2018 Mac Mini Review - <AUTHOR> https://marco.org/2018/11/06/mac-mini-2018-review <comment><USER2> >Number one — and this is a big one these days, especially for this product — is that it's not any less useful or versatile than the outgoing Mac Mini, including the generous assortment of ports. If the previous one served a role for you, the new one can probably do it just as well, and probably better and faster, with minimal donglage.

Wow. This is what it's come to. "It hasn't gotten worse! Yayy!"

<comment><USER3> The quote is a bit out of context. The sentence right above it:

>It makes almost nothing worse and almost everything better, finally bringing the Mac Mini into the modern age.

So, no, it's not "yayy" because it "hasn't gotten worse", it's "yayy", because "[it makes] almost everything better".

<comment><USER4> Anyone who owns a MacBook Pro with Touch Bar will definitely be saying "yay it hasn't gotten worse!" about these.

<comment><USER5> I'm pretty happy with mine, but thanks for speaking for us all with your sweeping generalization.

<comment><USER6> I work at a company where most of us use Macs. Everyone that has upgraded from a 2013-2015 MBP to the touchbar model absolutely hates it, including me. There's gotta be someone around here that actually likes it, but I haven't met them yet.

Its OK if you like it. I'm sure lots of people do, but you know damn well significantly more people have had issues with this laptop than normal, so I'm not sure why you're implying otherwise.

The keyboard is by far the worst I've ever used, and I've owned a variety of $200 Wal-Mart black friday laptops and a couple of netbooks, in addition to some high end stuff. I had a friend with an older MBP attempt to show me something using my computer and he could barely type on it without frequent mistakes. Within a minute he was getting frustrated. It just feels terrible. I never thought anything would be worse than typing on a touch-screen but Apple's engineers have accomplished a horrifying miracle. Its like they intentionally tried to design something that's as loud as a mechanical keyboard while still having worse tactile feedback than a $5.00 rubber dome keyboard.

On top of that, its not noticeably faster, after 4.5 years it still maxed out @ 16GB Ram (They fixed this in 2018 but its too late), which is not enough for my use case + it died after 3 months (Not the keyboard, it was a power issue).

This is both the most expensive and the worst computer I've ever owned. The 2013 MBP I'm using now as a loaner while I get my new one fixed is, to quote Steve Jobs "Like getting a glass of ice water in hell." It just works.

<comment><USER7> The touchbar made me realize that I have a habit of resting my fingers up there. I came to this realization because when I didn't think I was typing anything, stuff would happen. Eventually I realized I was touching virtual buttons on the touchbar.

I don't hate it, but I wish more of the tools I use took advantage of it.

I think it could be massively improved by shortening it a little on the left to make room for a physical escape key. That's about 95% of my problem with it.

<comment><USER8> Consider mapping CapsLock to Esc (and Ctrl when long-pressed) with Karabiner. I haven't used my physical Esc key since 2014 or something. Might help with your issue.

<comment><USER9> If you remap CapsLock to Esc, what key do you use for Control for doing Control A, Control E, Control K, Control Y, Control N, and Control P in every application?

<comment><USER8> I tried to address this in my parentheses, but Karabiner specifically lets you bind CapsLock to both: Esc when tapped alone, and Ctrl when held down in combination with other keys.

And your post also answers you sibling comment: Ctrl modifier is useful outside of just Emacs.

Try it out. I believe the API changed in the macOS release before Mojave, so they relaunched Karabiner under the name Karabiner Elements. This option is under the "Complex Modifications" tab.

If I was writing a list of tricks for macOS power users to try, this would be my number one. Up there with binding a global show/hide hotkey for iTerm (I use Ctrl-Space, thus CapsLock-Space).

<comment><USER10> I prefer Magic Trackpad 2 (or native MBP 2015 trackpad) to any other way of navigation but Vi keybinds -if available- work as well.

I currently use Karabiner for this as well, but a slightly different configuration.

The two rules I use are:

* R-Cmd + hjkl are arrows (which works great with HHKB but even on native MBP it requires less movement of hand from trackpad or typing hand than the arrow keys)

* Caps solo is Esc while Caps with another key equals Ctrl.

Is there a way to do this in Linux as well? I currently have to use Linux regularly and I rebind Caps to Ctrl however for Vim it isn't ideal. So I'd like to have the same functionality I have with Karabiner on Linux (Xorg / console).

<comment><USER11> You can use xcape on linux to do this. I use it to map CAPS to CTRL/ESCAPE, and right shift to RIGHT SHIFT/COMPOSE

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> People are missing the point about the integrated graphics. For me this is a feature not a bug because it has USB-C instead.

That means that instead of hopelessly compromising thermals and power supply with some power hungry, yet limited GPU (because of the small form factor) you simply buy the CPU and memory that you need. It simplifies the job of keeping it cool.

CPUs are evolving a lot slower these days. This one should last you many years before it becomes a problem. Having upgradeable memory all the way to 64GB means that too is not going to be a problem any time soon. It means that a mac mini should have a serviceable life of 3-5 years or more if you are less of a power user.

Additionally, you plugin an eGPU of your choice and additional storage via USB-C. Better, when improved eGPUs become available, you can sell your old one and buy a new one without having to tear the machine apart. They also don't overtax and compromise your power supply or cooling.

I currently have an imac 5K that is nearly 5 years old now. I maxed it out at the time with all the bells and whistles and it has served me well. So, money well spent despite the shocking price initially.

I'd totally consider spending 3-4K on a setup with a mac mini, decent eGPU + monitor, and external ssd storage (I actually have a Samsung 2TB T5 already). The new imac pro would cost more and deliver less value. What I like about this setup is that it is completely modular and I can replace individual components without having to worry breaking the other components.

I imagine the mac pro next year will also emphasize expansion and upgrades through USB-C rather than internals. Basically the old model without dedicated GPU and upgradable Xeon CPUs + Memory would be exactly the right product right now. Egpus can be replaced easily and with a solid base configuration, a pro machine should have a long productive life.

<comment><USER13> What would you recommend for a Mac-compatible eGPU these days?

<comment><USER14> The Blackmagic eGPU is designed to be plug-and-play compatible with Macs. You can even buy it directly from Apple:

[https://store.apple.com/xc/product/HM8Y2VC/A](https://store.apple.com/xc/product/HM8Y2VC/A)

Also, one nice thing about this eGPU is that it has two Thunderbolt ports, so you can plug a Thunderbolt display like the LG UltraFine 5K directly into it.

<comment><USER15> Well, THAT's interesting. I've been looking at some Blackmagic stuff for streaming and camera work, that would take burden off my desktop computer. It looks like the new Mini plus this plus outboard x264 encoding (also includes ability to run a good dynamic mic into the encoding) would add up to an insanely flexible livestreaming setup that could do both GPU-needing things and camera-based things without loading the computer, and be expandable later with SDI camera inputs and the ability to do production video switching.

It… didn't occur to me that I might be thinking about running such a rig off a Mac Mini. But then it didn't occur to me that a Mac Mini would come out and be in some conditions faster than any other Mac currently made. Interesting times…

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The pricing is not really justifiable especially given the most use cases of the Mac mini (Home Theater, NAS, Backup etc.) are better handled by other OSes.

The NUC8 with comparable specs (sans 6 core CPU) comes at under half the price! If you needed the 6 cores sure but given most workloads other than encoding don't - it's questionable. Even then the 6C processor doesn't cost enough to make up for the difference.

<comment><USER17> What OSes are better for a "Home Theater" TV computer?? That's a serious question; I recently replaced a creaking old Mac Mini (that couldn't do 4K) with a new Dell, after going a little bicurious with respect to Windows 10 (for software development work)... and, surprisingly, it's a complete and utter shitshow.

I was astonished, actually; I had assumed Windows would be better than macOS as a TV computer, other than integration with Apple services (Apple Music, my kids photos as screensaver).

Nothing could be further from the truth. It's a shitshow. 100% of Windows media players are garbage (VLC included, and there is no Movist). They can't play high-bitrate video without stuttering (on way better hardware), they show some ungodly mishmash of scaled UI and tiny unreadable UI on a 4K TV, for each player you install (about 10, so far, for me) you have to google for an hour to make sure they aren't malware (and of course almost all of them _nominally_ are, trying to install all sorts of insane adware shit during the install phase, although that is par for the course on Windows)...

It's been 2 months and I saw the new Mac Mini and despite the 200%+ markup on storage I couldn't help but think _Hmmm...._

My TV also has at its disposal Xbox (OK but not great), PS4 (pretty shit), iOS (Apple TV, pretty shit), and Nintendo Switch (has no TV computer features at all, basically).

So what OSes are you talking about? Linux?? Android?

<comment><USER18> Why do you need a PC at all? A TV can play movies directly from a NAS.

<comment><USER19> I don't trust my TV enough to be on the network.

<comment><USER20> Yes, this precisely. Smart TVs of all flavors as well as Roku boxes voraciously mine your viewing habits, connected devices, network layout, mic input, and practically anything else they can get their dirty little hands on. They're usually running out of date OSes and are full of holes to boot, making you a potential vector for smart device botnets.

Smart TVs and Roku boxes simply cannot be trusted. I have a brand new, relatively expensive Sony smart TV and while its Android TV support is more than adequate I don't use it at all and keep it off the internet at all times. Instead, I use an Apple TV 4K.

