In the remote first aid course I attended we were told to wrap two empty plastic bottles with a closed cap (so with "air pressure") tightly inside a T-shirt.
What’s the story around the Unlagged mod was that a mod you remember? It was mentioned in the blog post curious if it was popular and if it eventually got iD's attention to implement something similar officially?
One thing to keep in mind is a lot of mods were frowned upon or flat out not allow at all, especially as you can imagine with playing competitive. Once PunkBuster did finally get release for Q3, there was also a bit of hesitation from ranked players on making any non-typical modifications to the game out of fear of being banned. That said, aimbot was a huge issue with Q3 and rarely did I witness PunkBuster do its job.
iD tends to be very tight lipped about things from my limited interactions with them, even in person at Quake Cons..but I do know they were all hanging out on the same forums and places the players were at - so my hunch is they were aware of it.
I mostly lived in modded Q3A - held a few world records in DeFRaG from time to time, but none that were important. I miss those days, they were the best of times :D
Same. I realize that Objective-C is dated by contemporary standards. But when I first learned it 20-ish years ago it felt like a superpower. I bet it was even more impressive when it first appeared another 20 years further back.
I think that one of the tragedies of older programming languages is that they survive long enough for people to forget the technical - and technological - constraints that influenced their design. Swift is great, but there are reasons why there weren't any Swift-like languages being developed in or around 1984.
Similar feelings about Java. It is definitely not my favorite programming language. (I suppose Kotlin isn't either, but it's in the top n.) But it's hard for me to actually hate it. Java walked so that Kotlin could run.
I started the iOS development with Objective-C and hated the language. gp's comment is pretty much my feeling as well.
I wonder if I'd enjoy Swift so much if it wasn't in contrast to how utterly horrible Objective-C was.
These days I still need to revisit legacy Obj-C codebases occasionally or make Obj-C wrappers to interface with C++ code and every time it feels like diving into a cesspit.
I was first introduced to Objective-C in 2010 when I worked on my first iPhone app. I've come back to it a half dozen times over the past 15 years since then and always hate it. I only discovered swift a few years ago (when I had to do some iPhone stuff) and was so happy to not need to use Obj-C
It has thunderbolt 5 ports but the only drives capable of using that aren’t widely available or out yet and cost just as much as a base model Mac Mini.
But it should be essentially the same speeds as the average internal m.2 drives it seems.
In typical average everyday use, not much at all if you get a high quality external SSD.
Source: Me, with my M1 Mac mini using a Samsung T7 connected via USB.
Things I use frequently are on the 256GB internal SSD, such as Office 365 and Xcode. Huge things like games that aren't a huge deal if they take a few more seconds to load are offloaded to the external. The only inconvenience this setup has caused me is that I have to periodically uninstall old iOS simulators from Xcode to keep enough free space available for OS updates.
Eating less food and keeping your body from knowing it seems to be a big part of why it works.
On GLP-1 agonists, you don’t get nearly the counterbalancing reduction in energy expenditure you usually see with caloric restriction. Your body keeps happily releasing lipid stores, assuming they will be replenished, but they aren’t. Hunger hormones remain untriggered, cortisol stays low, and insulin keeps shuttling glucose into cells to be burned.
If you aren’t metabolically deranged, your body does this anyway. But many people have totally decompensated metabolically due to excess energy intake over time, and essentially cannot recover without some kind of treatment.
GLP-1 is just the beginning — future compounds will do a better job maintaining muscle mass, for example. But this is looking like an absolute miracle, and once patent protection ends (especially for oral formulations), we’re going to be living in a very different world health-wise.
Losing muscle mass is just what happens when you're in a calorie deficit. The same thing happens if you're in a calorie deficit without the aid of a GLP-1.
Making sure each meal contains substantial protein will help negate this.
Right, it’s not something specific to GLP-1 treatment, but there are myostatin and activin A modulators under investigation to specifically counteract muscle loss related to caloric deficit more generally.
Patent protection for the early versions has already ended. Teva is making generic versions of liraglutide and it's been available in the US for a few months. The other GLP-1 agonists will be protected for a few more years though.
True but imagine the price and availability impact when the oral formulations go off-patent. The autoinjectors are inherently expensive to make and ship, and some people have a needle phobia. Oral daily seems like the endgame here.
