and so they put that fucking AI bot into it. Now, Bing results are polluted with autogenerated nonsense, so I am once again trying DuckDuckGo and hoping it has improved its indexing...

Re: Where do we go from here...?

... in the USA only. In Europe, Ford (like Tesla) will continue to use CCS2 for charging.

That adoption went both ways: Tesla has been forced to open the Supercharger network to all makes of vehicle, and to change its previous charging-port licence, which was as “open” only in the way a bear-trap is until you step on it.

In exchange, the US car manufacturers will now agree to use that Tesla connector type (called NACS - North American Charging System) for future production, and CCS1 stations will switch to using it too in time. with adaptors being made available to allow CCS1-equipped vehicles to access those and the existing Supercharger stations in the near term.

The benefit? You don’t get pushed into buying a Tesla anymore just because there’s no other charging network where you live. Conversely, if you want a Tesla, but there were few Supercharger locations near you, then great news: the other charging sites near you will soon become compatible with that new Tesla.

This is a good result for customers.

Re: "because if you unplug your car, your house goes dark"

Maybe, but spending £2000 for a 5kWh battery and high power inverter looks expensive when your car came with at least 40 kWh of battery, you’re already paying for it, and like most cars it spends over half its working life parked at your house...

Not “acquire” it: the very nature of FOSS makes that impossible. They did hire its lead developer for nearly two decades, and they put a lot of development work into it in the early 2000s, but that’s all freely available thanks to the licence.

Actually, in that brief near-decade between the creation of MacOS X and iPhone becoming a hit, Apple was one of the better corporate citizens when it came to FOSS. WebKit is another project to which Apple contributed a lot, and for their internally-developed Bonjour/Zeroconf mDNS-based service discovery system they went through the IETF recommendation process (eventually RFC 6762, 6763) rather than keeping it proprietary. The XNU kernel and Darwin user-space are still open source, but now these days Apple keeps the drivers for its own hardware segregated from that..

Times changed once Apple stopped being a computer vendor, and the Jobs instinct to control everything took over.

Dashboard is not the “instrument binnacle”

I didn’t downvote you because Tesla’s manufacturing quality is so shit that there is a remote possibility that the dashboard in your has subsequently become detached and lost, but no, you’re not talking about a dashboard: the dashboard is the horizontal surface running from one side of the cabin to the other that faces the driver. You mean the “instrument binnacle”, which is a housing, mounted on the dashboard, in which displays of important information for the car’s driver are presented. Tesla is too cheap to put a second screen on the dashboard (or, more expensively, to have to design two dashboard mouldings: one for LHD, one for RHD), hence that stupid tablet.

The name, if anyone cares, is carried over from the dash-board of a horse coach - this is the plank of wood that was mounted in front of the driver, and its purpose was to prevent pebbles and other road dirt hitting the driver. (the meaning of “dash” here is “to break or smash”; the same one as in the phrase “to dash one’s hopes”).