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> Higher YoY inflation announced -> Companies raise prices on everything -> employees demand an inflation raise -> Higher YoY inflation announced -> ...

Yes. This is exactly the cycle that approaches a limit (all else being equal). Inflation-adjusting wages doesn't make inflation keep going up indefinitely.

They really, really don't.

IMO even most college graduates can't read or write worth a damn. Possibly they can think, but it's hard to tell.

I had a similar experience, and this was way into the era of "OMG college is unaffordable".

College can still be affordable. The specific college you want, the one that other people have heard of outside an eight-county radius, dorm living the whole time, out-of-state tuition, famous professors, guest lecturers whose names are well-known... well, probably not.

Just checked, the one I went to is about $18k/yr now, in-state tuition & fees. That's roughly an inflation-rate increase since when I went. You'll likely have some debt without scholarships or parental help, but a college job can keep that under control. CLEP out of a couple early classes, take advantage of that tuition being flat-rate rather than per-hour(!), and it's very manageable. Start at a community college and transfer, and the numbers look even better.

I used it for a long time but switched back to regular Terminal for the lower latency, because I realized I couldn't even name an iTerm2 feature I used that Terminal didn't have. I'd just been using it because it was so widely discussed.

> Does that imply that Linux is not stable?

The desktop environment is not, no. Various applications one is likely to run on it are not, compared to some closed-source alternatives, including those provided on macOS.

Heavy Linux on the Desktop user for about 10 years, here (~2001-2011). I still try it periodically. I see a lot more bad glitches, X/Wayland crashes (may as well be a whole system crash, on a desktop), and application crashes, on Linux than elsewhere. I find it's most stable when I build up from something minimal and hand-configure everything, but I just don't have time for that anymore, and stopped finding it entertaining years ago.

They do that and fix their GUI stack (nope, Wayland ain't doing it) and we might finally actually be a decade out from The Year of the Linux Desktop.

I've found kids complain about crappy old-fashioned options for games/movies/et c., until that's all they have available. After a day or two those "bad" options become totally fine and they're excited about them and excitedly tell you how great they are.

I grew up mostly on the NES and earlier systems, and IMO from approximately the Super Nintendo on, game system generations have all delivered about the same amount of happiness (though some individual systems were major duds, of course). It's just a matter of what you're used to. Admittedly, the frustration level of average games on the NES and other earlier systems kept them from being quite the joy-generating devices that later ones would be.

I think people who aren't sufficiently tuned into computer geek and/or Web and/or font nerd culture are aware that they're supposed to think Comic Sans is bad, and instead they like it. I see it used all the time, in many contexts, by people who seem to just think it's fun.

This is only true if a 7% increase in wages causes at least a 7% increase in inflation, which it doesn't. The effect you're describing doesn't shoot up forever, but approaches a limit.

Yeah—when you're shipping weapons for free to one side in a war, plus providing a ton of intel to them from military assets you're operating expressly because of the war, also for free, you're a legitimate target, especially anything related to industrial production (so, including your energy infrastructure). Just because Russia's not decided to shoot at us over it (not because they're nice, but because it would surely make their situation even worse) doesn't mean we're not, effectively, war participants.

I'm not complaining about that, mind, but it's not like it's surprising or unfair that they'd try to hit us in limited ways, if they can.

Day one of the invasion I double checked our backups (ahead of schedule) and security. And the company I'm with isn't at all involved with anything military, nor do we have any particular interest (business-wise) in Ukraine—some kind of mass automated attack still seemed likely enough to be worth a little of my time. I assume CISOs with infrastructure and military orgs were on a war footing before the shooting started. At least, I hope they were.

Yet theming with exactly two options (light/dark) is quite popular.

It was a UX problem, not a problem with the core concept.

Now, decades in to The Web, it's also a chicken/egg problem, because almost no sites are designed to behave OK under reasonable customization by the user, and almost no users customize their browsers' default styles, so why would sites change to accommodate that? Aside from the light/dark thing, of course, and you do see users pushing for support for that, and sites putting in effort to support it.

If Apple expands Dark Mode to include a half-dozen other options for a11y and such, I bet you'd see support for those become fairly common. It's just got to have a decent UI and the push has to come from a browser with a large enough user-base to encourage site operators to care. Once upon a time, Firefox could likely have done it, assuming they could manage not to screw it up. These days, Apple, Google, and MS are the only ones who could realistically try.

Actually, we have another version of this, now that I think about it: reader mode. People seem to really like it.

That's because it's buried (and has been increasingly so over the decades), it'll mess up some sites and won't do anything on a bunch of others because no-one accounts for user-defined colors/margins/fonts anymore when designing for the web, and it has more options than most people want/need to deal with.

A simple browser-provided theme dropdown containing a few nice options, directly in the main browser chrome, from a major browser (perhaps Firefox, back when it still counted as "major") could have changed things completely—see the pressure on sites to support "dark mode" now that that's a simple option to enable.

It'd be nearly impossible to change now, but 10-15 years ago, maybe it could have been changed, if any of the very small number of entities steering the direction of the web had tried.

No, you're basically right.

To the extent that containers solve a problem, it's mostly a problem with package management, and with UI for process isolation/permissions/hardening.

