Stop Ruining It

double pane with tabs would be handy so you could inspect or move files between two tabs. also, i'd really love two pane: filesystem and content viewer

If you are going to copy someone, copy from the best, I guess. But Microsoft managed fill their top-space¹ and not let enough space for the address to be properly displayed, so they need to hide information all the time.

The tabs on PowerShell are actually not a copy of Konsole. I guess that's why I always get annoyed by them on Windows, but not on Linux.

1 - There's actual less stuff than on KDE, if you don't count empty space.

I need clear, well defined data in the windows and a path.

You really cannot appreciate it until you experience it for a few weeks. It's that new car smell but all the time.

First flat design, now sluggish window redraws... Windows is getting retro hipster. Will 26H2 take away overlapping windows?

The same goes to some extent to anything with a web interface, for example Databricks.

No money in the “computer hobbyist” version of reality, but all the money in the world in the “everyone is a potential customer” version of reality.

I know exactly when it happened: when people stopped buying software.

When you had to walk into a store, pick up a box, read the bullet points on the back, and pay a decent chunk of cash for that program, you were incentivized to do at least a little research and ensure you were getting something useful. You would be stuck with it (and with exactly it in the form you bought it, without hope for an endless stream of updates).

That in turn incentivized software companies to make products that were worth real money to people and to care about their reputation.

Once everything because free (sorry, not free, ad-driven), that whole calculus went out the window. What it was replaced with has a lot of upsides. If every app on my phone cost me $50 with another $20 for every upgrade I've ever gotten, I surely couldn't afford half of them, and I'm in a better income bracket than much of the world.

But it has as a huge downside that it no longer centers the experience of individual humans with agency. Instead, users are treat as a sort of aggregate stream of fungible attention units. A software change that alienates a million users but garners you 1.1 new users is a net win.

Companies are longer trying to maximize users, they are trying to maximize usage. You exist only to be a drop in a bucket of liquid attention.

I know when. 2007 January 9. Steve Jobs announcing the iPhone.

Of course, but in the organisations I have experience of, I'd estimate that the 'bad actor' rate is very low - certainly a low-single-digit percentage. (I don't work in tech, BTW.)

> Disempowerment (is that a word?) is necessary. So necessary, that entire departments incorporate it as a large part of their mandate. HR, finance, QA...

I think we need to differentiate between different forms of disempowerment. For example, having a set budget to work within (i.e. the disempowerment that a finance department might generate) is structural in nature; and further may either be empowering if an individual or team has freedom to work within those constraints, or disempowering if the budget is too constrained, or changes unpredictably. In contrast, smart committed people having their ideas stamped on irrationally by a bad egotistical leader ultimately leads to disenchanted people who don't want to invest their energy any more.

> Maybe it's not always popular because some disempowerment is necessary, and framing the entire issue as a necessity for its removal and those who disagree as dysfunctional is needlessly inflammatory and counterproductive?

You're maybe not considering the background context of why such a discussion would even be taking place. These discussions spring out of leadership noting somehow (direct observations, discussions, workplace surveys, workplace transformation initiatives, etc.) that people in their organisations are less "empowered" than they (leadership) would wish (with perceived negative impacts) and therefore this is something they want to reverse. They're frustrated and confused: they think they're offering an environment for people to behave as they hope to see, and yet people aren't stepping through the apparently open door.

It's unpopular because asking why people are disempowered shifts the focus from the failings of individuals ("why is this employee not behaving as I expect them to; what stick or lever or additional incentive can I use to improve their behaviour?") to the failings of leadership ("what have I been doing wrong all along to result in this sorry state of affairs? Am I the cause?")

Even then, it depends. If I've already switched away from said product or service, I'm not coming back regardless of what they say.

Do you think any form of response is garnered to such proposals? No, naturally not. Hardware is wrought with pitfalls, production issues such as setting up, moving production... as you mention, being one of them.

Everything may be as molasses with hardware, but... it can be exceptionally profitable. Ah well. Rant over.

Early Sept 2015 JetBrains announced their initial subscription plan to SIGNIFICANT public pushback. Within two weeks they announced new terms (essentially their current hybrid subscription plan).

> The consumer goods conglomerate said it cut digital spending by more $100 million between April and June of 2017 and continued with the cuts at the same rate for the rest of the year.

>P&G, however, has not cut overall media spending. Funds have been reinvested to increase media reach, including in areas such as TV, audio and ecommerce media, a company spokeswoman told Reuters.

Looks like they still spent it in marketing and advertising just not digital spending. Also for sticky old well known consumer goods I’d wager sales drop slowly.

I cannot describe the disgust I feel seeing my employer's logo on a fucking F1 car.

Care to explain, to pick one advertiser, how Nestlé is primarily running a surveillance scheme when advertising one of their products, rather than trying to get me to buy more of it?

I look at my own work as a mixture of these two. Not interfering with the parts of the world and other people that are already providing their unique value, but also adding my own particular contribution as well.

btw it costs $9,999 according to google

edit: I couldn't help researching it, the picture looks like that because the device doesn't actually have analog needles, it has an lcd screen with analog needles rendered onto it. I guess they had to cut costs somewhere, because their customers are very budget-conscious. so probably an actual picture of the device looked unpalatable to the marketers, and they decided that the crappy photoshop would be fine.

It’s an environment designed for the exact opposite of your best intentions.

When I was younger, we had the Jetsons, the tail end of the space race, Star Trek, Carl Sagan, home computers took off, we witnessed increasing standards of living, politics were deescalating, the fall of the Berlin Wall and (effectively) the end of the imminent nuclear annihilation threat. Lots of reasons to be hopeful for the future and to see sci-fi-like technical progress as progress and empowerment.

Nowadays, we have no hopeful vision of the future--not even in sci-fi. We know tomorrow is going to be worse than today. We know technology advancements are meant to siphon our money and time away. We're not going to get flying cars, but we'll get costly subscriptions for everything. We're not going to get tours of Jupiter, but we will get mass-surveillance and phone addictions. Political extremism is increasing, with anger, belligerence, cruelty, and ignorance being major planks in political parties across the world. And finally, we know Climate Change is going to wreck everything, even if none of that comes to pass. Current generations no longer believe they will have it better than previous generations.

I’m talking about a one-time cashing in of trust one already has built up, not saying whatever the algorithm demands to go viral.

These people already have the thing others are expecting from content creation!

I think this is different from the short-term phenomenon you describe where people want to get rich quick via crypto/prediction markets/wallstreetbets/etc.

It’s much more like you already have enough to retire on, but cash it all out because your cousin’s tattoo artist’s stepson recently got a bachelor’s in finance and they won’t charge any management fees.

The claim is that FLAC decoding digital hardware performs processing which causes noise ("computer hash") if it is not isolated from the audio paths. He gives an example of some hardware where isolation eliminates the problem, supposedly.

I'm skeptical of the claim. Not in the sense whatsoever that I suspect it being false (I don't), but in the sense that the same noisy hardware would produce some "computer hash" even if it were processing uncompressed waveform data. I don't know anything about FLAC, but cursory searches suggest that decoding it is very lightweight. Whether processing raw PCM samples, or decoding FLAC, the hardware would mostly be idle in between producing audio frames (unless it is an embedded processor that is very low in terms of computational power?)

Anyway, he's not simply an crackpot claiming that FLAC quality is inherently different from WAV.