> On GLP-1 agonists, you don’t get nearly the counterbalancing reduction in energy expenditure you usually see with caloric restriction
And that's mostly related to how much you move. If the body needs to reduce energy expenditure, there isn't much it can cut that's non essential that will make a difference, other than activity and movement in general. So you feel like laying on the couch all day.
I haven't tried GLP-1 myself, but reports seem to indicate that GLP-1 drugs make you feel _tired_, which is basically the same thing. So I am not sure the body is fooled that easily.
> many people have totally decompensated metabolically
Around 88% of americans have some level of metabolic dysfunction so that tracks. Numbers worldwide are trending up.
> and essentially cannot recover without some kind of treatment.
They can. Going back to a healthy food intake will fix anything that's not permanently damaged(and if it is permanently damaged, there isn't much medicine can do either). That can be sped up with other measures, such as fasting.
I am a bit skeptical of trying to fix a problem that was mostly created by the food industry with medication. GLP-1 isn't without side effects.
Cutting sugars and simple carbs in general has very similar effects and will decrease your hunger hormones as well. I think everybody should try that first before relying on medical interventions.
Besides, carbs tend to make you retain a lot of liquid. Drastically cutting them usually improves fluid retention, people see changes pretty quickly in the scale, and that can motivate them to continue. Do that long enough and even eating habits will change and so will your palate. A soda becomes unbearable.
>but reports seem to indicate that GLP-1 drugs make you feel _tired_,
I know a few people that take one of the name brands, and they really don't complain about this issue. What they do talk about is having more energy after dropping weight because they just don't feel compelled to eat much anymore.
I'm not overweight myself, but I am a Type 1 diabetic from a young age. "Sugar noise" is not something that is easy to ignore. Especially in the case where you have excess insulin in your bloodstream but not active enough for your body to use it. Your body will scream at you to eat something sweet/carby. In people that are overweight this can be caused by insulin resistance. Until you experience it, it's really easy to say "People should try", but it's about as easy as telling someone to drop meth or heroin.
I am overweight. That food and sugar noise thing is real and brutal. Your parent comment should really factor that in the discussion. I know it's hard because (fortunately) they may not have experienced this themselves, but it's horrible.
My body SCREAMS for me to eat something sweet/carby all fucking day long. All day. Never realized the extent of it until using GLP-1s. I tried many things: full strict diets with macro counting, IF, more lenient and "natural-feeling" diets where you just try to eat whole foods that are filling and tasty. With or without weight lifting, sometimes cardio. Yeah they work, big surprise! But the entire time you are fighting against that urge, doesn't matter if you've gone a full month with perfect "discipline". Eventually it gets you. And I was miserable the entire time trying _not_ to think about food.
As public health policy though, just telling people to do the things you describe doesn't work because dieting sucks and your body doesn't want you to do it.
Some people can do it but they're usually not among the huge percentage of obese people in the population.
With GLP-1 agonists it doesn't even feel like you're fighting your body because you just automatically don't want to eat too much (just like people who don't have problems managing their weight).
I think it's basically a good thing that modern day civilization has cheap and available calories because no one has to go hungry, but this is an environment that evolution just hasn't prepared us for and many many people are just not calibrated right for it. Maybe we can finally fix that.
I've been taking Ozempic or Zepbound for a couple months as a personal experiment and the effects have been nothing short of life-changing.
I have been somewhat of a "casual bio hacker" for the past 25 years and have done things like quitting alcohol or caffeine cold turkey and staying off it for years, or tracking every calorie I ate for 10+ years. I've had periods of eating really healthy, I've had periods of eating whatever but staying in calorie deficit, I've had periods of just not eating much at all, I've had periods of eating anything and not caring. I've tried a variety of more extreme body modifications just to try it and note the results. I find messing with the body (or food intake or whatever) to be like trying to reverse engineer an unknown binary, or like trying to write a keygen but for your mood and health. It's been a little hobby of mine for a long time.
These medications are WAY different. There is no way to describe it. You just feel... better, in almost every way. As someone once posted on another thread, their relationship with food changed. I noticed my relationship with food changed as did my relationship with other minor vices; my "screen time" is down. My anxiety is almost entirely gone, my mood is better, and I feel like I sleep better.
