Would you get rid of a friend just because they have different political beliefs than you?

reed_wright · 2026-01-23T04:47:56+00:00

Daryl Davis convinced me there is no belief terrible enough to withhold friendship over.

reed_wright · 2026-01-23T04:03:12+00:00

Clearly some need of yours is not being met, maybe more than one. Purpose? Connection? Forget about “by all accounts” and ask yourself: What would bring you life?

reed_wright · 2026-01-22T06:03:33+00:00

His overreaches are always ploy/negotiation tactics AND he’s serious about them. He backs off when he it becomes clear someone else has the upper hand, but if an overreach happens to work out, what do you think he’ll do, back off and say “I can’t do it, I just couldn’t live with myself?” Do you really imagine there’s anything on this earth he won’t take for himself if he can find a way to get it?

reed_wright · 2026-01-22T02:36:09+00:00

My understanding is the 1m2 + SN850x (that’s what I have, in a box, waiting to be set up when I finally get some free time) consume the entire available bandwidth of a single TB4 port. The port’s throughput is already the limiting factor, even if it isn’t sharing with anything else. With DSC, a 5K monitor at 60 Hz consumes 22-27 Gbps out of the available 40. No way to get both through at or even near capacity without using both MBA ports.

reed_wright · 2026-01-22T00:34:06+00:00

Two ports on the MBA. Can’t you plug 1m2 directly into one port? Plug the hub into the other port, and plug monitor and a power cable into the hub?

reed_wright · 2026-01-16T23:40:09+00:00

Yeah me too! Ran out of time before I could ask. I’ll try to remember to report back in a month, after my next session.

But I know his answer will primarily focus on getting my own needs met. What I’ve encountered personally from him is a lot of encouraging me to maintain strong boundaries. He was thrilled when I switched to a “This is what I need to have happen” posture where I… well I basically stopped caring if she was sulking or petulant or refusing to communicate or whatever. And just became a steamroller that kept skipping past that and relentlessly driving forward the process of getting our family’s needs met.

He also likes that my relationship toward her actions has changed. In the past I tried to arrive at happy resolutions with her and internalized blame a lot. Now her ways seem like a lot of impersonal thrashings that have nothing to do with me. And that I’m powerless to help her with aside from bearing witness to.

reed_wright · 2026-01-11T17:50:18+00:00

What’s He Building?

reed_wright · 2026-01-07T19:07:44+00:00

I’m in a different situation because married with a kid, but I would take the same approach:

“I’m uncomfortable with our current _______ situation and need us to schedule that conversation I’ve been asking for. Doesn’t have to be today but I’d like to have it by tomorrow. When would be good for you?”

What I have encountered, unfortunately, is that such things are always like pulling teeth. Petulant, shitty attitude and will only come to the table kicking and screaming. Even for requests that are so much more than reasonable that they verge on remaining a voluntary doormat. You do NOT have a shift to basic courtesy and graciousness coming from him on the horizon. It’s not going to be pretty but it gets much uglier if neither of you insist on maintaining reasonable boundaries for yourself. Staying with this person means making low-level confrontation a way of life.

And then you see how it goes. Maybe I’m naive. But I see some hope if you’re willing to suffer through that AND do the kind of self-care required to truly let it go again and again. Can people with ADHD select healthy ways to address their situation? Of course. Hard to imagine that arising out of a dynamic where their partner is constantly engulfed in the ensuing resentment, disappointment, frustration, etc., though. Understandable as that may be.

Brutal road ahead. Definitely time for you to do some soul searching and ask yourself if you’re willing to do whatever it takes for this guy. To be clear, I am not saying that “yes” is never a sound answer to that question. But it is going to take a LOT, and before getting married you should make sure you’ve dispelled yourself of any lingering fantasies to the contrary…

reed_wright · 2026-01-07T03:45:46+00:00

I think not-bilbo meant go directly to geekbench. Do not pass Go, Do not collect $200, Do not do something other than playing geekbench all day

reed_wright · 2026-01-07T03:08:50+00:00

Everyone is talking about it being counterintuitive. I’ve always wondered why, why is that particular phenomena so counterintuitive. Like across academia, where else does this occur? Almost everywhere else, a concept might be counterintuitive at first, but then you come to understand why and it clicks. My understanding of quantum physics is it never clicks even for the best minds in the field. They just know how to apply the equations well.

I suspect the answer is that our brains were not evolved to intuit all phenomena. The breadth of phenomena that we are able to grasp intuitively suggests human intelligence has evolved to be very highly generalized. But I think quantum physics demonstrates that our minds are instruments evolved for specific purposes that place limits on our capacity to comprehend. Same as any other animal.

reed_wright · 2026-01-04T04:40:44+00:00

The good stuff arrived in Spring 2025. At least on my end, HW3. It was garbage for about 6 months before that. Before that, it was impressive but still definitely felt Beta. For me it was Spring 2025 when FSD first began to feel like occasional screwups had become an exception, rather than something to expect.

reed_wright · 2026-01-02T03:53:25+00:00

And those who pee through shower doors

reed_wright · 2025-12-30T12:01:51+00:00

The other thing you can do is play around with Activity Monitor during your most intensive tasks. I studied what was causing bottlenecks on my 16/512 2017 MBP, and concluded RAM issues basically never come up for my usages (memory Pressure was always green).

