This concept was very popular back in the days when computers used to boot from HDD, but now it doesn't make much sense. I wouldn't notice If my laptop boots for 5 sec instead of 10.
At the time of their introduction Optane drives were noticeably faster to boot your machine than even the fastest available Flash SSD. So in a workstation with multiple hard drives installed anyway, buying one to boot off of made decent sense.
If they had been cheaper, I think they'd have been really, really popular.
By my reckoning, there was zero overlap between the period of time where a reasonable computer configurer would pick a hard drive to boot from and the period of time where Optane was available.
And even for the general concept of a cache drive, I don't think I've ever seen it do well in the mainstream. Just a few niche roles, and some hybrid drives that sucked because they had small flash chips and only used them as a read cache, not a write cache.
I setup a self hosted runner and then use that in my CI workflows. Then I disabled it from sleeping so it can clamshell forever and now it sits here in my living room silently workin' https://imgur.com/a/EaBICdo
This is a very lame excuse. You can do 100 different things without compromising your shoulder. Try cardio. Or just wight lifting with very light weights. Or group classes.
Lame? I see what you did there. Either way, I have had a problem for two decades thanks to bad weight lifting. It's still bugging me right now as a matter of fact. Moral is that I should have worked with a decent trainer.
This article periodically surfaces in some shape or form. There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one. This is a lie, and the sooner we stop telling it to the young generation - the better.
Human societies have always rewarded and valued those who built hierarchies more than those who built things. If you focus on building a thing - you will forever be a cog in someone's big project. There's a reason that management ladder is more competitive.
I think some places pitch the dual ladder a lot morethan they actually support it, but it's still there.
EM vs IC are totally different jobs though. The whole thing where you're a good IC, so you get "promoted" to being an EM is insane. There's some overlap, I guess, every job has pieces of managing other people even if it's not in the job description, but...
Just because EM offers higher positions in the hierarchy (and salaries etc to go with it) doesn't mean that accepting a "promotion" to being an EM is going to make your life better. Personally, I hated being an EM; I don't like the work, and I don't like that when I do a bad job, it directly impacts the careers of my reports.
I don't mind being a cog in someone's big project; but even if I did, I don't see how being an EM avoids it, unless you start your own thing, which I absolutely do not want to do.
I'm pretty sure I did well enough for myself in the IC track. I could have gotten bigger compensation as an EM, I suppose, but diminishing returns wouldn't have justified the additional stress. Obviously, that may depend on individual factors, everyone's path is their own and I got a lucky draw.
> There's this idea that there's a "dual ladder", and the IC ladder offers just as much respect and compensation as the management one
It is not a lie. It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.
Companies where the underlying stack is a revenue generator and not a cost center are companies where these kinds of dual tracks exist, but these are only found in the major tech hubs and are not available if you are remote first.
They also require you to be both technically and socially adept.
>It is true IF you live and work in the Bay Area, Seattle, and TLV - which represent the bulk of tech industry employment.
Is that actually true (the bulk of people in the tech industry are working in "big tech" or startups)?
I don't know if there's any hard data around this, but my understanding has been that people working for these types of companies are maybe a single digit percentage of all tech workers (if that).
People working for those companies are certainly the most vocal online, though, which maybe skews perception.
Sorry, I guess we'll have to agree to disagree. The ladders are simply not comparable, even in the Bay Area. Sure, at the entry point where one transfers from the IC ladder to management compensation can even drop. However, that's the bottom rung - and one typically can't get straight into management as a new grad. The management ladder goes higher.
Best to remember this isn't a ladder but rather a tree. Yes, it goes much higher, but you chances of ever getting there is minimal because it narrows so quickly.
I mean, this is true and also not true. The management ladder does start higher and arguably does end higher with C-suite titles (though even that may not be the case, e.g. Google now has a Chief Technologist or two, who are SVP/C-suite level). But at the major tech companies under discussion in the parent, yeah the levels do map basically 1:1.
You can maybe argue that it's easier to advance on the management side, and I think that was certainly true pre-2023, but since then there's been a clear tightening of easy empire building advancement, and at least in my neck of the woods, I've seen IC-track advancement has been faster from staff to principal than from manager to director.
I like the aluminum body a lot. I'm not particularly clumsy, but each of my macbooks ends up with some fall damage at some point over the 5+ years that I have it.