Even as the weight loss rate decreased (which was dramatic at first but has mostly stopped as I didn't increase my dosage of the medications to see what would happen), I just feel... better.
No amount of eating better or healthy lifestyle that I've tried (and documented) in the past two decades has produced anything nearly as profound as the impact that Ozempic has, both on my mental and physical health. Which seems crazy, and I thought that people who were crowing about an off-label diabetes drug were crazy as you probably think I am. But I agree with these types of articles - GLP-1 drugs are just the first step in some kind of next step in health, and obviously right now the focus is on "lose weight, undo the damage of processed foods!" but I think we are going to find that GLP-1's are just the first of many new discoveries that could extend or improve our lives beyond the aesthetic reasons that people take them today.
Regarding side effects, I have a lot of people ask me or comment about this. I think just like any drug, you only hear about the people with bad side effects. 8% of American adults are taking a GLP-1 drug right now, yet CVS Pharmacy doesn't have a section dedicated to managing the side effects (but they do for opioid side effects like constipation), which would be my gauge as to how it's really going.
I did have some dehydration (far less than something like scopolamine gives me) on the first couple days after my first self injection, but increasing my water and electrolyte intake fixed that and it seems to have gone away (I've even tried lowering my water and electrolyte intake and it didn't come back). I am not more tired, nor do I have more (or fewer) digestive issues than before. I think people who do have increased digestive issues have just never experienced (or not recently) what happens when you are really full and just overeat, because their bodies are so used to higher calorie or sugar consumption. Just like how Thanksgiving dinner can make you tired or make you have to wait in the family line for the bathroom, I suspect that GLP-1's are causing some people's "normal" meals to feel to their body like a "Thanksgiving dinner" because they effectively are (by comparison). I have noticed some slight muscle loss in my non-dominant arm that is of mild concern but nothing that I am worried about at this time.
This is anecdotal yes and it's just my personal account of these medications but I was skeptical until I tried them, like you are, as I thought "oh, just eat healthy, why needs a shot".
I will update this post when it's determined that GLP-1's cause some crazy or horrible disease but for now I am enjoying this experiment with them.
> I have noticed some slight muscle loss in my non-dominant arm that is of mild concern but nothing that I am worried about at this time.
Muscle loss large enough to be noticeable is concerning, and muscle loss is one of the side effects of these medications that has me most concerned. How did you notice that your off-arm is weaker?
I haven't measured in a while and I don't feel "weak" per se, but I did notice in the mirror that my left bicep seems to be smaller than I remembered (and that's an area that I don't really have any fat buildup which might just be disappearing due to weight or water loss). I also haven't been doing any workouts (intentionally, just to see what happens on GLP-1 meds) but I suspect just some simple workouts would help. For me right now, after ~4mo it's not enough to concern me more than just "ah, guess I should find the weights some time" but I am keeping an eye on it. Otherwise I haven't noticed anything else so it may not be related or might just be me being paranoid
What are you referring to here? The muscle-preserving medication? Are GLP-1s actively reducing your muscle mass, or is it the fact that people on them ate very little and didn't tend to exercise?
Assuming you're going to fix a extremely complex system like the human body by just taking a pill is what some people call the bias of Illusion of Control.
You don’t believe the medicine that billions of people take to treat diseases that would’ve otherwise demonstrably killed them is “accumulated knowledge” enough? From insulin to antibiotics, we have sufficient evidence that many types of medicine DO work. Nobody is “playing god” (whatever that means), it’s just reproducible and consistent data
Modern medicine does have magic pills for many illnesses; for example, antibiotics are magical for many bacterial infections, many vaccines are almost magical too.
OTOH, many pills will have undesired side-effects, and the body is in a complex dynamic equilibrium, so it may happen that blocking GLP-1 may have side effects.
Eventually, we'll all die, but I'm optimistic that GLP-1 will lead to a better equilibrium. Preliminary evidence says it will. I'm not as confident as the author though :)
Like I asked, where's our cutoff? If obesity on average kills you a couple of decades earlier than otherwise, does treatment for that meet your approval?
Cool. How about cancer treatment? Some of those you can live with for some months/years. We allowed to treat anyway when the outcomes are better?
> Staying obese into old age carries risks. There are multiple ways to manage that risk. None of it is as exigent as other conditions.
