My sense: human relationships come from repeated interaction over time. This is why college is easy for friendships and suburbs aren't.
The solution is very different for someone who is within walking distance of a neighborhood coffee shop vs someone who isn't.
It seems like there's 3 levels of solutions recommended here:
1) Individual: join recurring activities, volunteer, join communities, get a dog, work on yourself, sports/physical hobbies
2) Founder: Create third spaces, host events, or just create and initiate activities that bring people together
3) Policy: Urban design reform, third spaces. Make it easier for more third spaces to exist and more walkable neighborhoods.
It's like capex vs opex. A lot of the fixes recommended here are very high ongoing daily effort for individuals. But this is such an important thing for humans! So it would be better if the built environment was better, and human interaction was easier and lower effort to get for more people. More walkable high trust places, more third places.
Should there be lots more affinity based master planned communities? Probably yes. More in person theme parks and activity places? Probably yes. More games like Pokemon Go? Probably yes. Better walkability in existing cities? Probably yes. etc.
tl;dr at an individual level, these suggestions are good, but the fact that so much individual level effort is needed imo points to more of a need for macro solutions so it's lower energy for most people to have nice local walkable communities and friends (like people have in university, cities post-university, and in retirement homes)
Honestly how? What law could be written that would ban PE firms and lookalike businesses that would hold up to scrutiny.
No one with a brain likes what PE does, but really, what do they do that's illegal as opposed to people finally realizing that capitalism is essentially evil?
PE depends on favorable tax loopholes and a lot of acquisitions depend on them being able to do things like buying a company with a ton of loans which they then saddle the acquired company with or stripping assets before going bankrupt. All of that depends on arbitrary legal structures and protections which could be rebalanced to favor more productive business models.
Right. Either you directly regulate activity, or you adjust incentives. If you suggest one, detractors say you can't do that, you have to do the other thing, and then work as hard as possible to block your efforts to do the very thing they suggested you do. That's because they don't want things to change at all. But that's obviously not an option, so I tend to suggest trying both and seeing what sticks.
what gets me is trying to make the argument that market economies are not necessarily capitalist economies. it seems plain over time that capitalism works to destroy markets. As an American I'm pretty pro market, but that means at this point I'm an enemy of capitalism.
It doesn't help that the people who say that prove an understanding of capitalism is about as thin as a single layer of varnish and their collective ideas for workable alterations would fit on a single index card after it was already ripped up by hand.
Painfully true and somehow it's everywhere on this forum. To these people, capitalism and markets and money are all the same thing, and the only finite resources in the universe are those whose distribution is gatekept by the evil, evil capitalist overlords.
Everybody's experience is different. I've found experientially that anybody who can actually define and describe these things with any degree of seriousness is, at least, aware of the resource constraints that make up the real world and have opinions that at least run in approximate sync with reality, which definitionally excludes them espousing real Redditor crap. I'm willing to engage with anti-capitalists who have at least put in the work to understand capitalism, but it seems like there's not much overlap between "understands" and "disagrees" for that segment.
No, and in case you stopped reading partway into my comment, this type of useless gotcha counts under Redditor crap. I don't think it's controversial that understanding something is a pathway to criticizing it appropriately. The average anti-capitalist cannot begin to describe exactly what it is they hate, which is in my opinion one of the defining valuable features of capitalism - that many people can benefit from it without understanding it one lick, and can in fact ineffectually hate it while benefiting from it.
This is the website of a bunch of rich capitalists who got rich by doing capitalism. Of course you can't call the owners of the website evil on that website.
One implication of this is that we need regulatory improvements (ie improvement via negativa, less) for healthcare, childcare, education, and building new housing. It’s non-ideal when government policies restrict supply and restrict competition, and entrench existing players.
And as an aside, if you can, just get customers first instead of raising. Raising is best done either when it's impossible to not raise, or when you already have multiple investors offering you money.
Then once you have nice revenue and customer references, cold email investors who've invested in similar companies to yours. Or, maybe you'll see that you don't need to raise because you're getting enough money from customers.
The prescription here might be for people to be able to easily afford to live walkable to some of their family and friends.
Lots of things come from this: shared resources (less income need, less work stress), shared emotional support, shared childcare (less income need), etc.
