phantasmish

Probably to take back a bunch of the education market, which was lost to Chromebooks.

It's what I've used for years and it's entirely fine for me.

For a long time I installed iterm2 because "that's what you do" but one day I realized I was suffering a little wasted disk space, slightly slower start-up, and slightly worse input latency, for... no reason, because I didn't do anything with it that Terminal.app couldn't do.

25 years on unixy operating systems. Spend tons of time in the terminal.

What's amazing is that these folks can straight-up publish what they plan to do, and then people still act surprised when they do it. It's so weird.

See also: Project 2025. Or various propaganda strategies that are proposed publicly, in specific detail, then used verbatim. They don't even have to hide it, and still get away with it. It's totally bizarre.

Documentation should often be wrong.

There should be five options for each piece of tooling, none of which quite work the same way, all of which have a fan-base singing their praises, and three of which have critical problems you probably won't find out about until you try them. Then the one you pick gets abandoned when you're part way done. (this feature only for the Javascript and Python DLC)

Example farms should use old versions of libraries that are no longer maintained.

Interfacing with other farms should require manually faking a downgrade of some protocol you're using, because the older one is no longer available for you and they can't/won't upgrade.

You should be forced to design certain parts of the system in ways that are harder to use and constantly break when changing other parts, just so the appearance of those parts is "on brand". This should require re-writing functionality that would otherwise be supplied "for free" by a library.

When you're finally getting things how you want them, your farm should get cancelled and the whole thing abruptly burned to the ground because your parent company just decided to buy a different, existing farm instead.

cmd is brilliant. I have to shift my entire hand downward a little to hit ctr+c/ctrl-v, and make a pinkie-stretch that I can feel straining my hand. Cmd+c/v keeps three fingers on the home row, and involves just a slide-over of the thumb by maybe a centimeter. It's great.

caps-as-an-extra-ctrl helps with all of that, but leaves you with the problem of overlapping shortcuts in the terminal. Cmd also fixes that.

I hate how hard it is to get anything remotely like it working in Linux. All the solutions are partial and very janky.

Archive.org has a lot of the old flash stuff, including Xiao Xiao.

A new rise of political violence was clearly coming in when Trump told his supporters, on camera, in front of a crowd, that they ought to shoot Hillary if she won—and then he not only still had an active campaign a week later, but went on to win the election.

That was a huge "oh shit" moment. The rest of this isn't exactly a consequence of specifically what he said, but is something that one could predict from that and other things he said and did in the first election and his first term. The fact that he said what he said and that was no longer regarded as abhorrent by enough people to keep him from even getting close to the Presidency, was the sign.

> (Though over in America, most of the historic grand mansions are now tourist attractions, for lack of heirs with the wealth and interest in maintaining them.)

Part of this is that the "old money" tended to withdraw from public life after the Great Depression when they decided infamy was a serious liability.

That's why one struggles to name any of the living heirs of the big names of that era, who are absolutely still filthy stinking rich, while newbies like Musk, everyone knows. The culture of what Fussell calls the "top out-of-sight" is to remain sufficiently anonymous that nobody knows their given names unless one goes looking (and even then, it may be hard to find much trace of them). A bunch of them don't show up on any of those "richest" lists not because they couldn't rank, but because you effectively have to opt-in to those, for enough of your wealth to be traceable without great effort to get counted.

Owning a highly-visible Newport mansion could well be a mark of poor taste, among that set.

They still have their grand houses, they just may not (though, may) be in the Georgian or Neoclassical style or whatever, and they're probably not visible (from remotely close-up, at any rate) from any public road. Drive minor highways in the right parts of the country and look for nice (though, not necessarily imposing or impressive) gates leading into what looks like a simple, wooded lot with an unremarkable, perhaps even gravel, drive that immediately disappears into the trees, and you've probably found one, and they're all over the place... plus their families will usually own plenty of extremely nice, but not flashy, well-located houses and condos and such in more-populated areas.

"Meritocracy" was a satirical term invented to mock the way that the markers and abilities suggested by "merit" tend to accrue self-reinforcingly to the "meritorious" and those connected to them, creating a stratified society that pretends to justice and legitimacy by appeals to "natural" outcomes of "natural" advantages or "better work ethic", and dismissal of calls for reform with pleas that changes could only result in "less-meritorious", so, necessarily, worse, rule.