And why should this not be one of the ways to manage that risk? The biggest difference seems to be that it actually works, on average, unlike some other common treatments like telling people to eat less and exercise more.
Do we know? I think that's the question being asked here. Using these drugs seems to improve a bunch of indicators and we're not sure why.
It's really interesting to me that there's some evidence for Metformin -- a diabetes drug that suppresses glucose production and appears to do other things we don't fully understand -- having general health benefits and possible life extending benefits in healthy people. Normally it's just used to treat some forms of diabetes.
Feels like we're on the cusp of figuring something out about inflammation, aging, and metabolism.
Does eating less food reduce addiction to tobacco, alcohol and other substances? Because there is mounting (but not conclusive) evidence that GLP-1 agonists do just that.
Sample of only a half dozen people close enough to me to talk intimately about it - but for drinking it’s been absolutely proven in my mind for some people.
I have one friend in particular who started a GLP-1 drug solely to assist in drinking less - she certainly does not need to lose any weight. It worked like a light switch for her and turned moderately problematic drinking into easily achieved light social drinking. No impact on appetite since she is on a very low dose.
I have had the same experience, even though I took it for weight loss to start with.
I do know that drinking can be downright unpleasant for me if I push through the aversion after my first drink and try to go for a few more. I have noticed a strong correlation to drinking and my blood sugar crashing rapidly afterwards while on Tirzepatide while wearing a glucose monitor.
A single cold beer on hot day with friends is still quite pleasant. Sitting in a bar for hours on end drinking heavily is simply downright uninteresting now before you get into any unpleasant side effects.
> Is this based on your survey or her self assessment?
Both? Being around her, and her self-assessment. Not sure how else one could interpret such a statement. This is all anecdotal evidence and should be taken as such.
> Yet it used to be? You don't find this situation suspect?
Yes, it used to be moderately interesting sometimes with the right people. Suspect in what manner? That it removes the desire to get inebriated? Perhaps so, since we do not understand the mechanism at play. What we don't know can certainly hurt us.
Overall the desire to drink less seems very similar to the impact it has on appetite and hunger levels. In that way, it is not so surprising to me.
>In the current study, the researchers demonstrated that semaglutide reduced binge-like alcohol drinking in both male and female mice, and that the effect was dose-dependent (i.e., greater amounts of semaglutide led to greater reductions in binge alcohol intake). The researchers also tested semaglutide in rats that were made dependent on alcohol through long-term exposure to alcohol vapor. They found that semaglutide reduced alcohol intake in this animal model, again with no sex differences.
It is not documented, so no, it is not. Which is why I questioned if it was entirely based on self assessment or not and left the door open either way as the question was based out of curiosity and if his anecdote was public I wanted the answer to be as well. Is that not fair?
> when those pieces of data come together it provides evidence.
When you properly document them it literally stops being an anecdote and then becomes evidence.
> The researchers also tested semaglutide in rats that were made dependent on alcohol through long-term exposure to alcohol vapor.
So.. what are we actually measuring then? Isn't alcoholism a disease and not some acquired exposure based dependency? The idea that "GLP-1 for Everything" is even floated in this way is unusual in and of itself. I'm uncomfortable with all this and am once again annoyed at the way we use rats in research.
I wonder if it's about more stable glucose levels hence avoidance of cravings. Anecdotally, alcohol and nicotine cravings seem to pass me whenever I have a particularly fast acting (low osmolality) carbohydrate supplement.
There is no known link between how much you eat and Alzheimers, substance abuse, etc. If it was as simple as eating less makes these issues go away, we would've figured that out a long long time ago.
Alzheimer's is now being referred as type 3 diabetes for a reason.
Human metabolism is sensitive to the type of food you eat.
Check https://www.metabolicmind.org/ as a starting point and follow the rabbit hole to understand the link between what you eat and mental and metabolic illness.
Also, GLP-1 also eliminates muscle - your heart is a muscle.
GLP-1 reduces calorie intake and puts many people on a deficit (typically on purpose). This of course will reduce muscle just like any other calorie deficit anyone runs long term.
This goes against all evidence I have seen for folks who have lost a drastic amount of weight very rapidly. Bodybuilders seem to see the same effect as well when on cuts.
