primitur

I'm with you. I had a 2017 15" Macbook Pro for work reasons, and just gave it back. I was not sorry. My list of reasons: worst keyboard on Macbook, since like ever. Useless touchbar that just annoyed me more than anything else - was never useful. USB-C is great, but guess how many times I've had to leap across the room because there's no more magsafe and smash my self into the floor in order to avoid the laptop doing it, hmmkkay.. bit of a devolution, I reckon.

I'm very happy with my 2015 MBP though, and will just push it through this particular iteration of upgrades for another year or so.. that is, assuming the thermal paste survives, lol, curse you Apple!

>The dysfunctional politics of social media is an adult problem.

It wouldn't be so drastic if the family unit were not under attack by social movements hell bent on removing the last bastion against their attempts to introduce social upheaval. the family unit is a real and functioning means of social survival. Attacking the family unit because it is "the final frontier of liberation" is a highly contentious argument - it also happens to be the last bastion of true civilization. Once the family unit is deconstructed, civilization fails. This is demonstrated throughout the historical record.

History: you only need to look beyond your own sphere to see that historically, yes, a majority of all parents, ever, have cared for their kids and wish for them to have a better future.

Statistics: if it were not so, we wouldn't have survived as a species, let alone been to the moon and been given the 'privilege' of iPhones, et al.

Privilege: oh look, you used a word.

>What makes you think most have a desire to raise their kids with future-proof values?

History.

>What makes you think that most have a desire to raise their kids?

Statistics.

> privileged assumptions

I think you've got a bit of hatred for this subject.

>Simpson/Huxtable thing is valid.

Fiction is merely an analog for the truth; in this case, a very minor, small part of the reality of parenting. No, Homer is not a good parent model. His character is more of an allegory for cynical irony than the reality, which is that a vast majority of parents - fathers - care very deeply for their children and want to see them survive whatever the future brings.

Anything less is the very apathetic, solipsism, we've been discussing.

Yes, I've done it and Disk Utility doesn't think there's anything wrong. But yet, I've tried over and over to make a disk image - of different disks, even - and every single time I get the error "no usable disk image found". At this point, after having scoured the web for clues, I can only conclude: this is a bug in MacOS.

I'm now trying to do a full update to the latest release, and see if it works beyond that point - but if it doesn't, the good ol' tarball approach is all I've got left.

I think Apple has some QA issues.

If our culture didn't promote narcissistic/solipsism as much as it does, above all others, perhaps these execs wouldn't be so inclined.

Yes, its an ethics issue. I don't disagree that Facebook have stepped over the line. But we have to face the truth of the matter, which is that our society encouraged them to do so - and allowed it to happen - and is continuing the slide down the slippery slope towards totalitarian oblivion. Facebook isn't going to fix that for us, nor would it be fixed if we nuked the Facebook campus from orbit, to be sure.

Which is why I think there has to be an ethical, and technological means perhaps, by which we can enact the social change required to bring us out of this conundrum. Just the way that social change was brought about by culture revolution, itself the product of some small incident perhaps, we have to find that means. I don't know what it is, but I start now to think of what a 'decent' social network would be like .. don't you?

I believe Linux (the kernel) has one of the most productive, QA production lines out there. If Apple were to adopt the "Linux way", we may indeed see a change ..

On the other hand, it may work against us, having Apple involved in Linux things. I'm not sold either way - but I sit here, re-installing MacOS on two Macbook Pro's, both of which absolutely refuse to make a usable/safe disk image out of their own disks. This is such a frustrating conundrum, it feels like Solaris in the 90's. I can only hope something changes at Apple, or else I'm just going to wipe MacOS and put Linux on these machines. That is quite a watershed, imho.

Facebook wouldn't be such a bully if it didn't have so many willing victims, throwing themselves at its maw. There is a market for industrialized narcissism/solipsism .. but what came first - Facebook, or the narcissist? I believe its the latter, but I'm willing to concede that Facebook - as well as others - have definitely fomented this market.

Right now, we have to deal with the Facebook dystopia. But, it won't go away if we just shut down Facebook. We need to work on the reasons for the cultural and social proclivity towards allowing the usurpation of our basic human rights. Do most of us even know what our human rights are?

But YES PLEASE if it means we don't have to deal with endless new bugs introduced by their heinous QA of lately .. APFS, root logins, &etc.

