Thread by @delong

braddelong.substack.com/p/apples-geniu…

This is NUTS. & GENIUS. GENIUS-NUTS: On startup, the Apple Silicon M1 notices that it has lots of background and housekeeping work to do—mds_stores, bird, cloudd, kernel_task, & c.—and so it starts doing it. It immediately full-throttles all four... 1/

...of its IceStorm efficiency cores. Then I start working. And it responds, giving me FireStorm core #5, with occasional spillover to FireStorm core #6, holding FireStorm cores #7 & #8 in reserve, just so if I ask it to do anything heavy, it can respond instantaneously... 2/

..., rather than get caught up on its background and housekeeping by letting those processes onto the performance cores. Let’s see if I can get it in gear… Here I have an unconverted terabyte zoom session lying around… PEDAL to the METAL, Commander! Zoom & MacOS are not... 3/

...able to feed the FireStorm cores fast enough to fully-occupy all four of them, but it definitely gets us to a heavy workload… And yet the fan never goes on. The thermal envelope of the machine is so far from being a constraint that it needs no boosting at all... 4/

...I haven’t felt like this with the performance delta of a new machine since the high tick-tock days of Moore’s Law, back before the beginning of the Great Recession. But I do wish this from <anandtech.com> said “TSMC-Apple” or “Apple-TSMC” rather than just... 5/

...“Apple”. TSMC is doing a lot of the heavier lifting here.

PLUS: Somewhere in the past I remember reading Matthew Yglesias talk about being on a panel with Mike Allen, in which Mike Allen said that his way to do journalism was to (a) write the story between Republicans... 6/

... insisting that the earth was flat while Democrats claimed it was round so that 90% of readers would think the point was “opinions of shape of earth differ”—thus pleasing Republicans—but dropping breadcrumbs so that the 10% who read it properly and then thought about it... 7/

... would realize that the Republicans were bullshitting—thus making it so the Democrats could not complain. And, he said, his bosses at the Washington Post were pleased.

That Mike Allen seems to me to have had a much firmer moral compass than this one. Allen (& Nichols... 8/

...who I think needs to move quickly to get away from his current associates before it is too late) says “some democrats…worry…”, “some economists… fear”, “some Democrats… arguing behind the scenes…”, yet White House officials insist…” and “Yet Biden still wants to... 9/

... spend more…”

Yet when we look for a referent for “some Democrats…” and “some economists…” we find—Larry Summers. Allen and Nichols didn’t even bother to talk to and get a quote from Olivier Blanchard. Or from Charles Goodhart, who fears that debt accumulation will... 10/

...put the Fed in the position of having to walk a knife-edge ridge, blindfolded. Phoning it in. If you don’t bother to find three examples of what you are talking about, you aren’t being serious.

Larry rarely has opinions for no reason (although he is prone to... 11/

...overenthusiasm). And I very much hope that demand will be strong enough that the Federal Reserve will be able to accomplish liftoff from the zero lower bound on interest rates—that would be a good thing. But as best as I can see Biden is not intending to pump up demand... 12/

... any more: he wants his additional spending to be paid-for, after all. 13/END