Shogun's a milestone in my reading history - it's so extraordinarily engrossing. It deflated me more than any other book as I turned each of the final, waning pages because I didn't want to leave its world behind.
I was briefly elated to see there are "sequels" but just as quickly disappointed to learn they're set centuries apart; it ended up feeling like I was clinging to the only album ever made by an amazing band. I've yet to read the other books in the saga, but I should circle back and fix that.
I don't love it (yet). It's probably a combo of my Windows background, my ignorance of MacOS tricks, and actual limitations/flaws.
* Cmd+~ from a fullscreen window does nothing, and non-full windows of the app cycle only among each other. If I have fullscreen windows anywhere in my setup, it breaks my flow and (afaik) makes me mouse to the Window menu. I feel like MacOS's fullscreen paradigm is more to blame here, because it violates a range of other behaviors I'd expect.
* Unlike cmd+tab, cmd+~ doesn't give me a visual overview of my windows (how many? what order?). I can see why, since cmd+tab shows only icons and app names, which isn't enough to differentiate between windows of the same app (unlike alt+tab on Windows, which shows thumbnails, paths, page titles, etc.
* Cmd+~ also cycles in a static order, not most recently used. This feels like fallout from the second point, in that if you're not showing thumbnails it could get confusing.
The first one in particular took me a bit of time to realize; before I did, it just felt broken and made me not rely on cmd+~ at all.
You’re totally right that fullscreen breaks cmd ~. It also breaks cmd tab in unexpected ways.
You’re also right about lack of visual feedback, which is disappointing given the various stuff that I think is still currently branded Mission Control, where obviously the fundamentals are already there.
Cmd ~ isn’t statically ordered though, it’s either application specific or based on recent use in a weird (easy to confuse) heuristic. It follows a similar (maybe identical?) pattern to recent use for cmd tab, and even app switching on iOS.
To your third point, is this a setting somewhere? I tested before I posted w/ 4 Brave windows, but they stay in the same order.
Makes sense, since cmd+~ immediately switches on key down to the next window; cmd+tab (like alt+tab in Win) lets you keep the selection open and choose an out-of-order app, which alters the MRU. How would you do that here? The only way I've affected it is creating/killing windows at points in the cycle. Using cmd+shift+~ for me just goes backward in the same static order.
Some kind of interaction with the window usually (again can be app specific) … reverses the order to the window where this sequence started, then may or may not continue the original order.
I’ve seen this most consistently in apps where I commonly have too many windows open, VSCode iTerm and Chrome being the worst offenders. Edit: my worst offenders, the apps don’t do anything unusual here.
Coming to MacOS from Windows (M1 line made me switch) Rectangle provided some nice window management utility that felt more Windows-like (at least for moving windows between monitors and snapping to each side).
Never really liked the multiple desktop model
Same here, mostly. My laptop since 2015 has been a MBP, so I've had plenty of MacOS experience, but day to day has always been 90/10 Windows. Now that I have the M1 I'm trying to use it daily, so the little grievances are more apparent (but I also have more motivation to solve them).
I've always felt like multiple desktops (on all 3 OSes) have untapped potential, but like you its never worked for me. But hope springs eternal - I try it again every now and then. I'd like to hear more about how some people use it.
Heard good things about Rectangle. I'll check it out.
Sure, and I'm positive you knew which three I meant when I said it: the three that together probably comprise 4 nines of overall desktop use, and which are compared all over this thread.
UX does differ somewhat between, Linux distros & WMs (and Chrome OS, to the extent you consider it Linux proper), and between releases of all three OSes; but within families they maintain broad continuity. I use multiple variants - again daily - and my point stands that all have untapped potential.
But I doubt you supposed otherwise, nor honestly think I'm unaware of other OSes... so why take the time to ask? Pedantry? Did I slight an OS you favor?