This could have ended up as a few simplified settings, as presented to most users... as we have with light and dark modes. Colorblind themes (for multiple kinds of colorblindness, say), high-readability themes for people who need the large-print editions of books, that kind of thing. Doesn't have to mean making everyone pick exact point values for every type of H tag, or whatever. A few presets in a dropdown could be really helpful—again, just look how everyone goes nuts over something as simple as having a "dark mode" setting.

One of the worst things to happen to web usability was the shift away from the user deciding how pages look. In an ideal world the Web ecosystem would have grown up such that nearly all pages respect user configured font and color choices. Then, it wouldn't much matter which font the page creator decided was best, since the user's browser would automatically override it.

Ah, software "engineering"—the fastest path to professional-tier wages coupled with blue-collar or service industry social standing.

> I wonder why you consider it a net-negative?

No perceived benefit, and now there's chatter in my head. It's not exactly counterproductive, but I don't see how it's helpful.

> In my own experience, having become more adept at using it, may I suggest you just need more practice?

I'm coming up on 40 and again, it's not really that big a deal, so, heh, a little late. I don't even know what I'd "use it" for—I was great at language use, written composition, totally fine at speaking, creative play, all the things one might think it'd help with, before it, so it just seems like a tag-along that's not doing much good, or a little annoying at times, but nothing helpful. I can "use it" for things but I was fine at those before.

> Personally, learning to "turn it off" (or giving a rest) and even moreso learning about the limitations of such language-centric mindsets; being able to "put the language down" and pick it back up when needed (so to say) has allowed me to cancel out the negative aspects.

Yeah, the negatives aren't that bad, I just don't see any benefit, either.

As long as from the programmer's perspective it's opt-in rather than opt-out—that is, "await" by default. That was a huge mistake for Node and will seemingly haunt it forever.

I didn't have one until I was 10 or so and tried to have one, just on a lark.

At some point it became permanent. IMO it's net-negative but not enough so to be a big deal.

Yeah, that's not obscure in American English, because it's one of a handful of Australian words that've made it into phrases we'll say when we're trying to mimic Australian English, i.e. "throw another shrimp on the barbie".

Is it somehow cheaper when it's a subscription, and when the set of things you might start streaming isn't "this single thing I just paid for" but "anything in your catalog"? Because they don't just give a discount for that—they give a tremendous discount.

Haha, that's fair. I still think spending more than an hour or two on the news per week has rapidly diminishing returns, in terms of societal benefit, and most of that should be local news or very focused, deep coverage, for maximum benefit.

> A better recent example might have been choosing between McCain and Obama, if you're focused on presidential races.

I'd love to see some blank-slate person try to judge them just by their own websites. God, those were so different.

Yes, of course, but that's still much cheaper than physical disk distribution.

How much time do you need to do that, though? Is keeping up with all the minutia, checking in on how Ukraine's doing every single day (even multiple times), really helping anyone? I do keep up with the news, and especially international news, but I'm under no illusion that it's a valuable use of time. Past very low-levels of engagement, it's a hobby, or a pastime. Like knitting or watching soap operas.

Again, I think that end would also be better served if a high proportion of news media consumption were shifted to citizenship-relevant books (and maybe very high-quality, low-frequency periodicals), probably starting with textbooks and classics in political science, history, and economics (I doubt anyone who's mined those well already, needs any help picking their next high-value read).

Huh—I never saw Netflix' British content as accommodating UK culture, but as accommodating American Anglophilia. Same reason they have a ton of Japanese content.

Maybe it's both, I suppose.

Try selling a Blu Ray. Now try selling a movie you bought on iTunes.

I would do a whole lot more digital rentals if the prices weren't so damn high. How is it that it can be significantly cheaper to rent the physical disk than to stream the movie once? How can I watch 20 hours of stuff on HBO in 4k for like $10 or $12 or whatever that runs now for a month, but a single 2-hour movie is $5?

It'd also help a lot if I didn't need a different "app" for every store, with its own player UI. Learning how to use yet another designer's cute "experience" just to do the same thing I used to do with a few buttons on the front of a VCR that were the same for every single movie, isn't my idea of fun.

Sure, needing to deal with the question at all is a result of a certain set of cosmological and metaphysical assumptions—but it happens to be a problem that a ton of Western philosophers dealt with, over the years, because they were starting from such a set of assumptions, and so did feel a need to address it, so if you're reading (or reading about) Western philosophy—especially before the 20th century—you're gonna see a lot of it.

In Leibniz' case, his work on that problem just happens to be probably his second-most-famous work at all, and better-known than most such efforts, even into our era of atheistic modernism (in part because of the Voltaire connection I mentioned—I'm sure Candide is far more widely-read than anything Leibniz wrote)

Yeah, my first thought was "holy shit, maybe finally an actual justification for regular bloodletting as a health practice!"

For me, it's that I want a significant portion of a piracy set-up for things that I can't get at all (4k actual original Star Wars trilogy, certain shows with the original soundtrack rather than a worse replacement, some obscure pieces of media) or for things I consider likely to disappear any time (YouTube videos) so if I'm going to have it anyway, I may as well also use it to avoid the "where the hell can I watch this?" shuffle. I do also pay for several streaming services.