Category: MacOS

arc may be removed from my mac

whbeebe1 Comment

So the Arc Browser folks dropped another update, and I paid attention to the big changes this time. And I’m not all that enthused to read about them.

First up is the announcement that the Arc team is dropping support for versins of macOS older than version 13. This includes two of my Macs. What’s interesting is that every other browser out there is still supporting those older versions of macOS. I need that support in order to be able to safely browse the web.

Second is the comment about better support for crypto wallet extensions. I have absolutely no use for crypto currencies. Your browser many not support it directly but providing support for extensions is just as bad in my book, and is indicative of the type of customer you’re going after. And I’m not in your target demographic.

Third, but by no means least, is the bold announcement you’re using ChatGPT 4o for your search engine. I’ve come to despise what is supposedly AI, or LLM (large language models) based AI, because it’s not AI but a very sophisticated pattern matching system. To quote from Infoworld:

The problem, however, is that LLMs don’t actually learn anything. They can’t reason. They’re great at pattern matching but not at extrapolating from past training data to future problems, as a recent IEEE study found. Software development has been one of the brightest spots for genAI tools, but perhaps not quite to the extent we’ve hoped. For example, GPT-3.5 lacked training data after 2021. As such, it struggled with easy coding problems on LeetCode that required information that came out after 2021. The study found that its success rate for easy problems plummeted from 89% to 52% and its ability to create code for hard coding problems tanked from 40% to 0.66%.

According to Michelle Hampson, the finding shows that ChatGPT “lacks the critical thinking skills of a human and can only address problems it has previously encountered.” Tim Klapdor less graciously states, “ChatGPT didn’t learn the topic, it did no research, it did no validation, and it contributed no novel thoughts, ideas, or concepts. ChatGPT just colonized all of that data … and now it can copy/paste that information to you in a timely manner because it’s spending $US700K a day on compute.”

Arc is no longer welcome on any computers I control. I have too many other excellent choices.

Links

AI’s moment of disillusionment — https://www.infoworld.com/article/2514409/ais-moment-of-disillusionment.html

virtualizing rhel 9.4 on an apple m1 max macbook pro

whbeebe

I’ve had to create a Red Hat 9.4 virtual machine on my M1 Max MacBook using UTM ( https://mac.getutm.app ). Because this is an ARM architecture machine, I used UTM because it would use Apple Silicon’s native virtualization support, and I installed the aarch64 version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.4 so that it would be truly virtualized, not emulated.

So far the virtualization works flawlessly. Unfortunately for me and my work, the reason for installing it, to provide a RHEL environment for some work I’m doing, is a failure because the software I need to run under RHEL is only available for x86-64, not aarch64. Not everyone is rushing to embrace the future, especially with regards to processor architectures. It now appears that far too many vendors are refusing to support ARM systems, which is a sad state of affairs considering everyone is trying to install as much ARM-based silicon in their clouds; consider for example that AWS released Graviton 4, a 96 core beast that consumes far less power than Intel or AMD for the same workloads.

Anyway, this modest post documents how to set up UTM to install and then run aarch64 RHEL 9.4  on Apple Silicon M1 Max and a MacBook Pro. I’m going to leave the acquisition and installation of UTM as an exercise to the reader. It is open source, so you can either download a free copy from UTM’s website, or else use the App Store to purchase a permanent copy for $9.99. Using the App Store helps the UTM developers to help keep the lights on, and provides you, the user, a way to get automatic updates through the App Store.

After acquiring and installing UTM, you also need to get a copy of Red Hat’s Enterprise Linux to install. You can also do that for free by registering as a developer. You can download and install up to six copies for personal use. I’ve installed three so far, one under UTM and the other two using Parallels on another MacBook Pro running with an Intel i9. I wrote about that machine earlier, and called it the Beast.

With all the bits in place, it’s time to configure UTM and get RHEL installed on it. Again, installing the RHEL ISO isn’t that difficult, but the configuration can be somewhat perplexing. These settings work fine for me, and might work fine for you. But at least they’re a starting point.

I enabled everything on the virtualization tab except Rosetta on Linux. Remember this RHEL is aarch64. I have no idea how RHEL under x86_64 emulation might operate, and I don’t ever intend to find out. Also note that keyboard and pointer support are Mac keyboard and trackpad. The defaults are generic, and they don’t quite work as well.

I had absolutely no idea where to start with the display, so I had to play around with this for awhile before I found the value shown above. I can now shut down the VM window, and when I start it back up it will be at the correct size and resolution. Getting to this point was aggravating.

Finally we come to the networking. I found these settings on a forum posting, and discovered they work well for my setup. For one thing network traffic between my native MacBook Pro and the RHEL VM stay on my machine.

One nice note: power consumption at idle, especially inside the RHEL VM, is at an absolute minimum.

I’m still amazed at the power of Apple Silicon. With UTM installed I will probably start looking at other versions of Linux compiled natively for aarch64 under UTM.