While you're at it please add a namespace .. it'd make it a lot easier to administer in a project.

Great project by the way - I've put it on my workbench-TODO for a little hacking some time in the next few days. I've got a standard 'command processing server' project that I've been hacking on over the years, I might try to hack up a moustique_ integration, just for grins.

>we're training a generation of narcissists

This is an age-old conundrum, and I don't think we'll ever be rid of it. However, I do believe we need to refine the current situation such that it doesn't become the #1 dominating factor in social discourse.

It would be nice to see a social network arise that rewards altruism and empathy, for example, while demoting narcissism and solipsism... Perhaps that will come, somehow. In some ways I believe we already have these platforms in some forms (github comes to mind) ..

I'm not calling for its end. I'm calling for its control. And there is no better entity in all society than the family unit when it comes to social control. You can't effect change without control...

They don't have to be wise or responsible. They do have to have a desire to raise their kids with future-proof values. These are not necessarily the same thing.

And .. Homer Simpson? Fiction, yo.

The elephant in the room is not Facebook.

Its the generations of people who have, over the last 10 years, grown up to assume that their personal lives are of interest to others, and wish therefore to capitalize/profit on exposing their life to strangers.

This is going to be a much more difficult precipice to step back from than, say, the rampant piracy of things like Napster, and so on. We'll definitely have to push technology harder and further to establish better ways for these addicts to come down from their highs and return to a more normal level of social interaction - but then again, maybe its too late.

(Upvote me if you agree.)

Seriously though, I believe we have to appeal to one demographic that gets ignored through all of this, thick and thin: parents. Its truly the only way to adjust this cultural liability for future generations - we simply must insist on parental controls over social media from now on.

And, in addition, we have to establish that parents should regulate their kids' use of online/social media tools in such a way that we reduce the devolutionary effect on human interaction that is occurring now.

Perhaps its truly time for a revolutionary new service: FamilyBook. You can only gain access with a birth certificate .. mmm ...

>I disagree that if you can't do the job of the people 'below' you, you're not qualified to lead them.

+

> Distrust tends to lead to a lot of control and micromanagement, which imho for knowledge workers does not work.

=

To each their own, and I have had this argument elsewhere before, but I will say this: brittle organizations are built on the basis of competency; if you cannot do my job, why should I trust you to understand my issues?

I just went through an episode with this kind of 'leader' - he basically demonstrated everything described in this article, with the end result being I no longer am employed at his company.

Unfortunately, leadership is not something that younger (<30) generations of people are learning to embrace, or even understand. There is such a narcissistic bent going on in the modern, Western world, that this should be no surprise - but it is really shocking to be faced with a CTO who absolutely has no idea how to foment team spirit, how to motivate his juniors, how to get people to enjoy doing the often-times-mundane-inane, boring, work that has to be done in modern times.

Perhaps it has always been that way, perhaps I - as a ~50 year old - am getting very jaded/off-my-lawn type, but I think there were definitely differences in the generations of managers that went through the hoops in the 80's, compared to all the new-school cargo-cult startup circus hijinks that pass as 'business' these days.

I truly believe that if you can't do the job of the people below you: you're not qualified to lead them. If you can't motivate people to work harder to solve the issues that they're stumbling on: you don't deserve leadership. If you can't get your team together to coordinate their activities in a way that makes Russian ballet seem like a circus full of bears - you need to get out of the way and get someone in who can handle the machine-like precision needed to coordinate an organization and start making real headway to building the business.

Alas, a lot of the startup-/venture- cult movements that are currently enjoying mainstream status don't really focus on this angle. We've become a selfish, materialistic, narcissistic species - at least in the tech world - which doesn't really pull much off except individual reward above all else. The desire to be 'new and not like our parents' is really getting in the way of civilization-building.

At least, having just suffered immensely at the hands of an absolutely incompetent, dufus manager, whose company has far too much money to waste on the build-vs-buy equation of startup building .. I just feel like we're devolving, yo.

Haven't had any problems with it personally, but I only have about 100 people in my network.

Its a content management system that allows you to easily host and serve content on the IPFS filesystem, which is a decentralized datastore currently deployed and serving millions of documents. You can communicate with your peer network (friends) using blog-style posting techniques, share files (video/audio/html/etc.) and host them seamlessly on IPFS without requiring a centralized authority.

