And what is the revenue stream tied to that ci/cd pipeline they aren’t capturing today? Apple would sell less hardware in order to…?
There aren’t any app developers avoiding the Apple ecosystem because there aren’t Darwin containers. They don’t sell server hardware and by all accounts have no intention of ever reentering that space. So they’d spend a bunch of developer cycles to reduce their own revenue stream with no apparent upside beyond “goodwill” which they’ve never been overly concerned about.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but by the same logic, you could also say this whole containerization framework is of no use either.
If they're investing resources into it regardless, they might at least try making something that Docker for macOS and co. haven't solved the same exact way already. Something that, due to their almost unhealthy obsession with "system integrity", only they can realistically make. Like native containers.
Supporting the containerization framework lets them sell more laptops to Linux devs that may have otherwise bought a Dell or hp or insert brand to run Linux natively on or windows with WSL.
If there’s one thing this administration has shown, it’s that they believe laws are just suggestions for other people and that ultimately nobody will stop them.
They’re essentially daring the public to resort to violence and frankly, it’s getting exhausting.
Why follow the law when the president will pardon you and the Supreme Court has said he also won’t be held accountable for basically anything.
I welcome the reasoned responses that think this administration isn’t actively flaunting our laws. How’s that war powers act coming along?
That has nothing to do with tracking though. Just because I can see my kid went out of the neighborhood without permission doesn't mean I need to punish them for it or even tell them I noticed.
Furthermore, my parents couldn’t track me, but I guarantee if I came home 2 hours later than I said I would I was getting grounded unless I had a REALLY good excuse.
> but then you’re getting peppered with complaints from people using distributions you’ve never heard of because some part of the app isn’t working right.
Honestly, it sounds like you guys need to learn to say no. Worked at an OEM and we had device divers for RHEL. If you got it working on something else, good for you. But if you wanted to open a support case, you better be able to reproduce the bug on a supported version of RHEL.
I would occasionally humor people running CentOS if I had some spare cycles, but if you were on Debian the answer was: sorry, would love to help but I can’t.
The people who can’t understand why you have a tight support matrix are the people you don’t want to get sucked into the rabbit hole with anyway.
Why is federal rules forcing states to host business they don’t want a good thing? AI isn’t a protected class. Nothing about a datacenter provides benefit to local communities. It increases their water and electricity bills so that someone on the other side of the country can either replace them with a computer or just get rich off their natural resources.
And then those same rich a-holes use their profits to attack any political momentum that would see them actually having to pay a remotely fair amount in taxes.
But it’s not just ideological. The facts are, even with great strides in efficiency, datacenters use a TON of water and electricity. And without fail that results in increased prices for the local communities who see almost no benefit from these datacenters.
Ironically the very same people profiting most off of them are the ones saying they’re going to leave the country if they’re forced to pay anything resembling a fair tax rate. They’re always all about socializing costs and privatizing profits and the common folks are finally waking up to it.
This is false. Evaporative cooling systems consume significant amounts of water and do not reuse it. They can't anyway, recondensing the water would release all the heat they removed by evaporating it.
Most people who believe that data centers use a lot of water aren't mislead about how much water data centers use, but they are unaware of how much water everything else uses. In the great scheme of things data centers simply do not evaporate that much water. They are too small and too few. As a comparative example, all the data centers in Arizona combined use less than 1/50th of the water evaporated by Arizona's own thermal power stations. Or, to choose another benchmark, the evapotranspiration of the rice crop in California is more than 250x the water used by data centers in California.
I think also to a degree, even if someone knows those other water use figures, it's easy to see an intrinsic value to the community from those sources. Many people do not see much value in pushing AI to such a degree where all this new compute is required, and others see a negative impact from this activity. It's much easier to argue against something you feel is wrong or bad than something that is arguably crucial for day-to-day life like electricity and staple crops.
Of course. The American consumer is the greatest hypocrite of all time. Their cars, fuel, airline travel, hamburgers, and paper goods are beyond reproach. Your matrix multiplication is an abomination.
You believe lies, 99% of data shows that data centers do not use appreciable amounts of water compared to almond farms, or gold courses, or bog standard lawns.
That source says data centers use a lot of water. Less than all almond farms combined, sure, but it doesn't support the parent argument. It's also 3 years out of date, and not relevant to protests against all the data centers that have not yet been completed.
You say that like environmentalists support those things. We don’t. We regularly criticize golf courses as a waste of water and land. We regularly call out the water waste and ecosystem impact of manicured, uniform lawns.
> Data centers use very little water, right down to none if they want. And state-of-the-art hyperscale data centers really are operated by AIs.
There are many, many reasons to oppose datacenters. Not the least is they're there to drive inequality to ever-greater heights and they're 21st century version of the toxic waste dump (put 'em where people are weak and marginalized).
But water use is a very simple argument, and sometimes you have to pound on those to get through to the general public that's not immediately affected.
> Sorry but no, you don't get to lie just because your arguments don't resonate with the public. That makes you a bad person.
You misunderstand: data centers usually do use a lot of water, and I think the lie is "data centers use very little water." I believe it's possible for them to use little, but that's a choice that costs money. What I mean was instead of arguing the nuances of cooling or a particular project (which probably keeps all the details secret anyway), it makes sense to simplify and emphasize the water use angle.
Things would go over better with communities if they had assurances with regard to local impact and if those were violated they’d have recourse. Also would help if they provided some token compensation (like the Alaska fund). It wouldn’t be much but it’d be something and most people would probably take that.
This is give an inch take a mile type thinking. The arguments against data centers are based in emotion not reason, so it’s effectively a fools errand to try and placate them.
