The M series chips are optimized at both the assembly language and silicon (hardware) levels for mobile use. X86 is much more generalized.
Readit Newsdabockster commented on Ask HN: Why hasn't x86 caught up with Apple M series? · Posted by u/stephenheron
No, that isn't the problem. The problem is that you are comparing a human in one corner (mortal, fallible, made of meat, imperfect, objectively poor) with a very large conglomerate of corporations on the other side (immortal, disembodied, transnational, legal staff on retainer, very, very wealthy, made of paper, hard to criticize in the same way that you could criticize a person). No corporation is even going to put weird stuff in their mouth on camera or look unkempt. They'll make their arguments, reasonably, legally watertight and accompanied with bags of money through their lobbyists.
No, the problem is that you’re thinking of this like Spock - purely logical. Humans aren’t logical. We absolutely trust/distrust each another based on appearances and mannerisms. This is not limited to RMS.
People are prejudiced, plain and simple.
I set my parents up with a computer and locked it down nice and good. A few months later they called me asking me about this full screen message they couldn't figure out how to make go away that was demanding they call Apple or Google for tech support.
I was able to remote in and close it. Then I noticed the message saying uBlock Origin had been disabled in Chrome (because Google broke ad blocking).
Thanks Google.
I actually filed a complaint with the WA Attorney General over that. My older parents got hit by that exact process. So there’s at least a public record complaint that Google is now actively blocking cybersecurity technology (because that’s what adblocking software ultimately is).
They all works fine because Microsoft allows distros to sign their keys. We are a single bad law or a change of corporate politics away from them not doing that and deleting Linux out of existence on personal computers.
Now, maybe you’ll still be allowed to if you have a special license from the government to purchase approved hardware to run it in a datacenter. Which can be promptly revoked if you were found to be running illegal VPN software or something like that.
You can self-sign keys. Secure Boot has had a mechanism for that already for years (mok on Linux).
Weren't Jolla (Sailfish OS), Canonical (Ubuntu Touch), HP/LG (webOS), Mozilla (Firefox OS), Samsung (Tizen) recognized companies? Yet they failed to break the duopoly. Even Facebook failed with their phone. Who would fight with Andoid/iOS then?
All of those ran really slow compared to Android versions at the time, or their dev tooling sucked. The only one I really enjoyed using was Sailfish, and even they had to implement an APK compatibility layer. So for the average consumer, what’s the benefit to using that over straight Android?
> Maybe it's time for a third large phone OS
It's been that time for years. But it's easier said than done. The closest we've currently got are the various phone-targeted Linux distros out there. But they're not quite ready for serious usage for me; at least not on the Pinephone. Still, that's where to put your time & money if you're serious about wanting a change.
> easier said than done
This is true for both the engineering and business sides. Cyanogen’s failure showed that it ultimately doesn’t matter how good your software product is if your business side of things is poorly run. Same with the Pebble smartwatch - amazing product, terrible back office.
They can, it would likely just increase the cost of cheap devices to end users, as the manufacturer now has to provide additional software support and does not want to lose money.
One could argue that those “cheap” devices are ewaste from the beginning, and customers needing lower cost mobile devices should be buying more expensive ones used or refurbished.
dabockster commented on Ask HN: Are there software engineering areas that are safe from LLMs invasion? · Posted by u/toxinu
From what I’ve seen, LLMs are good at making stuff that has already been made and posted to GitHub a thousand times before. At my job we’re constantly asked to do things that really haven’t been done before, at least not by people sharing source code, so the LLMs suck at most of it.
LLMs make for great tech demos, but when it comes to writing code for production that actually does something new and useful, it hasn’t impressed me at all.
You have to pair program with them. They don't work well at all when fully autonomous.
But they do work for pair programming. Which explains a lot of the tech layoffs we've been seeing.
Pair programming with an agent is so powerful and underrated.
dabockster commented on Ask HN: What "developer holy war" have you flip-flopped on? · Posted by u/meowface
Open vs closed source software
Open vs closed web
Both of the open options are nice on paper, until you realize that they were largely being pushed by big tech. The same big tech that is scraping them hard for AI training, and possibly have been using them silently without respecting licensing agreements for an even longer period of time.
"Open" only works when everyone plays nice and fair. This whole kerfuffle of AI scraping has shown that this isn't happening, and likely hasn't happened for a long time if at all.