> The Pythagoras theorem doesn’t change even if you use an LLM.
Indeed. But it does change if you want an answer on a non-Euclidian surface, e.g. big scale things on the surface of Earth where questions like "what's a square?" don't get the common-sense answer you may expect them to have.
I bring this up because one of my earlier tests of AI models is how well they can deal with this, and it took a few years before I got even one correct answer to my non-Euclidian problem, and even then the model only got it correct by importing a python library into a code interpreter that did this part of the work on behalf of the model.
I don't mind Scheme - love it. But MMIX is one heck of a convoluted, "fantasy-alien" assembly language that I cannot stand. Gave up reading TAOCP because of it. Knuth should have stuck to pseudo-code or plain C.
Not sure if that's sarcasm or not, but when I was in uni (late 90s), it was C++, which was very much a practical real-world language. There was a bit of JavaScript and web stuff, but not much (but Javascript was only 4 years old when I was a senior, so...).
According to Google AI > A vacation (American English) or holiday (British English) is a designated period of time for rest, recreation, or travel, often taken away from home. It involves a break from work or school routines, usually lasting several days or weeks. Vacations are crucial for mental health, reducing stress, and fostering better relationships.
So maybe different meaning for everyone. For me it’s getting away from technology and into nature.
> a break from work... are crucial for mental health
When I'm hacking on my Linux desktop automation scripts on my free time, I can assure you that my good mood is positively contributing to my mental health.
Would be interested to know if automating rewrites makes the disc run hotter which affects the disc lifetime physically as opposed to writing it and then removing it which cools it off (but may cause physical wear and tear from handling it). Does heat play a role in degradation or whether it’s the opposite and helps it in some way.
And the ‘features’ also involve lot of performance updates that can leverage something like newer metal. Given that a large chunk of the user base uses an iPhone from 1-2 years ago it simply makes sense to use this and abandon old SDK.
This makes me wonder though how Apple seems to deal with this for their core apps.
Montreal and Paris means the europeans and French can move in and out when it comes to hiring. I really like how the world has interest in EU, Canada and Australia now that the west has become unstable for immigration.
Europeans have free healthcare and retirement. They consider putting their money with long term benefits not just become CEO on Tuesday and declare bankruptcy on Wednesday.
Retirement is the worst.
You are basically forced to pay into a unsustainable system ( at least in Germany ).
It already has to be subsidized by taxes .
Exactly. State retirement in Europes is not free nor great. We pay extra in taxes for it and it's only great for the present day retirees, not for those paying into the system right now who will retire into the future. It's the same as US social security, it's not some extra perk that Europeans have over Americans.
Top tier scientists aren't gonna be swayed by European state retirement systems.
It is an universal system but definitely not free .
In Germany you pay on average 17.5% of your salary for healthcare insurance and 18.6% for retirement .
However contribution caps exists . 70k for healthcare and 100k for retirement .
Hopefully Tim’s exit soon will bring some fresh perspective at Apple where designers and engineers are given a driving seat and not the shareholders.
Apple can do a 180 here and completely take over windows market share. They just need to stop making useless changes and stop with planned obsolescence when people literally are looking to switch.
Forget people, id like to see Apple themselves optimise the macOS experience for 8gb Ram. The M1 Air base should ideally be useful until the MacBook Neo loses macOS updates. So 6+6 years at least. But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I recently erased my M1 Air 8gb Mac on Tahoe and use it for basic stuff like browsing music podcasts video conferencing etc. while I moved work development to linux. Runs really great for it. Now add things like Xcode/Vscodium, iTerm, preview, slack and you are going to see it become hot and in general slow down. CPU usage easily goes beyond 50% now.
When I got the Mac a few weeks after launch, I was doing these exact same things daily. In fact I used Xcode and Emulator back in 2021 frequently along with many apps. It had no slowdowns. Maybe things would occasionally stutter if swap/cache was used and I did too many things. I also relied on rosetta 2 apps at times so things were not exactly optimised either. The overall experience was 'Apple Silicon is FAST'
If anyone with Monterey can test their M1 Air 8gb with Tahoe they will definitely notice a difference in doing the same tasks.
