Parallels is quite good - I can watch 4K YouTube videos at 60fps with no noticeable frame drops on an M1 Pro, and general desktop animations, etc. are fine. That said, I do occasionally get rendering glitches, usually in Firefox where a small rectangular portion of the screen will briefly flash black while scrolling quickly through a page.
The biggest quality of life issue for me personally is the trackpad. Although support for gestures and so on has gotten quite decent in Linux land, Parallels only sends the VM scroll wheel events, so there's no way to have smooth scrolling and swipe gestures inside the VM, so it feels much worse than native macOS or Asahi Linux running on the bare metal.
Update - We are investigating reports of issues with many services impacting segments of customers. We will continue to keep users updated on progress towards mitigation.
Jun 17, 2025 - 19:53 UTC
The color change doesn't bother me nearly as much as the change in proportions. Insetting the face on the right and removing its curvature makes the smile look super weird and less "human" to me. I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it feels a little off.
My theory is they straightened it out so it looks almost like half of a representation of a house, i.e. Finder helps you find and organize things in your "home".
Those examples are all either zero cost or "buy once, use forever." How is that an argument against outsourcing your core competency to third party in perpetuity?
You are not at the mercy of anyone. There are capable, open models that are self-hostable. For example, JetBrains IDEs come with a free local model [1] that runs on your CPU, which is exactly "buy once, use forever". If you want a bit more oomph a consumer level Nvidia GPU or Apple Silicon is sufficient.
> outsourcing your core competency to third party
I don't think my core competency is remembering obscure syntax, or being able to perform repetitive tasks. But if that's true, then I'm screwed anyway. My employer can simply pay an AI company 100 bucks a month and fire me. My own resistance against using LLMs won't change anything. The only logical thing to do would be to accept that my core competency is no longer valuable, and find another core competency.
Good thing my MP3 files only store a psycho-acoustic model of that Metallica album!
I mean sure, if you go to painstaking lengths, you can trick your computer into making some noise that seems vaguely similar to the copyrighted work it was trained on, but I trust the consumer to make their own fair use evaluation.
I think it makes sense if you think of Tauri as a "view layer" for rust apps. If you're building a rust GUI app using something like Dioxus, I could easily see wanting to bundle a cross-platform renderer with consistent "quirks", vs having to adapt your frontend to work with all the platform web views.
It has trade offs in terms of memory usage and binary size, but Electron has already conditioned users to expect every todo and chat app to be 500mb on disk and use a gigabyte of ram at idle. In other words, if Electron would make sense for your project, but you want to use rust, this seems like a good fit.
How do you get from “ Right now, nobody knows from whence personhood rises” to (paraphrasing) “once we can recreate the connectome, we can back people up?”
If we don’t know what it even is, why is it so inevitable that we’ll be able to recreate it in another medium?
> connectome — neural structure — in small animals, there's even a possibility we may expand this to human brains (though we don't know how long this will take us to do!)
I don't know how to phrase it as any less "inevitable" without saying it's "impossible".
That said, a restore from backup may be easier than understanding/accurately simulating at exactly the correct depth to do whatever the important thing turns out to be and not waste effort on unnecessary things*: we've known for a long time that it's possible to encourage neurons to grow in certain ways with electrical stimulation. At some point in the research process, I expect someone to try to use this to replicate an existing pattern (probably in something simple like a fruit fly) — if that organism seems to remember things that only the original had learned, that would be interesting.
I expect that people will do the same test with the digital version of the connectome and eventually get it to also remember something from the original living brain, and that people will even then continue argue that the the digital version is still missing something. And that this argument will continue even if the simulation is scaled up to a human.
And even if we can not simply store the copy but allow it to develop in the simulation (human brains do change over time), I expect these arguments to continue even if that digital human connectome simulation learns something, then is downloaded into an organic brain in the fashion I have described, and the new living human brain discusses things that only the simulation had experienced.
Right now, on the topic of personhood, we don't even know the right questions.
* in one extreme, a computer can simulate any physical process. Right now, it looks like quantum mechanics is sufficient for all chemistry, and hence all biology, and hence brains. But it may be wildly excessive to simulate all the way down to that level — we don't know, we have much to learn. On the other, neural nets in AI are widely recognised to be toy models, and lots of people assume they're too simple to explain biological cognition — again, we don't know, we have much to learn.
“On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the display department.”
“With a flashlight.”
“Ah, well, the lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
I'm rewatching the originals now, and it occurred to me that they were made during that magic period when computer graphics were advanced enough to be believable, but still expensive enough to be used sparingly.
By the time the Hobbit movies were made, it was cheaper to make all the orcs into digital props than to hire and costume a bunch of actors, and everything looks like a video game.
The biggest quality of life issue for me personally is the trackpad. Although support for gestures and so on has gotten quite decent in Linux land, Parallels only sends the VM scroll wheel events, so there's no way to have smooth scrolling and swipe gestures inside the VM, so it feels much worse than native macOS or Asahi Linux running on the bare metal.