Feel free to double check my math, but a modern M1 CPU with its ~16 billion transistors would be about 380 million times bigger (imagine a square ~1.7 miles on a side)
It would take an electric signal about 40ns to travel from the center to one corner and back, and a signal certainly needs to do more than that in a clock cycle, so the physical limit on its operational frequency would be well below 25 kHz. If you want comparable computing power to a regular M1, you'd need to build a tower of them at least 100,000 high. On the plus side, you could build a city on the stack and no one would need heating in the winter. The cluster should be powerful enough to coordinate the traffic lights. Synergy!
> The cluster should be powerful enough to coordinate the traffic lights.
This probably says more about how bloaty modern software development is, than the capabilities of your hypothetical macro-M1. You wouldn't need a cluster. Just one should do. The entire traffic light system of San Francisco ran on a few PDP-8 controllers, once. About as fast as the macro M1 at 25 kHz. (Even at 25 kHz, with parallel execution, it'd still be completing hundreds of thousands of 64-bit-data instructions per second, running circles around something like the original IBM PC or even the early Macintosh.)
With hardware so cheap and software stacks so deep these days, we often grossly overestimate the number of cycles really necessary to complete a task.
But they burned huge amounts of their social trust capital in doing so, because they didn't just say "there are shortages, please stop hoarding masks", they outright lied about the efficacy of masks and perpetuated the lie for months. If people have no idea what to believe, it's because the government led a catastrophically inept response.
No. The CDC said AT THE TIME that they didn't recommend everyone wearing masks because hospitals were facing shortages. They have always been open about their reasoning and data. Quit repeating this terrible lie.
That is not quite true. The CDC listed several reasons not to wear masks. They definitely mention a shortage of masks and retaining supply for medical personnel, but at the same time they also said they were unnecessary and unhelpful for anyone not working directly around symptomatic sick people. Also, most people do not differentiate the CDC from the Surgeon General. This is a quote from the LA Times quoting Jerome Adams:
“Seriously people — STOP BUYING MASKS!” he wrote in a tweet that was later deleted. “They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”
Regarding the surgeon general quote, if you understand that he's referring to protective masks (such as N95s) and their capacity -- and it's pretty clear that he is -- the contents of his statement holds up very well, even now. PPE is extra crucial for those working around infected people. Most members of the general public are unlikely to use N95s in such a way they'd be significantly protective (after watching how most people wear any kind of mask including x95s, I don't know anyone could argue differently, and that's before you get into the kind of fit testing that people who count on these things professionally do and speak of as difficult).
What happened subsequently was a shift to cooperative masks whose benefit is primarily reducing transmission from the wearer.
These two things are both discussed under the header of "masks" but they are very different interventions. It's less that the position changed, it's more that what authorities were actually talking about changed.
You can fairly argue that this counts as a messaging failure and I'd agree, but a lot of people seem to be missing what the issue actually was (especially some who set this up as dishonesty or an attack on expertise).
Many N95s have valves that aren't permissable as COVID masks anyways. They are mostly designed to keep pollution out rather than your breath off of other people.
I for one, am glad that N95s haven't been mandated. I found them extremely irritating when I had to wear them because of high pollution in Beijing. The masks we wear instead, in comparison, are much more comfortable.
Here[1] is Dr. Fauci talking about how masks are mostly ineffective. Only at the end of the video, he agrees with the host that if everyone wears masks, it can lead to shortages for healthcare workers.
Really cool. One piece of feedback: Try to get the white balance to better match the warm wight light of the room. The tv will blend in much much better.
My only gripe with the smart keyboard is the touchpad uses a mechanical button for clicking. It feels clunky compared to the crispness of the last few mbp generations which use a haptic electromechanical component to (perfectly) simulate a click feel.
Funny thing about haptic click is how jarring it is if it's off, like pressing your iphone's home button before you realize it lost its charge. It really feels super-dead.
It used to be terrible on old non-mac machines (probably still is), but Apple's trackpad has been good enough for tap to click to be preferable since at least 2014, maybe earlier.
Another lesser known feature I think is great is three finger drag. This lets you move a window by just using three fingers on the menu bar of that window. It used to be an easy to find setting, but they've since buried it in trackpad accessibility settings for some reason. It's still one of the first things I enable on a new machine.
That's been a feature since at least Windows XP (also you could tap the GHB nipple/TouchStick)... so it was really confusing when laptops started having clicky touchpads :D
There's not enough space. The iPhone 7 Taptic Engine (the only one I could find dimensions for on short notice) was .4 inches on it's smallest dimension. The new Magic Keyboard is .25 inches thick. I don't think it's worth doubling the thickness of the keyboard portion for the improvement the haptic version might give, it already takes the super thin iPad and basically doubles both it's thickness and weight.
I never understood that. Why do you need a skeuomorphic click? You don't trust that tapping works? Whenever I set up a new phone it's a mad dash to disable the haptic tap feedback before I go crazy.
