vidarh

We did, and yet people did still often just come over unannounced, to the point that it that the unannounced visit - which was common enough to be believable, but not always welcome - was a frequent plot point in various media.

It was common during my childhood for us to always have something in the cupboard - like a cake or biscuits or chocolate - that we could offer in case someone just dropped by.

It's been decades since I've cared about having anything ready for a possible surprise visitor, as while before I'd feel rude if I didn't have anything, now I'd feel they were rude for not checking in advance as now they rarely have an excuse for not doing so.

Does it? It means different types of socialising a lot of the time, but couples often merges friend groups and I could definitely see a case for some subset of those friend groups ending up meeting up more regularly. I don't know. It'd be interesting to see data broken down by relationship status.

I'd get more energy from sitting alone in a dark room than by throwing a - or attending a - party...

That doesn't mean I don't enjoy attending (never throwing) parties on occasion, but it's exhausting to me. Whenever I come home from a social occasion I need time to recover.

It's very much down to different personalities.

Running full screen when the apps you're using does sensible things in full screen mode works reasonably well on OS X - I use OS X for one of my clients, and live mostly in iTerm2 and browsers. It still feels different, but, yes, it's close to what I'm after. On my Linux box, I'm chasing moving that functionality into my wm, instead of needing my terminal etc. to support it - since it means I can mix and match apps and switch between floating and tiling + opening/closing screen-like virtual desktops.

I honestly don't know what will feel ergonomic on a modern setup - I'm chasing nostalgia in part, but at the same time I'm fully aware that I remember it with very rose-tinted glasses, so I'm trying to stepwise approach some mix of the nostalgic elements that works with my existing setup.

Yes, but my point is that while the resolution / colour change was one aspect of screens, it wasn't really the most interesting one. We relied heavily on screens also for e.g. productivity applications that didn't have a particularly compelling reason to change either.

Many applications had settings to run either in windows on the Workbench screen, or on a separate screen. Some would then let you choose between windows on a separate screen or running effectively full-screen. And using screens like a grouping mechanism like that was overall the more common use of screens other than for e.g. paint applications that needed the different colour modes.

It felt like a less offensive version of Windows MDI concept.

It's not that there are no applications today that approximate it because there absolutely are. It's more that on AmigaOS this was ubiquitous and expected and you didn't need to do anything to fullscreen these applications - only small utilities tended to lack options to run on their own screen.

In later versions of AmigaOS, you could also open "public" screens that like the Workbench screen allowed windows from multiple applications on the same screen, somewhat like virtual desktops, but that somehow felt less compelling, I think because you then relied on separately starting multiple applications.

The US is uniquely bad because of its dramatically higher number of incarceration - one of the highest per capita in the world, only beaten by El Salvardor, Cuba, Rwanda, and Turkmenistan. If those are the kind of countries you're content to be compared to... Yikes.

It is also bad because of its brutal prison system, but it is not the most brutal by any means. For a democracy that purports to be a civilized developed country, on the other hand, it is pretty high up on the list.

Personally, if I somehow magically found myself on a US jury, I'd find it morally really hard to convict even in the case of an open and shut case due to the inhumane US prison system.

When there are known far better models and you continue to actively harm people - both those incarcerated and society as a whole - in record numbers, then yes, it is wildly immoral.

> Saying "He had no free will" doesn't mean "The state has no right to confine him away from people he might hurt."

You get it.

Saying "he had no free will" would mean there's no basis for using incarceration for vengeance, and it ought to change how prisoners are treated. It does not take away a legitimate need to lock people who remain a threat away. Nor does it entirely take away a justification for some use of incarceration as deterrent, to the limited extent it actually works.

It just means a different calculation over how and when the harm done to those incarcerated outweigh the risks and harms to society of letting them go free, as well as a collective responsibility of society for addressing the conditions that causes these outcomes in the first place.

Of course human society can function with such notions. For starters, we still have no evidence that supports "free" will, and human society manages to function just by blatantly ignoring it and holding on to what we have nothing to suggest is more than fiction.

But a society that accepts that people have less or no actual agency would still have legitimate reasons to incarcerate, just fewer, and still has legitimate reasons for a criminal justice system, just with different priorities.

E.g. protecting against genuine risks of reoffending is still a moral reason to incarcerate where there are no alternatives - maximising freedom means protecting people against real threats even if the person making up that threat is not able to choose differently.

But if you accept that there is no free will, then the moral basis for conditions that amount to vengeance disappears. Society won't collapse over that - in fact, we know from the reoffending rates in places like Norway that treating prisoners better correlates strongly with less reoffending, and so even if you don't buy that there is no free will, it remains the most moral choice purely on the basis of lessening the suffering inflicted on the rest of society as well.

If you accept there is no free will, most of the other logical consequences comes down to how you approach society as a whole, and how criminal justice changes is just a side effect: If people have no free will, then a whole lot of arguments use to e.g. deny benefits and welfare breaks down, and we arrive at a strong moral argument for improving conditions for the poor since we know poverty correlates strongly with more crime, which directly produces harm both for society as a whole and directly for the perpetrator and victims.

None of this causes society to stop functioning. It just stops people using "free" will as an excuse to not to look for root causes and focus on what actually works to reduce offending and reoffending rates by hiding behind immoral ideas about moral hazards.

P.S. I note you've still not tried to actually provide any argument for how free will could even potentially exist.

