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You don’t necessarily need a majority to influence the population. Nassim Taleb has described several examples of “intolerant minorities” that influence the beh

You don’t necessarily need a majority to influence the population. Nassim Taleb has described several examples of “intolerant minorities” that influence the behavior of the whole. I wouldn’t be surprised if a similar thing happens with ARM. https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dictatorship-of-the-small-minority-3f1f83ce4e15 https://medium.com/incerto/the-most-intolerant-wins-the-dict...

eecc 5y ago
Well, I do hope that in this case the “intolerant minority” will drive cross-compilation and platform independence of code. It would be sad - and in the long term unsuccessful - if it just Balkanized the development landscape.
- est31 5y ago
  Yeah it's quite fortunate that just as everyone is dropping x86 32 bit support, aarch64 comes along and prevents the ecosystem from hardcoding x86_64 too much. It makes sure that the computing landscape doesn't assume too much about the arch.
pjmlp 5y ago
My point being that Apple adoption of ARM is irrelevant for servers, Apple products aren't even available in most countries below tier 2 in an amount that developers would care. They will either be using Windows in some form (even if pirated), now with Linux VMs as standard feature, or some Linux variant.
- est31 5y ago
  It's a chicken and egg problem. Generally though, I expect ARM to be cheaper in the long run as there are more companies that can build ARM chips. Even if the users of those clouds won't see the difference because of profit margins, it's in the interest of Azure, AWS, etc to push users towards the cheaper hardware. Already the fact they use ARM at all improves their situation on the table with Intel and AMD quite a lot.
- coldtea 5y ago
  >My point being that Apple adoption of ARM is irrelevant for servers, Apple products aren't even available in most countries below tier 2 in an amount that developers would care. (a) It's not those countries that drive trends (if they were we wouldn't have heavy frameworks and a 10MB SPA bloat as the norm in web development), (b) ARM was already trending for use in servers (heck, even supercomputers), (c) and Apple's transition means tons of devs in the West (and elsewhere, e.g. I've worked outside of Europe and US and everybody had a Mac in several different companies) will end up with an ARM chip and start influencing server trends (d) At first many of those devs will go to ARM for personal server needs, like people use Digital Ocean and Linode and VPS providers for tons of personal/small business products today (e) As for Windows, it wont stay out of the ARM game long (it already has a leg in). And even your developing world devs will easily find cheapo ARM computers for Linux/Windows.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Lucky you to work for such wealthy organisations. I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky, and even then, Apple hardware tends to stay at MBA levels, unless they are doing iOS development. I have seen devs teams where iMacs are timeshared across teams.
    - coldtea 5y ago
      >Lucky you to work for such wealthy organisations. Are we talking about enterprises here, with say, millions in revenue and a few millions in profit, or small shops that can't afford webservers and maybe use some shared hosting? >I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky Well, outside of the virtue signalling (and/or implying that I don't care for fellow developers), this is neither here, nor there. It's not developing world SMEs that set industry trends, or have historically done so. And we were talking about whether there will be a trend towards ARM in datacenters (helped because of the fact devs will now get more familiar with ARM, with M1 and similar ARM moves from MS). It's not about whether Macs (or ARM) will be the architecture of choice for cash strapped companies in Freedonia. (Plus, IT demand and ability to work / compete across the world, makes devs an exception related to their countries average wages. A local dev wage might be 1/2 or 1/5th of what a dev gets in Silicon Valley, but it's not 1/10 or 1/20 - as their national average across professions can often be. And such salaries still have them afford nice tools, Macs or high end PCs or similar). (Also, Fortune 500? Never worked in one such company, and the ones I did are more like Fortune 1,000,000 but still Macs are extremely popular with devs).
gogopuppygogo 5y ago
The reasonable person adapts to the world around them. The unreasonable person makes the world adapt to them. Therefore all change is dependent upon the unreasonable person. The world does not change for reasonable people.
- floatingatoll 5y ago
  False. It is not always reasonable to adapt; for example, when the adapting to the world would worsen the world. Changing "reasonable" to "passive" and "unreasonable" to "active" resolves the inaccuracy in your statement, and more correctly names the risk inherent in passively adapting.

