6 ms·

I'm your age, I agree, and I'll take it a step further. I think these toys are causing an irrational exuberance. I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thous

• tikhonj 14y ago
  To be fair, there are some tiling window managers that basically read your mind with a bit of configuration. And yet people here use OS X instead (actually, I know two people using XMonad on OS X, but they're rare). Make of that what you will. Now, of course they don't literally read your mind. Instead, there's some easy to write configuration in a nice language (e.g. Haskell) that communicates your thoughts to the manager ahead of time.
  • semisight 14y ago
    I would very much like to try XMonad honestly. I use OS X because I wanted the portability/power/battery life of a Macbook Air. I tried installing Ubuntu (as a starting point), but I wasn't able to get it to work. I've been thinking about trying to write something similar (a very small subset) of XMonad that will do the same style of tiled WM on top of cocoa, but I'm not sure where to start.
    • kasperbn 14y ago
      Have you tried "Shift it" for OSX: https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt https://github.com/fikovnik/ShiftIt
    • danieldk 14y ago
      I did use xmonad on OS X a lot, and I liked it. Since I live mostly in terminal emulators and vim, tiling for X11 applications was plenty enough. So, I ran X11 with xmonad fixed to a specific desktop (as OS X allows you to specify that an application should always run on a particular desktop). I used the other desktops for Cocoa applications (without tiling). Unfortunately, Lion switched to Mission Control, and I didn't revive that setup yet. It should be easy to do, since Lion now provides an option to prevent Mission Control to sort desktops by usage.
    • jerf 14y ago
      For ten years, I'd used a series of window managers, but all in the same basic configuration, a non-tiling window manager with about 10 keyboard shortcuts I defined to move around a 2x2 set of virtual desktops copied from when Enlightenment first introduced me to the idea. I wanted to try XMonad after hearing people talk about it so much, but I figured with 10 years of having burned the same workflow into my fingers it would take me some time, so I sort of budgeted some playing-around time on my home computer of a few days before I even considered putting it on my work computer. It really surprised me that by the end of the first evening I was already pretty good with it and by the end of the second day didn't want to go back. I disagree that it's a big productivity enhancer, I think there's some excitement bias there, but even after a couple of days I did find myself preferring it, which was actually contrary to my expectations. It helps that I know Haskell well enough to truly understand the configuration file and configure it using Haskell qua Haskell, and not just copy-and-paste snippets from others (I also added some DBus support to manage volumes using Haskell DBus modules, though it's not tested enough to share), so I would say that if there's a tiling manager in a language you already know (Lua has one for instance, I think), you may want to try that one. I would also say this is not all that great a way to learn Haskell, the subset it uses for config is too small, and opaque if you don't already know what's going on. But tiling managers in general work better than I thought they would.
• goblin89 14y ago
  > It's 2012, so why doesn't my OS know what I'm trying to do and solve problems for me? I'd (half-jokingly) respond: ‘It's 2012, why are you still using a computer?’ If we're talking future, what you've described is one alternative. Another is not using computers for everything. Imagine that a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, an efficient and relatively compact electric motor was invented. A revolutionary achievement for those who were aware. Soon engineers professionally working with electric motors appeared. But it was difficult for a regular person to operate one, and—let's be honest—regular people didn't really care about electric motors. However, people cared about other things: when someone combined an electric motor and a coffee grinder, it was a hit. Many a successful product making use of an electric motor was subsequently brought to the market. </narrative> We put computers in things for a long time already. Is there a reason at all for ‘real’ computers (with OS, window managers, and all this stuff) to exist, except maybe for scientific tasks and programming? Yes, today ‘real’ computers are already used by many. Mainly for communication, as well as for specific tasks like text editing, photo editing, video production, DTP. However, it's usually not very efficient. A person needs to deal with a complex generic system, which is intended for thousands of use cases—and as a result not really suited for a single one. It's understandable that most people don't particularly like using a computer, seeing it like a necessary inconvenience. Perhaps we can figure a way to turn a computer into that magic multi-purpose thing you've described, that can ‘read’ our minds and do everything equally good. It would be fantastic. However, I think it's probably more likely to share electric motor's fate.