I am not arguing the M1 Air is slow. I am arguing that the Macs now run slower for the same things than they used to with the prominent change being macOS. The headroom for apple silicon was really high. How apple managed to use it up is something that feels very shady given that macOS doesn't do much more than it did 5 years ago that would warrants the usage.
note: disabling Apple Intelligence doesn't make much of a difference.
I agree. 8GB is enough for simple development tasks. You’ll start to suffer if you have too many documents open in Chrome or start running middleware and other services on your laptop. For that I recommend at least 16GB and, in the case of Apple’s inexpandable memory, ideally more. Remember the laptop will keep working for a decade.
Can't imagine what one needs more than 16GB for unless it's local LLMs. I regularly do front end dev while I'm editing 10-bit 4K60 footage in Da Vinci Resolve, runs smooth as butter.
Tons of programming tasks requires at least 32gb to be somewhat comfortable, think of having running databases, running tests in background, running simultaneously multiple docker images, virtual machines, have one or more code projects open in an IDE with LSP (whole code database needs to be in cache), one browser with 20 tabs, and maybe one or more heavy electron apps (Teams/Spotify). You really quickly reach 32gb when doing real development.
My work 64GB M1 Max Macbook Pro is consistently out of memory. (To be fair my $LARGE_ENTERPRISE_EMPLOYER reserves about half of it to very bad Big Brother daemons and applications I have no control over)
I have a 128GB M3 Max from my employer. Due to some IT oversight, I was able to use it for a few months without the corporate "security" crapware. Didn't even ever noticed this machine had a fan before the "security theatre" corporate rootkits were installed.
While I agree with you, I think it's important to note that MacOS does swap to disk quite often, even on 16 GB. While it's rarely noticeable due to how fast the internal SSDs are, it still leads to some degree of SSD wear (and disk i/o usage) that could be avoided with additional RAM. I can't imagine this leading to drive failure considering how long the lifespans of SSDs are though.
Pretending your laptop is a screaming fast workstation and compiling C++ code on all cores can use quite a bit of RAM.
(I have a MacBook Pro that is only around 10% slower at this than an AMD workstation. The workstation has considerably higher TDP. I’m quite impressed.)
For mobile app development, running all my local docker containers for backend services, plus 2-3 iOS/iPad simulators and 1-2 Android emulators quickly pushes the memory limits.
I have an M2 Macbook Air with 8GB and it struggles even without the light development part, and latest macOS made it all much worse. To be honest I am impressed how fast the experience degraded as there was a lot of headroom.
I've been using 8 GB on my M3 for years as a security engineer, doing pretty heavy development. I usually have like 15 Brave tabs open, several terminals, a game (PokeMMO) and a small DeepSeek model, lots of Claude Code instances running, Obsidian, and LadyBird, among other small things. I honestly have no idea what people do with all that RAM.
To provide my anecdata, my work MBP is 48GB and with nothing more than our dev environment, VSCode, Slack and Chrome it's at 34GB memory used. Modern NVMe drives make swapping to disk bearable (and it's the same on MacOS and Linux), but it is still swap and there will always be a performance penalty.
Sure I could survive with a 32GB machine but over the many years of life a laptop has, the extra cost seems negligible, and I would prefer to have slightly more RAM than I need rather than slightly less. With how bloated the web is becoming I wouldn't recommend an 8GB machine in 2026 to someone who intends to use it for the next decade. (I know people still using 2013 Macbooks with 16GB that are still fine for the kind of usage the Neo is aimed at.)
Oh yeah well I run 500 VMs of Windows Vista each with an instance of DeepSeek botting Neopets stocks for me. I make more neopoints in a day than you'll make in USD in a year.
