I can also recommend starfront observatories (https://starfront.space) for folks looking to do remote hosting. It's in a remote location in Texas with solid skies and great staff, and has a pretty unique model of high density hosting to drive down cost, seeing a ton of deep sky astrophotographers come.
It's primarily for hobbyists. From the community discord, I know there are also serious rigs out there as well, on which some members are doing some astronomical science...
Obligatory comment that bray fals has been caught making up data ie, using Photoshop to paint detail in fals-1, the supposed new discovery that was actually already in some survey data.
Fun fact, Bray was the second jtw trident user in North America. I think I was the first.
Also, bit weird you can't come set up your own telescope.
I don't really know too much about this but apparently he calls himself an astrophotographer and not an astronomer, so maybe the use of photoshop isn't all that surprising.
his images on consumer hardware have smaller details than the hubble or meter wide telescopes on the ground. he says it's his processing skill, but it's probably really because he (at some stage of the process) puts his images through topaz denoise which invents detail.
Homelessness in the US is a complex problem. I found the Soft White Underbelly interview series by Mark Laita insightful when learning more about it: https://www.softwhiteunderbelly.com
Mark spent considerable time earning the trust of LA's skid row population – a large roadside tent community – and has a series of 1:1 interviews with a slice of the population, exploring their histories, challenges, preferences, and culture.
Mark doesn't believe that many (most?) of the skid row population would benefit from being provided with housing, and that issues of trauma, mental health, and childhood family environment are what he believes would have the highest leverage on the problem.
This is of course just one perspective on the problem, but Mark's perspective taught me quite a bit.
I have a feeling that the issue isn't homelessness really, but the kinds of people that end up homeless cause problems anyway. Someone won't stop being violent or committing crime because they got moved from a tent to a studio.
I don't think the temporally homeless, like someone down on their luck. makes up the issues people have with homeless. You see some crazy person, then you see that person is homeless, your answer to that is "oh give them a studio apartment!" and not lets help them with their issue. Police should be policing violent people, for some reason instead of that we want to build homes in the middle of nowhere and drop them off their. They're still going to cause issues.
I think people would be a lot more compassionate towards homeless people generally if the violent and destructive subset of homeless people were put in prison where they belong. With the awful ones out of the way, the peaceful sympathetic homeless people would become the public face of homelessness and the general public would be much more willing to to address their problems constructively (e.g. provide housing to them.)
But instead the justice system is set up to give effective impunity to the worst sort of homeless people; they're back on the street days after being arrested (if they are even arrested in the first place.) They cause incredible damage and commotion, so they hog all the public attention and give all homeless people a very bad name through association.
Confirmed; this is what happened to my 16" after this install. I needed to do a DFU restore (using Apple Configurator 2 -- you can download it to your hopefully spare MacBook from the app store) to get my mac back up and running. Unfortunately, for some reason, after the DFU restore, my 16" came back up to do a full reinstall, and I had to restore my files from backup.
I hope Apple doesn’t expect that everyone has a “Spare Macbook” laying around. I’ve been experiencing random system crashes when anything connects via TB3, and 3 random Kernel panics since the update.
The SSD in a T2 Mac is encrypted in the same way that an iPhone is, so if the DFU crashes hard enough you’ll have to regenerate new keys and that’s equivalent to drive zero.
No, it’s not possible to use a FileVault recovery key at this stage of repair.
It’s not failure, it’s secure by design to prevent attackers/governments from stealing your files without consent.
Under DFU brick and reset circumstances, the private key is gone, because otherwise an attacker could just upload a hacked firmware via DFU and access all your files.
I assume the installer uses a different process that performs a DFU upgrade-in-place that safely manages the handoff using signed code and such, but that’s not the process we get as a last restore described above.
If you don’t have off-device backups, you’re accepting the risk of losing all your data at any time due to any number of possible failures (software and hardware). Not much use getting upset about this specific case.
Not sure what DFU means as I'm not familiar with Mac. With any other encryption, it doesn't matter what the state of my system is. As long as I have the key, I can always decrypt it. And it's not a vulnerability. Without the key, the data is effectively inaccessible for everybody else (except maybe somebody with a quantum computer).
Saying a different way: for fork/join or barrier style parallel requests, stragglers set overall latency, and though the probability of any specific response being a straggler may be low, the probability of at least one response being a terrible straggler gets very high at large scales (or large fan-outs).
Unfortunately, this hasn't been my experience. As an example, I have a display-port-based Apple cinema display, and I bought this adapter to try to connect it to a new macbook pro 15":
The physical size of the connectors are compatible, of course; you can plug the monitor into the thunderbolt-2-side of the adapter, and you can plug the thunderbolt-3-side of the adapter into the laptop. But, since the adapter isn't display-port compatible, no joy.
If I remember correctly (and I might not), the apple store page for this adapter didn't originally carry a warning about this, but instead had text that made it easy to misunderstand whether this would work. The text on the page has changed.
