• 0 Posts
  • 469 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 13th, 2023

help-circle


  • Assuming we had proper bike infrastructure(which we don’t); you’d be hard pressed to top the speed a car can go, and you would still have to stop frequently at lights, just like a car

    Here it’s the exact opposite. There is no way a car can keep up with a bike in the city. Let’s say I wanted to go to the city center by car, which is about 2 kilometers. I would encounter 5 traffic lights just in that short drive. On a working day it would be slow, on a Saturday? Forget it. It would probably be faster to walk. Alternatively, I could go by bike and encounter exactly zero traffic lights. I would ride from my house to the bicycle highway (few hundred meters), and from there it’s an uninterrupted route to the city center. It’s a completely separate path and there are bridges crossing all major roads. Near the city center it turns into a shared space where bicycles have priority over cars. The city center isn’t accessible by car at all, so if you go by car you have to park your car at the edge of the city center (paid) and walk the rest. By contrast, I can cycle right up to any store and park my bicycle right in front of it.









  • Yes, there are massive advantages. It’s basically what makes unified memory possible on modern Macs. Especially with all the interest in AI nowadays, you really don’t want a machine with a discrete GPU/VRAM, a discrete NPU, etc.

    Take for example a modern high-end PC with an RTX 4090. Those only have 24GB VRAM and that VRAM is only accessible through the (relatively slow) PCIe bus. AI models can get really big, and 24GB can be too little for the bigger models. You can spec an M2 Ultra with 192GB RAM and almost all of it is accessible by the GPU directly. Even better, the GPU can access that without any need for copying data back and forth over the PCIe bus, so literally 0 overhead.

    The advantages of this multiply when you have more dedicated silicon. For example: if you have an NPU, that can use the same memory pool and access the same shared data as the CPU and GPU with no overhead. The M series also have dedicated video encoder/decoder hardware, which again can access the unified memory with zero overhead.

    For example: you could have an application that replaces the background on a video using AI. It takes a video, decompresses it using the video decoder , the decompressed video frames are immediately available to all other components. The GPU can then be used to pre-process the frames, the NPU can use the processed frames as input to some AI model and generate a new frame and the video encoder can immediately access that result and compress it into a new video file.

    The overhead of just copying data for such an operation on a system with non-unified memory would be huge. That’s why I think that the AI revolution is going to be one of the driving factors in killing systems with non-unified memory architectures, at least for end-user devices.




  • To add to this: Apple is actively working with Google and the GSMA to add E2EE to the RCS standard. Apple can no do this on their own, as RCS is a standard set by the GSMA. They need to go through the entire slow and bureaucratic process to add a feature to RCS, so while this will appear eventually I wouldn’t hold my breath.

    This also shows exactly why something like RCS cannot ever offer anything other than the bare basic messaging functionality. You cannot innovate on RCS because every change needs to go through a committee who’s all want to have a say in it and before you know it you’re spending years in committee meetings to add a single feature.

    Meanwhile, Apple decides they want to add a feature to iMessage, they roll it out in the next iOS update and it’s available to billions of users pretty much overnight.






  • Apple and Google are working together as part of the GMSA committee on RCS to add encryption to the standard, instead of using Google’s proprietary incompatible extension for e2ee.

    It’s probably going to take a while due to the whole process needed to add it to the standard, which is also why RCS in general is a terrible idea: you can’t really innovate if everything you want to improve has to go through this whole layer of bureaucracy.


  • Encryption is supposed to come when the working group has aligned.

    I wouldn’t hold my breath.

    The whole RCS thing is a Bad Idea™ . It’s a standard by the GSM Association, which consists of over 1150 members (750 operators and 400 other companies). Getting all these companies to align will take forever.

    To illustrate: the RCS initiative was started in 2007 and the steering committee was formed in early 2008. The first version of the Universal Profile, that would enable interoperability between different operators and networks was released in 2016. It took 8 f-ing years to come up with an interoperable messaging standard to replace SMS. It was intended to be implemented by operators, but since hardly any operator did Google had to run their own service, bypassing the network operators, just to get it off the ground. Operators are now slowly beginning to support it.

    If Apple decides to add a feature to iMessage, they implement the feature, roll out an update to their servers and release it to a billion users in the next iOS update. If they want to add a feature to RCS, they first have to discuss it in the committee until they agree on a solution, this alone takes forever. Then every player needs to update their software to add support. This means potentially 750 operators who need to update their shit, and that is after their software suppliers add support for it. In the mean time, the new feature will work for some users when they communicate with some other users, depending on which phone and operator each party has. Rinse and repeat for every new feature you want to add.

    This means RCS will at best only ever be a very basic messaging service. It’ll be an improvement over SMS and MMS, but that’s not saying much. It will be in no way a threat to Apple’s dominance in messaging.