/s but I suppose I've developed a work flow that adapts to the RAM I've always had. I've seen people with zillions of tabs and I do wonder if it's really that much more productive than the occasional HTTP request to reopen one. I find leaving things open as a form of bookmarking clouds my mental space too much.
I do intend to have beastly RAM on my new desktop so who knows, maybe I'll be like you in a year.
Yes, I had a base 2015 MBP with 8GB RAM until recently. It was fine for light local dev: Node or Python backends + Postgres + a small Linux VM. And personal stuff like email/browsing.
Wasn't ok for heavy IDEs like Android Studio, but I barely used those. My actual use case was light.
lmao the koolaid in this thread is mind boggling. most of the development on mac unless everybody is doing iOS and Swift development with 3rd party web services / APIs, is going to involve brew/virtualization. currently running 29GB out of 32GB on M4 for work. This is just absolute unrealistic claim.
I also survey and manage development env for a 250 engineer tech org. 8GB is not going to fly
Are you saying you and all your devs are doing light development work? That was the claim you're attempting to refute.
Light development for me is some node programs and a php server. If light development suddenly means 3 docker containers our world sucks IMO. People shouldn't need multiple operating systems to develop, that feels crazy wasteful.
But is the system choking? Or, are you certain it would choke with half the RAM you have? It's a well know thing that OS will book majority of the RAM you have and that's actually not a problem at all.
That's right. It's not the native Apple apps that are the problem. Safari, iWork, Logic, even Final Cut run perfectly fine in 8Gb if you adjust your expectations (if you want to process 8K video you probably need more).
It's third-party apps like Chrome or Teams that eat gigabytes.
Let’s see… if the same problem happens under Safari, then it’s Microsoft fault. If the problem goes away when Safari runs the Azure admin portal, it’s a Google issue.
Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors. We keep giving them server grade hardware and expect them to empathise with the muggles that run their software on potatoes.
> Developers should have laptops with 1366x768 screens, 4GB if RAM, and dual-core Intel Atom processors.
I used to support federal laws towards this end. However, now I think the advocacy needs to be updated for the era of LLMs, as developers can just let the testing chug away and come back later. (Note: I did not actually support such laws.)
For governments and services governments delegate to third parties, being usable by low-end machines is extremely important.
I always have to point out government services should not be designed to be efficient, but fair and universal. After they are fair and universal, THEN you can make them efficient, just as long as you don’t break fairness and universality.
I used a MacBook Air with M2 and 8GB for a year, it was fine. Worked on Xcode/Pixelmator/GarageBand and a 100 Safari tabs all at once. Even ran WoW and League of Legends etc just fine, hell even Baldur's Gate 3 if I'm not misremembering.
and before that, I used one of the ancient Intel Core M fanless MacBooks (probably the first one) that was fine too, I mean within expectations; you knew what you were buying.
I still have the M1 Macbook Air 8 GB and it works great as a travel laptop. It feels fast. Obviously it has its limits. I am not trying to do heavy workloads on it. But it is an incredible device. The Macbook Neo should essentially be the same speed in multicore performance and slightly faster in single core.
Yeah I've been running Baldur's Gate 3 on my M2 MBA with 8 GB of RAM. It's decent, I get 30-40 FPS which is perfectly fine for a turn-based game.
Performance is significantly better with the laptop open vs clamshell, so it's clear that thermal throttling is the main bottleneck. I've been considering doing the thermal pad mod to eke out some extra performance, but I'll probably just save up for a Pro.
I'm on a MacBook Pro (M2 Pro) with only 16GB RAM. I mean, I'm running 4 different JetBrains IDE's, 3-4 docker containers, Chrome, Mail, terminals, and a bunch of other stuff and it's never laggy (almost feels like magic coming from Intel to Apple Silicon).
16gb is plenty, an intern we had ran a M1 Mac with 8gb of memory and running a browser concurrently with Figma made everything slow down to the point where he went around asking for advice.