When I used to be assigned a plastic Dell work laptop, I dropped one onto the carpeted floor of my office because I thought it was going into my padded sleeve of backpack and that cracked the case, and broke the screen. I've accidentally yoinked my MBA (last intel one they made) off my desk, and while it dented the body of it, nothing broke. That is now my drum computer, and it gets regularly pelted with drumsticks when my grip tires.
My father recently dropped my macbook air from the car essentially on concrete bricks.
It has just gotten a single dent for something less than 0.5 cm and its on the side (although this damage was done when the laptop was closed so some damage is just above the laptop's display aluminium shell.
To be honest, its barely visible and everything is working and there was no damage on display or anything else for what its worth.
I usually don't like apple but damn the macbook air is tiny and can take some damage.
Although I am still just a little sad about the damage because the laptop was perfect condition beforehand now that we talked about it but its incredibly better than any other laptop atleast with that thing in mind. Gonna use this laptop for a long time (M1 Air)
As someone clumsy, I'm so grateful that my MacBook Air can take a beating. It has one slight dent of about 1mm in the 4 years I've had it and I definitely drop it or knock it off a desk or something a few times a year.
I'll take the extra weight of aluminum (0.3lb, 130g). Yes, someone might say the ThinkPad X1 Carbon is 14", but the 13" MacBook Air actually has a 13.6" screen.
If I were in the market for a PC laptop, I'd definitely take a look at the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, but I'm also not worried about the weight of my MacBook Air. The X1 Carbon Intel ones are on sale right now since Panther Lake will be a huge upgrade coming soon, but even on clearance they aren't cheap. An X1 Carbon with 32GB RAM and 1TB storage (Ultra 7 268V, the cheapest one due to the sale) will cost $1,679 while a similar MacBook Air will cost $1,699 - and the M5 has 48% better single-core performance and 56% better multi-core performance (Geekbench). A 16GB/512GB (Ultra 5 225U) X1 Carbon is $1,538 compared to $1,099 for a MacBook Air - and the M5 has a 74% single and multi core advantage there.
Panther Lake might narrow the performance gap, but early indicators don't seem like that's the case. Even the top of the line Ultra X9 388H sees the M5 with a 36% single-core advantage while the Ultra X9 388H gets 3% faster multi-core. And I'm not sure the higher wattage "H" processors work for something like an X1 Carbon.
The highest non-H Panther Lake processor (Ultra 7 365) sees the M5 get 51% better single-core and 58% better multi-core. Maybe we'll see better, but it looks like Intel isn't closing the gap in 2026.
Does it? In my case, it was my father who dropped my mac but luckily everything was all safe with tis but a scratch. So perhaps that can be taken into factor as well that its more than one variable.
That being said, I am pretty clumsy but I have never dropped any hardware except a dumb phone which I threw out a lot and it was so small and tiny but it never had any problem.
And then one day I dropped it from top just a little bit and let it drop/slide inside my bag (like a cushion) and that day it died. I recently asked someone about it and turns out that its battery got inflated.
The aluminium chassis cannot be used for heat dissipation without risk of harming users. Which is why there is a "macbook air peformance mod" to add thermal-interface-material (instead of thermal insulation) to turn the chassis into a heatsink.
The last generation of Intel Macbooks was so bad... the i9 I was assigned from my job at the time would constantly go in and out of thermal throttling, making the whole experience effectively useless... It was also so locked down, I couldn't apply any mods to be able to underclock/volt the thing to something reasonable.
I really do hope that Linux becomes an option in more workplaces without being too locked down for developers.
I believe we are talking about slightly different things. Yes if they thermally coupled the body to the processor, then a small patch of the body would get very hot, burning the user.
However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!
>However, the fact that the aluminum gets hot during prolonged use means that it is acting as a heat sink and cooling the CPU compared to a body made of plastic. Thermodynamics, it's the law!
Not really. It's picking up "stray heat" that is radiated from the copper heatsink inside and conduction from the air in the fan system. It does not improve cooling the processor in any kind of manner. If it were plastic, the plastic would get warm too. Maybe it'll be a 2 degree difference.
The original Air lineup was thinner in the front and seemed a little lighter. The thicker front on newer airs gives more battery life, but I'm not a fan of it.
The thinness at the front was a bit of a hack though wasn’t it? So Steve Jobs could make it look good in photographs. I’d take the extra battery life any day.
