cosmic_cheese

Years ago I used Synergy and derivatives, but at least back then wireless (as is often needed with at least one machine being a laptop without an ethernet connection or dock) performance was always disappointing, I think due to how it makes round trips through your network instead of using an ad-hoc P2P wifi connection like how Continuity built into macOS does.

Been doing this for almost 6 years now, since the pandemic. It was the best solution that I could find at the time and though Thunderbolt switches have appeared since then, reviews have painted them as extremely flaky almost universally and their port selection is limited despite their exorbitant prices, so for the time being I'm going to keep cable-swapping.

I've not had trouble with docks (all CalDigit) or cables failing, though the port on the dock has grown loose. It still works perfectly but can glitch out if I bump the dock (thankfully not common with how it's positioned at my desk).

As nice as the USB-C connector is, for this use case I'd really like a connector that's USB-C electrically but bigger, bulkier, more robust… something like the old FireWire 400 connectors with their satisfying click would be great.

The issue with Firefox isn’t so much its visual design (though it is a component) as it is things like interactions all feeling a bit “off” and little bits of lag scattered throughout (like frames for controls and windows being blank for a split second before drawing in). It gives a “made in my back yard” impression, and not in the good handcrafted way but rather the duct tape and bubblegum way.

I don’t think Mozilla is going to be able to escape this so long as the they continue to use their current UI stack.

FWIW, I find Zen on macOS to have much less of that uncanny clunky foreign feel that Firefox and its brethren such as Thunderbird on macOS have never been able to shake. It’s no Camino[0], but it’s the closest thing I’ve seen since to a Gecko browser that feels like it actually belongs on macOS.

I’d rather see Orion continue to be developed alongside Zen though, because goodness knows we need more non-Chromium browsers.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camino_(web_browser)

Exactly. Third party software must be to some degree treated adversarially. Yes, even FLOSS software, as that can become subject to things like supply chain attacks. Giving any random program one downloads carte blanche access is as insane as leaving one's doors unlocked and open 24/7. It's inviting serious trouble.

As an end user it’s difficult to not be bitter about the situation, particularly when you have execs coming out and saying, “yep these prices sure are terrible, better buy now before they get even worse!”

I’ve seen people say, “well that’s just the free market, there’s a customer that’s willing to pay more than you,” but that argument doesn’t hold water when industry incumbents are actively obstructing entrance of new competitors into their primary markets. Micron, etc can’t both refuse to carve off more of their capacity for consumer-destined NAND and also refuse to allow others to fill the vacuum they’ve so conveniently created. Either you’re serving the market or you’re not; you don’t get to have your cake and eat it too under properly functioning, healthy capitalism.

Except Zen’s is more consistent and in my opinion, cleaner looking.

I daily drive multiple Apple products, but this is one of those things where I disagree with Cupertino. I find that pill-tabs are bad design and that the way they mesh with Liquid Glass is strange. Tabs should look like tabs.

I don’t use split view much, but I can understand the appeal.

It makes a lot of sense if one uses subject-based browser windows (e.g. 1 window == 1 subject); it keeps all tab organization within the browser and makes it easy to minimize it, move it to different screens/desktops, save/restore it, etc consistently with less overhead (no secondary organization system [such as that of the window manager] involved).

This becomes even more valuable for cross-platform users who sync and can’t rely on their favorite uberleet-haxor-wm package being available everywhere.

In my family they’ve always been known as “those apples that look pretty on the shelf at the supermarket but taste like cardboard and aren’t even good for cooking”. We’ll all opt for just about any other cultivar if given the choice.

Part of it I think is that old-school forums tended to have tighter-knit communities that weren’t as prone to shifting around. People had to find the forum in the first place and then register a new account to post, which may sound trivial but presents enough friction to filter a lot of people (including many low-quality posters) out.

Contrast this to Reddit: its search and web searches instantly surface subreddits and one account gets you access to the majority of the site. Friction is nearly nonexistent.

I think forums were also less prone to power-tripping moderation. It was still a problem, but there’s not but so big-headed somebody can get about being a mod for some backwoods niche topic forum that will never get all that big.