Who is "we"?? Some places do have water shortages. And regardless of whether the power goes out or not, more power consumption = higher prices + more pollution.
Much of the US is in a drought. While we can generate plenty of electricity, doing so with outdated fossils fuels and ‘natural gases’ introduces a lot of pollution that harms people and the environment. We need to be careful about making these decisions.
But that’s really the problem - “we” don’t get any say in these decisions. A bunch of corrupt politicians and rich oligarchs make these decisions that screw over the rest of us.
And yes, for the record, I’m not uniquely against “AI” data centers. I’m opposed to a lot of other environmentally harmful and wasteful developments. They don’t get hyped up like “AI” does, though.
I get it’s not what you’re asking for, but WSL on windows is a lot more friendly than anything Apple has done in the last decade to assist in Linux support.
WSL is inside Windows. I haven't found the need for anything like this on macOS, as it's Unix and I can just install stuff with Homebrew. When the Unix version of some package didn't do what something else I was running expected, I was able to install coreutils in just a few seconds and carry on.
It seems the issue on Apple hardware is the fight to get Linux booting on bare metal with full support (what Apple supplied for Windows with Bootcamp when moving to Intel), which is the fight Asahi Linux is waging. Is WSL aiding in getting Linux booting from bare metal on proprietary hardware?
WSL for me was literally a gateway drug to switching fully to Linux. It did work, but took extra system memory, drained battery life, and caused intermittent suspend/resume issues. Just not worth dealing with compared to running native Linux.
WSL provides a seamless filesystem experience between windows and Linux which is more than I can say for MacOS. And it’s supported by MS, not a community add-on.
People downvoting me because Microsoft are just silly. It is literally undeniable that Microsoft has done more to provide Linux support in the windows ecosystem than Apple has with MacOS. The closest thing Apple has done to “support” Linux is add a hypervisor without a GUI that they’ll tolerate you using but don’t really support. Try opening up a case with Apple about a Linux issue running a hypervisor.framework Linux vm and let me know how it goes…
Microsoft will absolutely support issues you run into with WSl.
macOS and Linux are both POSIX-compatible operating systems. I guess I’m unclear on why you’d need to run a Linux VM with full filesystem access, when the tools can be installed on macOS itself the filesystem is just the filesystem. It seems like an unnecessary layer of complexity for most standard use cases.
WSL is 90% of a good product. They just quit improving it too early. Managing file permissions between Windows and WSL is a nightmare, it does horrific things to your filesystem if it ever runs out of memory, at least once every day a teammate is hitting a readonly filesystem issue. A team of some of the smartest people I know tried to smooth it over enough to be useful and we couldn’t do it.
At my bigco, we have all but given up on it and moved everyone to EC2 or Macs for non-Windows workloads.
No. I *don't want Windows*. WSL is not an option for me.
In fact, Linux is the only option, and it's what I chose.
Thankfully AI nowadays does an amazing job in issue diagnostic and resolution, and even patches the kernel to make stuff work, so this is the viable solution.
But what is the point of WSL if you can get run the real thing, without performance penalty, bloatware and spyware? WinBoat makes more sense if there is the odd program that does not have a substitute.
It's usually enough but not always. Sometimes it happened that my customers using MacOS or WSL were not able to pass some tests or reproduce some bugs. That was due to some differences between the userland of the Linux servers, which are our build and deployment targets, and what they have on their Macs. I work on a Debian laptop (it used to be Ubuntu) and I can always run on it whatever sw runs on the servers. The languages are Python and Ruby, some bash.
The developers on WSL (the Python project, Django) tend to have a simplified environment. For example they don't run Celery (I never investigated why) and run all the background jobs synchronously or they don't run those jobs at all.
The ones on Macs (the Ruby project, Rails) have the full environment but I remember that they skipped some integration tests because they always failed on their Macs (Capybara and Chromedriver, I don't remember the details.) I was the one running the full test suite. By the way: all the CI services I used in the last 10 years are particularly bad at running those kind of tests. Maybe it's the amount of memory or the timing of the operations and those CI VMs (or containers?) don't play well with the assumptions of the test frameworks. Any language, any framework.
Which doesn’t make it Linux, which is what op wants. It’s based on a BSD-based mach kernel. You might as well say someone asking for Linux should just run Irix, because hey, it’s UNIX!
Who cares about the kernel? That only matters for hardware support, which is going to be much better with macOS on mac hardware. Macs can easily run 99%+ of the software that people use linux for, because *nix. The only real reasons to require linux in this situation are ideological (free software/GPL vs proprietary Apple) and aesthetic (you're used to X/wayland/systemd/whatever system software and don't like Apple's solution). It would definitely be nice if Apple helped people out by documenting and releasing source for the bootloader and firmware to make it easier to install third-party OSes on their hardware... but they're not a hacker-hobbyist nonprofit doing it for the love, so why would they?
WSL is literally the Linux kernel running in a VM, so WSL is actually closer.
But you can have a Linux kernel running in a VM on macOS as well, and while it doesn't have something like WSL built-in, it provides enough foundation for others to build it: https://lima-vm.io/docs/
What are you talking about? The Mac platform is so much more friendly for doing Linux related work. First of all it’s Unix so most tooling has MacOS variants, and secondly you have a miriad way to install WSL like VMs with shared disk.
That’d be more relatable if they weren’t actively trying to remove encryption from their messaging to spy and serve even more ads at the same time they’re trying to charge a fee for the pleasure of giving them your data to sell.
If they were to support darwin containers, what would be the point? Literally nobody would build to it, Linux won.
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