Plurrrr

When I started working with my Mac Mini M1, I felt it was faster, but I couldn’t really compare with a proper benchmark. I work a lot with video so I created an Apple (M1 and older) benchmark that is focused on CPU-heavy video programs: ffmpeg and primitive.

One of the most bizarre aspects of quantum physics is that the fundamental entities that make up the Universe, what we know as the indivisible quanta of reality, behave as both a wave and a particle. We can do certain experiments, like firing photons at a sheet of metal, where they act like particles, interacting with the electrons and kicking them off only if they individually have enough energy. Other experiments, like firing photons at small thin objects — whether slits, hairs, holes, spheres, or even DVDs — give patterned results that show exclusively wave-like behavior. What we observe appears to depend on which observations we make, which is frustrating, to say the least. Is there some way to tell, fundamentally, what the nature of a quanta is, and whether it’s wave-like or particle-like at its core?

When you format a disk and install Big Sur on it, making it a startup or boot volume, it has a standard structure, something that has changed greatly over the last few years. This article summarises all you need to know about the layout of APFS boot disks and volumes in Big Sur, whether running on an Intel or Apple Silicon Mac. Detailed information for Catalina and earlier is here.