> They are mediocre at best, always have been.

Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

My 85 year old grandpa asked me about 20 years ago how he should go about learning how to use computers. We were a windows family at home but I was using Macs in school and OSX was relatively new and I thought it blew Windows out of the water as far as usability.

Didn’t take long for my grandpa to be sending me emails and news links, and becoming an overall competent and comfortable computer user, in his late 80s, and I credit that to Apple’s fantastic design.

I think maybe we forget how using Windows 98 and XP was day-to-day.

This is accurate. Apple’s been losing its soul ever since they spent a billion dollars making a headquarters that’s shaped like the “Home” button that they then immediately got rid of.

So what I’m reading, is they are able to dumb-down the design to fit less tech savvy people.

When tailoring for one audience you usually do tale away something from other audiences.

I understand your point and have a long list of bitter grievances against Apple, but OS X triggered a large influx of geeks to the Mac world. It was a Unix that just worked, and there were all kinds of important ways that appealed to key tech people.

>Come on. OSX was a paradigm shift in desktop usability and intuitive design.

OSX was born by moving from a real crap OS that couldn't even multitask property, to slapping the same UX paradigms on a Unix base.

The first release of OSX wasn't meaningfully different from OS9 in UX. They had the same goofy window gadgets for minimizing and maximizing a window, and still couldn't resize a window from any corner/side.

Finder is still just as much garbage as it ever was, nothing has really changed there. "About this software" is still the first thing on the first menu, because of course that's the most important thing a user could do with MacOS software is to look at what version they are using.

There's a reason MacOS has never gone above 15% market share - part of that is the extortionate cost of Apple hardware, as well as their shitty UX.

I will gladly take Windows XP over any version of MacOS.

I mean, only because they weren’t outcompeted by an old world civilization yet.

I think HGttG had a good solution for that involving a large spaceship.

I mean really I work in filmmaking. Ads just fund most of my business.

Work in something else. I make significantly more doing poison ivy removal than I ever did or was ever going to working in tech.

Are you willing to share rough numbers? Totally understand if not, just curious. Been thinking about something like this to get away from the AI force-feeding.

$100-$200 an hour on average for hand work, more if I need to use an excavator.

What does the friction look like? Insurance, licensing, that kind of thing?

Very variable depending on a combination of local/state regulations and what kinds of projects you're willing to tackle. The bottom end of the spectrum is a $50 a month general liability policy.

I mean, someone got paid for driving trucks dumping toxic waste in the river. I would support policies that ensure you don't lose access to healthcare or suffer in deep poverty from losing a job, but I'm not sympathetic to perpetuating such waste and harm on the basis of "it creates jobs".

I used to be an elevator operator ... :-/

What do you do? Honest question

I work on the production end. I’m a producer and production manager for live-action ads.

I'm a film industry professional but half-vibe-coded my personal website:

reachnick.co

What's your alternative?

I don't have one, nobody really does. But the blind belief in, and search for, some utopian society is what needs to die. Reduced expectations, less ambitious goals, and a renewed reliance on small local communities.

I'm not hopeful we will actually break out of the spell of modern big-government before we're surrounded by famine and rubble; but the seed needs to be planted now. Trump (and worse) is the logical and inevitable outcome of delusional self-indulgence, treating the state as an endless piggy bank, and knight in shining armour. It's just handing our fate over to the psychopaths, on a silver platter.

For whatever it's worth, working together in small groups ("prepping") is probably the best practical option we have as individuals and families. Building skills and local communities.

At least in the US, the "floppy" terminology carried over when the disks went from the actual floppy 5.5" disks to the hard-case 3.5" disks.

thanks, that's an insightful comment.

so defs not a globally consistent usage of the term then?

judging by the article's authorship, i'm guessing denmark and US the same

so perhaps US and EU but not elsewhere?

I only became aware of the use of a different term than "floppy" for the hard 3.5" disks when I opened this thread- you'd have to ask the person I was replying to where they're from.

> I mean, who else is using a pager in Lebanon?

But they can impossibly actually know who physically has the pager next to them, when they're triggering them. This is the "failing to verify each target" part.

That's not a very realistic standard for a wartime covert operation.

Maybe that's the wrong way to think about it? Maybe these "wartime covert operations" need to read up on Human Rights and figure out a way to work within it?

Sounds like a unilateral disarmament, which is not how to win a war. Hamas and the like have no concern with human rights of course.

Is this a SoP in wartime?

I mean in the case in Lebanon they knew. They sold those pagers to Hezbollah.

What is the reason in your mind?

Sold out manufacturing years ago. Long term building real physical products is going to be the only value. LLMs are going to drop the price of informational value.

Building widgets is not a high-profit industry, and every country that got good at building widgets wants the high-profit industries that the US had: tech and biotech and science in general.

Not recognizing the US's massive wealth and strength, and climbing down the value chain to imitate China, is a recipe for the decline of the US, which is being followed today.

Yep. Also an issue: the high profit industries are abused by pump and dump scammers like Vivek Ramaswamy who had his doctor mother run a phase 2 clinical trial on a struggling Alzheimer's drug he bought from GlaxoSmithKline before he cashed out and it inevitably failed phase 3 trials.

We're moving in the opposite direction of ensuring that capital is allocated productively in said industries by destroying regulations and agencies like the CFPB, FTC, SEC, and by giving platforms and political power to the cheaters and fraudsters who have infested the Republican party.

Looking at the stats, we seem to be manufacturing about as much as ever in the last 30 years, and the value of that manufacturing is skyrocketing. We're certainly employing fewer people in manufacturing, but it seems to be remarkably strong still.

>LLMs are going to drop the price of informational value.

Maybe... maybe not? I'm not going to try and predict the future wrt AI, personally.

Late stage capitalism, protracted and targeted destruction of public education and health systems, lack of STEM focus eroding most of their massive lead in innovation, overemphasis on preservation and subsidisation of dying energy vs new energy (also contributing to innovation losses), overemphasis on meaningless politics and culture wars that ultimately mean absolutely nothing, excessive inequality resulting in the destruction of productivity in the lower ~50% of the wealth pyramid, over-extraction of the middle class leading to declining birth rates (increasing reliance on immigration), poorer health outcomes than other developed countries due to numerous factors (broken overly exploitive health insurance system, terrible diet/obesity, decreasing vaccination rates), toothless antitrust leading to monopolies/duopolies in most critical areas further exacerbating the rent-seeking and over-extraction, loss of soft power due to destruction of the state system under first Trump admin and continued decline due to tariffs and being an unreliable international partner.

So there isn't one reason, there is a ton of reasons.

It's not irrecoverable but it's bad. I honestly hope there is some wake-up moment for Americans when they realise that their leaders have been selling them out for decades now.

What other administrations have said healthcare wouldn't be hard?

We're really just relying on LLMs to tell us things with no verification now?

I verified it with Grok, it says the same thing

If you think this is proof of it being true, then I am both worried and astonished. How about looking for the information yourself, instead of relying on LLMs? This is HN I thought?!

I'm sure 2 LLMs wouldn't hallucinate the same thing, especially when using RAG, so I'm confident in the accuracy in the information.

I thought your first reply was a sarcasm, now I'm a bit concerned for humanity.