But none of that really requires separate "screens" any more.

I love the screen concept, but the different resolutions and colour depth are the weakest reason for them on modern hardware.

> Or often it could, the games were just poorly optimised.

So in other words it wasn't generally an issue with the Amiga, but with sloppy work.

> There were plenty of games where the code didn't care to pick up the joystick movements in a reasonable time, making the game feel sluggish, even if the joystick movements can be read directly from the CIA port.

We clearly had very different experiences. To me that is not something that every concerned me.

It's not pedantic because it means it was categorically not that the machine "struggled with frame rates" but that the frame rates were imposed by external factors.

I can't recall many games with "low responsiveness to joystick movements". On the contrary, latency from movement to action were typically lower than on modern hardware.

The frame rate of games of the era was dictated by the frame rate of the video output. They would have struggled with higher frame rates, but that was entirely moot.

As an Amiga user that sounds like a horrible alternative future...

I've been thinking a lot about this. Virtual desktops gets us somewhat close, but not quite. You're right the difference in resolution and colour depth isn't really relevant any more.

What I think made screens feel different was as a grouping mechanism, usually driven by a single application (though in more recent versions of AmigaOS you could open "public screens") that would manage the layout for that screen. You can do that with virtual desktops, but it takes some effort to simulate the behaviour.

I'm slowly iterating on something like that for my wm. I now snapshot the (by default tiling) layout and restore it, letting me "open" and "close" screens/virtual desktops, and re-open the applications on them, so instead of opening a single application that opens a screen, I will open a "project" and it will open a desktop and multiple applications on it whose windows will snap into place. I'm not happy with it yet, but it feels somewhat closer to me to how it felt to use Amiga screens.

Something like:

"Plan out the change. Structure the plan so that it can be broken into individual PR's that each covers a single logical part of the change. Aim for less than 500 lines per PR unless the change is trivial and mechanical." (with a lower end model you need to be a lot more precise; with a frontier model you only really need to let it know you care about the PR size)

... in your prompts, coupled with gating PR creation on passing a stringent automated code review that also reviews it on whether or not it adheres to the rules you set regarding complexity of the PR, solves that problem without hiding the complexity.

If you have 230 file changes, that is a process failure unless they're purely obviously committing purely e.g. linter cleanups.

Norway learned the hard way that the American method doesn't work, and the current reoffending rate is the result of half a century of moving the other direction.

No, I don't know it. In fact, I don't think there's any kind of evidence to suggest "free choice" is even possible for any kind of definition of "free choice" that doesn't make a mockery of the idea it is "free".

I'm still waiting for a definition that could even suggest otherwise. I know I won't get one, because nobody I have this discussion with is ever capable of coming up with one.

If you can't even define the terms, why do you imagine I should "know" it to be true?

Compare to places that actually care about reform, like Norway.

So on other words you don't have an answer.

Please do define free will, and try to do so in a way that a) gives people actual agency (define that while you're at it, and b) compatible with the available evidence of how the universe works.

Norway actually used to have prisons modelled built on the so-called Philadelphia model [1] with strict isolation. Unsurprisingly it didn't work very well.

It was also one of the prisons that eventually helped drive public opinion away from US-style prisons as punishment because of how extreme it was (recognised also in a 1/3 reduction in sentences if you served there...). It was closed in 1970, around the time when the Nordic movements towards criminal custody reform started really gaining traction.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet but the Norwegian page is far more extensive: https://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botsfengselet

Given that the American prison system is performing as badly as it is, even if you ignore any concern for the prisoners, the US system is immoral even purely on the basis of the harm it does to society through the high reoffending rates.

Article 4 (formal consultation) is far more likely, and using that as a way of doing an "article 5 light" after consultation as a warning shot.

The Amiga Workbench was semi-spatial in that you could snapshot icons in place so their locations would persist, but you could also drag and drop icons everywhere without saving their location and it'd reset next time.

My current desktop works like that. It's not quite what you're describing, but it's a couple of minor iterations away to allow multiple different snapshots.

It's interesting, but personally I think the idea of a singular desktop model is what is going to die, and we'll instead get workspaces that are a lot more malleable by user intent and preferences and changing and morphing as indiidual users preferences evolve.

I'm stating that on the basis of having Codex mutate my WM while using it (just restarting it without restarting my session) to do things like adding two layer desktops, and snapshotting desktop state, resuming with the applications I want.

There's nothing special about any of that, but what is a bit special is describing a change in desktop behaviour I want, have it churn for a bit and for my live desktop to seamlessly change.

Being able to do that makes it meaningless to lock users into a pre-defined desktop model any more.

And that would be relevant if someone use sqlite as the default database backend for multiuser applications with stored procedures.

That's the problem here: Systems built on sharing the database over a networked filesystem, where one user can not just modify all the data, but can also execute code on all users machines.

I'll go one further: We'll see companies proudly boasting "no humans" as a competitive advantage and arguing letting humans do certain types of work is unsafe.

How many people with revolutionary ideas actually worth anything have genuinely failed to find someone to help them build it?

I think that if they're unable to sell their idea well enough to find a co-founder odds are the idea would die on the vine whether or not they're able to implement it.

If the cost to produce goes down, unless the demand is elastic, you'd expect fewer big hits in favour of a more fragmented, more competitive space all earning less.