Honestly, I suspect it makes very little difference in practice which one you’re using if you’re going to communicate with people outside Proton. If I use Gmail, and you send me an email from your Proton account, guess what happens.

I haven’t actually tried that. I got it running on my M1, but only used it with the laptop screen.

My view is that all corps are slimy, some are just more blatant about it than others. I do agree that Apple stuff tends to be overpriced, and I’ve love to see somebody else offer a similar architecture using RISCV that would target Linux. I’m kind of hoping some Chinese vendors will start doing that at some point. What Apple did with their architecture is pretty clever, but it’s not magic and now that we know how and why it works, seems like it would make sense for somebody else to do something similar.

The big roadblock in the west is the fact that Windows has a huge market share, and the market for Linux users is just too small for a hardware vendor to target without having Windows support. But in China, there’s an active push to get off US tech stack, and that means Windows doesn’t have the same relevance there.

Exactly, and there is already some work happening in that regard. This project is focusing on making a high performance RISCV architecture https://github.com/OpenXiangShan/XiangShan

I really hope the project doesn’t die, they had some people leave recently and there was some drama over that. Apple hardware is really nice, and with Linux it would be strictly superior to macos which is just bloated garbage at this point. I’m also hoping we’ll see somebody else make a similar architecture to M series using ARM or RISCV targeting Linux. Maybe we’ll see some Chinese vendors go RISCV route in the future.

Whether something is economically viable or not depends on how much time you spend developing the technology. Many materials in common usage today were exotic when they were first invented. Then economies of scale kicked in and prices went down. The US simply failed to invest into this technology. That’s the reality. China also has a long track record doing state level investment without seeking any immediate profit. The high speed rail system is a good example. Western media kept talking about how it wasn’t profitable, and that didn’t stop China from continuing to build it. There’s been no end of articles like this. And all of them completely missed the point that HSR is a long term investment that drives economic growth across the country.

Similarly, building thorium reactors is not a short term profit target. It’s a long term investment into energy security. Molten salt reactors can be built anywhere because they don’t require a large body of water nearby for cooling. They are extremely safe, there is no problem with long term waste, and China has abundant thorium reserves. That makes solving the materials problem an attractive proposition.

In terms of functionality, it works well. The main limitation is software availability. If you rely on anything that can’t be built for the architecture then it’s not going to be a good daily driver.

The reason the US had no interest in making thorium reactors work was because thorium has no military application. China has already shown they can make plenty of stuff work that the US was unable to make work. A country with 1.4 billion people, an excellent education system, and strong state funding for STEM can do a lot of things that the burger reich can’t figure out.

It’s not an apples to apples comparison because the architecture is so different. Notice his observation in the article:

I am very impressed with how smooth and problem-free Asahi Linux is. It is incredibly responsive and feels even smoother than my Arch Linux desktop with a 16 core AMD Ryzen 7945HX and 64GB of RAM.

M1 architecture has a huge advantage being a SoC and having shared memory between the CPU and the GPU which avoids the need for a bus. I’m still using M1 macbook with 8gb of RAM that I got to keep at one of my jobs a few years ago, and it’s incredibly snappy. I’ve tried x86 laptops with way better specs on paper, and they don’t come anywhere close in practice.

It’s amazing how people just can’t learn the lesson that the problem isn’t that a particular oligarch owns a public forum, but that public forums are privately owned in the first place.

China’s been operating a reactor for a while now, and making it economically viable is only a matter of time. At the end of the day it’s a materials problem.

https://www.powermag.com/chinas-molten-salt-reactor-reaches-thorium-uranium-conversion-milestone/

I imagine that SMR is much more compact than equivalent solar panels you’d need to ferry to the moon to get the same amount of energy. Meanwhile, there are designs like molten salt reactors which use liquid fuel and completely bypass the meltdown issue. Broadly for other Gen IV designs and newer LWR designs, passive safety systems and inherent reactivity feedbacks are the main drivers of making meltdowns basically impossible along with newer fuel types like TRISO being meltdown proof.

A metal fueled SFR for example has an extremely strong negative temperature coefficient for reactivity, essentially if the coolant temperature goes up, the nature of the fuel causes the reactor power to naturally drop without any operator intervention. This concept was proven by EBR-II back in the day.

Designs like that also have passive air cooling systems that rely only on natural circulation. No fans/blowers, valves, or other active components are needed to drive airflow. The temperature difference between the air inlet and outlet will naturally drive air through the system, again without any input from operators.

my bet’s on denial

British state propaganda upset that civilians are evacuated from the war zone. Shouldn’t be a surprise I suppose given that the UK is fully backing a genocide right now.

I agree there are interesting points, hence why I decided to post it, but also some nonsense as you note.

No, because Lemmy is a public forum and it’s fundamentally not a platform for privacy. The author is mostly complaining about the nature of how any public forums work in general there. I also don’t see a fundamental problem with censorship, the reality is that it’s a necessary tool for ensuring any community can function. Every community and every society has some level of censorship because some ideas are accepted to be harmful. For example, censorship of people promoting fascism, paedophilia, racism, sexism and so on is a good and necessary thing. People who advocate for libertarian free market of ideas are not serious.

The rant about voting is also nonsensical since it is configurable by server admins. For example, hexbear disables downvotes, but clearly users actually prefer having a voting system and that’s why servers end up enabling it in one form or another.

I’m betting within a decade if it actually works

exactly

I’m sure something will evolve to eat those too. :)

yup email is just fundamentally not the right tool for this