• unalone 14y ago
  One more college student here. You make a few mistakes with your reasoning, but at the same time there's something valuable in your sentiment. The problem with your "baseline platform" is that it runs counter to both how culture forms and to how we process information. First things first: there is no such thing – none, zip, zero – as raw information. Everything communicable is subjective. That subjectivity might expose objective fact, but even then, there's a subjectivity in which facts are brought up, how they're discussed, and ultimately what facts the communicator knows. You can't separate medium from message. That applies to everything. Rhetoric and information are inseparable. Your "read everything in your favorite theme/font" assumes that the purpose of publishing is readability, when publishing is just as much about contextualization and "experience-crafting" (too tired to think of the right word). The publishing process lets people decide whether something looks like it'll be worth their time, and it does that in part by creating a certain experience around media consumption that frames the media in question. This process doesn't start when somebody themes a blog or calls an agent. It starts the moment you begin to try to express yourself. There is no such thing as communicating without an audience; every form of communication is a form of publishing. It's through this process, moreover, that culture forms. From our specific choices we notice and abstract what we believe to be our values. These values then define both how we choose to function within society, and as these values spread they become our society. This is as valid online as it is anywhere else. Gaming theorists refer to a "magic circle" which divides a virtual world's reality from any other; a book I'm reading, Communities of Play, follows online gamers who are forced to migrate to a series of other games, and studies how the values they developed in one game influences their behavior in other games (and watches them try to recreate the original game in scriptable environments like Second Life). You talk about "authoring" and "commenting" and "sharing" and "upvoting" and, hell, even "editing" like these are all concepts everybody agrees with. But look at the difference in culture even between near-clones like Hacker News and Reddit. Then look at the difference between these sites and sites that are only slightly different – Newsvine, MetaFilter. By the time you get to something two steps changed – 9gag, say, or traditional web forums – you're looking at an entirely different way of processing information, even though you're still looking at essentially the same systemic process. And that's before you look at sites with entirely different purposes. None of those sites have remotely the same purpose as Flickr, and Flickr has little in common with Instagram, and Instagram has nothing in common with, say, TheSixtyOne. Look, if you're a biochem major you ought to understand that minute variations on a micro level leads to profound changes on the macro. Saying that information can be broken down into text/images/video is like saying that life can be broken down into carbon/hydrogen/oxygen. The magic is that a few basic building blocks can lead to ten thousand variations on the same silly theme, as you say. That's not a bug. That's a feature. I'll take that a step further and say that the magic of computers is how they allow ANYBODY to program systemic processes, so we're seeing systems and cultures evolve that literally never could have existed before. Cultures that rely on passing information that never could have been passed before. That break all preconceived notions of how cultures can exist. From this baseline computing platform came web sites, a primitive but effective way of creating localized systems. From these web sites came cultures – cultures within sites but also between them, like Communities of Play addresses. The web site is still among the most basic ways for people to publish. I'm publishing my thesis this year as a web site, because I can do things with hypertext and javascript and css that I could never do with paper. The book version of my thesis will be the deprecated version in a number of ways. Does that mean the web site is the only way to publish within these systems? Of course not! Newer and cooler things will evolve with time, and people will rely on the World Wide Web less and less and less. But the WWW is a great equalizer. It's given rise to voices that never could speak before. Protip: if you're feeling frustrated with the "ten thousand variations", stop reading tech news. Stop reading your Facebook friends. Take control of what you read. Don't rely on fucking Prismatic – it means well, but ultimately it's a hedonistic system, designed to show you what you want and hide from you everything else. Hell, don't rely on ANY recommendation systems. No Hacker News. No Reddit. Look for individuals. Search for people whose voices make you think. Create your own magic circle, your own tiny culture. Don't bother coming up with a platform or a startup to contain that culture. Just make the culture, and then build tools that help that culture sustain and extend itself. Maybe it'll never become huge, but it'll be big enough for you and all the people who think like you, and those are all the people you need. That's the purpose of a culture, after all. I don't check Hacker News very often now (for reasons just stated), but if you'd like to talk about this more shoot me an email (i.am@me.com). I love having this conversation. Or just talk around this subthread without me, whichever. Fascinating, isn't it, how each thread in a conversation like this becomes a whole culture of its own...
• adestefan 14y ago
  The simple answer to your question is that those things are hard. While most of the stuff I see posted on HN is cute, it's rare to see something that has solved a truy hard problem. In reality, must people are content reimplementing the same things in the latest flavor of the month instead of trying to solve truly hard problems.
• ctdonath 14y ago
  I'm upset at all the polish, all the ten thousand variations on the same silly theme. They do nothing to advance our civilization. It's disheartening. "Strange how much human progress and accomplishment comes from contemplation of the irrelevant." - Scott Kim