When you are losing 5% of your bodyweight per month (as I was, and many do) a substantial portion of that is simply going to be mean muscle mass. You can counteract some, but not all, of this by heavy resistance training. It's very difficult to not lose muscle mass while losing weight - it takes extreme measures for most folks (e.g. athletes) to do so.
I think it's a fair bit of a stretch to broadly say that this study shows an association.
> Conclusion: Higher intake of calories and fats may be associated with higher risk of [Alzheimer Disease] in individuals carrying the apolipoprotein E ϵ4 allele.
> The hazard ratios of [Alzheimer Disease] for the highest quartiles of calorie and fat intake compared with the lowest quartiles in individuals without the apolipoprotein E ϵ4 allele were close to 1 and were not statistically significant.
For the general population, there was no correlation. Identifying specific genetic outliers where there may be a connection is still useful, but far from a general result.
Exactly. There are lots of skinny alcoholics and drug addicts. Unfortunately many of them are homeless.
The real surprise I learned is that GLP-1 may discourage other addictions as well, including gambling. Source: A nurse I talked to who works with GLP-1 trials.
As others have already stated, it’s starting to become mainstream science that there is a strong correlation between obesity/poor body composition and Alzheimers. It’s not settled science yet, but the correlation is starting to look a whole lot like causation at a society level.
Not to cite anecdotal evidence, but my father-in-law was skinny as a rail and got severe, early-onset Alzheimer's. Obesity might be one potential cause of Alzheimer's, but it's among many.
>If it was as simple as eating less makes these issues go away, we would've figured that out a long long time ago.
You can't get people in large enough quantities to do that reliably and for long enough as part of a study. Best you can do is a small quantity of lab rats.
The data is already rolling in as part of prescribed out-patient data.
No, there are a number of effects of GLP-1 RAs that are not directly related to their initial research and development associated with insulin response, beta cells, etc or recent research associated with appetite suppression. For instance, there is growing research and speculation around dopamine systems in humans.
It might be awhile before the research propagates to the realm of popular science.
IMO, it kind of represents how incredibly blind we are to supposedly safe compounds, and how arrogant others are for calling for less regulation. When attention is high, suddenly so much more is revealed.
I don't think we know conclusively yet. That probably explains quite a lot of it, yes. It's unclear how that would lead to the substance (ab)use results, though.
Polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), whether from plants or animals, are most susceptible to oxidative damage because they have multiple double bonds that can react with oxygen. Each double bond creates a potential site for oxidation.
Societies consuming high amounts of oxidized oils (repeatedly heated cooking oils, whether plant or animal) show increased rates of cardiovascular disease
Populations with high fresh fish consumption (like traditional Japanese diets) show better health outcomes despite high PUFA intake, likely due to immediate consumption and minimal oxidation
Modern food processing/storage methods increase exposure to oxidized fats
Fast food consumption correlates with higher intake of oxidized fats due to repeated oil heating
Socioeconomic factors influence exposure - processed foods with oxidized fats are often cheaper and more accessible
Oxidation status of fats may be as important as the traditional saturated/unsaturated classification
> if you limit them you tend to live longer due to the decrease in oxidative damage
Can you elaborate on that? Aren't animal fats, particularly dairy, rather rich in saturated fats? And saturated fats oxidize less easily than unsaturated fats precisely because they lack weak double bonds.
You do have the option of a 10 gigabit Ethernet port, so you can build out a linux box for local shared storage with components as cheap as you're willing to trust.
As someone who just made a 16tb SSD array over Thunderbolt 3 (Best I could find) at 40gbps and the interface is still the bottleneck (disks are fast now!), 10gbps is going to feel really really slow vs the internal stuff.
It's possible to build a faster non-shared array if you aren't price sensitive (Thunderbolt 5 is 80 gigabits a secind), but someone with multiple computers and devices gets much better bang for the buck from shared local network storage.
As a bonus, you can back up your computers and iDevices to the shared local storage instead of paying for (probably much slower to access) cloud storage.
It's $800 to go up to 2TB from the 256GB model which is just criminally over priced. I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive. Weirdly the 8TB drive on the Pro is at least in line with the top of the line 8TB NVMe SSDs you can buy though there are cheaper options at about $600 vs the $1200 Apple is charging.
