I don't want to go too heavy on the negatives, but what's nuts is Python going for trust-the-programmer style multithreading. The risk is that extension modules could cause a lot of crashes.

My understanding is that many extension modules are already written to take advantage of multithreading by releasing the GIL when calling into C code. This allows true concurrency in the extension, and also invites all the hazards of multithreading. I wonder how many bugs will be uncovered in such extensions by the free threaded builds, but it seems like the “nuts” choice actually happened a long time ago.

How did you get that diploma/plaque, is that something every patent author will have?

You can buy them from various manufacturers that make them; you often get unsolicited mail from them as your name and address is on the patent filings.

The plaque was a personal order from one of the many companies that make them. What you actually get from the USPTO looks like this: https://x.com/EricLengyel/status/1159917092331642880/photo/1

How did you find out that his optimization was done for a different equation, just by trial?

Just looking at the formula in the code (and the book it came from), we see that the approximation is of form arcsin(x) = π/2 - P(x)*sqrt(1-x). It is called a minimax solution in both, and the simplest form of minimax optimization is for polynomials. So we look at P(x) = (π/2 - arcsin(x))/sqrt(1-x): plotting out its error function with the original coefficients, it has the clear equioscillations that you'd expect from an optimized polynomial, i.e., each local peak has the exact same height, which is the max error. But if we look at the error curve in terms of arcsin(x), then its oscillations no longer have the same height, which indicates that the approximation can be improved.

Thank you for elaborating!

yes, Estrin's method is the update

Sorry, I said that wrong. Estrin's doesn't reduce the number of multiplications.

If your goal is reducing the number of multiplications, I imagine it would make sense to factor that polynomial into degree-1 and degree-2 factors.

They list a bunch of companies under the heading "All these companies work with the same technology" on their landing page. I think it's quite scummy, and very non-impressive when you see it.

Simple rule to keep in mind that even math savvy people seem to forget about is that: sqrt(x²) = |x| with bars for absolute value.

For a programmer, it's clear that we have lost the sign information but not the magnitude.

Simple. Makes most sign and solution reasoning explicit instead of implicit when solving quadratics or otherwise working with square roots.

> Simple rule to keep in mind that even math savvy people seem to forget about is that: sqrt(x²) = |x| with bars for absolute value.

i would disagree with that (pun intended).

We can try the same with "oil production"

Do you know if the other 20% is oxygen (as was claimed) or if it's air? I just think the latter seems cheaper and more likely.

I think it may be CO2. CO2 in the gas would cause all sorts of unpleasant effects that would discourage continuing to breath it, and CO2 is probably cheaper to store and transport than oxygen.

It is open source, there are just many different ways to do open source code. One example is Lua, which is released as open source but the project is not open - they will not accept contributions from others.

Apple have historically moved forward minimum requirements for macOS and apps a bit aggressively. They need to slow that down now if they want us to take the macbook neo seriously.

Good. So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades. I hope the Neo is a kick in the pants to get everyone in the Apple ecosystem to take memory usage seriously.

More efficient software benefits everyone.

> So many software developers have gotten so lazy with RAM usage in the past few decades.

Fewer developers want to write ASM or C, today. Slower to market, slower to roll out features, etc. While that may seem like a good thing, and probably could be, the market doesn't like it.

Developer choose heavy weight frameworks or don't make use of modern features in said frameworks to improve performance. And in some cases, performance can be 'good enough'. If I pretended to be a developer, if my app performs well enough, it's not my problem what else is running on your system. Besides, the OS governs it all regardless.

That said, macOS has a terrible memory leak _somewhere_ that impacts even OOTB apps and this hasn't been corrected for the last two major releases.

You don't need to program in ASM or C to write a memory efficient program. Swift, Go, Rust, C++ and C# are all reasonably memory efficient at the scales we're talking about.

Usually you just have to actually look at memory usage and trim the obvious fat. But so many developers these days treat memory as an infinite resource, and don't have a clue how to use profiling tools to even investigate memory usage. That and, maybe stop shipping a copy of Chrome with your application.

I'm hopeful that LLMs will improve the state of application development. Claude can write sloppy code, but it also knows how to write rust and swift, and it knows a lot of tricks for optimisation if you prompt it.

There's 3rd party libraries which know how to interact with spotify. I wonder how many claude code tokens it would take to make a simple, native spotify client. Or discord client. Or client for Teams or Slack.

It's really quite bad. 'Telegram Lite' is using 1.16GB with just a single chat vs Signal using 193MB. Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.

> Somehow vscode (including their renderers) manages to come in pretty low compared to even Apples native apps.

Because the issue isn't electron, it's not freeing resources which you can do in any language/platform.

> vs Signal using 193MB

That’s still an order of magnitude worse than it should be. You don’t need 200mb of ram for a chat app.

I’d disable major OS updates and stay on Tahoe, and only upgrade if other Neo owners report it’s ok to do so. Ive been burned by iOS updates that made the phone sluggish enough times.

Not necessarily a reason to avoid the Neo, for the right use case. If I had secondary school kids they’d get one of these, but something to bear in mind.