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postmodest

734 karma · joined July 20, 2021

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postmodest··on Windows NT for Power Macintosh
I suspect that without Jobs, Apple is dead by 2002. Turned into an arm of, like, RIM. Then Google comes out with the Android phone and it's all over for everyone including Microsoft.
postmodest··on Windows NT for Power Macintosh
Isn't that the SmallTalk model, but everyone decided to use C++ instead?
postmodest··on FDA warns top U.S. bakery not to claim foods contain allergens when they don't
This is the same issue as Prop 65, and while we can all say "oh the law is bad" the real problem is _corporations are lazy_.

Instead of making sure their products are safe, they just say everything is unsafe, because they know consumers will become numb to it.

Our food shouldn't contain allergens, and our computer mice shouldn't give us cancer, but instead of taking the time to make sure of that, companies just tell us the products are dangerous, because they know we don't really have a choice.

They have the money and the capability, but they choose profit over consumer safety, and that's THEIR sin, not ours.

postmodest··on CSS Tip: An em isn't an "m", but an ex is an "x" (2012)
The circular reference is because em and ex are relative to the font size of the surrounding context, and you need to pick a physical (or derivable-from-physical) unit for the root context. em and ex always refer to the M and x height because that's how fonts work in the old "lead type" world.
postmodest··on FTC sues Adobe for hiding fees and inhibiting cancellations
"We can cut costs if we sell to a few whales and not a broad audience"
postmodest··on Microsoft to delay release of Recall AI feature on security concerns
Apple's competitors lose the PR war if they don't post to social media!
postmodest··on Restaurants Place Big Bets on Cooking Robots
Restaurants are thin margin business because wages for consumers haven't risen either, even as boardmember payouts have skyrocketed.
postmodest··on Restaurants Place Big Bets on Cooking Robots
"Surge pricing in effect" for non-tippers.
postmodest··on How to chop off bytes of an UTF-8 string to fit into a small slot and look nice
[poop]
postmodest··on Special-use domain 'home.arpa.' (2018)
And yet they let through `.email` ...what?
postmodest··on Libadwaita: Splitting GTK and Design Language
If Qt had just made peace with the GPL back in the 90's, we wouldn't have this problem.

C.f. Motif/BSD.

postmodest··on Helen Keller on her life before self-consciousness (1908)
What she's describing is the acquisition of our ability to turn experience to story through the tool of language. Imagine a time when you were nearly black-out drunk. You were conscious, but you only existed in that moment; you lacked reflection or forethought that comes with the ability to abstract your experience.

She finally had acquired a tool most of us take for granted--and many of us still struggle to use, preferring to live in that instinctive animalistic ever-reductive singularity of "the present"--and it brought her up to the level of others who grew up with language.

It's unlikely that there's some mysterious level of self-awareness beyond that, because that's kind of what we're wired for.

postmodest··on Partnership with News Corp
"We can't make headway with real media outlets so we'll partner with tabloid journalism!"
postmodest··on What UI density means and how to design for it
I suspect several of your examples are very likely the result of I18N considerations. Some alphabets/ideographic languages are denser than others. So text areas are set for the compact-est common denominator, and icons are unlabeled for similar reasons.
postmodest··on ChatGPT to lose voice over Scarlett Johansson similarity
Outrage that a company whose foundation is "laundering IP by running it through a complicated obfuscation engine" has created a product that is largely based on a critique of its own nature?

The only way they could've been more on-the-nose would've been to use Lucy Liu.

postmodest··on OpenAI departures: Why can’t former employees talk?
Who designs the training set for your putative "fact checker" AI?
postmodest··on A ‘plague’ comes before the fall: lessons from Roman history
Let's not forget the loss of tax revenue, the loss of grain imports from Vandal-occupied North Africa to support large urban centers, and the rise of local Christian Nationalists in the rural areas who dismantled the administrative state to establish their own infighting fiefdoms.
postmodest··on Apple apologizes for iPad 'Crush' ad that 'missed the mark'
Fuji Heavy Industries would like a word about pianos, guitars, trumpets, and, if we're honest with ourselves, everything else on that press.