<comment><USER21> > Instead, I use an Apple TV 4K

Which is what I'd do but unfortunately Google insists on using it's own video codec for 4k instead of H.265. Meaning your 4k AppleTV can't play YouTube videos at 4K. My smarttv can though... We use AppleTV for everything else.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I really don't like when reviewers test the high end configuration only. This makes the review pretty useless for most of us who may be considering a lower spec.

<comment><USER23> Car manufacturers rarely send their low end models out to reviews as well.

<comment><USER24> and Ferrari sends tuned versions of the car

<comment><USER7> Some car companies not only send out tuned versions of the cars, but a team to tune the car during the review.

You see this on _The Grand Tour_ all the time.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Macs aside - this video clearly shows the wonderful experience you can get when an audio/video producer cares about audio quality. Spoken word recorded with clear audio is so lovely.

I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on a daily basis and I really really appreciate someone putting the effort into this. Thanks!

<comment><USER26> I had a hard time watching him talk because the over dubbed audio is completely out of sync. It's really bad right around the 1 minute mark. I ended up minimizing the window and just listening.

I honestly don't care for this audio, it's crystal clear and perfect for a podcast but the video is of him sitting in front of a window with a dog and the absence of any environmental noise is odd.

<comment><USER27> "Yeah, sorry about the audio sync. I was fighting it for the entire edit, and ran out of time to really nail it.

Next time, I'll pipe the audio directly into the camera instead of relying on manual syncing during post, which had tons of drift."

[https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1059869643928670208](https://twitter.com/marcoarment/status/1059869643928670208)

<comment><USER26> Thank you for confirming that I'm not insane. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> A $2500 desktop computer with integrated graphics?

Honestly, it feels like a bit of a joke.

<comment><USER29> A huge chunk of that is the SSD. It's actually very reasonably priced, especially considering that you get a Mac ecosystem along with the computer.

<comment><USER30> > considering that you get a Mac ecosystem

People consider this a good thing?

EDIT: To clarify, the cost of their proprietary devices mean spending an additional bit. Every other company uses USB C now.

<comment><USER31> I have a Windows 10 computer for gaming and oh my god am I glad I don't have to use that for anything productive.

But hey, at least it's the year of desktop linux!

<comment><USER32> With Steam Proton you could call this the year of desktop linux gaming!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Ugh, all the comments about how it's overpriced in this thread.

 _" This is crazy! You can just build your own for half the price!"_

Snooze. You could have made this comment about most of Apple's products for decades. Some people apparently just don't get it, so here it is from my perspective:

As long as Apple does what I need, I'm not going to buy anything else. I'm definitely not going to build my own PC to save a few bucks. I recognize that not everyone is in this position, but my time is valuable and the difference between "click buy" and "research and buy a ton of parts and assemble them and install software and drivers and blah blah blah" is worth thousands of dollars to me.

I rely on a Macbook Pro for work every day. I generally keep them for 2-3 years, and given my preferences, work setup, software, and how much money I make with these things, I'd pay triple (or more) what Apple currently charges for them vs. getting some shitty Dell or Lenovo and hassling with Windows or Linux. That's not to say everyone should feel that way, but that's my situation, and I'm not alone.

<comment><USER34> 100% this, but for people who don't make money from using the computer I can see how the high prices are a real problem

<comment><USER33> But Apple's strategy has never been to go after the price-sensitive market. Complaining that their prices are way higher than commodity parts you can piece together yourself makes zero sense. That's like complaining that a Ferrari is way more expensive than a Honda.

<comment><USER34> Yep, good point. I read someone online commenting that Apple's "price sensitive" option are second-hand devices as they (historically) remain updated and working well for a long time. Hopefully the new 3rd generation keyboard will stand up to years of use - I'm not at all confident that my 2017 will have much resale value due to the keyboard issues.

<comment><USER35> Resale value on my 6 month-old MBP 2017 was pretty rough.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> The review doesnt tell you that you cannot upgrade or replace your SSD.

<comment><USER37> Which also means the entire thing has to be thrown out when the SSD eventually dies. Sure it's going to take a while, but it will happen. Yay consumerism, I guess.

<comment><USER38> In late 2014 I replaced the disks in my 2008 Mac Pro at work and my 2009 Mac Pro at home with Samsung EVO 840 and 850 SSD disks. I kept track of accumulated writes.

Both machines were heavily used for development and consumer type stuff. No big data stuff or big media stuff.

Samsung rates these things at 150 TB write endurance for the 850 and something around 120 TB for the 840.

My projection based on that usage is that it will take over 35 years to reach 100 TB.

Samsung's ratings are quite conservative. Reviewers that have put these things through write torture tests to the point of error have typically gotten several times Samsung's rating. Around 170 years worth of writes at my usage rate.

I haven't seen numbers for Apple's durability, but if it is within even distant sight of Samsung's EVO performance you can expect to have retired the computer for other reasons long before the SSD dies.

I'd expect that the only reason the SSD might lead to getting a new computer is that you want a bigger SSD, but even that might not be an issue because Thunderbolt 3 gives pretty good performance for external disks.

My Mac Pros have both been retired, replaced with a 2017 iMac (one iMac could replace both office and work computer because we switched to working at home). My Samsung EVOs are now on the iMac in an AKiTiO Thunder3 Quad Mini enclosure.

The internal SSD in the iMac gets just short of 2000 MB/s for both read and write, according to Disk Speed Test from Blackmagic Design. The Samsung EVOs get around 465 MB/s write, 520 MB/s read, so 1/4 the internal disk but still fast enough for most purposes.

Note that the Samsungs are SATA drives. Something that made more direct use of TB3 could probably go much faster.

<comment><USER39> I bought a 1TB Samsung 840 Evo in September 2013, and it just died last month. So it was in operation for around 5 years.

I used it for development type stuff. It outlasted the 2011 MBP I bought it for. In fact, I ran it on 3 different computers during its life span.

Overall, I'm pretty happy that it got the 5 years. With spindles, I prefer to replace them every 2 years to avoid headaches.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> This article makes me happy. To see that Apple is listening. I'm super excited for the next Macbook Pro,and I really hope we really get something that is better, more reliable and practical. I'll be thrilled if they can find their groove again for the Macbook Pro

</comment><comment><USER41> I'm in the market for a new machine, but unfortunately that GPU is too anaemic to make sense. It's a shame, because otherwise it looks like a pretty great proposition. An eGPU is an option, but at £500+ and twice the size of the machine, not a vary attractive one.

I guess the options are throwing down the cash for a 15" MacBook Pro, or waiting to see what they come up with for the Mac Pro next year…

<comment><USER42> I have the same issue, I don't understand why they are able to fit a Vega in the 15" MBP but not in the larger Mac Mini.

15" MBP is not an option for me because of the touchbar and keyboard, so I am basically out of options.

<comment><USER43> Yea, it could at least have been an option. But my guess is they didn't want too many SKUs, and wanted to hit a price-point of less than $1000.

<comment><USER44> Also they need to preserve a market for the "modular" Mac Pro next year

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> In a world of 5K displays and Apple's insistence on smoothness, this GPU just won't work.

<comment><USER46> Is that really an issue with Intel's integrated GPUs? Honestly asking.

I'm considering a Mac Mini, but there's no way I'm going back to low PPI displays and the lack of affordable 5K / 27" options concerns me (in my opinion 4K/UHD at 27" is a borderline unusable combination with its effective resolution of 1080p - feel free to convince me otherwise).

If those few 5K options can't be driven smoothly by an Intel GPU, it's settled and I'm waiting for an iMac update instead. Ideally I'd like a multi monitor setup though.

<comment><USER47> Looking to buy a 4k 27 inch external monitor for my 2018 macbook. What's the problem with it and why is it not better than a 1080p?

<comment><USER46> It's better than 1080p as it is much sharper and crisper, but 1080p at 27 inches results in rather large UI elements. An effective resolution of 2560x1440px (as seen in any iMac 27) seems like the proper resolution for a display of that size.

Read more about it here: [https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/](https://bjango.com/articles/macexternaldisplays/)

<comment><USER48> I'm curios about this too, does the Mac Mini offer "scaled" options, like MacBooks do with their built-in display, when connecting to an external 4k monitor? I think it does some supersampling, resulting in higher effective resolution.

<comment><USER46> Sure, it does offer scaling, but you really want 2x scaling - I tried non- integer values on a 5k display, just to get a sense for it, and it was as disappointing as expected. Slightly blurry text, rather obvious that this wasn't the recommended native setting.

In my opinion 2x scaling is the only option and that leaves you with an effective resolution of 1920x1080 points - sure, it's sharp, but far from true 5k and more importantly the same screen real estate we used to fit into 20-24 incch displays for years. It's the wrong resolution for 27".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Is anyone worried that Apple's transition to their own CPUs will render these x86 machines obsolete very fast? How long did it take for the pre-x86 Macs to fall behind when the software started focusing on x86 instead?

<comment><USER50> Apple waited for 5 years to release a version of OSX that couldn't run PPC apps on x86 Macs.

Last PPC Mac: 2005

First x86 Macs: 2006, PPC apps work on x86 Macs

Adobe CS3 (first native x86 version): 2007

OSX 10.5, last OSX version released for PPC Macs: 2007

\--

OSX 10.6 (x86 only, PPC apps still work): 2009

Adobe CS5 (x86 only): 2010

OSX 10.7, PPC apps no longer work: 2011

</comment></comment><comment><USER51> > Unfortunately, we still don't have any great standalone 5K displays. (The LG > UltraFine isn't.)