As a weaker example, I have an LG 27UD88 Monitor. The USB-C connection from it works, but only carries 60W of charging "oomph," and the 15" macbook pro needs 85W of charging. So, even though the menubar icon on the mac signals that charging is happening, the battery is actually depleting over time. (Yeah, this one is more caveat emptor than the other, but still.)
The confusion is that most people don't understand how USB, TB2/3, and DP work (not saying they should either!).
TB3 is an "alternate mode" signaling over USB-C. As such, every TB3 port is a USB-C port, but not every USB-C port is a TB3 port. Same goes for DisplayPort over TB2. Every TB2 "native" port allows DP, but not every DP port does TB2. TB3 doesn't however carry DP signaling as before though because a cable is either TB3 over USB-C, or DP over USB-C, not both. TB3 and DP both use the "same" alternate-mode signaling. This was my only complaint with the 12" rMB, having only one port, you couldn't plug in a hub, then hub to monitor, because the hub wouldn't kick in the alternate mode signaling required. This required the monitor to always be first device. Now with the rMBP having multiple ports, not a problem anymore.
As mentioned before, USB-C also has an alternate mode for DisplayPort. That's how your LG 27UD88 (fantastic monitor btw!) gets the monitor signal. Buying a TB3 to TB2 adapter is the wrong way to adddress hooking up a DP monitor, despite it being a semi-logical conclusion for even most tech geeks. The right combo is to get a USB-C to DP adapter.
I don't know what the USB-IF folks were thinking, but clearly we need some of whatever they were smoking as this is going to be a mess for years to come i bet.
As to your last point about 60W vs 85W USB-PD, technically you are very correct, but in real life not exactly. The distinction comes to play with how hard you are working the machine. If CPU/GPU are maxed, you'll drain a little battery, but under normal load you'll see a very very slow charge. Same thing happened before with Magsafe2 when you used a 65W power cord on a 15" MBP (that normally used an 85W adapter).
> As a weaker example, I have an LG 27UD88 Monitor. The USB-C connection from it works, but only carries 60W of charging "oomph," and the 15" macbook pro needs 85W of charging. So, even though the menubar icon on the mac signals that charging is happening, the battery is actually depleting over time
It actually loses battery being charged @ 60W? I can't imagine the MBP 15" is actually pulling that much current over the long term... If this is the case, that means it's simply not using the power delivery whatsoever which seems utterly insane.
I've plugged in my 15W phone charger to my 15" MBP, and I was fairly certain at the time my battery was going down less than it was previously. This could of course been placebo.
Ugh, what a silly rollout if so. Plus Apple shipping USB-C 2.0 cables with their chargers in an effort to save... $1? On a $3,000 laptop? Just ridiculous.
Not having a viable USB-C -> HDMI adapter at launch has to be the biggest oversight/wtf for me though. I don't know many users of MBP's that don't do presentations/toss some code up on a projector/etc. from time to time. This is now genuinely hard to impossible. I have to carry 2 HDMI adapters in my bag, as some TVs work with one, some the other. And some not at all.
I'm all for the move to USB-C - but it's like they put zero thought into the transition. You can't cripple a generation of hardware like this.
I know most of these problems will be solved both in software and in third party support - but man this product feels like some manager pulled 4 different groups together and said "you guys have had 3 damn years, release what you have now" and they tried badly at integrating it all together in a couple weeks.
Then you get into actual day to day usability issues like the touchbar lacking the completely in-your-face-obvious feature of haptic feedback making it almost useless... Like how was that not the first thing the first UIx tester who used the escape key said? Just amazes me.
> Not having a viable USB-C -> HDMI adapter
> Many users of MBP's…toss some code up on a projector
Your projectors support HDMI?! I wish!
Joking aside, my "presentation" adapter is Thunderbolt(2) -> VGA, because VGA is the only thing I can be fairly certain that almost every projector will support.
That said, I've ended up with a bunch of adapters, as a fallback in case that doesn't work. I'm definitely not expecting to plug into a projector with USB-C any time soon!
I had a similar experience. Two identical looking cables but one was mini display port, the other Thunderbolt. An old Mac Pro could be used as an external display with one cable but not the other.
Does rsync.net backup versions of the files you store on it? If not, a pitfall with your workflow is that if you corrupt todo.txt (accidentally, or if there is a filesystem problem, etc.) and then push it via rsync, you'll have accidentally overwritten your "backup" with a corrupt copy.
Agreed on the fantastic-ness -- the first 4-5 in the sequence in particular give you a very nice flavor of working in kernel-space, and they are doable. I taught a senior ugrad OS course and experimented with using this as the project sequence.
Some folks excelled (though they put in 15+ hours per week on average, which is quite high), some cratered and I needed a backup plan for them to make progress.
From time to time there are fun collaborative projects too, like https://app.astrobin.com/u/bagman?i=ey9s59#gallery.