flenserboy

This does look great for its use case, but I'd love a version as a latter-day eMate.

interesting. if this is to be allowed, it must be allowed both ways.

This sounds great, but it pains me that I can't dual-boot my iPhone 15 Pro as a lightweight Mac. Would be great with an HDMI connector & BT keyboard/mouse.

vague laws are put in place so that they can be used selectively to punish particular victims while letting friends through the nets

Crash the PC market, & then disappear down the drain. Fascinating business plan.

Of course they did stock buybacks instead of using their mountains of cash to lock out the competition or keeping their powder in reserve. Brilliant!

I think many more would be on to Pages if they realized it was more than a simple WP. It's especially great for personal use, where there's no non-Mac sharing needed — there's no simpler layout program out there, & the typographic options are nice to have. If I have something longer/more detailed to put together, that's what ()LaTeX, Inkscape, etc., is for. We need alternate app ecosystems out there, & it's nice that Apple hasn't left these apps to rot like they did back in the 2010s.

reminds me of some of the old Beagle Brothers one-liner games. it's easy to forget that something this simple is still fun!

the worst possible future for Apple, & perhaps for us all.

ok. it isn't as if there's been more than a handful of movies worth watching which have been made in the last 10 years. consolidating catalogs of at-best-mediocre platforms isn't going to make things any better or worse.

Quite. The last thing I want is opinionated software that might mess with the end product of whatever I'm working on, searching for, etc. Digital computing has the capacity to give us complete predictability, & those in charge of building it seem to want to prevent users from having it.

It's bad enough what Google did to search; a future where the only thing you get back is a) what the machine allows you to see or create (which may be determined by the built-in agent or by the programmers); b) what the machine wants you to see, & modified to be in line with its whims; & c) hallucinated slop where it is difficult to determine what is real, what is human-originated, & what is constructed out of whole cloth.

numbers often quoted in favor of statins use relative instead of absolute risk. when seen in absolute terms there is little case for statins except in some possible particular cases. they also do little, if anything, when it comes to life extension — the expected lifespan of a statin user is often estimated to be four days longer than that of those who do not use them. not only is this essentially statistical noise, it discounts the lowered quality-of-life side effects experienced by many who have been put on statins.

1. there is no longer a market for certain sorts of software, whether due to market dominance (Word), or the likely market size being too small to bother with.

2. FOSS has dropped into Code Reuse Mode*, & getting out of that is going to require motivated individuals to build their own, entirely new versions. LibreOffice is Good Enough for most users, so why go to all the effort of starting from ground level when a fork & reskin will do?

one would hope that FOSS would lead to having cool, alternate approaches to particular use problems (as in the old days, when there were myriad word processors on the market — XyWrite, WordPerfect, WriteNow, Word, etc., etc.), but Good Enough means that attention can be put on more interesting problems. what we're left with is a mediocre mass of applications.

*which is why nearly every alternate OS ends up feeling like Linux with missing programs & weird commands, so why not just use Linux? we're going to be stuck in a rut for a long time to come.

Can't wait for it to be AIs arguing back & forth with all sorts of unforeseen consequences arising. We have much to think through, & strong, simple rules to put in place, or things are going to get rather out of hand.

but it still should happen. every project (of a certain size) should have at least 1-2 programmers whose job it is to make the code faster & smaller. frankly, this could well be the best use of AI on code — not to generate it, but to use its potential speed to chew through existing code bases, outputting squashed-down, streamlined code which is tested to return the same results as the original (think the dream of gentoo, but every program on your system optimized for your particular hardware).

behavior will only get worse once people figure out that enforcement will either be entirely selective (based on the friends of whoever controls the programming) or entirely arbitrary. people will wish for anarcho-tyranny.

that, & how well does it cope with Perl?

corporate charters should be treated as the tools they are. such businesses do not exist without being tied to a particular set of laws in a particular jurisdiction.

Apple had a chance to bring back taste when they got rid of Ive, but missed it entirely. The overly rounded windows, the weird amount of blank space, the lack of clarity in general — the only thing that makes sense is that middle managers brought this about.

edit: Things are even worse — they already made newer apps much more difficult to read, likely because they have been brought from mobile to desktop. Now fonts are even smaller in System Settings, for example. What are they even thinking?

the tipping point came when boolean searches no longer worked. from that point on search results on Google have been what they want you to receive, not what you ask for. (it could also be argued that the real end of Google came when the long tail disappeared from results — that is where the real gold could be found, if one was patient, especially when it came to exact searches — & giving useful results could not be tolerated, whether due to restricting access to certain sites or info, or because more ads needed to be put in front of the eyes of users.)

yep. the whole purpose of this is to stop people from communicating with each other, and only consume approved vetted sources. they'd probably prefer to keep tech out of people's hands entirely (why would serfs need that?!?), but it is too useful for the purposes of surveillance and control.

LVT is envy written into law — "how dare someone use what belongs to them in a way which doesn't benefit me?!?", whether individuals or groups are speaking. It also puts a wonderful tool into the hands of decision-makers to reward friends & punish enemies. No.

Very cool! Thank you.

Has anyone tried this for command line applications? This could be a great way to develop some very specific/corner-case tools.

Your position is clear: if responsible governments (lol) punish platforms for what commoners post on them, platforms wishing to survive will, sensibly, not allow commoners to post. Moderation is not enough, as unapproved things will always make it through the cracks.

The deep distrust of unmoderated, un-nannied communication is also apparent:

>The "but it is only transportation of information, like telephones"

>argument is just ridiculous. It is valid for email at best,

>it is not valid for social media. They already routinely practice

>filtering of what is posted.

The at best you use to describe the freedom of communication in email shows that your position has no bottom: everything and anything the masses express, even in private communications, must be policed. You also do not understand that freedom of speech in the US is not moderated or regulated by the government, and is something enjoyed by the people, not just interest or power groups, which adds to the authoritarian vibe of your post.

Yours is an argument to entirely wipe away user content and corporatize the whole of the Internet, a return to the days of TV and Radio. Where, in your world, could citizens find a platform willing to allow them to share their opinions, creations, and find the like-minded?

Pandoc is your friend for this and many other use cases.

it's not a right, but it shouldn't be impeded. google does everything it can not to give actual search results — the terrible AI slop at the top, page after page of ads, & the elimination of the long tail, where reality was once allowed to surface. now we get hallucinations & paid content. treating this as if it is an improvement sounds crazed.

the funniest part here is that if G+ is part of the reason, they still don't understand why people didn't want to use it, making any decisions which follow wrong &/or misguided. while I'm not terribly in favor of breaking up companies, there is far too much incentive for Google, given its ad business (which is really what the company now is), to have any voice in the future of the Web. Chrome must be spun off, & firewalls put in place between the ad side & the search side of things (unless, of course, they really are just a govt subsidiary & this has been the plan all along, but there would have to be tangible proof of that).

good question. that would not be an easy problem to work out.