That's regular Apple pricing for you. Great deals on the baseline models, but insane margins on the upgrades that make them usable. And of course the ability to upgrade the devices yourself has been phased out in the name of performance and power efficiency
I just checked some Dell prices: $730 to upgrade an XPS desktop from 512GB to 4TB (Apple charges $1200), or $508 to upgrade an Optiplex tower from 256GB to 2TB QLC, or $654 to upgrade it from 256GB to 2TB TLC (Apple charges $800). Scalping on upgrade pricing is something all the PC OEMs do.
Yeah, but the 5 minute job of installing a cheap retail SSD in that Dell machine yourself is still an option which Apple has removed from all but the Mac Pro, which offsets any SSD savings by being $3000 more expensive than an equivalently specced Mac Studio.
I think it's more relevant with Apple because they've removed all the competition for basically all upgrades to their devices by either soldering things to the board or bundling them into their SOC. When there's no alternative their prices become the only option.
The Mac Studio technically still has socketed SSDs, which presumably cuts costs by not having to manage a separate motherboard SKU for every SSD capacity, but they went out of their way to design a proprietary SSD module format rather than just using the standard...
Kind of, they were socketed NAND cards and the controller lived on the mainboard, so as far as getting out of the problem of Apple entirely setting the prices for everything it's not relevant. As far as I'm finding no one managed to find a way to create a compatible card to create an avenue for DIY upgrades. I've found a few upgrades but they consist of buying an entire second Mac Studio to harvest the drive from.
Giles from Polysoft is manufacturing 3rd party mac studio nand cards. There is still a problem sourcing nand because apple doesn't let the owm sell to anyone but them.
I thought I had seen something about that but couldn't find the actual boards mentioned for sale. Sounds even worse though because it should be possible but Apple being Apple has ensured there's no source for Giles or other companies to perform repairs.
Yes, though that relies on the product being fairly popular and for the chip to be stable for a while for it to be a useful source. Mac Studio NAND chips aren't going to be readily available from them unless they happen to be a shared part from a more popular device.
Apples segmentation takes place in the nand firmware. The firmware contains the location in the storage configuration. And this may or may not be rewriteable. Iboffrc has done a video explaining how some of it works. It's all from reverse engineering though.
I think repairable or not, the pricing to upgrade to the max config just isn't something a price-sensitive consumer should take seriously. Beyond one or two upgrades, you might as well pretend it says "call for quote" and just not consider 4+ TB as a realistic option to get from the OEM, because those prices are trying to cause sticker shock. And that goes for any PC OEM—the price-gouged upgrades are so far beyond reasonable that it really doesn't matter whose prices are the most silly or by exactly how many hundreds of dollars. What does matter is whether aftermarket upgrades and repairs are possible.
It matters that there are no after market options for Apple because it means the inflated OEM upgrade price is the ONLY price available for every given upgrade. It matters less with Dell/Asus/Lenovo etc. because that's not the only price available.
The top of the line is also not where Apple is gouging the worst. It's in the middle tiers that are actually relevant to many more people. Most don't have a need for 4+ TB main drives but 1-2 TB is a size that's pretty easy to justify for a lot of people and Apple's price is the only option for them and they're absolutely lining their pockets with cash at the expense of anyone not going for the bargain bin basic tier that can't hold 2 modern games.
By all means, complain about the cost to get a 1TB config, and put that price in proper context. But it still doesn't make much sense to focus on the $1200 upgrades, or any of the other upgrades whose price rounds up to "lol, no".
The gouging is bad at all levels as well as the design effects on repairability and the issues with obsolescence. If you'll look way back though I acknowledged the $1200 is at least vaguely in line with the top of the line Sabrent 8tb NVMe of the same size.
"Repairability" is a red-herring when the discussion is about user-upgrades and the ability to purchase components from 3rd-party suppliers (who compete against each other and the OEM)
Apple's silicon is good but I don't see what's so special about all the other stuff. Looks like they just solder components to the motherboard instead of using industry standard interfaces.
> I can get double that for half the price with a Gen 4 NVMe drive
It's worse than that -- 4TB gen 4 drives can be had for well under $300, sometimes $225-250, and that's for buying a drive outright, not "trading up" from a 256GB device. I think it'd be more accurate to say that you can get double the capacity for a _quarter_ of the price.
I was ballparking it based on my recent buy of a Samsung 990 Pro 4TB and inflated the price a little in my head to closer to $400 than the $330 it actually was.
