Shogun's a milestone in my reading history - it's so extraordinarily engrossing. It deflated me more than any other book as I turned each of the final, waning pages because I didn't want to leave its world behind.
I was briefly elated to see there are "sequels" but just as quickly disappointed to learn they're set centuries apart; it ended up feeling like I was clinging to the only album ever made by an amazing band. I've yet to read the other books in the saga, but I should circle back and fix that.
Sure, and I'm positive you knew which three I meant when I said it: the three that together probably comprise 4 nines of overall desktop use, and which are compared all over this thread.
UX does differ somewhat between, Linux distros & WMs (and Chrome OS, to the extent you consider it Linux proper), and between releases of all three OSes; but within families they maintain broad continuity. I use multiple variants - again daily - and my point stands that all have untapped potential.
But I doubt you supposed otherwise, nor honestly think I'm unaware of other OSes... so why take the time to ask? Pedantry? Did I slight an OS you favor?
I use all 3 OSes ~daily and have nits w/ all of them. This one's minor even as it stands, but if I can make it "click" - at least for MacOS-specific workflows - I'd love to. Each OS shines the best if I adapt to its idioms (vs. trying to make Mac feel like Win, etc.).
Same here, mostly. My laptop since 2015 has been a MBP, so I've had plenty of MacOS experience, but day to day has always been 90/10 Windows. Now that I have the M1 I'm trying to use it daily, so the little grievances are more apparent (but I also have more motivation to solve them).
I've always felt like multiple desktops (on all 3 OSes) have untapped potential, but like you its never worked for me. But hope springs eternal - I try it again every now and then. I'd like to hear more about how some people use it.
Heard good things about Rectangle. I'll check it out.
To your third point, is this a setting somewhere? I tested before I posted w/ 4 Brave windows, but they stay in the same order.
Makes sense, since cmd+~ immediately switches on key down to the next window; cmd+tab (like alt+tab in Win) lets you keep the selection open and choose an out-of-order app, which alters the MRU. How would you do that here? The only way I've affected it is creating/killing windows at points in the cycle. Using cmd+shift+~ for me just goes backward in the same static order.
I don't love it (yet). It's probably a combo of my Windows background, my ignorance of MacOS tricks, and actual limitations/flaws.
* Cmd+~ from a fullscreen window does nothing, and non-full windows of the app cycle only among each other. If I have fullscreen windows anywhere in my setup, it breaks my flow and (afaik) makes me mouse to the Window menu. I feel like MacOS's fullscreen paradigm is more to blame here, because it violates a range of other behaviors I'd expect.
* Unlike cmd+tab, cmd+~ doesn't give me a visual overview of my windows (how many? what order?). I can see why, since cmd+tab shows only icons and app names, which isn't enough to differentiate between windows of the same app (unlike alt+tab on Windows, which shows thumbnails, paths, page titles, etc.
* Cmd+~ also cycles in a static order, not most recently used. This feels like fallout from the second point, in that if you're not showing thumbnails it could get confusing.
The first one in particular took me a bit of time to realize; before I did, it just felt broken and made me not rely on cmd+~ at all.
It seems clear that a dev team could whip up a product that tested well (using folks in office, family members, friends, etc.); was trained with datasets that - for whatever reasons - weren't sufficiently varied; and hit some mark of success and pushed it out the door to refine the rest later. It also seems clear that the resulting product could do poorly when recognizing black skin, due not to ill intent but lack of polish with the resources on hand.
But something I always wonder when accusations like "white supremacy" are thrown around: is it falsifiable? What evidence would dissuade you from that?
- What if both ends of the spectrum do poorly and extremely pale people have problems, too?
- What if the threshold is dark black and lighter-skinned black people, Asians, Middle Easterners and other non-white people are able to use it successfully?
- What if only a narrow band of light levels work, making it clear their testing range was generally too narrow, not just in skin color?
- What if they took care to incorporate black models in testing, but the photo quality (and their own in-house cameras and lighting) overestimated the quality of most home users'?
And what of the myriad other things that were done poorly in the software: limited OS support, bugs, excessive memory usage, overall intrusiveness, browser limitations, disallowed mobile devices, lack of multi-monitor support? Do they likewise arise from systematic oppression of some group? What if we dig in and find that white people are more likely to use iPads, Linux, and multiple displays?