What's wrong with the LG display? It gets a lot of criticism, but I find it hard to understand why. There was an interference shielding issue, but it was fixed more than a year ago.

For anyone familiar with the matter, what is it that makes the LG not great?

<comment><USER52> My personal issue with it is the lack of standard inputs, which make it impossible to use with an eGPU setup (excluding the Blackmagic, but that's a whole other kind of subpar). The data ports being exclusively USB-C is probably an issue for some as well.

<comment><USER14> If your complaint about the Blackmagic eGPU being "subpar" was the power of the Radeon Pro 580, you'll be happy to hear that one with a Vega 56 is now available:

[https://store.apple.com/xc/product/HMQT2VC/A](https://store.apple.com/xc/product/HMQT2VC/A)

<comment><USER52> It was partially the 580, partially the inability to swap out the card. It's nice that they're offering Vega options now, but for that model I'd be paying a $500 premium over a comparable setup, with TB3 out being the only benefit. I'll stick with my Dell P2415Q + Akitio Node for now.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER53> I bought a mac mini ten years ago (for about E400?). It still lives on today as my parent's desktop. I passed to them many years ago and not one problem. Fantastic machine.

However I cannot justify the prices they're asking for these ones. I'm looking for a new machine for myself now, but no way will these be considered.

<comment><USER54> Let me get this straight: You would not consider paying a premium for a machine even though your experience tells you, that it has a useful life of 10+ years?

<comment><USER55> All of my experiences with Mac have been like this.

Got a MBP for college, 2009. Still running as my mom's laptop in 2018. Meanwhile my dad's 2 year old dell has endless problems, it's incredibly cheap, despite having better internal hardware. It's slower, needed tons of configuration out of the box, and Windows 10 is just awful. My dad's laptop constantly has issues. My mom? Never once. It just works.

I will gladly pay for a product that is like that. I don't care what an SSD costs on Amazon. I don't want to spend time looking up components and motherboards and bargain hunting. I don't care about gaming and therefore the GPU. People on here look at numbers and costs but they never consider the customer experience.

It's far more damning of Apple to have the bad keyboard on the new MBPs than have some overpriced hardware. Ask 99% of people on the street if they even know what an i7 is.

<comment><USER56> I used to be as enthusiastic as you.

I've bought a number of Macs since I switched in 2007 and I've had a number of tragic stories.

My wife's previous Macbook Air died during its second year. It was working fine and one day it didn't turn on. Apple Mexico asked for close to $1000 at the time to replace the logic which was simply ridiculous.

My top of the line 2011 MBP died when it was 2.5 years old because of a known GPU defect. Apple fixed it over a year later but it was too late. I already had a new machine and the second hand value of the 2011 plummeted. I ended up giving it away to a junior dev in my team a couple of years later.

My current laptop is a 2014 13'' rMBP. I wanted to change the battery and Apple Mexico asked for close to $400 since it argued the complete top panel had to be replaced. I ended up doing it myself for less than $100.

I still prefer Macs for working because of macOS, but I don't know what I will do when my current laptop dies.

<comment><USER55> I'm sure lots of people have stories like ours, one way or another. Things break. Not everything is perfect, but sometimes it is. How often are macs really failing? We hear stories because Apple is hated and you-tubers love getting scenarios where they can make an attack apple video. But without actual numbers we have no idea if this is a trend or not. Consumer Reports regularly ranks Apple as having the best failure rates.

For a long time smart car buyers never bought redesigned vehicles. Why? Their reliability is unknown. As device gains in hardware continue to diminish, perhaps it'd be wise for us to take this stance with electronics - and wait a few years.

> I still prefer Macs for working because of macOS, but I don't know what I > will do when my current laptop dies.

Sadly it's not much better on the other side. Premium window machines still can't get basic things like the touchpad right. Windows 10 is pretty bad. I'd gladly get another machine - but nothing offers what I like about my Macs. The linux people aren't worth bothering with. Most people don't want to deal with the limits - and there aren't a lot of manufacturers.

<comment><USER56> My biggest gripe is not that things fail (that's completely expected) but how Apple reacts to that.

For example my 2007 MBP suffered from Nvidiagate. The GPU died during its third year, many months after the warranty had ended. Apple fixed it, no questions asked.

The 2011 Radeongate affair was ridiculous. There were thousands and thousands of users complaining online. It took Apple 2 years from the first machines failing to start a repair program AFTER a couple of class action lawsuits. It was a massive fuckup.

I haven't bought any of the redesigned MBPs with the butterfly keyboard, but again it took a couple of years to get a repair program after a couple of class action lawsuits. Also, in the US Apple is all fine and dandy, but in Mexico I've personally witnessed cases of Apple refusing to repair the keyboard because apparently they couldn't reproduce the issue.

> But without actual numbers we have no idea if this is a trend or not

Yeah, Apple is as opaque as things can be. Even more now than they will not even share the number of units sold in future reports.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER57> Looks promising. I've ordered one to replace my ancient cheese grater Mac Pro, and it should be quite an update.

I've always been fond of the old Mac Pros (still one of most beautiful machines from Apple), but the extensibility through TB3 has rendered many of the advantages moot (and my Mac Pro is stuffed to the gills).

</comment><comment><USER46> Side discussion: What are everyone's thoughts when it comes to external HiDPI monitor options to use with this Mac Mini?

Ideally I'd want 5K displays (I'm used to the iMac 5K) but it seems that LG's UltraFine is the only real option and the rest of the industry has settled on 4K/UHD at 27 inches, which results in a) limited screen real estate due to an effective resolution of 1080p at 2x scaling and b) slightly less pixel density.

I maybe fine with b) but both issues considered I'm seriously wondering why UHD displays at 27" are so popular - it seems like a subpar and regretful combination. Are my worries unwarranted?

<comment><USER58> I've been using dell P2415Qs. I run 3 at the HiDPI "looks like 2560x1440". It's not perfect 2x scaling, but it is close enough (185 dpi) and the price $300-400 each cant be beat. I've considered switching to the 21.5 inch LG ultrafines (220 dpi) but they are $700 and have very limited port choices compared to the dells. I use the dell displays with multiple other machines that don't have USB-C graphics out. And want to be able to use the displays with eGPUs that won't have USB-C out.

I just hope the default GPU of the mini can drive 3 UHD displays without choking on the dock animations :|

<comment><USER46> Well, at least 24" are more reasonable for UHD or 1080p at 2x scaling. However I currently use a non-retina iMac 27 at home (which I'm looking to replace) and an iMac 5k at work - I really want both: Screen real estate and retina- level pixel density.

Concerning the Ultrafine: Yes, it's too expensive and since I'd need to connect it to another PC without Thunderbolt it's not an option for me.

edit: There's also this option: [https://iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite- xb2779qqs-s1/](https://iiyama.com/gl_en/products/prolite-xb2779qqs-s1/) \- it's sold for under 700€ here in europe, but the 6bit is concerning.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER59> There is zero justification for the pricing. It needs to be starting around $399. Apple is still working the privileged pricing model. Considering it has year old processor and 8GB RAM. For $800 an i5 and 16GB should be standard. I can forgive that 128GB SSD but not the CPU or RAM.

Side note, why is a computer only for games, streaming, and mining bitcoin? It that what the end user experience is limited to?

<comment><USER60> Apple uses value-based pricing, not cost-based pricing.

<comment><USER59> Fair enough, but it "values" the Mac Mini at $799 with a year-old i3 and 8GB of RAM? It valued the last one at $499 and it was 5 years old. I guess what the market will bear is really true...for Apple.

<comment><USER60> It's not about how much Apple values their products. Value-based pricing is based on how much value the customer gets out of the product.

<comment><USER59> The customer will not get $799 of value out of a Mac Mini. It will be made obsolete by Apple before that happens. Especially if Apple takes another 4 years to release the next one.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER61> Too expensive. If you just want a redundant NAS everything else is cheaper. If you want a non-redundant NAS asingle disk NAS enclosure costs 54 bucks: [https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_cod...](https://www.hardkernel.com/main/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G151505170472)

<comment><USER62> I'm fairly new to this NAS stuff. Is there a reason to have one hard drive per sever, or is that just a limitation of this one in particular? I'm sure that RAID over a network of hard drives is a solved problem, but I wouldn't know where to start.

<comment><USER61> It's a limitation of that odroid enclosure. You could do raid over iscsi (but I wouldn't). Buffalo do a 2 drive enclosure very cheap, but I'd go for a synology or qnap enclosure for a bit more money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER63> This is a really weird device. The mac mini has long been used as a home theater pc of the apple ecosystem, due to it's formfactor and being the one apple device that didn't come with its own 20 inch screen or 3 foot tall tower. Apple tv, for all it's shortcomings, has sort of supplanted that and you're much better off sticking that under your tv and running your plex server somewhere else. So now we have a mac mini which is too expensive to be a home theater pc or to be stuck in a closet serving media, and is comparably priced with macs that have actual screens. So its like good for someone who for some reason doesn't want to carry a macbook around but wants a semi- portable workstation? or someone who wants an iMac with a bigger screen? It's not useful as a mac mini, and it's pretty redundant thanks to every use case being covered by an existing mac. Who is this device for? Who is buying this over a macbook or imac?

