funimpoded

That might make room for Apple to finally try. The AppleTV is already in a similar tier to modern consoles, as far as specs and benchmarks go. Most of what's missing is a first-party controller and a marketing push. Disk space is tight, too, I guess. Still, they're most of the way to having a horse in the race, if they want to.

I reckon a successful launch of the Steam box (or whatever they're calling it) with its enormous library could develop into something that really challenges what's left of Microsoft's piece of the console market (and threaten Sony a little, for that matter) though it's looking like the memory shortage is gonna kneecap that by forcing the price too high. Bad timing.

BeOS was way, way snappier to use on the same hardware than Linux (or Windows) no matter how much you trimmed down your (GUI) Linux.

IDK what scheduler voodoo they were doing, but it was awesome.

Only things I've seen that achieved something similar were QNX/Photon, and (though with the benefit of way stronger hardware and a ton of "cheating" by suspending applications) some (mostly early) versions of iOS.

I'm not sure I have any use for Haiku today, but I definitely wish for a world in which computer GUIs didn't feel so damn slow and janky and pre-occupied with whatever it's got going on internally rather than what I need it to be doing right now.

Also, I wish some kind of tagging system for filesystems had taken off well enough that I could rely on it, even cross-platform and when copying files between filesystems. Entire programs could just be file tags. Other programs could just be a thin GUI over tagged files. It sucks that didn't end up becoming a standard and reasonably cross-platform-compatible thing.

It’s a famous phrase coined by McLuhan. He means that the form of a medium determines the kind of overall message it delivers. A case of scrolls carries a different message from a bound codex collecting those same scrolls, and so on. Whatever the hypothetical ability to deliver the same messages over books, TV, silent films, talkies, YouTube shorts, tweets, radio, handwritten letters, emails, et c., in practice the media themselves shape the messages that they deliver, so the broader “message” they effect in the form of shaping society and public life are very different.

> If you strip social media down to its essential parts it's simply a multimedia communications and networking paradigm. Nothing ontologically good or evil about it.

“The medium is the message”.

This stuff’s been around long enough we’ve got a pretty good idea of what its “message” is.

Dunno how it is these days, but that reads like Android roughly 2012-2020.

I once found a looooong bug report thread on their issue tracker 7ish years old that had all the usual waves of promises that a fix might make the next release, then silence, then repeat, and the usual challenges to the bug’s status every time a release happened, plus it saw community members correctly diagnose the problem in the first couple years, then by like year 5 there’s was a (small!) patch posted by a community member with multiple posters confirming it was good and fixed the issue, that the author and others had been begging Google to apply and get in a release for a couple years. There’d been no responses from Google folks for a while.

That might be the worst one I saw, but encountering something like that was a few-times-per-year thing in my android app dev years.

You’ll need an under-25 who’s both used some of these enough to really understand them, and has watched others of mixed expertise levels use them, to get a meaningful opinion. Screenshots don’t cut it, for the same reason as why modern UIs can look slick in screenshots or a demo then be frustrating in actual use.

That person’s gonna be very rare, while lots of over-25s have that experience.

> I agree with everything you've said, but don't you think quite a lot of things have also been like this before, just to a lesser degree?

That’s exactly the reason LLMs and friends are so dangerous to companies, and it’s so hard for them to resist using them in useless/counter-productive ways. They’re excellent at faking signs of effort and work that companies can hardly help but reward, absent any actual way to measure manager effectiveness (and approximately nobody knows how to measure that, in the wild). This takes the form of gilding and padding on a lot of communication, none of which adds actual value but it does cost money directly and indirectly (time wasted sorting out which parts of a document are intentional and meaningful, and which are plausible but irrelevant LLM inventions, for instance)

I increasingly see “AI” as a sort of virus tuned to target management, specifically. Its output is catnip to them, and it’s going to be unavoidable for those who want to look good to superiors and peers (i.e. the #1 priority for managers) even as it adds no actual value whatsoever to what they do. People under them, too, will have to start burning tokens on bullshit to satisfactorily perform competence and “doing work”. Meanwhile, none of this is actually productive. It’s goddamn peacock feathers.

