hyperjeff

If anyone is interested in old Mac software and open source projects, I have an archived version of my old OS X listings. While most links are broken these days, it can be a handy for finding things for old Macs. I think the list ended when the App Store finally went online, around the time of Lion. http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/

> Inventing the automobile has clearly made humanity less fit. Should we stop driving?

Perhaps an apt analogy. One could argue that the lure of convenience of automobiles led to one of the worst decisions of the 20th century, to restructure society around automobiles, causing a self-perpetuating reliance feedback loop with many destructive side-effects (physical, environmental and cultural). We should pause a bit and not rush head-long into AI without trying to think the path forward through. It's a decision that we will all make together as a culture. There are many current troubles with AI already, even if they make no mistakes at all.

That’s so sad that the vast majority of his photos were lost to the 1906 SF earthquake. Amazing photos that were preserved though.

I did when I was a kid. Used to spend hours torturing insects. And I did think they probably felt pain in some way. I ended up well-adjusted, but kids are little psychopaths. These days I escort bugs out of the house if they are being bothersome, and otherwise just let them be their bad ol’ self.

Eventually they’ll do a better job than us, so maybe why not. People are very bad at managing themselves and the world. Leave a final prompt to take care of the biosphere, clean up the environment, and manage the humans but let them live happily.

Very nice! though sometimes the recurring revenue figures seem to be questionable (one in particular that raised $250k on Kickstarter, where that's listed as its yearly income, but is it?).

Also, does that iOS book series really make $100M/year? Supposing that's right, it's extremely anamolous, and contributes the lion's share to the front page's total revenue figure of $11.75M/month. Perhaps best to keep that data point out? Not sure who could call that level of income a side project.

Side note: The website only shows 10 projects per category with no mechanism to see more.

Yes! A very exciting time. I had a Mac at home and used NeXT at school, and i was able to buy Rhapsody / Mac OS X Server 1.02 for half off as a student. I ran my own web server out of my apartment with it for years on a PowerMac 7500 (w/ a 604e upgraded CPU, back when you could do that with Macs). Handled fairly heavy traffic for the time without any complaints.

For those coding in Swift, there is the Physical[0] package.

[0] https://github.com/hyperjeff/Physical

Different chips though, and different links. (Also, it’d be nice if we stopped linking directly to social media posts and instead used an intermediary that didn’t require access or accounts just to follow discussions here.)

although on multi-monitor setups, xeyes helps me quickly find my pointer location, if i’ve lost track, in an enjoyable way. almost anything can be useful to someone.

eech. i don’t want to use a language made by people who take advice from, let alone watch, tiktok influencers.

A lot of the app updates are using new APIs that only exist starting with the OS update. Practical way to surface the new OS features.

One can create quite sophisticated automator services, definitely living up to the idea of programming. It’s not where I would direct anyone to start learning programming (it’s not meant to do so). It’s easy to underestimate what you can do with it. Unless shell scripting and applescript aren’t programming.

Magic Leap 2 is roughly same price point ($3300 base, $4100 dev pro), but so far aimed at enterprise only. Android dev environment. Also Unity integration. Looks lighter to wear. Much lower resolution screens. Interesting comparison point going forward.

i worked for a company once with a large (10’ sided cube) and very high-quality anechoic chamber and would go in there on lunch breaks to mediate, was fantastic. (never had audio hallucinations.) i was young and had no hearing issues which probably helped.

There’s no helping with your first complaint (UI philosophy difference), but fwiw you can both have focus-follows-mouse (for either the whole OS or just Terminal, both work great) and multiple button support (I use a 4-button trackball with other fancy bits).

That said, despite being able to hack lots about the system, it would definitely be nice to have deeper modifications allowed. Alternate kinds of menus, pointers and windows would be nice, where users could experiment with new UI concepts, etc.

I personally really miss NeXTSTEP’s tear off menus, which were in early OS X builds until Aqua got rid of them.

A high say-do ratio would be bad. A high do-say works.

> Early mornings are a very special time because no one else is up and it is the quietest and most productive part of the day.

For the exact same reason, so also are very late nights (~1 to 5am).

Same experience for me. Viewing screens, with their unnatural light and uncanny hyperrealism, rattle my nervous system, and I can feel a subtle internal fight in my brain about what I’m doing. Somehow it’s also easy to get trapped, like you get magnetized. I see this in everyone. It can sometimes cause arguments trying to get someone to break the spell and have them reengage with the world. It’s not just the normal aggravation of context switching, our nervous systems get slightly hijacked.

Starting to read a physical book sometimes is very difficult after spending time on screens, but if I can break thru the first 15 minutes where I can’t get my eyes to track the page effectively and let myself slow down enough to fully pay attention to the words in front of me, with no possibility to click anything, then I find that my mood changes and I feel happy, calm, creative, inspired. After an hour I only reluctantly give up reading the book.

Rinse and repeat everyday. Some days I wish all computers would stop working.

Most physicists have never read them, fwiw, as interesting as they may be for their historical role. Most classic papers go unread, and it’s not a bad thing pedagogically. How things get sorted out is usually a huge mess and following the real history can be an enormous distraction (and can confuse and misdirect students).

There is often a wide gap between a popular opinion, perhaps softly or unspoken, and what is widely accepted and popular expression. Often popular opinions have few protections, and it leads to double-speak and coded or indirect language. Assuming that what is freely expressed is a reflection of popular opinion can lead to important misunderstandings.

fwiw, arxiv has posted book-length works since it started in the early ‘90s.

not sure what you mean by stretching a desktop across multiple monitors, but i’m pretty sure this is a pref you can set in macOS. Also, no need to use a touchpad if you don’t want.

Very much an intentional goal of the OS when it came out, the hope being that the concepts of files and folders might never be needed. A bold move to get rid of a mental overhead for using a computer that was never natural or intuitive to non-tech users. They eventually had to back off a bit, but it’s an amazing accomplishment that most users can still use these devices as if files weren’t a thing.

20+ years of Xcode. This advice is ludicrous. Something traumatic must’ve happened 10 years ago to produce this policy. I only ever reboot for system updates and run zillions of things happily along with Xcode and many other full dev environments at the same time.

If you work with many dedicated workspaces for specific tasks (for me, 16), then a lot of tabs on a machine can mean a perfectly reasonable amount per workspace. At any time I have between ~500 and 1k open across all devices.

I've built up a custom semi-madcap system, but like others, it works with my workflow. A script takes a snapshot of all tabs across all devices, saved to raw html so that it's fairly well future-proofed, and then I'm free to close any tabs that I can't get to right away. And then I've created a custom browser purely for being able to go thru the saved tabs, auto-organizing pages by subject or domain, with custom pruning tools.

I feel like page/tab/bookmark management is a core problem from the birth of web browsing that has never really been solved for most people. I have 3 main places for my core bookmarks, in Safari, Firefox and then also folders on my drive (still one of the few guaranteed cross-browser ways to store them without using online tools). This is all related to the tab problem above.

Minor note (plz pardon pun) on Bach: While it’s still debated what tuning he used for this work, it’s generally currently thought that he did not use equal temperament. Tons of ink spilled on this topic.

A cursory search might even give one the impression that Einstein had an opinion about bees. (Unkillable memes are pretty interesting.)

Not sure if you’re just unhappy about the minimalist landing page, but click around from there, lots of nicely done articles.

I sorely miss those exciting days. Hotline was so well done. I still have v1.8.4, but sadly remote host refuses connection. Is there no way we can bring such things to life again? Tor isn’t it.