<comment><USER64> I've bought two Minis as dev machines in the past. Portability was part of it. I also saved a bunch of money because I already had a full set of peripherals. Edit: Upgradable RAM and the ability to install a second drive was also great in retrospect, I wonder if the latter is still possible with the 2018 model.

And I'm not sure whether glossy Retina screens are really the best bang for the buck for developers. I often wish I had dual 1440p or a ginormous 21:9 screen when I'm dealing with complex projects.

</comment></comment><comment><USER65> I really wish people would more clearly disclose when they have been provided a product to review by the manufacturer.

<comment><USER66> Can it really be more clear than this:

Apple lent me a high-end configuration for review — 6-core i7, 32 GB RAM, 1 TB SSD — which would cost $2499 (much of which is the SSD)

<comment><USER67> How about blazing red letters at the top of the page?

How about putting "paid review" in the title of the HN submit?

<comment><USER68> But is this a paid review? He was lent the hardware, which means he had to return it after he had made his review. While there's certainly some conflict of interest there, I don't know anyone that would consider that a payment.

<comment><USER69> it's common practice for journalists to get review unit, which they later return. Not just apple, everybody does it.

Also, in case you're not familiar with Marco, he was a co-founder of Tumblr, created Instapaper, and is the developer of Overcast (podcast app for iOS). Not sure he needs the money

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER70> I've been an avid Apple user and supporter for many years, preached about the stability and the superior (tongue in cheek) hardware. I was waiting for a decent replacement for an ageing mini, but seriously Apple, at these prices?? It's insane. I've made up my mind after I saw the Apple event and reading/following the news of them hiding their sales numbers from now on [0].

I've switched over to Linux as my main desktop completely. While I've been using Windows for years, Windows 10 is just not doing it for me, even with WSL, it just feels limited and unpolished. Anyway, rant over. [0] [https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-the-going-gets- tough-...](https://www.marketwatch.com/story/when-the-going-gets-tough-apple- hides-its-numbers-2018-11-01)

</comment><comment><USER71> Slightly off topic but is there cloud Mac/Xcode that I subscribe to for my occasional App development?

<comment><USER72> There probably is but it will be built on top of Mac mini or Mac Pro farms as Apple does not allow virtualization of macOS on any hardware not carrying a Apple logo (I believe that is how it is actually stated in the terms even). So of it is available it might not be a cheaper option.

But I believe Travis CI does have macOS workers available for free, but they might be scarce in available time slots.

<comment><USER73> I've been using MacInCloud at work for the past 2 years or so, renting a single server for use as a VSTS/Azure DevOps build agent server, for iOS builde. I'm very happy with it - the server we have is fast enough, both CPU and disk, and it's been rock solid.

I've only contacted their support team about billing stuff, but they were responsive and helpful.

Disclaimer: no affiliation, just a happy user.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER74> "...cost $2499 (much of which is the SSD)"

The cheapest SSD I can find goes for €129.47, and it doesn't seem to get up to much more for consumer SSDs. Unless this SSD has some crazy specs that I'm missing, it seems seriously overpriced to me.

<comment><USER17> Apple charges +$600 (USD) for a 0.25 → 1TB SSD upgrade.

I heard some complaints, but was all like "Yeah, but modern Apple SSDs are 3GB/sec, that is pretty good, bros..."

My coworker clued me in, though:

        1TB samsung 970Pro M.2 (3GB/s)
        was as low as AUD$304 here just
        yesterday.   Thats ~USD$215.  I
        don't usually mind paying the
        _AppleTax_ but that is ridiculously
        overpriced.

I buy all sorts of overpriced Apple shit, but that _is_ so overpriced it's kinda offensive.

<comment><USER33> I don't know anything about SSDs (hint) but that SSD looks like it's on sale at Amazon right now for $393. I'm more than happy to pay Apple a premium of $200 or whatever to just get what I want out of the box and not have to think about this, research options and compatibility, worry about drivers or who knows what else, etc.

<comment><USER18> There are no compatibility issues, drivers or who knows what else with PCIe m.2 SSDs.

<comment><USER33> Yeah, I have no idea what PCIe m.2 is, and I don't really care to find out. That's my point.

<comment><USER18> I don't believe you:

If you put anything inside your PC, you'll have to look up how it connects :)

Even outside - whether it's USB-C or thunderbolt actually matters, HDMI vs Displayport etc.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This sounds like it'd make a decent development machine - better in many ways than a MPB.

</comment><comment><USER76> > ... not a low end product anymore...

Apple is clearly pushing everything towards a more luxury high end. More than ever, they're pushing the market to see how far they can go.

They're pricing me out. I can afford their stuff, I just find it hard to justify it.

</comment><comment><USER77> Having a user serviceable M.2 slot would have made this the perfect Mac for me. Lets say I have Applecare for the first 3 years and the SSD dies on the 4th year, what are my options? Replace entire logic board with new CPU & SSD?

</comment><comment><USER78> I'm impressed, but I am also not sure how accurate the benchmarks he's using are for replicating real-world load.

I actually think it's pretty cost effective if you go for 32GB RAM instead of 64GB, and keep the baseline 256GB SSD storage. It comes out to $1,899. With 64GB RAM and 2TB storage, it comes out to $4,099, which is a huge markup for things that can be self-upgraded on a PC.

Even $2,699 for the 64GB version doesn't seem that bad for effectively the best MacOS running computer you can get currently.

<comment><USER79> How hard is it to upgrade yourself?

<comment><USER80> According to the article, you just need a T6.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER81> Can't replace the SSD? Pass.

</comment><comment><USER82> I can upgrade the ram, the most useful piece of information in the review. If I could upgrade the SSD too, I'd be tempted.

</comment><comment><USER83> How is it compared to Intel's Hades Canyon? I'm thinking between those two mini-sized computers.

<comment><USER49> I have the Hades' predecessor, one advantage of this line is a pair of M.2 slots in RAID that will later hold 4tb, 8tb, etc NVMe sticks allowing massively more capacity at similar speed to the Mini's storage.

The AMD graphics in the Hades' is vastly better, but still significantly inferior to anything you will connect via eGPU. A lot of casual usage will not require the Hades' GPU but you'll always pay a power/thermal price for it. As resolutions increase, or depending on your requirements now, you'll probably be forced to pair it with an eGPU because it really only excels at 1080p for 3d stuff afaik.

One nice thing from the Hades' predecessor is fanless cases, I don't know if they've emerged yet for the Hades Canyon but going fanless is really amazing. Prior to that it could be loud, and the Hades added a second loud fan for the GPU.

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> It doesn't seems Apple is interested in using AMD CPU / APU in their products, otherwise they would have a decent iGPU along side.

I was expecting the Intel + AMD GPU combo to end up in this Mac mini, turns out not.

</comment><comment><USER85> I'm pretty sure I would rather buy an iMac than a Mac mini. An iMac at least comes with a display, and the base 4K version is competitive in price and features as far as I can tell.

<comment><USER14> I bought an iMac last year and regretted it. The performance was fine, but I ended up disliking the fact that it was an all-in-one. The fact that you can get iMac performance without a display attached is a big feature of the new Mac mini for me.

<comment><USER85> Yeah. I guess if portability is a plus, that would be better than an iMac. I move once a year so that wouldn't really be a problem for me, but if you need a Mac for portability, why not just get a MacBook?

I think the Mac mini is at an awkward price point. You need a monitor, keyboard and mouse which cost you extra. At that point you can get a base MacBook Pro.

I think it would only really make sense for businesses

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER86> Can anyone explain the market for this to me? In Ireland Mac Mini: 8th Gen i5 Processor/8GB RAM/256GB SSD €1269

Dell XPS 13 with: 8th Gen i5 Processor/8GB RAM/256GB SSD €1189

<comment><USER46> Unless the XPS can run macOS the comparison will be useless to the target audience of the Mac Mini. Furthermore both are very different product categories.

</comment></comment><comment><USER87> I bought my first-ever Mac just over three weeks ago, a refurbished Mac Mini (2010 version, with Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz, upgraded by seller to 8GB and 240GB SSD and High Sierra).

Pretty happy so far.

</comment><comment><USER23> I would have liked to see performance compared to the 2018 15" MacBook Pro, since they are around the same cost. The 13-inch really got its butt kicked.

</comment><comment><USER88> I'm just waiting for the same article but for Macbooks.

I can't wait to throw my money at Apple when they bring back MagSafe and scissor switches.

Not holding my breath though.

</comment><comment><USER89> >Apple lent me a high-end configuration for review

Is this common, for a company to _lend_ a product for review, instead of just giving it to the reviewer?

</comment><comment><USER90> The new mac mini seems like a straightforward improvement from the other versions with few things getting worse. I love that.

</comment><comment><USER91> I'm looking forward to see server blades made out of those Macs. It's just satisfying to see how they are built

</comment><comment><USER92> Best display to buy with the new mini is probably: Eizo Flexscan ev2785 4k 27"

</comment><comment><USER93> I am eagerly awaiting iFixit's teardown of the new mac mini.

</comment><comment><USER94> I wonder how it'll perform as a "super" Apple Tv.