The word itself is basically a joke about the circularity and word-game bullshit of "well we assign power according to merit, so anything else is necessarily less-just". If it's not clear, consider: "Goodocracy" or "Bestocracy", or "everyone-gets-what-they-deserve-ocracy". Like... yes, sure, but the details are everything, that's just a vague appeal to stuff approximately everyone wants.

It's entirely hilarious that it's been adopted as a serious term.

In the right circumstances and frame of mind, symphonies or sometimes brass band tunes play in my head, multilayered and everything. They've even got enough persistence that I can "rewind" them a few seconds (probably within some kind of working-memory window), even isolate parts of them and usually know exactly what instrument is playing it, and so on, then let them continue. The course of them is automatic, I don't control them, though.

If I had the first clue how to record them, perhaps I'd have a career as a composer, LOL. The actual invention of them would be no work whatsoever, though the writing it down would be, and I'm sure there'd be a good deal of editing and arranging afterwards to fix them up (plus, who's to say if they'd be any good, or wouldn't all sound kinda the same, to a trained ear?)

I'm only barely familiar with the body of "classical" music, and even less familiar with big-band or brass band music, is the oddest part, but those couple narrow sorts of instrumental music are all I get without having to put effort into it (and I mean none, it just "plays" when I'm in the right head-space and surroundings, and no I don't mean "on drugs", and actually it can be really fucking annoying if I'm trying to sleep). I wouldn't be surprised if I actually lost that ability (such as it is) if I tried to train up enough to write the tunes down.

... maybe I should look into humming-to-MIDI software, hahaha.

I believe both that aphantasia may be a real thing, and that the vast majority of discussion about it online is plagued by so much imprecision and variety in use of language that it can be hard to say how many people who think they may have it, actually do.

Consider attempts in this very thread to compare conscious visualization to visualization in dreaming. Someone who isn't in a critical frame of mind or doesn't know about the limitations of vision in dreams and how our brains trick us about dream-sight (or the fairly different limitations of real vision and how our brains also trick us about that, as you mention) may follow a train of thought like, "well, I 'see' just fine in dreams, and my conscious 'mind's eye' is very similar to that, so sure, by the transitive property, I can 'see' about as well when I visualize as I actually see things with my real eyes"

Me, I go "well dream vision for approximately everyone is total shit but with a layer of trickery on top, and my 'inner eye' is similar to that except with the trickery dialed way down so I can tell where the seams are and if I try I can be aware of when I've just invented some detail that was 'always there' but actually wasn't a moment earlier and I can tell that I'm not actually seeing with my eyes (unlike a dream, where I think I'm 'seeing'), so yeah those two are pretty close for me, and the ways in which they differ are basically just how much my brain's lying to me so arguably aren't 'real' differences anyway, but both are entirely unlike actually seeing, so no, I don't 'see' when I visualize the same way as I 'see' with my eyes, though it is close to how I 'see' in a dream except I'm less-fooled about how bad it is"

... and I propose that these two responses could come from people with identical actual capacity for mental visualization.

When one of the former meet the latter, it might end in the latter thinking they have aphantasia or at least lean farther that direction, without any difference in their actual experience of or capacity for visualization.

....

I've seen a supposed set of autism test questions (I don't know if they're really used in autism diagnostics) that include something like "would you rather go to a party, or stay home and read a book?" and supposedly the "autistic" indicator is asking follow up questions or excessive hesitation. Meanwhile I'm very sure you could find people who instantly answered "go to a party" but actually choose that far less often when presented with the real choice involving those two things (necessarily with a lot more details and context filled in). I don't think they're lying or deceiving themselves! I think they're regarding the question very differently from how some others do. I think something similar is going on here, with two "tribes" with different perspectives on the question itself trying to communicate and talking right past one another, leading to much confusion.

(Meanwhile, I do think it's entirely possible aphantasia is real, I just also strongly suspect a lot of the people who've been led, by online discussion, to believe they're far from the median in this regard, actually aren't)