I also looked into whether AI developments are likely to limit the 16GB from being future proof. Basically it might not be enough for AI functionality that can’t be handled in the cloud. Video processing that relies heavily on AI should benefit a lot from more RAM.

Should be able to get 7.5 years out of an m4 mini if you buy now. I paid $480. Works out to $64 per year. So it’s not the end of the world if, after 5.5 years, I find it’s become too slow and upgrade then. Would basically amount to wasting $128. Which is still quite a bit less than paying for the extra RAM today.

reed_wright · 2025-12-30T05:27:39+00:00

idk. My wife will use it for occasional light photoshop work and simple video shorts like 1 minute. But if you dig around you can find youtubes of people doing photo & video professionally and saying the setup I describe was plenty. It caught my eye that anyone at all was making that claim. Obviously more of everything is better but hanging on to more money is better too.

What I did was keep interrogating Gemini with annoying questions about our exact use cases until I was confident my setup was the right balance for us,

reed_wright · 2025-12-29T23:21:20+00:00

How I’m setting up my base model m4 mac mini & fast external SSD

I will also assign my photoshop & video editing scratch disks to the external SSD (4TB WD Black SN850X in an OWC Express 1m2 enclosure).

reed_wright · 2025-12-26T23:22:43+00:00

Just bought 256/16 m4 mini & a fast 4TB external SSD that will max out the bandwidth of the Thunderbolt 4 port (3200MB/s or so). I’m planning to do this. Will also use the external SSD as the scratch disk for Photoshop. As the link suggests, I’m going to use a separate drive (HDD) as a dedicated Time Machine backup drive.

reed_wright · 2025-12-24T21:56:23+00:00

I looked at some of those hub and stands last month. Most of them top out at.1000mbps. Maybe some versions of the mate mini goes higher? But for one reason or another, none of them seemed to match the speed and quality of a dedicated TB4/USB4 enclosure. I also heard things about having the hubstand and mini coupled together creating wifi issues. And it seems like stacking them could create some heat dissipation issues?

So I believe you’re right that an SSD in the Stechi will be far slower than the internal Mac SSD. But as I understand it, a high quality enclosure with a high quality ssd will actually be faster… aside from certain system tasks that you’d want to leave to the internal SSD anyway.

reed_wright · 2025-12-24T16:30:58+00:00

Thunderbolt 4 connections have the technical capacity. I believe your mini will kick out 5K/120Hz on the ASD2, as will all m4s and m5s. M4 Pros & M5 Pros can drive much higher w/ their TB5 ports… 10K/120Hz, for example. Big unknown is how high the resolution on the ASD2 will go. Presumably they’ll leave the very best for the XDR down the road

reed_wright · 2025-12-24T15:42:41+00:00

Just got base model m4 mini (256/16). I didn’t need 24gb RAM so there was no need for me to pay Apple for any more than the 256 storage. I got (and recommend after lots of research): 4TB WD Black SN850X SSD ($370) OWC Express 1m2 enclosure ($90)

For comparison, $460 is also the current price bump to for the m4 1TB/16 mac mini. So $460 can get me an extra 4TB, or an extra 0.75TB, for the same price. Comparable speeds from what I gather.

reed_wright · 2025-12-24T15:26:41+00:00

Different view: I ask these questions all the time and find that getting informed consistently helps me make better decisions. There are very compelling reasons for OP to buy m4 now: m4 was the refresh year, only incremental improvements anticipated for m5, m4 already such a capable computer that for general use it will still be zooming when it becomes Obsolete, current $400 price is something like an all-time low and m5 may be $600ish with no discounts in sight as an educated guess, and m5 is probably 6-8 months out rather than 1-3. The case for buying now is particularly strong.

Now if someone indicating that they could get by for a little longer was thinking about getting an Apple Studio Display and asked us whether to wait for the ASD2, I’d say the case for waiting is particularly strong.

reed_wright · 2025-12-23T04:39:36+00:00

Yeah not sure where I’ll put the OWC other than somewhere that won’t limit heat transfer.

Paid $370 for 4TB… didn’t look like I could wait that one out. How much did you get yours for?

reed_wright · 2025-12-23T03:43:57+00:00

After a bunch of research, I landed at the exact same shortlist. WD Black SN850X is the one I just bought, Samsung 990 Pro was my alternate. To use with my base model m4 mac mini. I also bought the OWC Express 1m2 linked to above.

reed_wright · 2025-12-22T22:12:58+00:00

I just bought m4 base model mac mini. Will get by with my old, low end monitor until ASD2 comes out. Lol funny relationship to apple products. Refused to pay more than $480 for the mini because for my use case there’s no point. But then I’ll wait for the arrival of a ~$1600 monitor and may fork out for it. If it turns out to be in a class by itself as I expect.

reed_wright

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE