tammer

I think the approach here where interfacing with a device is considered from first principles is one that is rarely taken on, and this is a thought provoking implementation. Kudos.

While you & I may find shoehorning LLMs into every nook & cranny distasteful, I worry Marl may think differently

https://open.substack.com/pub/nothinghuman/p/the-tyranny-of-...

Recent history of Apple vs. sovereign states is a real time vindication of Polanyi. Capital is always subordinate to the state (even if it proclaims to be the opposite).

I will second the recommendation to start with vanilla emacs. That isn't to disparage releases like spacemacs & doom. I simply found those to be more useful once I fully understood the power that comes with a fully reprogrammable editor. There is a learning curve and there is also a mental model to adopt, and I think that adopting the mental model is easier when starting raw and building up from scratch. Once you feel comfortable maybe try spacemacs or doom to see if they offer advantages for your workflow.

I also highly recommend the resources at https://www.masteringemacs.org

This person is missing that modern global society is rigidly organized around principles of competition. It's not the case that people don't care -- instead we are systemically pressured into putting all of our care into getting one over everyone else and taking care of our own. A society organized around different principles would give us the space to care about our collective wellbeing. Hopefully one day we'll get there.

This demo is impressive although my initial reaction is a sort of grief that I wasn't born in the timeline where Alan Kay's vision of object-oriented computing was fully realized -- then we wouldn't have to manually reconcile wildly heterogeneous data formats and interfaces in the first place!

This is likely the case in a lot of places. We're still in the midst of ransomware groups targeting hospitals.

has anyone done an analysis on how much big tech revenue comes from the DoD, particularly as its changed over time?

even the most secure outbound protection would likely whitelist the CrowdStrike update servers because they'd be considered part of the infrastructure

When I saw 'Global IT Outage' trending I assumed it was another major cloud service failure. Obviously this has far wider impact because of the need for intervention on individual endpoints.

The irony is dawning on me that for much of the recent computing era we've developed defenses against massive endpoint outages (worms, etc.) and one of them is now inadvertently reproducing the exact problem we had mostly eradicated.

This had my attention at first but I’m not sure it led me anywhere. For discussion of the fundamental contradictions with the current structure of the Internet (that lead to the problems described herein & more), I highly recommend The People’s Platform by Astra Taylor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People's_Platform

It’s a decade old at this point & yet continues to be startlingly relevant.

I’ve come full circle on this but I now think native applications on smartphones was a mistake.

There is no technological reason why applications can’t be distributed as PWA packages similar to the days prior to the App Store.

This would serve two important functions:

1. Remove most if not all distribution monopoly concerns

2. Create application standards that function nearly identically across the myriad of screen sizes and input types that are now available.

The current status quo of some service that makes my life easier or better only being available in a browser or only available on one or two of my devices (or, most often, available in a few ways but only bug-free or full-featured in only one method of access) isn’t the future I want.

These types of articles come out periodically and annoy me quite a bit. iPadOS has been my interface to the digital world for going on 6 years. Here are the things I do exclusively via an iPad Pro:

  * administer a dozen HPC clusters
  * perform all the digital tasks required of a non-profit board member
  * learn/read, communicate, consume media, photo edit and all the other normal life things one does on a computer nowadays

It’s true that I don’t have a podcast. But I think I’m in the majority of computer users there! I’ll also say that I have had to accept some limits or look for workarounds in the past, but the big additions of file downloads, safari compatibility modes and finally stage manager have effectively taken care of those.

This is correct & I’ll add that reorganizing around sustainable ways of being is in fact an inevitably.

And a result of this inevitably will be huge winners who invest in sustainable ways of being and huge losers tied to old ways of doing things.

well that explains a lot

as someone responsible for a small nonprofit that runs on google sheets, this product is super exciting.

a suggestion: key to us adopting this would be the migration story. I’d love if that was clearly presented on the website.

I still use it regularly. the app is my go-to calculator.

it just hasn’t been updated in quite some time. there are a lot of ways the back end could support new UI features etc., but something seems to be holding it back.

The resurgence of the email newsletter in recent times is a sign that, regardless of advances in web and web-connected applications, on a broad timescale open connectivity protocols ultimately hold lasting appeal.

Open protocols and techniques that enable effortless parsing of information serve a growing need for users of the web today. While I’m not sure if it will be gopher or something new, I foresee significant disruption potential for whatever effectively fills this need at scale.

I work for a big institution that includes a massively funded hospital network. I don’t actually work for the medical part of the institution. I am technically deemed an essential worker because we have servers on-site.

Recently I had some minor symptoms and wanted to get a test. By going through my employer’s employee testing process I

  A) got a test scheduled for the same day I called
  B) got my negative result under 12 hours later

This was a transformative moment for me in recognizing that there is an intentional, and centralized project to stress testing capacity in the United States. There is no shortage of materials or staff, just funding for lab capacity. This is an incredibly solvable problem that our leaders are choosing not to solve.

I truly believe the future historical narrative of this moment will cast our elected leaders as the orchestrators of mass genocide. It’s hard to consider living, breathing, contemporary people who hold esteemed positions to be on the level of evil as historical Nazis. But as time passes and we consider the impact their choices are having, it will both become easier to cast them in such a light, and to question the passivity of a population that accepts their decisions. It has never been more clear to me how such atrocities can happen and at the same time become normalized.

I would argue that in a number of ways Apple Notes is one of the most advanced in terms of features.

Yes, it doesn’t bombard you with its functionality and at first glance is a simple place to jot notes (perhaps its greatest strength). But dig into the feature list, and perhaps help me find a similar application that:

1) can combine tables, rich text formatting, and in-line sketches 2) can store any file type in-line 3) can encrypt protect notes 4) can bulk share Notes + live edit 5) has a built-in complex document scanner

I know there are some alternatives that cover most of these but I think Apple Notes is king precisely because of these many layers of functionality.

A friend of mine recently pointed out that until this point, we didn’t generally or commonly understand pandemic as a real possibility (even if we did historically & scientifically). The same is true for nuclear weapons.

  * https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off.

My god i haven’t been so drawn into a website in a long time. I actually forgot what that feeling was like.

I find it odd to the point of unsettling how fresh and unique XP’s design feels today.

I think you are correct in that this is often not brought into such conversations.

I also think that the full extent of this conversation, that consumer interest is currently in opposition with our responsibilities as a society, is rarely considered by the mainstream media as well.

Fun tip: Make a folder called “Developer” in ~

Take a look in Finder.

Tangent: are we witnessing the beginning of a new design trend? I feel like every app & website that’s popped up recently is designed in something like a “modern” version of an 8-bit/retro aesthetic. (Hence the terminal-purple & courier font here, but many more examples abound).

Precisely. This is leveraging the “network effect” that has thus far mostly been a tool of corporate profit for mass benefit.

I yearn for a future where knowledge is distributed in a practical, organizied way such as via Gopher or similar, along with tapping the full potential of email as a one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one communications medium where data is distributed and address ownership is maintained.

I encountered a bug a while back — when I would connect to a dial-out call to get onto my company’s conference service from its app, while using a pair of cheap Bluetooth headphones (I’ve upgraded since then!) the mute button didn’t work.

As in, the mute button would be clearly activated, but my audio still carried through to the call. As in, I discovered this in quite an embarrassing way.

I filed a radar but never got a real response about it. Really there appears to be a strong need at Apple to ensure QA is checking for confirmations of user interaction. As I haven’t experienced anything like this since I’m still with them but these types of problems are the very thing that would lead me to shake my deep investment in the Apple ecosystem.

I’ve been banging this drum for a while, but to me it’s clear as day: the company that cracks this and makes the process described within easier and monetizable will be the next unicorn.

People are starving for ownership of a one-to-many communication address (which email is designed for, but has not been well executed by email clients since email has been seen first as business/office tech).

I think this is valid and needed but I often wonder if we over-focus on the open web as the alternative over the other biggest widespread open technology in the world: email.

I go to a lot of art & music performances. Lately, and particularly for the last few events I’ve attended, the performer emphasized joining their (MailChimp-managed) mailing list, because they didn’t want to seem uncool by promoting Facebook.

I don’t know exactly what it looks like, but I strongly suspect the social graph that disrupts Facebook gets built on email, somehow. Something like MailChimp, but without the direct marketing/conventional newsletter expectation baggage and a focus on message consumers as well as producers.

The advantages of “push” style communication, flexibility in styling messages, and potential for advertising all seem to me like a revolution waiting to happen. The openness of email, combined with the fact that everyone has one (even millennials!) are icing.