eecc 5y ago

Well, I do hope that in this case the “intolerant minority” will drive cross-compilation and platform independence of code. It would be sad - and in the long term unsuccessful - if it just Balkanized the development landscape.

est31 5y ago
Yeah it's quite fortunate that just as everyone is dropping x86 32 bit support, aarch64 comes along and prevents the ecosystem from hardcoding x86_64 too much. It makes sure that the computing landscape doesn't assume too much about the arch.

pjmlp 5y ago

My point being that Apple adoption of ARM is irrelevant for servers, Apple products aren't even available in most countries below tier 2 in an amount that developers would care. They will either be using Windows in some form (even if pirated), now with Linux VMs as standard feature, or some Linux variant.

est31 5y ago
It's a chicken and egg problem. Generally though, I expect ARM to be cheaper in the long run as there are more companies that can build ARM chips. Even if the users of those clouds won't see the difference because of profit margins, it's in the interest of Azure, AWS, etc to push users towards the cheaper hardware. Already the fact they use ARM at all improves their situation on the table with Intel and AMD quite a lot.
coldtea 5y ago
>My point being that Apple adoption of ARM is irrelevant for servers, Apple products aren't even available in most countries below tier 2 in an amount that developers would care. (a) It's not those countries that drive trends (if they were we wouldn't have heavy frameworks and a 10MB SPA bloat as the norm in web development), (b) ARM was already trending for use in servers (heck, even supercomputers), (c) and Apple's transition means tons of devs in the West (and elsewhere, e.g. I've worked outside of Europe and US and everybody had a Mac in several different companies) will end up with an ARM chip and start influencing server trends (d) At first many of those devs will go to ARM for personal server needs, like people use Digital Ocean and Linode and VPS providers for tons of personal/small business products today (e) As for Windows, it wont stay out of the ARM game long (it already has a leg in). And even your developing world devs will easily find cheapo ARM computers for Linux/Windows.
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Lucky you to work for such wealthy organisations. I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky, and even then, Apple hardware tends to stay at MBA levels, unless they are doing iOS development. I have seen devs teams where iMacs are timeshared across teams.
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >Lucky you to work for such wealthy organisations. Are we talking about enterprises here, with say, millions in revenue and a few millions in profit, or small shops that can't afford webservers and maybe use some shared hosting? >I happen to care for fellow developers, and outside our Fortune 500 customers orgs, I haven't seen anyone being so lucky Well, outside of the virtue signalling (and/or implying that I don't care for fellow developers), this is neither here, nor there. It's not developing world SMEs that set industry trends, or have historically done so. And we were talking about whether there will be a trend towards ARM in datacenters (helped because of the fact devs will now get more familiar with ARM, with M1 and similar ARM moves from MS). It's not about whether Macs (or ARM) will be the architecture of choice for cash strapped companies in Freedonia. (Plus, IT demand and ability to work / compete across the world, makes devs an exception related to their countries average wages. A local dev wage might be 1/2 or 1/5th of what a dev gets in Silicon Valley, but it's not 1/10 or 1/20 - as their national average across professions can often be. And such salaries still have them afford nice tools, Macs or high end PCs or similar). (Also, Fortune 500? Never worked in one such company, and the ones I did are more like Fortune 1,000,000 but still Macs are extremely popular with devs).

gogopuppygogo 5y ago

The reasonable person adapts to the world around them. The unreasonable person makes the world adapt to them. Therefore all change is dependent upon the unreasonable person. The world does not change for reasonable people.

floatingatoll 5y ago
False. It is not always reasonable to adapt; for example, when the adapting to the world would worsen the world. Changing "reasonable" to "passive" and "unreasonable" to "active" resolves the inaccuracy in your statement, and more correctly names the risk inherent in passively adapting.