It’s like some kind of management parasite. I’m not even sure at this point that it’s going to lead to an overall productivity increase whatsoever for most sectors, because of this added drag on everything.

It reminds me of how movie special effects making-ofs got super boring when most of the work started being done with computers end-to-end.

But with everything.

“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.”

- An older neighbor counseling the has-things-relatively-great-but-unhappy-anyway protagonist in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road

> at the same time it's unbelievably sad that in recent years about 70% of the movies i saw at a cinema were multiple decades old.

There are literally thousands of good movies released between ~1890 and last year.

It’s improbable more than a hundred or so will come out this year that’re worth your time, and they’ll be harder to sort from the junk this close to release.

If anything, it’s amazing new movies have as large an audience as they do.

Lots of these franchise-connected series are flabby as hell. Netflix’s marvel series were almost all very bad about this, but so are most of the Disney Marvel series. On the Star Wars side, whatever positive qualities they may exhibit, Asoka and the Kenobi show both could have used large cuts. Even the relatively-speaking excellent Andor often doesn’t make effective use of its time.

I’m not sure what it is about the economics of this form of the medium that causes that to happen.

> I don't think it's that compelling to say "obviously no one wants to be on Instagram and they're getting manipulated into it." ...yeah they do! The question is can you make a compelling case that spending time on it is harmful.

I want to follow news and deals from a handful of vendors and local businesses I like a lot. The best way to do that is following them on instagram. It’s the only reason I signed up and installed the app. If it’d been one or two, I’d not have bothered, but it’s that way for lots of them.

I never want to see the “feed”. I would disable it if I could. I would make it default to my “following” view if I could. Instagram so very much wants me not to do that that they went out of their way to make it impossible to achieve that even with iOS’ built in shortcut-like system (you used to be able to).

As a result, sometimes I get distracted by one or two of the top items on the feed. That doesn’t mean I actually want to see them. That I open the app once every couple days doesn’t mean I like the app. I think it’s terrible.

People taking what folks do with a sharply constrained set of options as an expression of “why they want” or revealed preference or whatever is frustratingly wrong.

Funny, the deeper I get into film the more I respect how much the original trilogy does really well. Especially the first two, Jedi’s got some “I have a story I want to tell a certain way but am stuck with more characters than I need and refuse to budge on either front” issues in the script, among other script issues (some giving us a preview of problems that would really come to the front in the prequels)

> Disney can do whatever it wants if it restores and releases a 4K version of the theatrical cuts of the original trilogy, something the fan base has wanted for decades at this point. I won't hold my breath.

We have 4k77 and the follow-up projects. I doubt Disney would release anything I’d prefer to those. They would probably find a way to make their version slightly worse.

TLJ was almost great, but clearly needed to see Rey go dark at the end, while Kylo turns away from the dark side, and we get a role-reversed third movie. It was heading there so clearly that I have to think juking and doing the obvious, boring thing was a studio meddling issue. “Ok no you can do a lot but you can’t do that.”

Yeah, questions I have: 1) what’s the effect for countries with humane amounts of paid leave (e.g. France’s 7ish weeks plus ten or so holidays) and working hours; and 2) so how about, you know, the idle rich? Should we be forcing them to work 40 hours as gas station clerks, for the good of their mental health? Should we forcibly deny them access to their money sometimes so they have to get a job every now and then?

I suspect what’s actually going on is that decades on end of employment and the stress of the constant threat of financial ruin causes substantial psychological trauma and absolutely destroys a person’s social self and life, and the idle rich are actually doing fine despite not having jobs, and people in countries that let you live a little bit of life still in your “working years” don’t see this effect so strongly. If that’s true, then it’s incredibly fucked up that the prescription is “more of the thing that robbed you of your humanity to begin with… all to further enrich the idle rich who are not so-traumatized”