Though the tone of the ad was still... Orwellian: imagine a hydraulic press, stamping on human creativity, forever.

postmodest··on TheDesk desktop environment
That model of visual-memory-centered skeumorphism died in the 90's. Because for a majority of people, they get no benefit from persistent visual placement of content, or visual differentiation of documents, and can't cope with the "desktop" in REAL life, much less the metaphor that was "every desktop UX between the Mother of All Demoes and the death of even trying that was the iPhone" now people interact with the world through vertically siloed apps which all have different management models for content, and make it easier to charge you feudal rent on what would otherwise be your own possessions.

And what especially galls me is that if you suggest this "skeumorphic" model to OSS devs, they act like you're crazy. Even if it's something simple like "the Indigo Magic Desktop's scalable line art icons that had animated states". Suggesting visual interfaces seems to grossly offend people who develop software.

postmodest··on A few facts about POSIX
They dropped any utility that switched to GPLv3 because of v3's infectious patent clause that would've put their patent portfolio in danger.
postmodest··on You might not want to use your fingertip to unlock your phone
Except now the cops know that 1) this is indeed your phone and 2) you have just tampered with evidence and 3) that evidence is juicy
postmodest··on The forgotten war on beepers
Our SMS-to-Internet microblogging app startup is hiring full stack developers.
postmodest··on I continue to no longer attend vintage computer festivals
In my life, it's that the only people with room to have large wooden furniture were the Boomers and their parents who could afford to live in 2.5k+sq foot houses. My whole apartment couldn't hold the furniture from my parents living room.
postmodest··on How deep does life go?
Are we really playing whataboutism for the banded iron formations from 3.7Gya?

Are you going to mention the Siberian Traps next?

My dude, civilization almost collapsed several times due to like, one volcano. Imagine a 20% increase in global CO2 due to human activity.

You can say "well, the earth recovered from the Permian extinctions" but that's meaningless, we're talking about _humanity_.

Trilobites weren't all "oh, no worries, the Cyanobacteria didn't end life on earth so we're totally fine, brah! We're _rationalist trilobites_!"

postmodest··on Top Israeli spy chief exposes his true identity in online security lapse
Man, Fuck Ted Faro.
postmodest··on Could the cosmos, in fact, be conscious?
Could Pet Rocks Be Conscious?

I mean, really. I feel like having a method of sensation and an ability to react to those sensations is a fundamental basis for "consciousness" and if you can point to the sun or the Local Cluster's sensory apparatus, I may listen to the rest of your (the Editorial You, not the commenter this reply is attached to) argument.

Otherwise, we're just pointing at complex things and saying "does haz Conscience lol?"

postmodest··on Who killed the network switch? A Hubris Bug Story
> It bothers me deeply how much of C ethos can be boiled down to, "We can't be bothered to learn to type at a reasonable speed"

"My computer is a LITERAL TELETYPE, so I will enshrine typographical parsimony in every part of this OS/Language I am creating" -K&R

postmodest··on Happy birthday APFS, 7 years old today
...because their "disks" all have hardware ECC?
postmodest··on Happy birthday APFS, 7 years old today
ZFS expects to have a huge cache, and defaults to 50% of memory, separate to any other fs cache. For advanced features, it requires a certain amount of cache per TB of storage.

For single-disk non-checksummed, non-deduplicated storage, it's a lot of wasted code that a device with a "mere" gigabyte of RAM doesn't need. So APFS hits most of their needs: volume management + journal + better disk layout for SSD.

postmodest··on Bob Moore, who founded Bob's Red Mill, has died
Dave's got bought by the Wonder Bread folks after Dave had a bit of an episode that shook up the company, IIRC.
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