which could, for the most part, be boiled down to 2 hour-long segments. so much is stretched out for the sake of padding. the good news is that scrubbing through shows is possible — it is usually painfully clear when to stop & watch at double speed — & time otherwise lost is recovered in this way.
they have little respect for precedent which they agree is wrong, which is a far better standard than letting terrible decisions stand because tradition or because popular.
There will be your internet-connected computer which will be assumed to be compromised, & which little, if anything of use will be kept on, & then there will be the airgapped system you do work on, which will probably be the last trusted version of a Linux distro you have multiple copies stashed away of. It will be a very old-fashioned experience, & moving/sharing data will become a dicey business.
Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.
It's clear they don't want stand-alone Office anymore. One gets the feeling, given how Windows has devolved, that they'd like to rid themselves of all desktop software so they can focus on the backroom, perhaps because the data they could acquire is tastier.
I have added spores to my garden for a few years, & the results have been excellent. Not only have the plants thrived, the network spread through the lawn to a further extent every year, & the grass in that zone looks much healthier than the rest of the lawn. Mostly I sprinkle a bit in with each seed or row — it does the work from that point on.
Trees have shown the same pattern — we had a large, older tree go down, one which had quite a bit of fungus growing around it, & the trees planted near the old site did well while new trees on the other side of the yard did not, even with significant, regular watering.
We need a second, new internet that cuts these rent-seekers out. The backbone is there, we can use mesh, we could use Starlink (there's a real opportunity there) — locking out & starving the current titans of cash is where we need to be. It won't happen, but it should, for all sorts of economic, cultural, & liberty-oriented reasons.
Efforts like this could be a nice way to get old apps to run "natively" on current hardware, as there are a ton of them out there which are perfectly good for work, but which cannot run today.
Speed certainly wouldn't be there, but capabilities would. Plenty could get done on those old machines — most of it had to do with programmers having the imagination & skill to be able to shoehorn their ideas into spaces they weren't meant to be crammed into.
One memory this project brought to mind for me was a hack I came across which allowed simultaneously running DOS 3.3 & ProDOS on a 128k Apple II, giving each 64k (well, a little less due to overhead) & a way to switch between the two with a simple command. Two programs couldn't run at once, but one could step between the two OSes to run programs made for each pretty seamlessly. If this sort of thing was possible on basic consumer hardware, ten or twenty years of development would have led to many far more interesting & useful things.
this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.