Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I really appreciated Lori, Andy, and Rene’s hostility to the outcomes for device owners/users of removing all ports in the directly foreseeable future, if not beyond. I personally endorse what I suspect should prove to be a happy medium of hot-pluggable interfaces, be that pogo-pins or what have you, but the fact they’d yank it, especially for the claimed rationale for durability or ingress when they could simply bring MagSafe current or equivalent in the meantime at the very least is IMO unconscionable and I felt a flood of relief and solidarity to hear such unequivocal assertion of the primacy of impact upon users in the discussion of the issue!
I’m also just as sanguine on Alex’s no-nonsense hard-line in favor of privacy and encryption and his clear-eyed analysis of the stakes and how critical our role in defending it is, however much I disagree with him on civic issues, and thank you, Rene, for refusing to accept Leo’s floated standard of corporate safeguarding as foil for true private encryption (though I’m hoping Leo was playing devil’s advocate). While it’s possible that differing encryption grades and/or standards could foist surveillance upon the populace while preserving it for nation-states in theory, as Alex pointed out, in practice that’s already been made a laughingstock by the government itself, or at least what deserves to be a laughingstock but is awfully hard to laugh about given how catastrophic for basic security globally it’s already proven, to say nothing of privacy. What I wish every discussion of privacy and encryption would always include is the fact that breaking privacy by breaking encryption also breaks basic security for vital infrastructure everywhere, from power plants to banking. I’m relieved to hear that those in positions of influence upon politicians know the stakes well enough to know better than to accept either, so again: thank you, Alex!
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@Leo I’m very interested in seeing if any one will try to make a new System X (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_X_(computing)) with the new rack mounted Mac Pro? When Virginia Tech built the original System X, it was ranked #3 in the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers.
I really wish I had some use for that new Mac Pro. I want that monitor and I want all that POWER!!!
For a few thousand to about four thousand dollars you could get more power than that with an AMD Thread Ripper 3970X (32 cores, 64 threads) and a bunch of RAM. Not that it’d run MacOS (Hackintosh aside) but it’d have way more threads for things like transcoding or rendering. And supposedly in 2020 there will be a 3990X with 64 cores and 128 threads for probably a couple of thousand more. It’s a great time to be alive!
You could even make it look like a Mac 
Give your desk some Mac Pro cheese grater chic with this lookalike PC case - The Verge
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Wow 3990x haha damn!
SnazzyLabs’ hackintosh used AMD, and it does run Mac OS:
A particularly good show this week. Loved listening to the whole team geeking out over the new Mac Pro (even Karsten?) and appreciated the united front on privacy and encryption.
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