Instead of single family homes (one family is not the atomic unit of the human species!) it should've been single community developments with 15 homes and a big shared backyard but still private for all the houses. And the landlord + all the tenants can select the residents based on their personal preferences and anyone can veto.
I think many challenges stem from the lack of this.
I don't know what the fix is though, because housing regulations seem difficult to change.
Indeed. I think better "built environments that are conducive to community" are important, and can help things like this. ie things to reverse the "bowling alone" type trends.
To Apple: People are complaining because they'd rather you fix it, than them having to leave the platform (moving OSes is annoying, because operating systems have a lot of lock in - data you'd have to move, apps you need to find alternatives for and re-learn).
The iOS / macOS 26 frustration I think is particularly felt by the HN type crowd. Don't want something that looks cool but is less effective/performant/usable. "We" can feel Apple's priorities drifting away from ours.
Side note: I wonder how much easier AI will make it to migrate between operating systems? Perhaps future AI systems that are good at computer-usage could manage migrations/installs well.
I coincidentally watched BasicallyHomeless's video on his 100+ day Linux experiment and he made a really good point: because everything on Linux can be done with the CLI, it also has a working natural language interface (Claude Code). He ran into several issues, such as sound (allegedly that's no surprise, but not my experience), and Claude fixed them all.
Yeah, setting up my router with VLANs/Firewall/NAT etc was so damn frustrating with Ubiquiti compared to the Mikrotik router I had before.
While I could just export my config file with Mikrotik and ask ChatGPT to make whatever changes I wanted in seconds ("here's my config, make a vlan 20 with all my iot devices") and get a fully working config back, with Ubiquiti you just get a bunch of inaccurate "click here and there" instructions back instead since the UI changes slightly all the time.
The switchover was still worth it, as the Ubiquity UI is nicer in daily use (and Mikrotik wifi sucks ass, so I had to use other APs). However, every time I want to change something I wish I had an easily ediable config file to edit, and get LLM help with, instead of a confusing UI to click around in.
Indeed, large language models have much easier time working with a real written language.
I wonder if the modern GUI conventions could be reliably translated to machine-understandable text representation, operated on, and then mapped back to the GUI picture.
Response from Apple: We know you have a lot of vendor lock-in, which is why we're doing this. We want shiny features to talk about to get people to buy their first Mac, and don't give a shit about providing a great experience for existing users because we know they won't leave anyway.
The current state does not feel malicious in this way to me at all. It feels bumbling and amateurish. It gives the feeling that the people who kept the product cohesive have left or retired, and that a new generation of overly ambitious careerists have entered positions of leadership.
I’m convinced leadership at Apple are not power users. They’ve never put MacOS through their paces, or did any development themselves it seems. If they did they would have found all of the bugs and irregularities and huge performance problems themselves.
What do you mean by "largely the mindset they have"? I think the comment you're replying to is right, most Apple execs probably have jobs that can be done entirely on iPads, so none of the complaints by power users about macOS resonate at all (and this group is sadly far too small of a minority to have any financial impact).
I think any organization at Apple's scale has no shortage of skilled workers and ambitious careerists. But at the product level, I do believe that the result you see is generally an honest reflection of the organization's priorities.
If Apple wanted to ship a rock-solid OS, they could. They're just choosing to put those resources elsewhere.
The current environment is in some ways indistinguishable from COVID. The uncertainty of AI, forced RTO, and processions of layoffs have produced a terrible environment for retaining people who have the means to do literally anything else.
I feel like it says a lot, when intelligent amorality seems genuinely preferable to blundering incompetence. Many such cases. One wonders how much "enshittification" is intrinsic to networked software and our late-stage-whatever political economy, versus how much is a farcical byproduct of office politics and org chart turf wars.
The alternative for most people is Windows, which Microsoft seems hellbent into making worse and worse (I didn’t think that was possible but hey, here we are). macOS definitely sounds like the least of two evils anyway.
But what do I know - the year of the Linux desktop for me was 1996.