I also, as a side note, try to give the loosest most favorable (to my opposite) comparison because when I err on my side it becomes a "well actually" debate a lot of the time about how it's "not quite X times as many it's more like X-1 (so I'm not even going to touch that X-1 is still quite bad)" that is really tedious and annoying especially when the favorable version of the comparison is still quite bad for their point/side.
Very much so. When I bought my "cheesegrater" Mac Pro, I wanted 8TB of SSD.
Except Apple wanted $3,000 for 7TB of SSD (considering the sticker price came with a baseline of 1TB).
I bought a 4xM.2 card and 4x2TB Samsung Pro SSDs, cost me $1,300, I got to keep the 1TB "system" SSD, and was faster, at 6.8GBps versus the system drive at 5.5.
Similar with memory. OWC literally sells the same memory as Apple (same manufacturer, same specifications. Apple also wanted $3,000 for 160GB of memory (going from 32 to 192). I paid $1,000.
You can get some decent size external usb SSDs. I have the Samsung T5 2TB. I think they have larger models now. Works pretty well. And with USB-C speeds are very usable. You can probably get faster/bigger stuff via thunderbolt.
I'm considering getting one and a nice big monitor or TV. It needs to run x-plane 12 at decent speeds and maybe support a bit of light gaming. My macbook M1 pro is actually pretty decent for this but the screen is too small for me to easily read the instruments. I expect this will do better even in the base setup.
Otherwise my needs are pretty modest. I'd love to see steam add some emulation support for these things as I have some older games that I enjoy playing. I currently play those on a crappy old intel laptop running linux. I've also been eyeing a new AMD mini PC with the latest amd stuff (Beelink's SER9).
Seems pretty nice as well and seems like it is more performance for the money. Apple is doing its usual thing of charging you hundreds of euros for 50 euro upgrades. Get the base mac studio instead. It probably makes more sense if you are going down that path.
It's USD2,400 to upgrade the M4 Pro model from 512GB to 8TB, which feels a bit steep, but it's an option.
Alternatively, you can get one of these[1] external Other World Computing NVME SSDs for USD1,190 right now. And then you can easily move all your files from your laptop to your desktop when you get home.
There are no slots, it's all soldered directly to the motherboard. Even in the Mac Studio, which does use modular SSDs, they're proprietary modules rather than anything you can easily swap out yourself.
Fortunately I don't really see the point of using a mac mini, so this doesn't bother me too much, but... it's poor taste. You're holding it wrong was not cool the first time.
It kind of undermines the sleek form factor if you need to have a clunky NVMe enclosure dangling off the back though. Even with this tiny new design I bet they could fit a hatch on the bottom with space for a 2230 M.2 drive, but they don't want to because that would let you upgrade to 2TB of fast internal storage for $200 instead of $800.
Until someone brings out little two or four drive NVMe enclosures that fits exactly under the Mac Mini with a Thunderbolt bridge/plug that doesn't snag cables, because we all know Apple can't resist gauging buyers by refusing to include two easy to access M.2 bays on the underside.
I can't imagine anyone but Apple shareholders drooling at the taught of overpriced soldered memory would prefer a smaller Mac Mini case if ~0.5" more height would get you M.2 bays for storage.
There are a number of companies that specialize in making hubs/NVMe enclosures that match the aesthetics of the Mac Mini and sit directly underneath it.
It’s not the size of the NVMe enclosure that makes it clunky. It’s that you now have an extra dongle hanging off the back of your Mac and cluttering up the desk.
There is a reason for the popularity of those enclosure/hub combos that have the same footprint and color as the Mini.
I once was sitting at my desk and had this overwhelming calm come over me. I was trying to figure out what I had eaten that morning/afternoon and then realized the 2-3 'Just Chill' sodas in my trash my mom had gotten me contained L-Theanine. Was a pretty blind test but I wasn't able to reproduce it effectively with L-Theanine supplements I found on amazon.
Very interesting: maybe it could have been something else in the sodas? Alternatively, the quality of the amazon supplement might not have been great (unless you tried from multiple sources)
Quality of L-theanine seems to vary wildly across brands. I’ve had one that does nothing, one that gives me consistent headaches, and one that gives me consistent diarrhea.
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