I use all 3 OSes ~daily and have nits w/ all of them. This one's minor even as it stands, but if I can make it "click" - at least for MacOS-specific workflows - I'd love to. Each OS shines the best if I adapt to its idioms (vs. trying to make Mac feel like Win, etc.).
It seems clear that a dev team could whip up a product that tested well (using folks in office, family members, friends, etc.); was trained with datasets that - for whatever reasons - weren't sufficiently varied; and hit some mark of success and pushed it out the door to refine the rest later. It also seems clear that the resulting product could do poorly when recognizing black skin, due not to ill intent but lack of polish with the resources on hand.
But something I always wonder when accusations like "white supremacy" are thrown around: is it falsifiable? What evidence would dissuade you from that?
- What if both ends of the spectrum do poorly and extremely pale people have problems, too?
- What if the threshold is dark black and lighter-skinned black people, Asians, Middle Easterners and other non-white people are able to use it successfully?
- What if only a narrow band of light levels work, making it clear their testing range was generally too narrow, not just in skin color?
- What if they took care to incorporate black models in testing, but the photo quality (and their own in-house cameras and lighting) overestimated the quality of most home users'?
And what of the myriad other things that were done poorly in the software: limited OS support, bugs, excessive memory usage, overall intrusiveness, browser limitations, disallowed mobile devices, lack of multi-monitor support? Do they likewise arise from systematic oppression of some group? What if we dig in and find that white people are more likely to use iPads, Linux, and multiple displays?
Most often these accusations flow in only one direction, and that all other flaws or problems are taken to be simply happenstance and noise. Certainly anything that impacts white people negatively will not be automatically seen as anti-white, although in a world with activist devs, such a result isn't incomprehensible.
Claims of white supremacy (among other accusations of character) are thus, to my mind, wildly speculative and carry a very heavy burden of proof.
This perception of the US as having a free-market economy, particularly in the area of healthcare, is curiously persistent.
Vast sums of money are spent lobbying to distort the market in favor of particular companies and industries. The FDA has long been accused of preventing key drugs from coming to market that are available in other countries. The patent system alone perpetuates medication monopolies over decades for fabricated reasons, keeping cheap generics out of people's hands. The tax system heavily favors employer-run plans (for reasons rooted in the WWII era) that encourage overspending, tie coverage to your employer, and distort the market in multiple, deep ways.
Medicare and Medicaid are huge. The chart in the FEE link below puts US gov per capita expenditures at 4th in the world.
The below Vox article, which is otherwise anti-free-market, concedes that generic insulin providers seem too daunted by secondary patents and "extreme regulatory complexity," both of which obviously run counter to a free market.
This isn't to say a free-market system would be a panacea of all complaints (systems dealing in scarce resources will never be perfect to all participants), but those complaints would be much different than those about the layers of bureaucracy, high government spending, low competition, high time-to-market for drugs, breathtaking lobbying efforts, and overwhelming tax complexity we have now.
Maybe you think you'd prefer single-payer to the present regime, but to characterize the latter as "free-market" sets up a false dichotomy. (Note that it could logically still be "underregulated," as you say, despite not being free - not that I would agree.)
We had a free market for drugs. So free and freely abused that it gave birth to modern journalism (muckraking) and the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906. For good reasons few yearn to return to those truly free times.
Thanks for the links - that's interesting to consider when weighing the tradeoffs of an FDA-less country. Of course, the FDA is only one part of the story, and conceding a need for its general existence in no way means that its current purview and methodologies don't need extensive revision.
In any case, my post above was about what is (and what to properly call it), not what ought to be.
The free market will always distort regulation to suit the elites that profit from those distortions. Either through government or monopolistic corporations.
As long as private property is enforced through the threat of violence these problems are not tractable. The only solution to regulatory distortion is the complete abolition of capital.
In the case of healthcare, nationalized single-payer system gets far enough for something so critical to our existence without requiring a complete restructuring of the economy.
I think his point about podcasts and other audio is on the money, but it undercuts his argument for VR:
> They have this Bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan.
