hyperjeff

yeah really. half way thru i realized and felt punked. write your own damn articles people.

You’re a ”developer“, i guess, but not a coder (anymore), which is what your interlocutors are probably asking about. You’ve migrated to a middle manager job, not something they probably can just start doing competently. Essentially you’re agreeing with their initial sentiment, that coders will be made irrelevant.

clearly not a reader of Mondo 2000 back in the day. i do miss real hacker culture.

This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.

Pardons should be changed to be subject to congressional approval (and rate limited). It’s clearly been demonstrated that the temptation to abuse it is too great.

Everything they did was amazing. Hackers in the best sense.

As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.

Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.

I'd love to hear more! Have you collected stories on a blog or to places like Folklore.org?

Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)

I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.

i haven’t had my coffee yet, but i’m going to need to see this sentence diagrammed out.

Average users have no idea what of their information is in the cloud or not. Even if they did, they have no idea of the implications.

One can make Spaces deterministic by turning off Automatically rearrange Spaces. Add keyboard shortcuts for quick access to each. On multi-display setups, you can have the whole group of displays work in lock-step on a project by turning off Displays have separate Spaces. These are the first two things I uncheck on a new system. Each Space can be dedicated to different projects using any number of apps instead of trying to correlate Spaces with specific apps. (Sadly, you can only have up to 16 Spaces.)

Side plug, I have a utility that lets you associate names with each Space: https://github.com/hyperjeff/NameSpace (Apple should’ve made naming Spaces standard, but no.)

Nice. It’d be cool if you could tap on the subject tags to filter for the latest posts with that tag.

Bikes and scooters aren’t legal on sidewalks in Chicago, and these little robots are just clogging up what little pedestrian space still exists. Totally apart from the questionable ethics of gratuitously using tech for tasks that could be a job for someone.

+1 for the return of TouchID, but it’ll never happen. Having to orient the phone and stare into a bright screen all the time is sub optimal.

Back when I used to meditate regularly, I would find that an extra meditation in the middle of a sleepless night would go a long way toward pushing off the need for sleep. Generally, meditating always left me in a slightly heightened awake state. Perhaps the help with brain fluid regulation is a core reason for both effects. (I should go back to meditating again.)

relevant Dilbert: https://www.flubu.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/wpid-p...

Early releases of the dev tools even included the TextEdit source for you to learn from.

These days “classical” just distinguishes all things quantum from non-quantum. General relativity is considered a classical theory, for example.

Apple often goes to great lengths to avoid anything GPL.

At a minimum, an education should leave you with an ability regardless of the tools at your disposal. There may come a time when whatever tool you have grown accustomed to will not be available. (If a war breaks out, for example, don’t count on any of your electronic devices to work.) By all means learn to use tools effectively, but that’s not enough.

first thing i do on any email setup is turn off autoloading images to kill that positive signal. just doing this has cut down spam considerably.

I can’t speak to the errors you’re seeing, only that my experience is different. I’ve written well over a hundred CLI apps on macOS, of all sizes. I consider it a very good language for it too (also for scripting). A nice thing is that you can leverage the whole of AppKit/Foundation/Carbon/etc in CLI apps allowing for uniquely powerful tooling & integration.

I watched that series multiple times when i was in high school and early college. Really inspiring and the visualizations still live in my head. Unusually good production for an educational show. Set a new standard.

Are there any crimes that are solved via harsh criminal penalties?

Ambition, with respect to wealth, can be a double-edged sword. One can imagine being both ambitious and allowing everyone to share in the benefits, and the act of participating in some advance as its own reward. Those that do gain some advantage often are hiding the tremendous work of others, gaining a grotesque share of the fortune for their being in the right place and time. To paraphrase a scene from Life of Brian, it is the (so-called) ambitious, often, who are the problem.

If anyone is interested in old Mac software and open source projects, I have an archived version of my old OS X listings. While most links are broken these days, it can be a handy for finding things for old Macs. I think the list ended when the App Store finally went online, around the time of Lion. http://osx.hyperjeff.net/Apps/

Inventing the automobile has clearly made humanity less fit. Should we stop driving?

Perhaps an apt analogy. One could argue that the lure of convenience of automobiles led to one of the worst decisions of the 20th century, to restructure society around automobiles, causing a self-perpetuating reliance feedback loop with many destructive side-effects (physical, environmental and cultural). We should pause a bit and not rush head-long into AI without trying to think the path forward through. It's a decision that we will all make together as a culture. There are many current troubles with AI already, even if they make no mistakes at all.

That’s so sad that the vast majority of his photos were lost to the 1906 SF earthquake. Amazing photos that were preserved though.