Could it be all the corporate-tracking software ? I used to have a M1 Pro macbook with 16gb ram when it's first released, and somehow it still feel slow when compiling.
Then try again on my friend personal M1 MB, it was night and day.
On Tahoe, I upgraded only recently (maybe they made fixes after the initial complaints). Haven't noticed any regressions except for the weird corners but those I'm already used to. Super fast.
> But we all know M1 Air will lose updates in a couple of years maybe because Apple doesn't want us to keep using old hardware even if it's similar to new hardware.
I'm not sure if that will happen in just a couple of years because brand new M1A were being sold just a few weeks ago at places like walmart.
I dream of a macOS installer in which you can decide the level of bloat, instead of then fighting against apple’s super user in your device (SIP) using scripts from generous Internet friends.
“Warning: installing the service ‘Siri’ will add up to an extra GB of memory usage”
yes pretty much this. make useless features use up resources and make basic scrolling slow.
the Liquid Glass for example probably is not so great when it comes to resources. Probably works better with latest metal and hardware blocks on the GPU in M5 as opposed to using GPU cores and unified memory on 8gb M1 making latest macOS work not so great. I have the M1 8gb air and it is really slow on Tahoe. It was snappy just a couple of years ago on a fresh install.
For my work device I've disabled Liquid glass completely. The accessibility options to reduce transparency and increase contrast improve the readability of the system a lot.
Booting a 15 year old Mac a while ago had me surprised how clean the interface actually is. The Dock/Desktop look a lot better in the old versions, and the age is mostly showing in apps like Finder which do look a bit dated.
I really hope someone at Apple is going to make the call to drastically reduce the Liquid Glass design and start complying with their own UX guidelines again.
I downgraded today for the first time in my life. Sequoia is crazy fast in my MacBook Air m2 16gb
Not upgrading any of my Macs ever again. I was a fanboy looking for every new update like a present, for 13 years, not anymore. It took one Tahoe burn all that trust. Never upgrading major OS versions on hardware from Apple again.
Same. Been rocking Sonoma on my M1 Mac for years at this point and it’s been great. There’s been almost zero upsides to upgrading MacOS versions lately.
I think this could go equally for Windows as well, and many other software (not just OS). I purpose refrained from Tahoe because I didn't like the design but I wanted to know what the consensus was on it before upgrading. Apparently it's bad!
Win 11 is bad compared to Win 10 as well. I'm fairly new to Linux so I can't really form an opinion there.
> I think this could go equally for Windows as well
Absolutely. Why are all the buttons centred on the task bar for Windows 11? Violation of so many design rules. Literally the worst part of MacOS they took there which contradicted other reasons for the design. Throwing the mouse to the corner for a start button no longer works. I could go on.
> I'm fairly new to Linux so I can't really form an opinion there.
Gnome is great if you want something that gets out of your way. Some folks lament that its not as UI feature rich as KDE, but for me thats a bonus. The minimal UI combined with concentrating on UI features such as better mixed monitor scaling, etc. Love it.
KDE is extremely flexible, and featureful. You don't like the Windows default look and feel, make it a dock. Make it similar to Windows 8. Go wild. Not my thing these days but I can completely understand the draw to not be beholden to other peoples design choices if they don't fit your style.
I haven't used XFCE for a long time, as it didn't keep up with my high resolution monitors. But it was fast and flexible, and I hear that they are addressing this stuff now.
i3 was great. I drifted away during the great Wayland migration when i had to upgrade my laptop, found a bunch of neat updates to Gnome for my hardware, and just haven't found the time to return.
But the main point is that you are not forced into any one person/corporate point of view.
> Some folks lament that its not as UI feature rich as KDE, but for me thats a bonus.
Yep, I know it is opinionated and I really like a lot of their decisions. Most of what he says in that is "it doesn't clone Windows therefore it breaks my muscle memory". I don't care about your opinions and it isn't the same as mine.