Pretty much anything I'd want to do on Facebook et al., I can do on Akasha - with the difference that I control the content. This is significant for content-creatives because it puts them back in the drivers seat for who and how their material is served.

It uses Ethereum for the logic, and IPFS for the storage back-end. That might sound a bit hand-wavy, but I'd honestly just recommend downloading it (after you get into the beta) and seeing for yourself - its very easy to use, you don't have to setup or deal with either Ethereum or IPFS, and the GUI is intuitive enough that you shouldn't have any problem just launching it and using it. The initial startup time is a bit of a usability issue - it takes some minutes to get itself established on the network - but once up and running its kind of refreshing to be able to do all the things, without any of the typical social-media grot to deal with.

I got used to the keyboard eventually, but it was devilish few weeks until I did. As a vim user, the placement was bonkers .. but a bit of retraining of muscle memory was, admittedly, in order anyway.

Pyra is going to be great - only wish it had the Pocket form-factor/design ethos. The chunky plastic is a bit gauche for my tastes, and if we think the Pocket keyboard is terrible, well .. Pyra ain't no better! (Have played with a prototype for a few hours .. that muscle memory thing ..)

I haven't paid a cent to use Akasha.

I have pretty much every Linux handheld ever made, and my original First Batch Open Pandora is still the one I go to for my casual gaming needs. The reason is that the community around this device continues to produce absolute gems for the machine, as can be witnessed in what would have to be one of the most underrated app-store/repo's around:

http://repo.openpandora.org

My next-favourite device is the GPD Pocket. Its simply a great Linux workstation - near-perfect hardware design (unibody: yay! shitty keyboard: boo!) and - since its Intel - pretty much everything you could want to run on a machine this size is just an "apt install" away. Paired with a couple of iControlPads' (lol!), this is pretty much the ideal portable gaming rig.

I can't wait for the Pyra, and if there's a GPDPocket2, I'm definitely in for that. I'd love to have a device that delivers the community and form-factor of the Pyra, with the materials (unibody) and architecture (Intel) of the GPD Pocket some day. In order that we get there, I'm supporting any of these companies that push us closer .. even though, of course, a Switch or an Android tablet would probably be a better investment for gaming needs. ;)

I'm rather more inclined to use Akasha to supplant my current social network tools:

https://akasha.world/

The only challenge, really, is convincing my friends to use it.

>They're authoritarian.

Widely entrenched Child-sex rings among the MP's, covered up in the name of 'national security'. Too damn right they're authoritarian.

"Are these MI5 agents allowed to attend the child sex parties of the MP's, for an alleged greater good?"

- Doesn't sound so noble to me, honestly.

Its even worse.

Put this recent news in the light of the coverup over ministerial child sexual abuse in the UK .. now they've got a very significant means of getting themselves out of that particular pickle, eh boys?

Duplicity is a norm within the structures of the power elite. We, the people, don't like to ever admit it - it interrupts our comfortable lives - but both sides are regularly played by those who have the advantage of technological, legislative and bureaucratic power. Australia's imperial adventures pale in comparison with those of its allies in the 5-eyes nations, but its still just playing by the same rulebook of its cousins.

"Play both sides, for power." Now, the UK is freely admitting it does this.

>There is no Nazi in Ukraine.

Absolute nonsense. Neo-Nazi'sm has established itself in all of the Balkan and Eastern-European states, and fascism is on the rise. None are immune to its effects, because its growth is a tool of the military-industrial complex in its effort to derive yet more profit from fear, hatred, inhumanity.

Yesterday, it was terrorists. Tomorrow its neo-Nazi's and fascists. Either way, we're gonna need weapons to defeat them all, aren't we kids ...

https://www.quora.com/Is-Russia-justified-in-its-annexation-...

https://charlierose.com/videos/15573

>blame the USA

Which country regularly destroys, utterly, the infrastructure and society of other foreign nations, through both covert and overt means, in its quest for global military domination? (Hint: its not Russia.)

>Profit-driven and hatred-based are almost opposite things.

Not really, no. Not when you profit directly from peoples hatred, and its sub-product, fear. Hatred of others, fear of others.

America has commercialized hatred and weaponized fear. How else can you explain the invasion of Afghanistan when it should have had KSA in its sights?