Marvin

foregoneconclusion said:

Buffett isn’t getting any younger. It could be related to estate prep.

He was asked the question at a meeting:



The answer isn't entirely clear but he mentioned building up cash reserves due to the current state of the economy and lack of investment opportunities. There are a few people predicting a market downturn due to overvaluations and having significant cash reserves will allow buying shares at low prices if there's a correction. Due to high valuations, there's not many opportunities for high returns just now (3:30):



https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-crash-bubble-correction-dot-com-tech-overvalued-ai-2024-6?op=1
https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-bubble-warning-signs-signals-ai-stocks-earnings-profits-2024-6

Apple is valued at $3.3 trillion. When Buffet started investing they were around 1/6th this. It's not likely Apple will go to 5 trillion any time soon when their revenues are starting to level out and their p/e is 36. It makes sense to lock in their gains and wait for growth opportunities.

tht said:

The images of the aftermath of the flooding are horrifying. Some low lying areas or water collection areas looked like the water got to 10 ft high, with cars on top of cars.

The reports say 1 year of rain in 8 hours, not much time to prepare for:





https://e360.yale.edu/digest/satellite-images-spain-flooding

In the videos, some people have reached breaking point having to live through this kind of thing every couple of years and have decided to move elsewhere. There are heavily populated areas that will become uninhabitable due to the extreme weather.

Areas of land need to get an official status about how safe they are for the long-term so that large populations don't build up in them. It will devalue property but these events devalue it even more.

s.metcalf said:

“A donation”?  How much exactly?  This isn’t just a crass attempt to use a disaster as a self-promotion opportunity by offering an undisclosed tokenistic donation to undisclosed recipients that people naturally assume to be more generous than it is, is it?  Is one of the beneficiaries The Human Fund?

Don’t the taxes Apple pays to Spain and other countries already support national emergencies?  Oh wait…

High profile donations help draw attention to the situation, Tim Cook's post had over 1m views.

Certainly if they paid billions in due taxes instead of millions in donations, governments might have the resources to build out infrastructure to help prevent so much damage and relocate people but these extreme climate events are catching everyone off-guard and are largely outside of everyone's control.

Spencer314 said:

lordjohnwhorfin said:

How does this compare to what’s available in the PC world, whether Intel/AMD or the more comparable ARM based Snapdragon?

The M4 Max score is quite a bit ahead of Intel CPUs on both single and multi-core performance on Geek Bench 6. 

https://browser.geekbench.com/processor-benchmarks

I'm sure NVIDIA GPUs are still faster, but it's a bit more difficult comparing them since they don't really run the same benchmarks. It's also pretty hard to compare AI engines for the same reason. 

In a few tests, the M4 Max is measuring around half of an Nvidia 4090:

https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/27706
https://browser.geekbench.com/ai/v1/94340

If M4 Ultra doubles the Max and effectively matches a 4090 alongside the fastest CPU and a large pool of high bandwidth memory, the M4 Ultra Studio will be the most powerful lunchbox in the world and pretty competitively priced at $4k.

chasm said:

My hope is that Apple will keep the team intact and (wishful thinking probably, but) keep the product names.

Apple can probably come up with better names. I think Photomator would be best merged with Photos (like an editor service inside Photos) and they can bring Aperture features in too. With the likes of Aperture, some of the original teams left Apple so they didn't have anyone driving the project.

Pixelmator would then become part of the iWork suite and probably named like the other apps. Microsoft has had MS Paint, a bundled image editor for Mac would be very useful. There was one with the old ClarisWorks/AppleWorks suite:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleWorks

Word processing, drawing, painting, spreadsheet, database, terminal, presentation.



Drawing is more like Illustrator where painting is like Photoshop. Apple doesn't really need their own vector app. Apple made an Image Playground app for AI. They could have this as part of the new image editing app. A name like Canvas/Composition (Image Composer) indicates more what it's for as it can do painting without any photographic components.

9secondkox2 said:

Great step forward. This game is a benchmark for modern graphical capability. 

If Apple is touting this, then they’re feeling pretty great about what the m4 GPU can do. 

The game's marketing page says it will support frame-generation, which hugely increases frame-rate and is needed for the highest-end graphics. An Nvidia 4070 can run this game at upscaled-1440p (720p-native) with pathtracing and frame-gen over 60FPS. M3 Max and M4 Max are around the same as a 4070.

Apple said they are using 2nd-gen raytracing cores in M4 so there must be some improvements there too. The MBP presentation said 2x faster raytracing cores.

In a compatibility layer, Cyberpunk runs pretty smoothly on the Max chips without pathtracing:



A native build should be faster than this.

This video shows the difference frame-gen makes, FPS goes up 50-100%:



Frame-gen is part of AMD's FSR3 and Apple's MetalFX is reported to be based on FSR so the Cyberpunk game will likely use a newer MetalFX. They may apply this to other games like Resident Evil so they run better on mobile.

This is also the same base engine as Witcher 3, which still doesn't have a native Mac port so at least now it has a Metal renderer and can be ported. Witcher 4 will use Unreal 5 so that will already be supported.

Pathtracing is the peak of real-time rendering and can do photorealistic rendering so if Apple can handle this, there's not a higher quality bar to reach.