People still appreciate human art. People don't appreciate AI art because it's fake. If you enjoy AI art, you're probably fake and have no appreciation. That's my take.

Just remember that AI can not create art, it can only remember art. AI is not a human, AI is a probabilistic function.

I think it's your problem you got stressed from a probabilistic machine answering with what you want to hear.

They change the arch and add new features all the time. In M4 they added new kernel protections which now they need to somehow emulate.

It's "Secure Page Table Monitor". https://support.apple.com/en-il/guide/security/sec8b776536b/.... The kernel requires it so they need to emulate SPTM.

This is not exactly correct. They wouldn’t need to emulate SPTM, since SPTM is already running. And to be very correct, SPTM is a “process” running in a separate privilege level to the regular privilege levels found on arm processors. The reason it’s a pain is because pre M4 the bootloader gave you complete control over the CPU, including the Apple-exclusive extensions like GLx, the special privilege levels e.g. SPTM is running at. Since M4 the bootloader handles that, so asahi team has to either cope with being dropped after GL is already initialized and locked down, or running in a mode with all of Apple extensions disabled. So it’s not a problem for running Linux, but it’s a problem for running macOS with a thin abstraction layer to intercept talking with devices like the GPU, which made reverse engineering for them significantly easier.

Afaik this isn’t quite correct either. From what I could gather from the CCC talk and forum posts:

The Apple specific instructions to talk to the SPTM are only usable in the GL2 privilege level, not EL2 where you end up after booting non-Apple code.

The problem is the macOS kernel uses these custom instructions to manage its own page table mappings, and when being virtualized in EL2 it just crashes since these instructions are now invalid.

The solution is indeed to emulate the SPTM interface and instructions just enough for macOS to not crash, that way it can be virtualized for reverse engineering. The emulated SPTM could just pass through the mappings, ignoring all of the security checks the real one would normally do.

I was able to find quite a bit of existing SPTM analysis online (I believe from iOS security research) so this issue isn’t insurmountable by any means.

Knowing how it works does not mean it can be emulated perfectly.

From our knowing how it works [0] it’s just a mechanism for the kernel to give up some privileges and add extra security checks when modifying page tables. Sounds easy to emulate to me: just don’t do the checks and modify the page tables directly. Do you have some reason to believe it can’t be emulated?

If for some reason it’s difficult, the relevant kernel code could also be hooked or patched.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09272

Thanks!

Probably something like having water for a few hours a day.

And being told to restrict showers, not to water lawns, etc

That's the British idea of a water shortage; I suspect that many people would be thrilled if their water supply was good enough to consider a lawn in the first place.

This has happened about every year in the past 10 years during Summer in France at least (I guess Spain/Portugal/Italy, all mediterranean countries are alike in this regard, even most continental European countries).

I can't help but think there is some kind of agenda here...

All the benefits you mentioned are trivial, as in- many languages have them already.

I'll be surprised if those engineers don't want to leave the company themselves after these layoffs.

They're very clearly AI when you're told that it's a list of AI. But when you're given a mixed list of AI and genuine reports, I bet it's not so simple and very time consuming

I thought the same, except I realised some of the reports were submitted back in 2023 before AI slop exploded.

Orc, meet hobbits.

Kind of on topic, but how is Thinkpad with Linux compares to macOS? Battery life, driver support, performance, security, etc.

I miss the M-series silicon, but plain old Ubuntu runs like a charm on Thinkpads. I much prefer the Ubuntu UX and native Linux environment.

Battery life is slightly worse, driver support is perfect - every peripheral I've tried is perfect, performance and security are top-notch.

My two complaints are battery life and compiling Rust code taking a bit longer. But everything else is better on Thinkpad.

I use a Thinkpad and MacBook Pro interchangeably.

Note: I use an X1 Carbon, so that's more like a MacBook Air. They're not 1:1 and my complaints are partly due to my choice.

I have a personal T470 with linux and a Macbook for work. Battery life is worse on the Thinkpad, and I have a 5 year older CPU so performance is lower. Everything else is better. I feel like I did something really bad in my last life to be cursed to work with the MacOS UI everyday.

I use a ThinkPad with Linux as my daily driver and a MBP at work. I love my ThinkPad dearly-but it goes 0/4 up against the MBP.

The best thing I've done for my in practice battery life on Linux is enable aggressive suspend to hibernate, but it still doesn't compare to the all day use I get out of the MBP.

Driver support is really good, everything works, but it obviously can't compete with the 'perfect' driver support you get with macOS.

Performance is again really good but it's not M* performance, nothing is, but I'm happy with it. The OS is perfectly snappy and responsive.

Security is also quite good, Linux has fantastic TPM support now so you get passwordless full disk encryption. Fingerprint reader works and is well integrated into popular DEs. But it's not TouchID or Apple's secure coprocessor, SIP level extra. And just in general the Linux security model without SELinux or Flatpak sandboxing is user-based so you don't get protection against software you run behaving naughtily. The antivirus story is also not as good / nonexistent, but I've never really cared about those so nothing lost for me.

The advantage of the Thinkpad is you get to run Linux, it's about half the cost of the MBP, it's more than good enough as a daily driver, and you get all the full sized ports with no adapter.

Cheapish (~$1000) thinkpad E14 gen7 (AMD) variant has battery life of >24h (reading/typing in vim). At least according to power meter, not that I'd read or type that long.

And everything works on it on Linux, even obscure things like fingerprint sensor, various bizarro Fn key combos, all the various HW accelerations (video encode/decode via vaapi), etc. I didn't find anything that would not work.