linguae

16 ms·

211.
by linguae 1y ago
The sad thing is that Apple used to have people like Bill Atkinson (RIP), Larry Tesler (RIP), Bruce Tognazzini, and Don Norman who cared deeply about usability. What made the Mac special wasn’t its looks, especially in the pre-iMac and pre
212.
by linguae 1y ago
Many users of Microsoft Word 5.1 for Macintosh hated Microsoft Word 6; they felt the latter was not Mac-like. I was a kid during this time and the only Mac word processor I used in the classic era was the one included with ClarisWorks, so
213.
by linguae 1y ago
There are proprietary software packages that I rely on that are unavailable for Linux, though I regularly use WSL for development.
214.
by linguae 1y ago
I’ve also come to this realization as a longtime Mac user. Granted, I’m not old enough to have used the classic Mac OS as a professional, though I did use it in my childhood. However, I was in high school and college during the Jobs era o
215.
by linguae 1y ago
As someone whose grandparents endured Jim Crow, I largely agree in the sense that social media did not create America’s divides. Many of the divides in American society are very old and are very deep, with no easy fixes. Unfortunately al
216.
by linguae 1y ago
I remember learning Japanese in the early 2000s and the fun of dealing with multiple encodings for the same language: JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC. As late as 2011 I had to deal with processing a dataset encoded under EUC in Python 2 for a grad
217.
by linguae 1y ago
For highly-specialized engineers and researchers, there’s often only a tiny handful of companies they could work for that offer jobs in their specialties. For example, if you’re a compilers expert, there are only so many companies that hir
218.
by linguae 1y ago
In my opinion, there are two factors at play: (1) social division and (2) it’s easy in America for self-interested people and organizations to block progress by weaponizing due process. I’ll expound on the first point. European countries a
219.
by linguae 1y ago
I travel to Japan twice a year for business and for vacation, and coming back to the Bay Area and dealing with its transportation infrastructure is always jarring. I find the Bay Area very difficult to get around. The roads are jammed with
220.
by linguae 1y ago
Interestingly enough, even with RTO, I’ve noticed that driving on a Friday morning is much smoother than Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday mornings. Despite the BART shutdown, it was smooth sailing southbound down 680 from Pleasanton to Mil
221.
by linguae 1y ago
I’m at a conference at Stanford University right now. I was going to take BART and the Dumbarton Express to avoid having to drive in traffic, but when I drove to the Dublin BART station, I found out BART wasn’t running. I ended up having
222.
by linguae 1y ago
Indeed. This reminds me of Rob Pike’s famous 2000 polemic “Systems Software Research is Irrelevant,” where he laments the decline in innovative operating system designs of the era. Additionally, we need to consider the career incentive str
223.
by linguae 1y ago
Reminds me of this classic I’ve first read many years ago: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/unix-hoax.html In all seriousness, I have a high respect for Unix and Unix-like systems, particularly FOSS implementations l
224.
by linguae 1y ago
Thank you for sharing this interview link! I didn’t know that Étoilé was inspired by Alan Kay’s STEPS project. It makes a lot of sense. It would have been really cool to see a desktop environment that pushed Alan Kay’s ideas further.
225.
by linguae 1y ago
I’ve been periodically keeping up with GNUstep’s progress since 2004, when I first learned about it as a high school student brand new to Linux and Mac OS X (I grew up on Windows at home and on classic Macs in elementary school). I even wr
226.
by linguae 1y ago
Étoilé was so promising….the idea of using OpenStep (via GNUstep) infrastructure in ways that went beyond NeXTstep or Mac OS X. It felt like an even deeper embrace of the Smalltalk influences of the OpenStep API to enhance the desktop comp
227.
by linguae 1y ago
Yes, it's today's housing costs, combined with inflation, that are highly demoralizing. Here's a personal anecdote: my grandfather was born in Arkansas in the Jim Crow era. He never went to school, and in fact was illiterate
228.
by linguae 1y ago
This makes sense to me. New homes in America tend to be located in suburban or exurban areas, where there’s land to build single-family homes, and where it’s often a long commute to job centers. This long commute may lower the desirabilit
229.
by linguae 1y ago
I wonder if the name Gershwin is a reference to the planned successor to Copland, which was intended to be the original Mac OS 8 before it faced development hell and was ultimately cancelled in 1996, leading to Apple purchasing NeXT?
230.
by linguae 1y ago
“In this world, where AI can just do trivial things for you, how does one get good at anything?” You get good by doing non-trivial things. Consider developers like Linus Torvalds and Jeff Dean. Not every developer has the skill to write a
231.
by linguae 1y ago
I wholeheartedly agree. It’s not enough to be good on the technical side; it’s also important to be good at interpersonal relationships and understanding the big picture of the organization where one is employed. I’ve found this to be tru
232.
by linguae 1y ago
This is exactly how I feel as someone who enjoyed the Mac during the Jobs era of Mac OS X and has been quite disappointed with the state of personal computing since then. The Apple experience is not the same today as it was during the Snow
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by linguae 1y ago
The only charitable answer I could give is national security reasons for having domestic chip production, and even that could be accomplished in ways that don’t require the federal government having an ownership stake in Intel. For example
234.
by linguae 1y ago
I agree; I don’t like the iOSification of the UI/UX, and I also don’t like the increased locked-down nature of macOS, such as having to go through a nag screen whenever I use lldb. I still prefer Macs over Windows for work-issued hard
235.
by linguae 1y ago
I agree. There have long been macOS-style skins for KDE, GNOME, and other desktop environments, and some of them do a good job at capturing the look of macOS. However, it’s the feel of macOS that makes macOS special. Additionally, it
236.
by linguae 1y ago
On the BSD side there has been efforts such as helloSystem ( https://hellosystem.github.io/docs/ ) and rayvnOS ( https://ravynos.com/ ) that aim to provide a FOSS recreation of the Jobs-era Mac OS X experi
237.
by linguae 1y ago
I wish Microsoft reverted to its 1990s style of making tools for power users that don’t get in the way. Windows 2000 was peak Windows to me. Security issues aside, it was a solid OS. It also had a non-flashy interface that got out of my
238.
by linguae 1y ago
Unfortunately the executive branch has a lot of power, and many opposed to these wild moves are fearful that openly speaking out will lead to retaliation. Witness the revocation of grant money at targeted universities, for example. Also c
239.
by linguae 1y ago
I feel the same way about Windows XP. Windows XP may have brought NT-based Windows to regular consumers, which is partly why there's nostalgia for XP, but for those who were already using NT-based Windows at the time, Windows XP wasn&
240.
by linguae 1y ago
I feel the exact same way as someone who is a teacher and researcher of CS. If I were to do it all over again, I would’ve done a bachelor’s in math, with an emphasis on discrete topics (combinatorics, graph theory), linear and abstract alg

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