</comment><comment><USER95> I wonder how long the Mac mini will stick around

</comment><comment><USER96> > $2499 (much of which is the SSD)

Where 'much' is approximately 5-10%.

<comment><USER97> In terms of the retail price. More like 30-35%.

The 1TB SSD is a $800 option on the 128GB base model, and a $600 option on the 256GB model.

The 2TB SSD is an even more eye-watering $1600 option from the base model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER98> Stop using Geekbench for reviews :(

<comment><USER99> What would you recommend instead?

<comment><USER45> FCPX BruceX

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> Apple's new strategy seems to be, instead of having products that sell themselves for their clear benefits, just flood either YouTube casuals or Twitter "celebrities" (depending on target segment) with the highest end config machine and expect praise.

<comment><USER101> That has always been Apple's MO. Ever since their "Think Different" marketing campaign, where they realized they can convince the sheep to follow if they associate with the brightest minds and celebrities (e.g., put an Apple logo next to Einstein, next to an astronaut, etc.) without actually offering a better product.

It's always been a fashion statement to own an Apple product...

What bothers me is how the technical community, both software engineers and academics, have fallen into this trap.

A new Win10 pc is a much better development machine. Sorry, but I do prefer to Think Different and don't care about what is fashionable, but make my choices based on specs, utility and value.

<comment><USER102> Since I am part of this aforementioned technical community, I will spend a few extra dollars in order to get: 1) high resolution screen, 2) large track pad that works well, 3) native "unix like" shell, 4) sleep that works 100% reliably when I close the lid.

I don't consider it a fashion statement, I just want it to work. After 20+ years I don't like to tinker with my desktop anymore. I would go back to Gnu/Linux for desktop, but finding the right hardware with the above specs is a challenge if not impossible (I have yet to find a track pad driver that works as well as Apples).

I have not reevaluated in 2018, If there is anything better I would like to hear specific examples of hardware and OS combinations?

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h > native "unix like" shell

Funnily enough, IIRC Darwin isn't unix-like - it's an actual certified UNIX™:) Although in the modern ecosystem, perhaps it's more appropriate and useful to say that it's a Linux-like :-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER103> As a side note, it is a good thing that Apple is supporting 16Gbit DDR4 on time and schedule. (this was not always true in the past)

</comment><comment><USER104> TLDR - Overpriced. Buy something else.

</comment><comment><USER105> The pricing is a joke.

Refurbised Mac Pro with dual GPUs and SSDs are much better value.

</comment><comment><USER106> Off topic, but Marco has lost a bunch of weight! Not sure I love the beard though.

</comment><comment><USER107> A 2500$ windows desktop will give you.

1\. A much better discrete GPU which can run titles in 4k.

2\. Ability to run games cause windows has DirectX.

3\. Ability to run Linux natively using WSL.

4\. Expandability - You can add components like more RAM or an additional GPU.

<comment><USER108> > 3\. Ability to run Linux natively using WSL.

But what are you doing in WSL that you can't do on a Mac (or, of course, a Linux machine) without a 'subsystem'?

Sincere question, because the 'Mac is not Linux' things that wind me up tend to require X11 to fix, WSL would be no different.

<comment><USER107> Mac ships with their own posix subsystem, WSL allows you to install a bunch of popular flavours of linux on top of Windows. I personally run Arch Linux and have access to a lot more bleeding edge packages.

<comment><USER109> To clarify, Mac ships with a native Unix [1], derived from BSD, not a posix subsystem. It has its own init (launchd) and its own GUI, but most of it is a Unix.

Using Macports or homebrew gets you most of the packages that are available for the various Linuxes, GNU utilities etc.

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_%28operating_system%29)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER110> The review was good but I'm honestly surprised that Marco, of all people, would have such a badly dubbed video. Get Casey Liss to help you, his audio in videos isn't as good as your audio but it matches his voice at least. #AccidentalBadVideoDubbing</comment>


Let's talk openly about depression - <AUTHOR> http://www.gustavoveloso.com/2016/05/29/lets-talk-openly-about-depression/ <comment><USER2> As someone who does the tech 9-5, I've found it difficult to make small talk/form deeper relationships with people outside of tech. Conversations often tend to die off after the initial "What do you do? Oh that's cool..." or "About that weather we've been having..." Any tips on expanding your network outside of tech?

<comment><USER3> Take a genuine interest in what others find passion in, and you'll find making friends is easier than you think.

A good start would be replacing "What do you do?" with "What do you love to do?" or "What are you passionate about?" :) Good luck!

<comment><USER4> I find the idea that once can just consciously decide to "take a genuine interest in" something to be _entirely_ alien. Is this something that most people are able to do? I can direct my attention toward something, but that doesn't make boring subjects interesting.

<comment><USER5> I've found that few things that people are passionate about are truly boring, especially to curious hacker types like myself.

The difficult part is to find that part of the subject, even if it's just a kernel, that triggers the interest you potentially have. This can take a while, sometimes. Perhaps reading up on how to interview people can help in this regard (it's helped me!).

In my case, but I suspect this is true for most humans, my 'genuine interest' activates once the 'human interest' angle, to put it vaguely, starts appearing. Probably because that's easier to relate to.

I hate talking about football, for example, but I've had wonderful conversations with football fans once they started sharing personal stories of things they experienced, adventures they had, or stories of how they used to go to games with their fathers, and how this was one of the few ways in which to connect with them, etc. In the process, I learned some interesting things about football too, but that wasn't really the point for me.

Over time some of these football fans became close friends of mine. We don't talk about football much nowadays, because it's clear that I find the topic mind-numbingly boring. But we _do_ still talk about dads, and that's very valuable.

<comment><USER6> For me, the thing that made it work was when I noticed that I could apply the same impulse that led me to spend an hour wandering on wikipedia and tvtropes. I noticed that I tended to mostly read about history, so in conversations I started to ask people thinks that would get them to tell me the story of how they got interested in something or to tell some piece of the subject's history.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Checkout this site: [http://devpressed.com/](http://devpressed.com/)

And this excellent talk: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa- Mc2KSk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFIa-Mc2KSk)

<comment><USER8> I got really excited by this devpressed site.

I have Asperger's. Plus PTSD from various stuff that happened as a result of that.

So the idea of a safe place to share my strengths (and weaknesses) and try to find a job that doesn't stress me out was really exciteding. So I fired up Tor[2] and tried to register.

Then the confirmation email never name. I tried resending. Set a timer. Wait 15 minutes. Try not to perseverate.

I only have two emails - my main, plus a very old hotmail account which has now been morphed into an Outlook addy. Outlook has a pretty rich feature set, including aliases[1]. So I thought I'd try that.

"There's a temporary problem with the service. Please try again. If you continue to get this message, try again later".

I go through the process again on Outlook. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Try not to perseverate.

I guess I could use my personal email (my first name at my last name dot com), but frankly part of why I was excited about registering.

Maybe the issue is I did the initial account registration over Tor. Or maybe I'm just particuarly unlucky today.

All I know is my rational brain quietly whisper "Oh, just go back later, it's probably some server side bug", and my emotional brain yells back... other things.

I guess I could sign in with my Twitter, but if you'd been through what I've been through, you'd have trouble trusting people too. That's how I got into privacy and security work... feeling like I had a secret, and I needed to protect it.

[1] [http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-alias- account](http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/add-alias-account) [2] Yeah, a VPN is probably sufficient but lately I'm interested in how much of the web is closed off to Tor users due to crazy captchas and other gotchas.

<comment><USER9> >> In the event of a critical issue or urgent matter affecting this site, please contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com

[http://devpressed.com/about](http://devpressed.com/about)

<comment><USER8> Thanks for pointing this out! I sent an email.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The 3 P's mentioned by the author are some of the most classic human pit falls into mental paralysis.

>1\. Personalization – the believe that we are at fault. This is the lesson that not everything that happens to us happens because of us.

"Small-minded people blame others. Average people blame themselves. The wise see all blame as foolishness."

-Epictetus

>2\. Pervasiveness – the belief that an event will affect all areas of your life

"Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream."

-Lao Tzu

>3\. Permanence – the belief that the sorrow will last forever

"A student went to his meditation teacher and said, "My meditation is horrible! I feel so distracted, or my legs ache, or I'm constantly falling asleep. It's just horrible!"

"It will pass," the teacher said matter-of-factly.

A week later, the student came back to his teacher. "My meditation is wonderful! I feel so aware, so peaceful, so alive! It's just wonderful!"

"It will pass," the teacher replied matter-of-factly."

-old Zen tale

</comment><comment><USER11> If you have depression combined with ADD, OCD, Autism or ME/CFS, then you might want to look up "methylation" on the internet. Genetic testing can show if you have a defect in your methylation pathways, which can lead to these disorders, and to depression.

Good starting point: [http://geneticgenie.org/](http://geneticgenie.org/)

They even have an implementation of methylation analysis on this website.

<comment><USER12> Do you have a reliable cite for this please?

<comment><USER13> Genetic Genie is setting off a lot of bogosity warning bells in my head.

Yes, epigenetic methylation is associated with increased risk for all sorts of chronic illnesses. And, yes, oxidative stress influences heritable methylation. At the same time, the site appears to be peddling its own brand of alternative medicine woo and affiliate links.

<comment><USER11> Check this out:

[http://geneticgenie.org/blog/2013/02/01/think-supporting- met...](http://geneticgenie.org/blog/2013/02/01/think-supporting-methylation- is-an-alternative-health-fad/)

<comment><USER13> Yes, and? The entire website stinks of snake oil.