Finally, some of it is owed to how forums were dominant during a time when the internet was primarily populated by the sorts of people who owned computers then: academics, nerds, and open-minded early adopters. The dynamic was just different. It’s also the part that’d be most difficult to reproduce today.

Some anime on Netflix is affected. Off the top of my head, the iconic first ending theme for Naoki Urusawa's Monster had its haunting vocals removed leaving only the backing track, and Neon Genesis Evangelion had its similarly iconic ending theme covers of Fly Me to the Moon sung by its voice actresses removed.

Yeah it was pretty rough up until the late 2000s. I had been running iMacs so video output add-in cards weren't an option so I had to resort to a variety of different tricks to achieve the desired result. One of the last ones I remember trying involved some sort of hijinks with my TiVo box to get it to pull stuff from my computer.

I eventually just gave up and watched things on my iMac G5 since its 20" screen wasn't all that much smaller than my CRT TV, and then later in college I upgraded to a 27" Intel iMac which had a nice IPS panel display and was better to watch things on than most flat panel TVs from that era around that size.

Yeah, I'm in agreement with the blog post in that I don't advocate for dismantling of copyright, but there are absurdities within the system like this that are in dire need of attention.

I've only barely skimmed the surface of the preservation world, but the irreverent attitude taken by the industry towards audiovisual media releases frustrates me greatly. That more accurate older releases are made unobtainable in favor of newer botched versions just adds insult to injury.

I'm grateful that diminishing returns were hit earlier with audio, though, which limits the blast radius for music releases. Most classic albums have a range of different masterings available on audio CD, many of which are available cheaply secondhand, which makes getting ahold of a good/accurate release considerably less daunting.

Movies and especially TV shows on the other hand are a mess. It shouldn't be a miracle to get a high-quality, faithful official remaster like the one Star Trek: TNG got.

I too was fascinated by VCDs for a stint during my younger years.

For me, the attraction was the potential of breeching the then-seemingly impenetrable wall between my computer and TVs. I had recently come into the possession of a CD burner (DVD burners were not yet available, at least not cheaply) and when my family picked up a dedicated DVD player that was advertised as also handling VCDs, I saw an opportunity.

The associated software ecosystem was quite flaky, though. I tried burning them with Roxio Toast and Nero among other utilities, but producing VCDs that player would actually play was hit or miss. I burned several coasters and eventually gave up.

The problem with the ISS is that its potential was hampered by it and the Shuttle Program that enabled it being one of the largest design-by-committee compromise soups in history. Its successes were in spite of so many things dragging it down. If iterative development of spacefaring tech is the goal a very different approach would need to be taken.

> No, because you said, "nobody bats an eye about any of that", which is not even remotely true of military spending.

I mean, it must not be taken that seriously because little has been done to change it. Instead, just about everything else gets constantly gets chipped away at to significant fanfare.

And yes I'm aware of the controversy that surrounded the Apollo program and to a large degree empathize, but even at that point in time we probably could've found a way to walk and chew bubblegum if we really wanted it.

I'm not banking on anything and I'm not even really that focused on Mars specifically. Mars is just a good first step in establishing self-sustenance outside of Earth's gravity well, feeding into the goal of greater spacefaring capabilities.

In the case that we don't lose our ability to get into space, cool, development in that field gets a bit of an earlier start. If we knock ourselves back into the Stone Age, well, at least we can say we tried our best in that small window of time. The worst outcome is losing the ability without having even tried.

As noted in the original post, I don't really buy into the "backup" theory so much. It's more that it would be a shame to have gained the ability to put people in space and then lose it having done practically nothing with it.

> I'm hopeful that will change someday

And part of my point is that these things don't just magically change on their own, but because a lot of smart people are actively working on changing them. Absent those efforts, the status quo remains.

The classic example is military spending. It's astronomical and in the US, higher than any other type, and much of that is owed to the cronyism in the military-industrial complex, regulatory capture by contractors, and endless chains of subcontractors with each link in the chain pocketing cash. The Pentagon can't even pass an audit.

Many things could be funded if that were cleaned up, and even if none of that cash goes towards space it reduces pressure to further cut existing funding toward it which would still be a massive win.

