Hopefully this stuff pans out. I’d love see it happen.

This is existing high performance hardware that you can buy. I’d love for there to be something equivalent built using RISCV, but there’s not.

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.

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.

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.

I’m betting within a decade if it actually works

exactly

yup email is just fundamentally not the right tool for this

Right, which really suggests that email is not the right medium if you want genuine privacy.

Right, understanding what your threat model is important. Then you can make a conscious choice regarding the trade offs of using a particular service, and you understand what your risks are.

Metadata tracking should be very concerning to anyone who cares about privacy because it inherently builds a social graph. The server operators, or anyone who gets that data, can see a map of who is talking to whom. The content is secure, but the connections are not.

Being able to map out a network of relations is incredibly valuable. An intelligence agency can take the map of connections and overlay it with all the other data they vacuum up from other sources, such as location data, purchase histories, social media activity. If you become a “person of interest” for any reason, they instantly have your entire social circle mapped out.

Worse, the act of seeking out encrypted communication is itself a red flag. It’s a perfect filter: “Show me everyone paranoid enough to use crypto.” You’re basically raising your hand. So, in a twisted way, tools for private conversations that share their metadata with third parties, are perfect machines for mapping associations and identifying targets such as political dissidents.

Open sourcing these thing would definitely be the right way to go, and you’re absolutely right that it’s a general solver that would be useful in any scenario where you have a system that requires dynamic allocation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNfuduZvjwY

ok there dronie