spanhandler

So... we're gonna throw out the freedom to play with non-cheating strangers when your friends are all busy, in order that every computing device, instead of just lots and lots of them, can have arbitrary software installed on it?

This feels like losing options, not gaining them.

> That doesn't address the issue: those who would can't.

Then buy any other general computing product on the market. I'd be more sympathetic to this concern if Android didn't exist. Meanwhile it does, and the users who picked Apple did it because they don't care about this, they don't care very much about this, or because they actively want the App Store restrictions and the ecosystem that they create.

> You don't lose anything if you don't want to.

I very well might, though. Changes to rules change how actors behave in a system. The way software developers and publishers behave on iOS could change in ways that I don't like if they're able to viably distribute software outside the App Store. That might be OK, except forcing developers and publishers to follow the App Store rules is part of the appeal of the devices. If that'd been a major sticking point for me, I could have bought Android.

It's not false though? Games are a thing. In the sense of how systems run and how actors make decisions in it, not in terms of video games. Any change that makes it convenient to run a competing app store will almost certainly change the experience of using iOS, even for those who choose not to use an alternative app store.

If there's a way to allow easily & conveniently running one's own software without letting competing app stores work, I'm all for it. In fact there is a way to run your own software, it's just inconvenient, because time-limited so you have to re-install it periodically, which effectively kills any possibility of running a successful app store via that method.

No, this is correct. Hypercorrection for this rule usually comes in the form of saying or writing things like, "would you like to come with Tom and I to the park?" due to not understanding why the rule exists, and just blindly following the pattern.

That one's still firmly in the territory of being a good rule to follow if you're trying to communicate clearly, without being distracting, and aren't aiming at some kind of particular, very colloquial register. Perhaps in 30-50 years that will have changed.

Maybe, maybe not, but by like 5th grade most of them seem to have one regardless. Many younger kids have one. By 7th it's practically all of them (a smartphone, that is, though yeah, often an iPhone)

Our school assigns every kid an iPad. In Kindergarten. Good idea? I kinda don't think so, though it's been useful this year, of course. But it happens.

Increasingly parents have trouble letting kids wander the neighborhood on their own without a tracker/communication-device on them, and a smartphone's really good at serving that role. There are other options but kids want to have their smartphone on them, and as soon as you want them to be able to do one other smartphone-thing any other option starts to look kinda pointless.

(just relating observations of parenting in the wild, not my own parenting approach)

Raises hand.

I don't wanna have to worry about stupid computer shit when I'm just trying to use my iPad or iPhone as a tool to accomplish something else. Drawing, playing music, reading, writing, edutainment for the kids, very occasionally a game. Maybe the odd SSH session. If I decide I want some software to help me with any of those things I just want it to be in the App Store, and I just want it to use the App Store payment system. I don't want competing app stores because that might mean that sometimes what I want isn't on the Apple one, following Apple's rules about spying on my and otherwise behaving as badly as desktop software and webapps do these days. It means I have to search more than one store. Now we're veering into the stupid computer shit I don't want to have to worry about, again.

Homeschool for the very advanced older of our two elementary kids, done by one partner who's also going to be working from home, kind of. Many worries about that, including 1) will that actually work out OK?, and 2) if it does will that one end up so far ahead that we're now stuck homeschooling forever? Sort of a good problem to have but also... not a good problem to have.

Middle kid's going in, at least until they probably shut down in a month or two. Youngest is going to grandparents whom we very much hope we don't give The COVID, but none of the rest is happening if that one's home. No way.

"You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don't like. Great. This is the way ninety-eight-point-nine per cent of the people work things out, so believe me, buddy, you've got nothing to apologize for."

- Revolutionary Road (Richard Yates)

Advice given to a main character who's (spoilers?) smart and thoughtful enough to be deeply bored by and unhappy with anything like a normal career, while also easily doing well at such a job while hardly trying, but who also believes deeply that he's meant for something more artistic and intellectual and adventurous but is both entirely unmotivated to actually make that happen, and also probably not that smart.

And yes I felt attacked when I read the book :-)

To me that meaning checks out, but is a bit archaic. It’s how you might see it used in an older translation of the Bible, or a 19th century translation of the Greek tragedians, or maybe Tolkien, or something like that.

Modern, and especially colloquial, usage tends to be as a synonym of “envious”, so far as I know. “I’m jealous of her hair”. “His Instagram posts of his beach house make me so jealous”. “Stop mocking her car—you’re just jealous”. I don’t think I’ve ever heard or seen the older meaning intended in colloquial speech or all but the stuffiest of writing in the last 20+ years.

So, as is typical, two useful words have become one word through misuse.

I took it in the spirit of questioning one’s questions, and thought it was rather good. Russellian, even. Judging from the general reaction in here this may just mean I’m a dim bulb with a bad sense of humor.

I dunno, I’m actually about halfway to being convinced that if we can figure out what causes breakfast we’ll necessarily have solved the problem of consciousness, too.

