Sure - but in the real world that mostly only happens when the documentation is an afterthought.

Not sure about jellyfin, but I assume it uses ffmpeg? The M1 is fast enough that ffmpeg can re-encode raw video footage from a high end camera (talking file sizes in the 10s of gigabyte range) an order of magnitude faster than realtime.

That would be about 20W. Apparently it uses 5W while idle — which is low compared to an Intel CPU but actually surprisingly high.

Power consumption on my M1 laptop averages at about 2.5 watts with active use based on the battery size and how long it lasts on a charge and that includes the screen. Apple hasn’t optimised the Mac Mini for energy efficiency (though it is naturally pretty efficient).

TLDR if you really want the most energy efficient Mac, get a secondhand M1 MacBook Air. Or even better, consider an iPhone with Linux in a virtual machine - https://getutm.app/ - though I’m not sure how optimsied ffmpeg will be in that environment… the processor is certainly capable of encoding video quickly, it’s a camera so it has to be able to encode video well.

This. My Mac has 16GB but I use half of it with a Linux virtual machine, since I use my Mac to write Linux (server) software.

I don’t need to do that - I could totally run that software directly on my Mac, but I like having a dev environment where I can just delete it all and start over without affecting my main OS. I could totally work effectively with 8GB. Also I don’t need to give the Linux VM less memory, all my production servers have way less than that. But I don’t need to - because 8GB for the host is more than enough.

Obviously it depends what software you’re running, but editing text, compiling code, and browsing the web… it doesn’t use that much. And the AI code completion system I use needs terabytes of RAM. Hard to believe Apple’s one that runs locally will be anywhere near as good.

Here’s a tip on good documentation: try to write the documentation first. Use it as your planning process, to spec out exactly what you’re going to build. Show the code to people (on GitHub or on a mailing list or on lemmy or whatever), get feedback, change the documentation to clarify any misunderstandings and/or add any good ideas people suggest.

Only after the docs are in a good state, then start writing the code.

And any time you (or someone else) finds the documentation doesn’t match the code you wrote… that should usually be treated as a bug in the code. Don’t change the documentation, change the code to make them line up.

You don’t need metaphors. It’s pretty simple.

The Spotify app should have a button that takes you to their website, where you can sign up for a premium subscription.

It doesn’t have one because Apple would kick Spotify out of the App Store.

Also - all other links to the Spotify website (support, terms of service, privacy policy, etc) take you to pages where the main navigation of the website has been removed so that you can’t find the signup page. Because again, Apple bans that. For the longest time apps have not allowed to have any way for users to find a signup form on a website.

That policy is now illegal in the EU (and a growing list of other countries) and Apple’s attempt at compliance is a new API - only available in Europe - that informs the user that they might be a victim of theft, fraud, etc before they get taken to a website that is deliberately sandboxed… supposedly to prevent theft/fraud/etc but more likely because it makes it really difficult for Spotify to link that signup with an existing free account.

Oh and if Spotify opts to expose users to see that horror show… they’d have to pay tens of millions of dollars per year to Apple. They have so far refused to do so, meaning the new regulations have failed (well, they were failing, until the EU declared Apple’s compliance efforts insufficient).

near ChatGPT4 performance locally, on an iPhone

Last I checked, iPhones don’t have terabytes of RAM. Nothing that runs on a small battery powered device is ever going to be in the ballpark of ChatGPT. At least not in the foreseeable future.

First of all, you’re implying it runs latest Windows - but Windows 11 shipped a few years ago.

Second - not really a fair comparison. 18 years ago the iPhone didn’t even exist. And the oldest model (17 years old) had really weak hardware. 4GB of storage, 128MB of RAM, and the CPU was an order of magnitude slower than current spec CPUs (it was also 32 bit - and 64 bit ARM is a completely new architecture - similar to the failed Itanium).

Even if it was supported, it would be a horrible experience.

Apple was advertising that these devices would be refurbished when they were sending them out to be destroyed

When did Apple claim that? Sure if you send them a one year old phone, they will refurbish it (they will also pay you several hundred dollars to take the device off your hands). But they’ve never refurbished several year old models. Those have always been recycled (destroyed) regardless of what condition they are in.

Um, did they actually do something impressive or is it just a really big gas tank?

I’m struggling to imagine why anyone would even want 1,300 miles of range in a PHEV. Surely it’d be better to have a smaller tank and more space inside the vehicle.

Apple has the target disk mode, but doesn’t the laptop need to be shut down for it to work?

Modern Macs can’t do Target Disk Mode. If you had the right cables (thunderbolt or firewire) it was really fast, just as quick as a high end internal PCIe SSD.

And yes, you did need to reboot - because the other computer had full arbitrary read/write access to the raw sectors on the drive with no safety checks or security. If you did that while the computer was running normally, you’d corrupt the data on the disk as soon as they both tried to do a write operation at the same time — and also TDM needed to be used with caution - the other computer could easily install a rootkit or steal all your saved passwords.

It’s been replaced with “Mac Sharing Mode” which operates while the Mac is running normally, does have all the necessary algorithms in place to avoid corrupting the disk, full security to authenticate each read/write operation and block attempts to mess with system files, and therefore is orders of magnitude slower than TDM.

The big difference is exclusive content. Music has a few exceptions but in general sign up for one service and you can listen to anything.

That forces music services to compete on the overall experience (and price), while video services pretty much exclusively compete based on what content is available and literally none of them offer all of the things a person wants to watch. So nobody will ever be happy with any streaming service.

It was great, in 2017

It hasn’t stopped being great. In fact it’s better than it ever was.

We need better safe guards and checks so that some person can’t just delete France.

The map is updated millions of times per day. There are checks in place, but minor edits don’t get much review especially if it’s something simple like “this street has a bus stop”. Deleting France, yeah someone would notice that change and block it. Most software doesn’t use the realtime map state - they use a slightly older version of the map in part to avoid using a version of the map that has been compromised.

You really only see the current map state if you are editing the map.

It’s hard to repair. So pay for the extended warranty.

Out of warranty repairs will often just require buying a whole new headset.

GPL is also free for commercial use… all open source licenses are. The rendering engines used by Safari (and Chrome/Edge) are GPL.