The AJHG paper they cite to is talking about folate and methylation in the context of fetal abnormalities. This is a whole different beast from feeding adults B12 vitamins and hoping for the best.

<comment><USER11> > and hoping for the best

Well you are supposed to do a blood test for the metabolites that occur in the methylation pathway, to see if the cycle is running correctly. Not sure if that is mentioned on this particular site, but this is what people are doing for example on this ME/CFS forum [1]

> The entire website stinks of snake oil

You could still be right about this (or not), of course. I'd also like to see some clinical trials of this approach.

[1] [http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/methylation...](http://forums.phoenixrising.me/index.php?threads/methylation- pathways-panel.4711/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Living for your dream isn't a walk in the park, so it's important to build up a network of people you trust and can talk to. Anyone that wants to talk about entrepreneurship, building, whatever and depression just hit me up online or available for coffee whenever in SF. Contact info in my profile. Reach out. :)

<comment><USER14> Does private messaging on HN require some amount of karma or is it simply not supported?

<comment><USER3> Not supported. I have DMs on Twitter, Facebook, Baqqer, and SMS though!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> It is quite a coincidence that this topic popped up on HN. On my way into work this morning, I was listening to This American Life, in particular act 2 of this episode [0]. It basically follows the awkwardness of two dads trying to form a friendship in Austin.

I was thinking why is it so hard for one man to form a friendship with another. Personally, I have found it difficult to form a friendship with other men outside of work or of school. Now that I am about to turn 46yrs old, I can count on one hand the number of guys I can consider a good friend. The rest are either workmates or schoolmates.

Social contact is not the silver bullet to depression, but I believe that it helps a lot.

[0] - [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/587/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio- archives/episode/587/the-perils-of-intimacy)

</comment><comment><USER16> Three P's for me: Pasolini, Pertini, Pippo. EDIT: if you are not italian: knowledge, coherence and craziness.

</comment><comment><USER17> >Personalization – the believe that we are at fault

Yes, guilt is the means by which so much bad stuff gets installed in our minds. Ideas that get passed easily from mind to mind regardless of truth content are called _memes_. I propose the term _remes_ for ideas that get _recalled_ easily in an individual's mind. These get rehearsed more frequently than other ideas regardless of their truth content and so they persist; they achieve this by generating guilt.

</comment><comment><USER18> I agree with the sentiment, but this whole Change Through Piecemeal concept for these sorts of things cab be discussed so much more breadth. Let's talk about mental health with a focus on distancing the concept of 'othering' from our heuristics instead, please.

</comment><comment><USER19> Be Chinese.

<comment><USER20> Thoughts can be your own worst enemy if left uncontrolled. I have heard psychiatrists agree when a patient states that they cannot control them. Totally false. The thing about depression is simply that feelings are the hardest thing anyone will ever try to control in their own lives. Modern psychiatry is stupid if it thinks anything is solved with medication. Then you have bad memories. Those can be replaced if you learn to not only control your thoughts, but also stop using the word victim in it's entirety.</comment></comment>


Show HN: React on Rails (isomorphic JS React framework) - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-rails

<comment><USER2> This is very confusing for Ruby developers for more than one reason:

\- The name implies this has something to do with Ruby on Rails while it has nothing to do with Ruby on Rails.

\- The repo name is react-rails, which is identical to the official gem[0] a lot of Ruby on Rails developers use to include React in their Rails projects.

0 - [https://github.com/reactjs/react-rails](https://github.com/reactjs/react- rails)

<comment><AUTHOR> Fair enough, I've edited the topic name to clarify, thanks for your feedback!

</comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> Also see the starterkit: [https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-rails- starterkit](https://github.com/elierotenberg/react-rails-starterkit)

</comment><comment><USER3> how/why would I combine this with Ruby-on-Rails?

<comment><AUTHOR> Despite the name, it has nothing to do with Ruby-on-Rails. The name, coined by @Vjeux, is more about the purpose: provide a full-stack, batteries included framework for making apps with React. It embraces the React core principles all the way, from the data backend all the way up.</comment></comment>


IMacs, Mac Pros, and laptops - <AUTHOR> http://www.marco.org/2011/05/04/imac-vs-mac-pro-vs-macbook-pro <comment><USER2> I think this analysis is probably correct for many people. However, the 27" iMac can now be used as a pretty terrific monitor when it's outlived its current lifespan. Considering the equivalent Apple display costs about $1000 new, that makes the iMac a great bargain when I upgrade to a new laptop in a few years.

</comment><comment><USER3> The one thing he didn't mention is Thunderbolt, and I think that it completely changes the iMac. Without it, you basically had the choice between SSDs, which were fast, and hard drives, which actually had enough space to store your stuff. If you are a photographer or do video, an SSD isn't going to cut it. Now, you can have the internal SSD while using an external Thunderbolt drive (once they show up) for actual storage.

However, I'd still probably want to open it up and install the SSD myself. Apple's SSD is too expensive, all that's needed for OS + apps is 64 GB. $500 is way too much.

<comment><USER4> I hope external Thunderbolt SSD's will keep much of the same performance characteristics as the internal SATA ones, but there's no way to know that until there actually are some thunderbolt devices :). Having a good performing external SSD would be pretty sweet, as it could be a painless and relatively cheap way of upgrading your iMac.

It comes down to how much overhead you get if you go over Thunderbolt, and how good the Thunderbolt -> SATA chips will be.</comment></comment>


The Fermi Paradox - <AUTHOR> http://waitbutwhy.com/2014/05/fermi-paradox.html <comment><USER2> The "we are the first" argument seemed less convincing than it could have been. A better argument from that perspective is the observation that Type III civilizations expand at an alarming rate. Whatever the motivation for expansion[1], basic simulations and back of the envelope calculations show that even with technology we could imagine building in the not so distant future, humans could expand into the cosmos at >0.9c. We must assume the same of ET.

Now information only reaches us at the speed of light; we are only capable of looking for ET in our own past light cone. That means that any Type I or Type II civilization like us should _expect_ to see an empty sky for most of their existence, until all of a sudden the most distant stars go dim (Dyson sphere, or whatever energy capturing device). And the darkness spreads in a wavefront travelling at _almost_ the speed of light, until it hits and ... the unpredictable happens.

We see an empty sky because if the sky wasn't empty, the planet we call Earth and our Sun would already be consumed by some extraterrestrial Type III civilization and Fermi would never have existed.

[1] An inflationary universe provides incentive for a hypothetical Type III civilization to spread throughout the cosmos as quickly as possible, as idle time means regions of the universe becoming permanently inaccessible. Or maybe just resource competition and a desire for some elements of a population to remain on the frontier.

<comment><USER3> This model assumes that interstellar travel is profitable. There is no evidence that this is the case, even if we had Star Trek technology.

If it isn't profitable, then it turns into a drain on the home planet. That isn't sustainable.

<comment><USER4> Curious: What would make interstellar travel not possible? Do you mean for humans or machines as well?

<comment><USER5> At scale it would not only have to be technologically possible but also economically feasible. If you can't afford it you can't do it even if you have the tech.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article does a good job of covering a lot of different ideas on this paradox. I have a problem with the idea of "big numbers" in it though, like where it implies 500 billion billion is nearly infinite, or that one-in-a- billion is a freak occurrence. There is a saying that if enough monkeys pound on a keyboard, one will type Hamlet. This would take a lot of monkeys. If we take the odds of hitting one character to be 1 in 40 (which doesn't account for properly hitting the shift key to make a capital), factoring in the 130,000 letters in Hamlet (according to Wikipedia), we get the odds of a monkey typing it at 6x10^208267. This number comes from 40 keys and 130,000 letters. How about when we start taking molecular numbers of items (6x10^23) and start raising that to a large power? I don't think it is a given that the number of planets out there infer there should be other life.

<comment><USER7> We can't calculate the probability of life arising though because even if we did know how it arose here—which we don't exactly—we don't know all the possible different ways it can arise, which may or may not also be a number raised to a large power.

<comment><USER6> That is a good point. I agree with you. And people do have suggestions as to how life can be more probable than naively expected. But this answers the question why there is life at all as opposed to why we don't see more of it.

My bias is that life is highly improbable and that we will not find any other life in our universe. But I also think it is no miracle that we exist, as I will describe. Given that I am trying to say this in one paragraph, it may not sound well justified, but it is how I view the problem. I'll start with Schrodinger's cat. A cat is in a box with some radioactive source that can decay and kill the cat. You can ask if the cat is alive or dead - and the answer is both. I will ignore the next part (Schrodinger's whole point) about what happens when the human observes it. There are different interpretations about why the human thinks the cat is definitely in one of the two states as opposed to both. This has to do with the human's observation and is not important for now. The point is that the cat is in both states. The universe can be in multiple states, some with life on earth and some without. Every possible state that can exist, does. So no matter how improbable we are, we will exist in some version of the universe. And there would be lots of other life too, just maybe not in our version of the universe. So the probability of life existing doesn't impact whether or not we should exist, but it does impact whether or not we see other life. I don't think we will. But as correctly pointed out, we don't know the answer to this right now.

<comment><USER5> > My bias is that life is highly improbable and that we will not find any > other life in our universe.