In other words, audio is successful because it's used as a complement to what we're already doing, not an alternative to it. We can't quit our jobs to spend 10 hours in VR, but it's easy to imagine lightweight AR HUDs for everything from entertainment (e.g. impromptu podcast menus) to specialized on-the-job uses.
Seems like AR will require inherently lower friction and less trade-off with the real world.
I feel like AR would fit better inside of my company than VR. I imagine a day when we sit around a desk and create
"things" in a shared 3d space that we can all touch and interact with.
To be clear I am very much hoping AR can replace the white board.
Agreed there's some hyperbole as to the current state of things, but the ability for new entrants to pressure the old guard in an industry and in some cases put them out of business or relegate them to the margins is paramount. It's about the system and trajectory more than any point in time.
And GP is absolutely right about some of these: it's hard to imagine bigger competitors than the likes of Sears, Walmart, IBM, Microsoft, etc. who, even if they aren't literally dead, have absolutely had their mantles of increasing dominance ripped away, contrary to the doomsayers of the past. Even if GM adapts as you say, they'll be producing electric cars with modern design at competitive prices with better features than ever, precisely because they were forced to by the market. The goal isn't to undermine any company's longevity; it's to force every company to bow to customer pressure via competition. Old or new, it's a win if products get better and cheaper.
Uber and Lyft are getting more and more regulated
This is a common thread across every industry we can discuss, and to the extent that you're correct about the same players wielding power and wealth across eras and trends, lobbying and regulation play a massive role. It's fundamentally a critique of government power, not capitalism.
Same old stuff in new clothes, with the same cast of people running the show.
I'm curious: in what sense is Netflix the same people as the cable companies (or for that matter, movie studios)? They're directly competing in many ways, run by literally different people, with different employees requiring different skills, and competing in new and different markets around the world.
There's obviously no objective truth to whether pronouns apply retroactively; it's just social convention.
Clearly, it's polite to respect someone's wishes when talking to or about them, whether it's pronouns, nicknames, personal space, or umpteen other things. If you're introducing Chelsea to another friend, it seems only civil and natural to say "she [not he] was stationed at Fort Drum!"
However, I don't think a person can unilaterally require that the world around them retroactively change all references to a historical event, particularly when it renders some of those details nonsensical or wrong. History is written: documents were released by a person calling himself "Bradley Manning" and identifying as (and meeting biological criteria of) a male. Other aspects of the story -- from Manning's all-male combat team to his quarters in the USDB -- hinge on that fact. Manning's presence doesn't imply that the military unit was mixed-gender. One version reports the story as it was known to everyone involved; the other modifies it after the fact according to the unilateral wishes of the subject being reported on. That's not a good pattern, I don't think.
As an outsize example, if George W. Bush transitions to a female this year, the US will not celebrate that we've had our first female president.
I'm completely sympathetic to interpersonal civility, but empathy goes both ways; I think it's beyond the pale to expect society writ large to scramble, under penalty of being called bigots, to conform to what's frankly an unverifiable declaration of internal personal change on the order of a religious awakening (which oddly doesn't enjoy the same umbrella of unquestioned sanctimony).
I disagree with both GP and the immigration laws affecting these people, but the term "illegals" to describe them strikes me as an innocuous shorthand for "people of illegal immigration status." It carries no implicit judgment of the people or the laws; it just states the relationship of the former to the latter.
This trend of casual libel against others, claiming intent and meaning that you can't possibly know, is worrying.
The shorthand is a politically-charged term that was designed to frame, for the listener, the target being described and to remove sympathy for them as a human. It's not libel when the person's words can be proven, nor to describe the utterance of said words. It's an opinion upon words that were said, thus not libelous.
Prior to the 1880's, the US used to be a nation that accepted the many who would become the hands that raised America to its place on the world stage. Somehow, the spawn of those earlier waves think that they are the reason the US is great and seek to limit entrance of the minds and labor of others who come seeking that old dream of meritocracy.
"Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
"Undocumented workforce" is just as slanted. Their problem is not lost paperwork. It obscures the lack of steady demand for their labor, and their willful defiance of our efforts to guard our home.
Prior to the late 1800s, we still had an untapped frontier, and immigration was in our interest. It was never a principle we committed to at all costs, despite what one poet might have thought. Now our own huddled masses are splitting a pie that isn't growing, and immigration is not so beneficial that it makes up for the overpopulation it causes (because few people have been emigrating).
The pie. The pie... about that pie. Recognizing immigrants increases the tax base. Recognizing immigrants ensures better wages and changes the entire narrative. Come, work, share in our bounty and our responsibility to each other.
Increase in population relate to increases in infrastructure, housing, services, global workforce competitiveness, military capabilities, and a myriad of other indirect and direct supporting features of societies that fare well historically. Do more with more instead of thinking you can always do more with less.
Increases in demand for food, services, schools, etc grows the pie. Sure, at some point, demand needs to be able to keep pace. But the US is not at that point.
It's easier to use the steamroller of global goodwill described by the statue poem than it is to simply sharpen the blades of dominance. Eventually, there's no metal left to sharpen and nations of billions will route a nation of millions.
>Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
You know that's just a poem on a statue, right, and not actually codified in law?
This can only be accurate for people who want literally $0 to be taken for taxes, in any form, by any level of government... and yet still expect services to be rendered.
I don't know anyone like that, and I suspect they're in a tiny minority.
For my part, I'd consider those taxes to be theft when they are used for purposes other than a strict list of constitutionally mandated purposes. The other things are services I want to neither pay for nor receive.
Some examples: unemployment (ahem, now "Reemployment") tax, social security tax, welfare, domestic spying operations, Medicare/Medicaid, public education, the Affordable Care Act, much of our military spending, corporate bailouts, lots of alphabet agencies' budgets, etc.
Note that it's not freeloading; I don't want anyone to have them paid and/or provided for by government, including myself.
Many, many things exist in the world that don't exist in the constitution; it's a foundational body of law, not the entirety of the law.
As for not wanting something, but still being obligated to pay for it, there many transactions in the world where you have to pay for more than you want; no automaker will sell you a brand-new car with all of the seats missing, and very often when you go to a restaurant, even if you ask for some ingredient to be left out, you still pay full price for the meal.
That some of your taxes go to things you don't like does not mean you are free from paying for them.
The route to changing what your taxes go to is the political arena, not merely claiming that, because you don't like it, they're "theft".
The tax argument aside - my understanding is if the constitution doesn't provide for it, the federal government shouldn't be doing it.
10th amendment: The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
The libertarian view is that pretty much everything is fine as long as everyone involved is participating willingly.
Consider the ramifications: with voluntarism as nearly the only requirement, libertarianism is a substrate for communities to layer additional rules on top as befit their values: socialist communes, gun-free zones, drug markets, shared libraries, required weapons training, a Greek-style local democracy, whatever. Two communities can be diametrically opposed in their values, sharing only the common tenet that everyone participates voluntarily.
Of course it's impossible to pull off: can kids born in each community be considered voluntary participants? Can someone revoke their rights for the rest of their life with the stroke of a pen? How does someone traveling through these places even keep track of the laws (we see this with states already)? Lots of difficult/impossible/senseless questions arise. But it's a thought experiment: absent religious considerations, is there a more moral system that allowing everyone to voluntarily interact with others in only those ways that are mutually beneficial?
Those details aside, if allowing as many people to craft their life experiences as voluntarily as possible is of merit, investing great power in a central power governing over 300 million people is an extremely poor way to achieve it.
I was briefly elated to see there are "sequels" but just as quickly disappointed to learn they're set centuries apart; it ended up feeling like I was clinging to the only album ever made by an amazing band. I've yet to read the other books in the saga, but I should circle back and fix that.