Ubuntu Pro is still free for personal use on up to 5 physical machines, which covers my small home network just fine. It is annoying that they withhold security updates unless you fork over your email address, but I don’t recall them trying to sell me anything since I made an account
there's some ubuntu/gnome thing that replicates the worst features of the mac.
but here's the real question: why? the global menu bar is literally the most dated and outmoded element in macos. it isn't 1993 anymore. your computer can run more than one program at a time. a globally modal application focus is completely ridiculous. the only thing more ridiculous than a global menu bar is a global spinning beach ball mouse cursor. these are relics of the past and have no place in a modern, multitasking, multiprocessing, multiprocessor, multiscreen computing environment.
moreover, the things that matter, browsers and terminals, don't even have normal menus anyway.
kde plasma is superior in all ways. stop wasting time with weird outmoded 1993 era computer interfaces.
Browsers and terminals have "normal menus". Some examples would include Vivaldi and iTerm.
I agree though that placing it on top of the screen (as opposed to the window to which it applies) doesn't make any sense. Windows actually got that right with MDI way back in the day, if you remember how menu merging worked there.
However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
> However, there is an unexpected upside to having the menubar there even so. Because macOS apps can't not have a menu bar, they are forced to expose their commands there. Which usually ends up being a more stable UX compared to all the moving around of buttons in the window itself, plus you can search the menus.
that is not nothing- but maybe a vestigial training wheel for onboarding a generation onto single application guis. maintaining separate stacks of applications and then document windows within applications (as is done with the global macos window switching keyboard shortcuts) also feels clunky and more suited to an outmoded (har) ui paradigm.
Can AI vibe code a way to get a macOS keyboard layout, basic shortcuts, and macOS-style emacs navigation in gui text boxes across the OS, on Linux? Last I checked all of that is pretty much impossible to achieve without accepting a ton of jank and some parts of the system where it doesn’t work (even the keyboard layout thing!)
Yeah you can, there's packages like xremap and input-remapper where you can define custom keyboard re-mappings. To replicate the Emacs key bindings from macOS, you can bind Ctrl+F to right arrow, Ctrl+E to End, etc. I even re-binded Cmd+C to Ctrl+C so I didn't lose any muscle memory from years of macOS shortcuts. Obviously requires some upfront time but once you get it working it works very well in my experience (and the keyboard re-mappings work at the input event level, so it works across all applications automatically).
Notable re author: “Addy Osmani is an Irish Software Engineer and leader currently working on the Google Chrome web browser and Gemini with Google DeepMind. A developer for 25+ years, he has worked at Google for over thirteen years, focused on making the web low-friction for users and web developers. He is passionate about AI-assisted engineering and developer tools. He previously worked on Fortune 500 sites. Addy is the author of a number of books including Learning JavaScript Design Patterns, Leading Effective Engineering Teams, Stoic Mind and Image Optimization.“
I remember that win. Seemed super fishy at the time, with bizarre features like:
- "the World's first ever, fully featured DVD playing sidebar"
- "allowing users to send e-mails without needing to log-in to an account"
- "an AI (Artificial Intelligence) animated speech character named Phoebe"
Maybe this guy really did make a super original web browser with every bell and whistle as an independent sixteen year old. I never saw a release, so the mystery remains.
The solution is very different for someone who is within walking distance of a neighborhood coffee shop vs someone who isn't.
It seems like there's 3 levels of solutions recommended here:
1) Individual: join recurring activities, volunteer, join communities, get a dog, work on yourself, sports/physical hobbies
2) Founder: Create third spaces, host events, or just create and initiate activities that bring people together
3) Policy: Urban design reform, third spaces. Make it easier for more third spaces to exist and more walkable neighborhoods.
It's like capex vs opex. A lot of the fixes recommended here are very high ongoing daily effort for individuals. But this is such an important thing for humans! So it would be better if the built environment was better, and human interaction was easier and lower effort to get for more people. More walkable high trust places, more third places.
Should there be lots more affinity based master planned communities? Probably yes. More in person theme parks and activity places? Probably yes. More games like Pokemon Go? Probably yes. Better walkability in existing cities? Probably yes. etc.
tl;dr at an individual level, these suggestions are good, but the fact that so much individual level effort is needed imo points to more of a need for macro solutions so it's lower energy for most people to have nice local walkable communities and friends (like people have in university, cities post-university, and in retirement homes)
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