Yeah, like, pretend you're looking at a message in a FreeBSD base system's documentation or something. They're just saying "don't write new shit that relies on macOS system PHP, because it's going away"—it is... not recommended!

As pointed out in the thread, it says the same thing for Python2 (though only if you run it bare for some reason, not with --version, and obviously only if you're invoking the system Python2, not something from e.g. Homebrew) so it seems to just be the message they use for anything that's deprecated and expected to vanish from macOS installations in the future. I bet the same message is used a bunch of other places.

I'd be kind of horrified if anyone's writing PHP on a mac that is not targeting the system's PHP specifically, but is using it. You want whatever version's gonna be on your deployment target, not what happens to ship with your OS installation. Included scripting languages are there so you can write scripts targeting the OS, not develop with them generally. You could, but it's not what most people are going to want.

What’s with the people in the twitter thread taking this as an insult to PHP itself, or a sign that PHP will no longer run on macOS? It’s clearly neither.

Mine are mostly state-related. The DB and files from a live site are so tied up in basic config & functionality that if you only have the source code repo you may as well have nothing.

Yeah but if you use bare tools then it’s hard to change them and the interface may differ project to project. If you let the JS developers pick your universal build tool then they’ll want to change it annually because now the old one they loved is “terrible” and some other thing is great and is definitely the way forward. Plus then you’ll need node on every machine that needs to run the build, and probably you’ll want to lock the version and not use the one in LTS OS releases because those are too old so now all your poor non-JS developers are installing NVM and Node and a pile of other crap.

Or you can just make everyone wrap their build tools in make.

That and multiple remotes. Not even necessarily all having the same branches.

Yeah I thought we might end up having to temporarily stick some ply across it or something when we moved in, but it's never been an issue. Our kids are psycho daredevils who don't listen for shit, so I have to assume it's just not that interesting to them. I think the diagonal sheet metal in the hole helps. Effectively, the hole in the ceiling under it is offset by the width of the hole itself, and the metal directs stuff between the hole in the floor and the hole in the ceiling under it, which means that you can't really get a good look at stuff falling down. You can see it go through the hole if you look in at an angle, but not the fall to the floor. The metal itself would be rad as hell to slide hot-wheels down, except it's pretty short and you can't see the car fall on the other side very well so I guess it's more fun to just throw them off the stairs, or the deck, or whatever. Its residing in a small, boring linen closet probably helps.

It's like an 8-inch-square hole. Big enough for a shirt or pants or a towel to slide down, maybe with a nudge from a foot. By the time a kid can open the closet door to get to the hole, they'd have a hard time fitting through it. Any cat that falls through a hole in the floor has only itself to blame, and can likely manage the problem just fine.

We have kids and a cat and none have had trouble with it. It's not half as dangerous as and has a lower attractive-nuisance factor than any set of stairs.

There seems to have been something that happened between the 80s and 90s and today that caused any team doing something non-trivial to go from like 3-8 people to more like 100. Like, you look at a description of exactly what the project was and you ballpark what you'd need today, and it's like 100+ people. The team that actually did it was eight humans and an office cat, and in many cases not one of them is famous for being some superhuman-level programmer.

I'm not sure what caused it. You'd think the opposite would have happened, in fact, since our tools are supposed to be so much better now. But I wouldn't dismiss the possibility that part of it's something along the lines of changing interests and work styles for developers entering the field.

Huh. I was hoping this would be about everything except building the product.

Our built-in-the-late-90s house has one of those in the hall closet upstairs. No door on it, just a hole. There’s some flashing and a “chute” that’s just a piece of sheet metal angled at 45 degrees to keep stuff from free-falling the whole way down, so it doesn’t look unfinished, but it’s basically just a hole.

Really it’s just a laundry chute. If the laundry room is directly under you, why make it fancier than that?

Ok, but for one thing I only put that in there to provide the perspective from which I was hating on the article, and for another I agree that that’s typical and my point is that I don’t think we’re dealing with a Carter or a Reagan or even a Nixon, in terms of historical judgement, but, like, a Buchanan or a Johnson (and no, not LBJ)

[edit] to illustrate: it’s 2080 and you’re a politically-motivated hack historian making a worst ten Presidents list. Do you list 10 political enemies? No. You make 5-8 uncontroversial safe picks, and 2-5 are your political enemies. My contention is that, due to his effectiveness in and execution of the office, Trump is likely to eventually land on a lot of those lists due to being in the “safe pick”, legitimacy-lending category, not the political one. Meanwhile, yes, he’ll be on those plenty for political reasons for the next decade or three.

Eh, sure, but those who are uncommonly inept, corrupt, and ineffective and also not very recent tend to end up down at the bottom, crossing political boundaries. Unless we have a run of exceptionally awful Presidents then I think when enough time has passed, we're likely looking at one of those situations. There's a certain class of President who ends up being widely considered to be quite bad, not so much because those ranking them disagree with what they stood for, but because they were ill-suited for the Presidency and were just... bad at the job.