It's probable enough for you to be writing this. The only options are 0, one and many. We can rule out '0'. That leaves us to decide whether the chances of us being the only one are larger than the chances that we are one of many. Obviously the second one has more chance of being true the one where there is only one. But we like to consider ourselves to be special so most people will believe the 'one'. Just like the sun used to revolve around the earth, now we're essentially seeing the universe as revolving around us. The alternative, that we're not special is not compatible with a lot of our collective culture.

<comment><USER6> The point is that there are multiple universes, according to the quantum mechanics interpretation I subscribe to. So all of your options are true: 0, 1 and many. My position, which is admittedly no better than a guess, is that most universes by a far majority have 0. By virtue of me writing this, among other things, we live in a universe with at least 1. Again, my position would be that it is unlikely we have more than 1 in our universe.

What you are saying it true under the assumption there is a single universe.

<comment><USER8> I think you're trying to articulate is the Anthropic principle [1].

It basically states that the probability that "some" life exists is 1.

I'm not sure what the name of this next one is, but I believe it's a widely defended scientific principle that we're "typical" in some sense. This principle gets hard to justify cosmologically (it reduces to Occam's Razor locally), but it makes sense to me. It rejects very clearly some quirks like the Bolztmann Brain [2] argument.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle)

[2] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think Authors is way way optimistic with these numbers:

"Let's imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like planets develop life" and "

"And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth"

Why 1% and not 10^-10%?

<comment><USER10> Agreed. It's a common error to think that the smallest fraction of something is 1%.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> The estimates of stars seem reasonable; the estimates of Earth seem a bit ill- defined. (The study he links to discuses Earth-size planets, but there are many other factors that go into Earth's suitability for life.) The real issue though is in the "speculative" part:

> Let's imagine that after billions of years in existence, 1% of Earth-like > planets develop life... And imagine that on 1% of those planets, the life > advances to an intelligent level like it did here on Earth. "

1% sounds like a small number, but it's a bit ridiculous to just throw it out there and assume it's reasonable. It's a little bit like when a startup does a top-down estimate of revenue - "If we only capture 1% of the e-commerce market, we'll be worth billions!"

I think if you do a "bottom-up" style analysis of the likelihood of atoms forming a replicating growing organism, or that organism evolving to think intelligently, you would get a far smaller number, say in the range of 0.00001% to 10^-20 for each one.

</comment><comment><USER12> I've always wondered at what distance it would be impossible for current technology to detect life on earth.

<comment><USER2> A very short distance. IIRC something like 20 or so light years, but I'm having trouble finding the citation. That's for radio waves (and the number is getting smaller as the technology is getting better -- EM radiation blasted into the universe is considered waste by hardware engineers).

For direct detection of life, that's still an open question. I remember a poster done by a grad student who looked at whether life would be detectable from the Moon, looking at the Earth. This was tested with data from one of the outer solar system probes which did a lunar flyby on its way out (Cassini?). The result, IIRC, was inconclusive -- you could see signs of life, but not anything that was absolutely definitive proof.

Indirect evidence might be provided by spectra of the atmosphere observed via solar transit. A biome is likely to have different spectra than would be predicted by inorganic atmospheric physics. Still, that's making some assumptions about what extraterrestrial life would be like, and only only visible along the elliptic plane.

<comment><USER13> The chemical composition of Earth's atmosphere (21% O2) is so far away from a long term chemical equilibrium, that any current astrobiologist would interpret it as a sign of planetary scale life. (And correctly so: the oxygen was produced by life.)

So life on Earth is pretty visible from the other planets in our solar system.

And spectroscopy to observe the composition of atmospheres of planets orbiting the nearest stars will probably happen in not-too-distant future.

<comment><USER2> Meh, it's a long way from saying that "we don't know how the O2 could have been produced except by life" to "the O2 was produced by life." Just look at the current debate about methane on Mars.

<comment><USER13> In a 1993 article, Carl Sagan considered the atmospheric oxygen content "at least suggestive of biology" (Conclusions, 3rd paragraph).

[http://www-pw.physics.uiowa.edu/~dag/publications/1993_ASear...](http://www- pw.physics.uiowa.edu/~dag/publications/1993_ASearchForLifeOnEarthFromTheGalileoSpacecraft_NATURE.pdf)

<comment><USER2> Am I supposed to disagree with that? High atmospheric oxygen content is suggestive of biology. So is seasonal blooms of methane on a planet like Mars. Is that suggestive that there is life on Mars? Yes! Can we definitively infer that there is presently life on Mars? Not yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I think the biggest fallacy in this rationalization is when it is assumed that advanced civilizations would want to expand like yeast; consuming everything, building dyson spheres... Why would they want that much energy, and why extract it from the sun? Trying to picture myself as one of these superlifeforms, I think would like to have the sun visible... For sunbathing and sh __ __... plants to grow etc... Maybe they have built little fusion reactors wherever they need energy?

<comment><USER15> The SUN is visible everywhere within a Dyson sphere; it's the STARS that you can't see any more. The idea isn't that a civilization wants to do this; the idea is that it needs that much energy to continue with whatever industrial or infrastructure processes it requires to support a very large population. Dyson reasoned, we need steadily increasing amounts of energy input to support what we are doing; if the trend continues, what's the limit? (Typical physicist question, no?) The limit is to harvest all the energy emitted from your star. The only way to do that is to build a spherical collector, so that every photon can be captured. Then where do you live? On the sphere's inner surface. Of what material could you build a stable sphere one AU in radius? Where would that bulk of material come from and how be processed and positioned? How would you provide gravity on its inner surface? We have no fucking idea -- but we are not a Type-whatever civilization.

<comment><USER16> I always thought that was a primitive notion. We can build the sphere, but not control the star? Imagine a caveman - "Limit to civilization when all energy from campfire captured - most people warm, most meat cooked" Clearly one can do better than a campfire.

Instead, imagine harvesting energy from the star asymmetrically - from flares or from the inside out. Or get your energy from a neighboring star. Or make your own star. Or whatever a Type-whatever civilization decides to do.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> I am surprised a more common argument was not mentioned: other life exists but the laws of physics limit our interaction. Maybe there is undiscovered physics like wormholes or time travel, or maybe there isn't and the speed of light really is a fundamental limit that cannot be surpassed. In that case, no matter how advanced another civilization becomes, they still can't violate natural law and are thus unable to reach us.

<comment><USER18> The laws of any potential biology and the messiness of the world could together effectively limit a civilization's energy usage to much lower than indicated by the easily deducible laws of physic (the explicit laws of physics might limit the output of an internal combustion engine to a certain but the effective maximum winds up less than that. Human biological systems experience serious damage by being weightless for significant periods, etc).

I only recently realized that this "paradox" looking at the possibility not of "earth advanced" civilization but supposed advanced civilizations that would put out much more energy than humans put out.

The whole thing seems to rest on false-extrapolations of mid 20th century hard-science fiction authors. Our Western Civilization has experienced an exponential growth of some things, has expanded it's "frontiers" quickly in a variety of ways, conquering the rest of the globe and then labeling space "the final frontier".

But all this has been low-hanging fruit. We're reaching the end of population expansion, space is fundamentally hostile to human life in a way that would take tremendous progress to overcome and we're facing longer term consequences of the rapid expansions we have achieved (global warming is just one of the consequences). If humans survive this, we'll have to have somehow achieve a steady-state for energy consumption and related things. But once we do achieve that steady state, why would we want or need to suddenly start using the energy of an entire star (after the thousand years of scientific progress we'd need to under how to do that)?

<comment><USER19> Humans can build large sealed cities on the Earth-facing side of the Moon using solar-propelled remote-controlled "drone" technology. The response time is only about 1 or 2 seconds so the human operators on Earth wouldn't need the equipment to have much of its own AI (unlike later on when humans repeat the process on Mars). Once enough such specialized machinery is on the Moon, entire "cities" the size of an apartment building could be built, funded in the same way Ordos in China was. The hard part would be experimenting with different biochemical processes afterwards in each city so one of them could provide enough oxygen, water, and food for humans who'd arrive much later on.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about the theory that we are the way super-civilization spreads?

If physical space travel is extremely expensive (as it should be, considering the distance), then may be it is better to send a signal that would trigger creation of life (in our case on Earth).

Then when Earth civilization is advanced enough, it would be able to receive complete boot sequence and then fully advanced alien civilization would be replicated on Earth.

<comment><USER15> ... or, how about the hypothesis that we were intended to be a seed package (a.k.a. "biological rootkit") but due to a bug in the programming, we failed to develop properly. Just a mistake playing itself out...

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> Possibility 5) There's only one instance of higher-intelligent life—a "superpredator" civilization (like humans are here on Earth)—who is far more advanced than everyone else and keeps it that way by exterminating any intelligent civilization once they get past a certain level.

If we're the most advanced civilization right now, that will be us in a few million years. We're kind of dicks.

<comment><USER22> Exciting for a movie plot I guess. But, what could they win from exterminating another inferior intelligence? By your context, they are already inferior, and thus, no threat to the apex civilization.

<comment><USER23> It's been suggested by Robin Hanson (who coined the name "Great Filter") that an ethical super-civ would see a galactic war with another super-civ as the worst thing possible, and so wipe out other civs to stop that worst thing possible,

I don't buy it, FWIW, because "ethical" doesn't overlap with "wipe out all other life" in my book. (Although you could certainly, say, have some system that stops any civ from leaving their planet by dropping rocks on them each time they launch something into orbit.)