Most often these accusations flow in only one direction, and that all other flaws or problems are taken to be simply happenstance and noise. Certainly anything that impacts white people negatively will not be automatically seen as anti-white, although in a world with activist devs, such a result isn't incomprehensible.
Claims of white supremacy (among other accusations of character) are thus, to my mind, wildly speculative and carry a very heavy burden of proof.
Thanks for the links - that's interesting to consider when weighing the tradeoffs of an FDA-less country. Of course, the FDA is only one part of the story, and conceding a need for its general existence in no way means that its current purview and methodologies don't need extensive revision.
In any case, my post above was about what is (and what to properly call it), not what ought to be.
This perception of the US as having a free-market economy, particularly in the area of healthcare, is curiously persistent.
Vast sums of money are spent lobbying to distort the market in favor of particular companies and industries. The FDA has long been accused of preventing key drugs from coming to market that are available in other countries. The patent system alone perpetuates medication monopolies over decades for fabricated reasons, keeping cheap generics out of people's hands. The tax system heavily favors employer-run plans (for reasons rooted in the WWII era) that encourage overspending, tie coverage to your employer, and distort the market in multiple, deep ways.
Medicare and Medicaid are huge. The chart in the FEE link below puts US gov per capita expenditures at 4th in the world.
The below Vox article, which is otherwise anti-free-market, concedes that generic insulin providers seem too daunted by secondary patents and "extreme regulatory complexity," both of which obviously run counter to a free market.
This isn't to say a free-market system would be a panacea of all complaints (systems dealing in scarce resources will never be perfect to all participants), but those complaints would be much different than those about the layers of bureaucracy, high government spending, low competition, high time-to-market for drugs, breathtaking lobbying efforts, and overwhelming tax complexity we have now.
Maybe you think you'd prefer single-payer to the present regime, but to characterize the latter as "free-market" sets up a false dichotomy. (Note that it could logically still be "underregulated," as you say, despite not being free - not that I would agree.)
I think his point about podcasts and other audio is on the money, but it undercuts his argument for VR:
> They have this Bluetooth thing in their ear, and they’ve got a hat, and that’s 10 hours on the forklift and that’s 10 hours of Joe Rogan.
In other words, audio is successful because it's used as a complement to what we're already doing, not an alternative to it. We can't quit our jobs to spend 10 hours in VR, but it's easy to imagine lightweight AR HUDs for everything from entertainment (e.g. impromptu podcast menus) to specialized on-the-job uses.
Seems like AR will require inherently lower friction and less trade-off with the real world.
Agreed there's some hyperbole as to the current state of things, but the ability for new entrants to pressure the old guard in an industry and in some cases put them out of business or relegate them to the margins is paramount. It's about the system and trajectory more than any point in time.
And GP is absolutely right about some of these: it's hard to imagine bigger competitors than the likes of Sears, Walmart, IBM, Microsoft, etc. who, even if they aren't literally dead, have absolutely had their mantles of increasing dominance ripped away, contrary to the doomsayers of the past. Even if GM adapts as you say, they'll be producing electric cars with modern design at competitive prices with better features than ever, precisely because they were forced to by the market. The goal isn't to undermine any company's longevity; it's to force every company to bow to customer pressure via competition. Old or new, it's a win if products get better and cheaper.
Uber and Lyft are getting more and more regulated
This is a common thread across every industry we can discuss, and to the extent that you're correct about the same players wielding power and wealth across eras and trends, lobbying and regulation play a massive role. It's fundamentally a critique of government power, not capitalism.
Same old stuff in new clothes, with the same cast of people running the show.
I'm curious: in what sense is Netflix the same people as the cable companies (or for that matter, movie studios)? They're directly competing in many ways, run by literally different people, with different employees requiring different skills, and competing in new and different markets around the world.
I was briefly elated to see there are "sequels" but just as quickly disappointed to learn they're set centuries apart; it ended up feeling like I was clinging to the only album ever made by an amazing band. I've yet to read the other books in the saga, but I should circle back and fix that.