FWIW I think this despite not even thinking he's the most damaging recent President, by a long shot. Yes, even with the whole COVID thing. I'm pretty sure The Other Guy's (I hesitate to distract by naming him) easily safe from ever being lumped in with the notoriously-poor-at-Presidenting set of ex-Presidents—Trump, I think he's got that label in his future.

Individualism, taken to anything like an extreme and as policy, can't even form something resembling a modern economy. It is, generously, an open question whether one can even do that without a state (less generously, it's not in any practical sense an open question, and no, you can't) and certainly you can't without forming some kind of bonds and structures that can force action of members against their immediate wishes, so there goes any high-purity individualism if you want... like, any stuff.

> The problem with articles like this is that the people who already agree with the author will think the article is insightful and focus on the parts that are obviously correct

Raises hand

I agree with your point here, more or less, in that I think the article was written the way it was to achieve the effect you call out, but while I probably mostly agree with the author's political positions I also think the article's kinda bad because it's poorly presented and the "insight" it offers is mostly cliché. (see my other posts in this discussion for details, should you care).

> In an ironically cult like absolutism, you dismiss the moral discussion that transpired within Western philosophical traditions that debate this very topic - of Judeo-Christianity, of consequentialism.

There's a lot of this in online political discussion. Strident but, ah, let's say poorly sourced claims about ethics or morality, with whole castles of charmingly clear and straightforward political philosophy built atop them. I usually "nope" out when it looks like we might end up accidentally re-creating the "what is Justice?" dialogue from the beginning of Plato's Republic, but with only one of us realizing it, which is a situation that comes up pretty often, actually.

This kind of column's a venerable cliché in left-leaning political writing in the US. Very good instances of it are still valuable, but this isn't really one of those and doesn't add much that anyone who pays attention to political writing hasn't already seen many times over. Better-argued and better-framed versions of the more historical and contextual bits of this are essentially the air that much of the left breathes. I've (repeatedly) seen forum posts cover the recent-events portions of this better, over the last few months, let alone professional writing.

(for the record, I'm writing this from a pretty damn "left" perspective, having read just... so many of these sorts of columns, or whole books, over the years. This ain't a notable or particularly good one.)

Even if he did that wouldn't necessarily mean we were a failed state. Again, it's got a specific meaning. The writer's an anthropologist so probably understands that just from exposure to the poli-sci department and/or reading enough about current events and politics to decide to write this article, and also being (one supposes) a thoughtful person.

Again, look, I fully expect, when historians take a look back at this time, Trump's gonna fill a slot on damn near all of their "worst 10 Presidents" lists for a very long time. [EDIT, restore accidentally omitted sentence] But we're not anywhere near failed-state territory.

However, sometimes history happens fast and maybe this time next year the US will actually be a failed state and the military won't be getting paychecks and will have disbanded or set up fiefdoms, and cartels will have de facto annexed Texas into the quasi-narco-state of Mexico that they already essentially co-govern, because no-one can stop them, and all our corporations will have scrambled chaotically to find ways to maintain continuity of operation and ownership of capital while moving to corporate structures overseas (incorporation, being a legal construct created by a given government, is worthless if it's granted by a failed state).

That is what happens in a failed state, and if we become one, that's what will be happening. It is not what is happening now.

But probably not. I dunno, I remember when everyone was sure Junior would try to become a dictator. Believe it or not the "other" side was exactly as sure that Obama would, too. I get that Trump is actually making public moves to screw with voting and doing all manner of other awful things, but I think one can be reasonably concerned about and upset by these things but also acknowledge that it's incredibly unlikely—not impossible, unlikely—that "failed state" will be an accurate term to apply to the US any time soon.

Also sometimes I go read Wikipedia's summary of history for various years, going through maybe a decade in a sitting, to gain some perspective. Remember that time we killed a few hundred thousand of one another over the right to own humans as property? That was a bad one. And holy shit the 1960s were another crazy '60s. Black people and Episcopalians being straight-up murdered because they took part in civil rights protests, and I don't just mean by cops or by counter-protesters at the protests but by people later, in cold blood, for having participated in them. Quakers self-immolating in protest of the draft. Told a bunch of 18 year olds we were gonna stick them on ships and planes and send them to the other side of the world to die an/or become killers in some jungle over a war we lied ourselves into, and if they didn't like that they could rot in jail. That decade sucked, too. Good music, though. Lots of decades of US history are full of shockingly bad political stuff and strife. Most, maybe.

[EDIT] maybe this provides a clear test: if the US state fails then the Federal government will no longer be able to effectively secure its own nuclear arsenal, pretty much by definition. Someone might keep them secure, but it wouldn't be the Federal government. If security of the bulk of the US nuclear arsenal is not yet something that a wide variety of foreign state and NGO actors are getting acutely nervous about, then you can be pretty sure the US is not yet a failed state. And no by security I don't mean worries about Trump having the big red button, I mean worries that anyone might walk in and take one, or the people guarding them might sell them, like everyone was worried about when the USSR collapsed.

Mmmmm.... call it a C-. Some paragraphs are train-wrecks. There's about 1/3 of an only-semi-interesting but not-actually-bad article in here if you cut it down, maybe.