We regularly expend vastly more resources on things that are far more frivolous and questionable than anything related to spaceflight has ever been, but nobody bats an eye about any of that.

As for the problems, we solve them like we always have: one at a time. Additionally, some of these things haven't even yet been studied to the extent necessary to take a crack at solving them. Taking the humans in microgravity problem as an example, we know it's a problem but have done precious little in figuring out things like exactly where the minimum threshold sits for gravity, whether simulated gravity via centrifugal force is adequate, etc.

I do think that SpaceX is jumping the gun a bit. I'd rather take it a touch more slowly and first do things like put a centrifugal space station in orbit to perform studies on. That said, after how crewed spaceflight beyond earth's orbit came to a screeching halt with the end of the Apollo program, it feels like a miracle to be getting anything.

There's a difference between something being extremely difficult and it being actually impossible.

And yes, Mars is not going anywhere, but the same cannot so confidently be said about our ability to get there. Our species has been capable of spaceflight for a tiny fraction of our existence and there is plenty of precedent for catastrophic loss of knowledge and capability.

Even if that's the case, I still don't think it does anything to validate taking the defeatist route and not even trying.

This topic is a bit of a sore spot for me.

I would agree that any notion of a large martian settlement (much less a comfortable one that people actually want to live in) on any shorter timeframe is not realistic and that Mars cannot be treated as a "plan B" in the case of climate change making Earth uninhabitable, but total dismissal of the idea (as well as the idea that humans will forever [and potentially should] be permanently Earth-bound) rubs me the wrong way.

Yes, it's an unfathomably difficult and complex project that should not be in any way underestimated. Realistically, it will take many decades at minimum and probably in excess of a century. That doesn't mean it shouldn't be attempted however, and it's not as if any of it will magically get easier in all the time spent not trying. This could wind up being a self-fulfilling prophecy sort of situation if it's allowed to be.

> But since then the smartphone has mutated from a device of convenience into a grotesque attention-stealing privacy-invading Everything Device, which is used primarily as a proxy through which companies are doing massive harm to our society. For many people smartphones have become a necessary evil, and an increasingly-large group (many of whom Gen Z or Gen Alpha!) is deliberately refusing them out of self-preservation.

Right. The Jobs vision was still an accessory. An advanced and staggeringly capable one, but an accessory nonetheless. It hadn't yet become an inescapable, addictively-designed pillar of daily life.

People are also coming back around to the idea that convenience isn't the only thing that matters and that a "split device" lifestyle can even provide hobbies with associated communities for those who partake. Curating a music collection comes naturally after picking up a dedicated offline music player and getting into photography more seriously follows buying an old secondhand standalone digital camera, for example.

Importantly, this provides a degree of protection from compromised PoS terminals. Ever since I switched to nearly exclusively using Apple Pay for physical shopping I’ve had no unauthorized charges, whereas back when I was still tapping, inserting, or swiping my card I’d need to call and get a card or two replaced almost every year.

Linux and the BSDs might be more instrumentable, but the rest of the experience is so fragmented in comparison. Regardless of category, there is no single service or data format that everybody has agreed to use and build on top of.

The advantage of the Apple approach is that the user’s data is instantly available across third party apps. For example, instead of needing to build (or import) a whole CalDAV apparatus to be able to build a little calendar-based todo app, you can just use the system calendar API and let the OS do the heavy lifting, making your app much more lightweight and instantly usable with almost no user configuration. This naturally applies for scripts and agent skills, too.

Nothing is foolproof, but signals can go a long way. If an app's UI is poorly considered or comes across as careless for example there's a good chance that its other aspects are like that too.

It's for this reason that I find the desktop generally of more use on a Mac than I do under Windows or under Linux with a Windows-type DE.

macOS is built around the idea of windows being sized and positioned as they will, with very little management (automated or otherwise), leaving a substantial amount of desktop exposed most of the time. As a result, the desktop gets a lot more usage as a staging space since it's constantly available for drag and drop operations (both to and from).

In Windows-paradigm systems on the other hand, it's almost a given that the screen will be filled entirely with 1-2 windows and the desktop is only ever really visible upon reboot or hard context switches.