My home setup has both a trackpad and mouse (and a separate keyboard). I like them both. In practice I use 65% mouse and 35% trackpad I think. Trackpad is great for horizontal (or 2d) scrolling and gestures. Mouse has better ergonomics for accurate pointing, and is more natural in some apps (eg KiCAD).
For people making a living on western software engineering salaries, why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
A lot of other crafts and jobs need way more expensive hardware. Software engineers "only" need a $1,000 - $3,000 laptop every 5 or so years. That's typically less than 0.5% of that 5 year's salary.
> why wouldn't (Apple) hardware be worth the price?
How about "not worth the cost" instead.
Not worth the cost of losing the freedom to run your own software and make your own choices.
Commodity laptops might be slower and less flashy, but if Linux goes in the wrong direction I can install FreeBSD or OpenBSD or my own vibe-coded OS or whatever.
Western society has for the last few decades surrendered principles for convenience, and the state of modern computing is a microcosm of the consequences. You're all consumers now, instead of users.
> China has recently awarded 1.3 to 1.4 million engineering bachelor's degrees a year, and about 292,000 postgraduate engineering degrees in 2022. [0]
> For the US, ASEE and NCES put engineering bachelor's degrees at a stable 130,000–145,000 a year, rising above 200,000 if computer science is included. Because China counts CS as engineering, the fair comparison is roughly 1.35M against 230–250k US engineering plus CS graduates. That is about 5–6x in absolute terms. Adjusted for population (1.41B vs 335M), China produces about 950 per million people and the US about 700 (1.3–1.4x more).
Even Claude highlights that the numbers aren't apples to apples and in China the definition of "engineer" is more loose. I do believe that in relative numbers, more engineers graduate in China
On lawyers:
> In the US there were 1,322,649 active lawyers as of January 2024. For China, there were around 650,000 lawyers in 2022. Which in relative terms is 8x in the US than China.
At 1G constant acceleration reaching Andromeda would take ~15 years, or ~29 years if we also need to decelerate at the same 1G rate to not just whoosh by.
The furthest known galaxy is MoM-z14, which would take ~47 years to reach.
But unlike Andromeda, MoM-z14 is accelerating away from us, or more precisely, the space between us and MoM-z14 is expanding. It's "receding" at 726,000 km/s (= 2.4 times the speed of light). And still accelerating. Because of these, even the magical constant 1G accelerating spaceship can never reach it, not even in 1 Billion years.
> “bzip3 is not yet listed on the large text compression benchmark” It is now
And it comes in relatively well, in my opinion. I'm a compression amateur, but bzip3 is the first entry I recognize as a general purpose compression program.
Yes, bzip3 compresses that 1GB text file into 170 MB while zstd needs 213 MB (SI units, from my own tests with the "enwik9" file of the GP's page, and the latest releases of both programs, same commands). But the decompression (memory and speed) is a different story.
On my desktop, decompressing with zstd requires 128 MB and 1 s, while bzip3 uses 3.2 GB and 90 s.
Without `-b 511`, bzip3's ratio decreases and decompression requires about the same memory as zstd. But the decompression is still two orders of magnitude slower.
Feels like it's the opposite of what it should be. It's fine to impose the world on the compression side, but decompression should be optimized for low-end devices. This is where deflate and zstd get it.
But on-topic: iOS shouldn't show any ads.
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