No actual feedback from or impact studies involving actual users or outcomes are ever registered.

It's like mixing sawdust into the cookies to cut costs, except that when a depivered CBT is worth less than the electricity consumed powering the monitors it is (sometimes) displayed on, nobody with enough influence to matter ever gets upset enough about it to mean anything.

"They're too easy to get sentimentally attached to, and then it makes me sad if I blow them up!"

Honestly this probably enhances the sandbox nature of the game by making the stakes more palpable.

I see what you're saying but that isn't how I think about it.

I'm happy to have as "much" OS as is useful and adds value, convenience, or user experience for me.

Example: I quite like Windows Hello. Facial recognition is the smoothest, most pleasant form of biometric authentication available on a laptop, and it's nice to be able to use it anywhere throughout the whole OS that a password would otherwise be required (e.g. before revealing hidden passwords in a password manager, when opening a command prompt with elevated permissions, or before applying passkeys to log into a website). It starts up fast, works in low light thanks to IR emitters, and recognizes me pretty close to 100% of the time. It's a great experience. My use of my laptop would only be reduced by having "less OS" in this case.

What I don't want is anything that compromises my utility, convenience, or user experience in order to make the OS useful and valuable for someone else.

Example: advertisements embedded in the Start menu are plenty valuable to M$, but compromise my user experience in the process.

Example 2: Inserting Copilot into Paint and Notepad seem valuable for pumping M$'s stock price, but both annoy me by cramming unwanted AI into my basic utility programs where I have no interest in it.

This is extremely nice and saves me time on a literally (not figuratively) daily basis, to the point that I generally forget that it hasn't always worked that way.

Obviously Mercury is successful, and obviously Haskell is how they did it. So it's essential to their success. Would it be instrumental to anyone else's anywhere else doing anything else? Can't possibly know, I don't think.

Very cool!

Why do you say "constrains what’s possible, not what’s reasonable", as though it's one and not the other? Does possibility conflict with reasonability? I would think it's not an either/or, it's a both/and.

The set of reasonable things is bounded by the set of possible things. So if the constraints of TUI design make certain things impossible, surely they make those same things unreasonable at the same time.

This is a confusing concession. Of course we love TUIs because of the UX, what other reason is there?

Constraint breeds consistency and consistency breeds coherence.

Take 1,000 random TUI designers and 1,000 random GUI designers and plot the variations between them (use any method you like)—the TUI designers will be more tightly clustered together because the TUI interface constrains what's reasonable.

Yes of course you CAN recreate TUI-like UX in a GUI, that's not the issue. People don't. In a TUI they must. I like that UX and like that if I seek out a TUI for whatever thing I want to do, I'm highly likely to find a UX that I enjoy. Whereas with GUIs it's a crapshoot. That's it.

Is this a skill issue? Absolutely. Do I still restart the REPL frequently (not after every def, but often) just to make sure I'm working with the same environment my program will be experiencing at run time? Yes I absolutely do.

It gets way more use than I wish it did.

Here's my advice: if there's someone around you who can teach you, learn from them. But if there isn't anyone around you who can teach you, find someone around you who can learn from you and mentor them. You'll actually grow more from the latter than from the former, if you can believe that.

I think there's a broad blindness in industry to the benefits of mentorship for the mentors. Mentoring has sharpened my thinking and pushed me to articulate why things are true in a way I never would have gone to the effort of otherwise.

If there are no juniors around to teach, seniors will forever be less senior than they might have been had they been getting reps at mentorship along the way.

The big problem with documentation is that if it was accurate when it was written, it's just a matter of time before it goes stale compared to the code it's documenting. And while compilers can tell you if your types and your implementation have come out of sync, before now there's been nothing automated that can check whether your comments are still telling the truth.

Somebody could make a startup out of this.

To an individual consumer perhaps, but schools need to buy hundreds at a time and the second-hand market isn't really great for that.

This is basically Apple taking a bite at the Chromebook market. Interested to see what reviewers have to say.

The statistic you cite does not necessarily contradict what the parent comment is saying. "Up 29% since February 2020" is an absolute change since a specific point. The parent comment is saying prices have "come down" i.e. since their peak. It can still be up overall, so long as it's not up as high as it was at one point.

EDIT: To be clear, the parent comment might still be wrong, or might be right only within a biased sample (i.e. their own experience). I'm only making the point that the statistic you're referencing does not outright disprove what they're saying. Prices can be up since six years ago AND down since two years ago (random time periods chosen for illustration only).