But you can search Hanson's blog for more talk about this if you want to see more discussion.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> In that great expanse and time, there may also have been ample time for civilizations to rise, then fall. We might have just missed them on such grand scales. Nobody says we'll be hanging around for a billion years trying to communicate with others... if we even last that long.

</comment><comment><USER25> We are not even listening hard. SETI covers an incredibly tiny range of possible spectrum and possibilities of intelligent life. Are there any other attempts to find alien communication via data mining?

If I were a galactic artist, I would use pulsars to modulate their signals and create a statue that broadcasts the existence of life.

[http://www.technology.org/2013/11/20/extraterrestrial- civili...](http://www.technology.org/2013/11/20/extraterrestrial- civilizations-modulate-pulsar-signals/)

</comment><comment><USER26> I personally find the "we are first" solution to be the scariest scenario. We are not suited for the responsibility of being the only intelligent life in the universe.

<comment><USER27> What responsibility? I can see absolutely zero responsibility attached to that scenario.

Humans also may be the most responsible intelligent life that ever exists in the universe. What's the basis to judge such things to begin with?

There's an exceptionally low probability that human survival has any bearing on whether other intelligent life comes to exist (in the we're first scenario). Being first bears no responsibility because future life in the galaxy or universe is not inherently dependent on what we do.

<comment><USER22> I guess parent was implying an inherent responsibility about being the first intelligence, or conciousness.

As such, should we nurture, protect, and by all means spread the intelligence sickness? I'd think yes.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I don't see why a "Great Filter" is needed to justify there being no other highly evolved lifeforms - all it needs is for there to need to be a reasonably large number of key evolutionary steps and environmental conditions with a sufficiently low probability. Multiply those and you end up with some pretty tiny chances of observing life as we know it.

<comment><USER29> I had the same thought and agree with what you wrote. But when you think about this set of evolutionary steps you still end up with the same scenarios: you are rare, you are first, you are fucked. So in that regard, you can subsume all of these steps into a filter.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Would discovering the fossils of some complex species on Mars (or any where else in the solar system) be any worse for getting past the great filter then the discovery of fossils of dinosours on earth. We allready know that mass extinction events on Earth are possible, and should expect them to occur on other planents with life too

</comment><comment><USER31> The idea that maybe aliens visited before humans could record what they experienced struck me. Even if they did record it, we wouldn't believe it. Need proof? See the Bible or virtually any other ancient religious text. Our modern society believes if we can't prove it today, it didn't happen.

</comment><comment><USER32> I think they sort of cover this but here is my simple explanation. Think about how many slugs there are on Earth. How many of them have never seen a human? If we are slugs in comparison to advanced beings that have a billion years of evolution on us then it is no surprise we have not seen them.

</comment><comment><USER33> How about this possibility: the Great Filter is now! We entered it, perhaps, when we developed sufficient collective nuclear weapons capability to wipe out most or all human life; we won't be out of it until the major threats our civilization poses to the biosphere have been resolved.

<comment><USER34> A lot of people consider nuclear annihilation a big threat but I'm not too worried about tbh. I mean if you think about it, every major player has got a trigger to end all life at any given point, doesn't it seem reasonable that at some point you invest a lot of money into systems that can safeguard and prevent this type of catastrophe. I know a lot of people may consider the governments dangerous and selfish but they aren't stupid, major players have definitely got systems in place to neutralise these threats.

At least they do in my optimistic viewpoint.

<comment><USER35> I would like to share your optimism. But then I read about things like the US nuclear launch codes being set to 00000000 for quite a few years, or an incident when survival versus Armageddon depended on the judgment of one man [1], and I have to conclude that human governments should not be in possession of nuclear weapons.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER36> My solution to the Fermi Paradox: Who the hell knows, who the hell _can_ know, when all we have is a sample size of 1 to extrapolate from. The solutions to the FP seem to be representative of the personal beliefs of whomever is discussing it.

<comment><USER37> Of course no one can now _right now_ , it's not one of these things that can be solved by theoretical work alone. At some point - assuming we don't go extinct before reaching it - we _will_ know.

But it's still open to useful speculation, as there might be something we still need to consider in order to avoid said extinction.

The Fermi Paradox is one of the more thought-provoking signs that something might be amiss (at least in our part of the galaxy), and especially because our culture is predisposed to _not_ take anything happening on the interstellar stage very seriously this provides an impetus for reflection that would otherwise not happen.

One of the most benign (but ultimately depressing) possibilities is that biogenesis is somehow extremely unlikely. There is no reason to assume this is true, given that we know even the more complex building blocks of life are actually very prevalent throughout the universe - but it may still be statistically unlikely that cells form from them. On the footsteps of that possibility follows the hypothesis that technological intelligence is rare. Again, that's not exactly in line with what we can observe on Earth, but it might still be the case.

Most of the other options should be positively troubling, though.

<comment><USER36> "The Fermi Paradox is one of the more thought-provoking signs that something might be amiss (at least in our part of the galaxy), and especially because our culture is predisposed to not take anything happening on the interstellar stage very seriously this provides an impetus for reflection that would otherwise not happen."

A hypothetical observer in North America, circa 1500, would have no idea that Asia and Europe existed. Perhaps we're not too far from some interstellar space empire, but since they use some exotic means of FTL communication, we can't detect them?

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure how your argument applies to what you cited of my post, but you are not wrong. You don't even need to consider exotic FTL communication, it could just be low-power directional radio traffic.

In fact, if a full clone of Earth with exactly the same culture and technology as ours was located just a dozen light years from here, chances are we would not be able to detect that civilization.

The media is always talking about our expanding radio sphere, but in reality this signal gets very weak and jumbled, very fast, with increasing distance. The means all the misinformed derps who believe aliens are coming to take our resources (a group which includes Stephen Hawking for some reason) can sleep pretty well at night knowing that we have not really advertised our existence yet.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Thanks for letting me find out about this article and this whole awesome website!

</comment><comment><USER39> i love this puzzle. here are some theories:

1\. simulation argument

2\. civilizations have a high or inevitable chance to self destruct after <1M years of language

3\. civilizations transcend our observable universe after <1m years [1]

4\. due to the single observer problem, humans fail to grok some very important feature of larger scale space that prevents detection/increases isolation

[1] [http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html](http://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html)

<comment><USER40> 4 seems likeliest. Interstellar colonization is simply impossible because of the vastness of the distance that must be covered. It requires more energy than can be summoned to get a useful amount of hardware across multiple lightyears.

<comment><USER41> At a certain point, if you can make a self-replicating machine, with harvested solar energy for travel, you would expect that machine's descendants to slowly get everywhere intended.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> Think of something like the "Human Brain Project" [1] scaled to what it could become after evolving/improving/growing for 3.2 billion years..

[1] humanbrainproject.eu

</comment><comment><USER25> I'm a bit surprised nobody mentioned AI-s taking over as the Great Filter. I'm sure every technical civilization attempts to do that because it's very tempting to accelerate your intelligence by computation.

I've also read an interesting article that why probably machine life is more abundant than biological: [http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/robot- universe-d...](http://www.popularmechanics.com/how-to/blog/robot-universe- dominant-lifeform-17549081)

<comment><USER42> If AIs were taking over left and right we'd still expect to see some kind of evidence of their existence. Since they'd only be replacing biological civilizations I don't think it would count as the Great Filter, not in the context of Fermi's Paradox at least, as you'd end up with roughly the same number of technologically capable civilizations after the filter.

<comment><USER25> We can't comprehend intelligence million times beyond us, so speculating about their intention is very wild. Who knows, maybe an universal law of super- intelligence is to keep a low profile.

<comment><USER22> Yes, but I like my sci-fi like I like my Minecraft worlds. With at least a tiny layer of solid bedrock.

If you're going to propose a crazy but interesting possibility, you cannot pull the 'can't speculate, they're to superior' card. You already speculate by sharing the idea!

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER43> We might be very close to finding life on Mars. If we did and it was different than us that would answer a lot of questions.

</comment><comment><USER44> when the question is: "where are they?" and the answer is: "there is nobody here." then all long living civilisations must have left. so we should answer the question "why did they leave?"

<comment><USER34> Or maybe the long living civilisations never existed, or we aren't knocking on the right doors, or in the right areas?

</comment></comment><comment><USER45> Out of all those advanced civilizations in the universe, what fraction use electromagnetic radiation for communication? We are like ants waiting for other civilizations to communicate with us using pheromones.

<comment><USER23> There are humans that try to talk with ants (and bees, and dolphins) using those creatures' own methods. Unless there were strongly-enforced no-contact laws, then _some_ alien researcher would want to inspect those Terrans and see if we can talk. Even if they are way smarter, they'll use that smarts to talk with us in a way we can understand.

</comment></comment><comment><USER46> Another possibility... there are plenty of civilisations within broadcasting distance from us that are all listening but not broadcasting for fear of predatory civilisations.

<comment><USER47> that exact possibility was listed in the article.

<comment><USER46> That's funny! I read the article and then had that thought five minutes later and thought I'd come up with it. Thanks for pointing that out :)

<comment><USER48> I often wonder how many of my opinions derive from this same mistaken originality... Quite scary, actually.</comment></comment></comment></comment>