As for the battery, this doesn't look like a kind of device that's intended to travel with you room to room---but I agree it would have been smart for them to give people the option.

Personally, I almost never use more than two virtual desktops on macOS, which means most of the changes and bad decisions sail over my head. I don't think I really seriously used more than two virtual desktops on any OS later than BeOS, though -- which IIRC did it really well! -- which I suspect is less a function of macOS doing it badly than a simple function of rarely feeling like I'm cramped on a 27" 5K monitor. (Yes, I know half of you are like "I have three 24-inch monitors and each one needs nine virtual desktops to accommodate all of my windows." That's fine. You do you.)

(Also, they sign up for mailing lists all the time, often whether they want to or not because everybody wants you to be on their damn mailing list. Email is absolutely still a viable broadcast medium, despite all the pundits declaring "email is dead" before they go back to, you know, checking their email.)

I know this is the common wisdom (especially around these parts), and yes, I know the timing lines up, but I'm not convinced. Apple was actually on the USB-C steering committee, and they adopted USB-C as the One True Standard for Macs years before PC makers went whole hog on it. (One can argue they did it prematurely, or at least too aggressively, but that's a different post.)

So what's another explanation for sticking with Lightning so long?

1. When they changed from the original giant stupid fragile dock connector to Lightning, which was obviously a better connector, people screamed at them. A lot. For a very long time. It was all just a plot to make people buy new proprietary cables, you see. If USB-C had been fully finalized even a year earlier, they'd have probably gone with that instead of Lightning, but it wasn't, so they couldn't. Nerds like you and I might say, "Great, but why didn't Apple switch as soon as USB-C was widely available," to which the answer is: just try and imagine the shit they would get if they made people buy all new cables, again, just a few years later. Not gonna happen.

2. Your parentheses around "(inferior)" are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. The two connectors are very similar conceptually, and have slightly different tradeoffs: a Lightning port is thinner than a USB-C port, but USB-C's design puts the spring pins that actually make the connection in the cable rather than in the port, which is probably a better idea. Even so, it's not as if USB-C is just overwhelmingly superior to Lightning the way either of them are compared to, say, the original giant stupid fragile dock connector. There wasn't a whole lot of pressure to switch quickly.

3. Having said that, switching over time made technical sense, particularly once the Macs started going all-in on USB-C. There's no convincing reason the rest of Apple's devices wouldn't have followed suit eventually even without external pressure. Yes, "but they make more money by being proprietary," but counterargument: c'mon, the amount of extra money Lightning brought in was loose change in the couch cushions on Apple's scale, and they knew full well that people were going to buy USB-C cables from them at inflated prices at the same time they were buying their iPhones/iPads anyway. They are literally making up the difference, and more, in volume.

I'm not really sure what you're implicitly expecting him to have done "better" here. Ask Godier for a signed affidavit? Not publish this until he could get a statement from Apple to get their side of the story? (Which is to say, not publish it at all because the chances of Apple giving anyone "their side" of something like this is essentially zero.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_War:_A_Scenario

The scenario she presents is fictional, but it’s all based on current nuclear arsenals and response protocols. While what I’ve read of it certainly makes it seem like a worst-case scenario in a “nearly everything that can go wrong does” sense, it’s disturbing how relatively few things going wrong it actually takes—in a span of under two hours—to reach “civilizational collapse” level outcomes.

Then, around 1991, a friend gave me access to his college Unix account so I could play with Gopher, Archie, and TinyFugue (the world of MUDs/MUCKs/etc.). The catch: to get to his account from my home machine, I had to call into a Florida state network that let you dial in and connect to machines on various college campuses. The network ran on some IBM minicomputer. And, it didn't connect to the Unix machine, oh no. It connected to a VAX, which was then on the same local network as the Unix machine.

So I had to dial in to the IBM machine, connect from it to a VAX, and then telnet from the VAX to the Unix box.

Incredibly, this all worked with only mildly annoying lag...but then I tried to transfer a file from the Unix machine to my personal machine. ZMODEM didn't work. XMODEM didn't work. I think I tried one or two other things that I've forgotten.

Then I remembered Kermit, and its reputation for being able to handle difficult connections. It got the file through on its first try.

I get the impression that you are among the "stop bringing politics into these non-political places" crowd who believe that this stance is (a) exclusively taken by the left and (b) something that's only happened in the last ten years; I assure you neither of those things are true.

Me: This is what you said it does, and this is what it actually seems to do. Which one is right?

Engineer: Shit.

I also don't think I'd ever call configuring Emacs "trivial" compared to more modern editors. Matching the out-of-box experience of something like VS Code or Panic Nova requires some work. This isn't really a knock against Emacs, but I think Emacs fans -- myself included -- need to be honest about that. It's quite possible I would have picked up Emacs years earlier if I hadn't been given the impression that it was just super duper easy, especially once you picked a starter pack. It is not, it probably never will be, and I've come to believe that starter packs are actually a bad idea for most new users. If you don't understand just what it is you're putting in your init.el file and why, then if you run into problems, it's going to be way harder to figure out how to fix them.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48586304

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

Also, I watch Nebula on my Apple TV pretty frequently, and Dropout's available there, too.

I don't know what the best solution to the problem of wealth inequality is, but I know that we need to collectively get over this "but if people think they will be limited to a mere hundred million dollars in wealth they will have no motivation whatsoever to work" nonsense. You know what the motivation is? It's still a hundred million dollars, that's what.

"We create a culture of self-censorship and AI-detector-pressured rewriting and paraphrasing as people strive to avoid these witch hunts. That is the opposite of protecting human expression. We should resist normalizing a trust in any machine's ability to determine matters of guilt. If using AI to write is, at its worst, an industrialization of the mind, then AI detection, at its worst, becomes a surveillance system for thought."

And, I'm sorry (I'm not), but I am not going to just roll over and shrug and say "welp, guess we all need to dumb our writing down to keep well-meaning idiots from screeching 'AI! AI! AI! WHOOP! WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP!' at us." That isn't the evolution of language. It's Idiocracy.

And you can pry my em dashes from my cold, dead hands.