The final version of the “wedge” Air case was an amazing piece of physical design. The lid had a large-radius complex curve that perfectly controlled reflections. The bottom case had a curve that made it look like the machine was hovering above the desktop from almost any angle. Calling that a “hack” is sort of like calling it a “hack” that a Ferrari looks fast even when it’s parked.
The new designs are overtly boringly utilitarian. I would say they intentionally look ugly. I guess this must have been intended as a marketing signal.
And it seems like it’s working since you think the new design delivers better battery life. It doesn’t! The 13-inch M1, M2, M3, M4, and M5 MacBook Airs are all specced for 18 hours of battery life.
I think its a matter of the chonkers feeling like you're getting what you're paying for. "This thing is so expensive! WHY is it so thin?"
Of course the zeitgeist keeps changing and what made sense yesterday might look like madness for those that aren't following things closely. As for myself, I very much prefer "slightly chonkier, but better heat dissipation" (coming from owning an intel mb pro and using it on my lap often).
I have the M1 MBA and M5 MBP. The wedge MBA feels noticeably thinner and the MBP feels kind of chonky in comparison. It's a bigger difference moving them one-handed than the specs would indicate.
I'm in the same boat. I have one of the original M1 MacBook airs, and the thicker front feels like overall a downgrade in hardware. Going up to higher ram amounts might be good for some of my datasets, but it's not needed for any software I run.
So I guess I'll wait for the next cycle and hope they return to the "Air" idea again.
I have tried Julia few times and each time this is what stops me. I don't understand why they decided to make indexes R-like oposed to "all other languages"-like. My brain just stops working when i need to recalculate indexes and each time I'm wrong.
Some people may not realize it, but when it comes to programming languages, ergonomics matter—a lot.
That's just you being unable to let go of your biases? In languages with pointers giving primacy to offsets makes sense. In every other context aligning with natural language and math (first, second, 1..n inclusive) is perfectly logical.
I don’t think that any Julia program I’ve ever written would need to change if Julia adopted 0-based tomorrow. You don’t typically write C-style loops in Julia; you use array functions and operators, and if you need to iterate you write `for i in array ...`.
“ergonomics matter”
Definitely. Ergonomics is the main reason I enjoy Julia. Performance is a bonus.
And 1-based indices are much more natural and ergonomic to everyone that doesn't pretend to be a machine. When I think about n-th element of a vector, its offset is not the first thing I am interested in.
We had this discussion on here recently. It's really puzzling to me. Julia has the most ergonomic array interface I have worked with by far. How did 1 based indexing ever trip you up?
I’ll never get why people hype up Zed. Sublime Text already has all the same perks—and beats Zed at the very things it claims to improve. Sure, it might not have every advanced feature, but for “vibe coders” who don’t need a full IDE and just want to skim or tweak generated code, Sublime Text is the better choice.
Someone already mentioned the hoarderware issue, which is big for me, so I'll give my other concern.
Years ago on Twitter I believe it was lcamtuf that asked "Would you pipe a text file into less?" and Dan Kaminsky (RIP) replied -- "Not now that you asked if I would, no." The obvious implication is that people largely didn't think of simple text parsing utilities as places of concern for security issues, but that is not really in line with reality. I work with crypto and it seriously matters if I got owned in that I can lose amounts of money entrusted to me that I could never hope to recover or repay. I believe it is a basic fiduciary duty to use as much code as possible written in safer languages. Sublime Text is a massive C++ app and I can't look at the code. I am going to preferentially treat the Rust app as better. There's plenty of CVEs in editors. If I could I would replace every binary written in an unsafe language on every machine I ever use.
My editor touches every bit of infrastructure I have. I use it every day to change the behavior of production machines. I have no choice to treat my editor as trusted. So it needs to be trustworthy to the maximum degree possible.
I truly appreciate your perspective. It’s a very sobering reminder of the responsibility that comes with building a tool that handles code and data.
To be honest, this project is currently in a phase of personal hobby, self-improvement, and self-satisfaction. I must admit that it is not yet ready for mission-critical work.
While I certainly haven't included any malicious code, there are real risks: the app could crash and lose data, or underlying libraries might have vulnerabilities that I haven't had the capacity to fully audit yet. As I’m still experimenting with the architecture alone, I’m not ready to open the source code just yet.
However, your feedback makes me realize how important the "trustworthiness" is for a professional tool. If there is a clear demand for this kind of software and many requests for it to be open-sourced, I would definitely love to consider it as the project matures.
Thank you for sharing such a serious and important viewpoint.
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