CountSessine

I made this point below, but Windows 10 still doesn't have the display-real-estate efficiency of Windows 7. Windows 10 wastes all kind of screen space on large, flat surfaces that a non-touch-screen user will never use. Windows 7 wasn't as pretty as Windows 10, but it was better at displaying information.

So actually, you are harmed by this decision every day you use a Windows 10/11 laptop. You live with this every day. You just don't know what you're missing.

I really strongly disagree. I've been using Windows since the 2.x 286/386 days. Windows 10 and 11 are still less functional, UI-wise, than Windows 7 was. They're still not capable of the information-density that Windows 7 was. They still have larger and less space-efficient widgets than Windows 7 did.

We forget this because Windows 7 was ugly and Windows 10 and 11 are nicer looking and that feels like progress, somehow. But you don't get nearly the functional information density with Windows 11 that you did with 7.

I mean, if this is what you've been waiting for forever and it changes your life for the better, then congrats. But I think this will wind up being a huge net-negative for most Mac users as macOS is made to look and feel more and more like iPadOS.

Touch-screen Macs is kind of a terrible development for anyone who loves the Mac. It's not just a harmless feature that you can ignore if you don't want it, because it's customer-facing and will now generate complaints and bugs from people who do use it. Those people will complain (rightly) that macOS UI widgets are too small to accurately manipulate with your fingers (they are indeed too small) and don't make sense with a touch screen (they don't make sense).

That means Apple will begin imposing all sorts of UI dreck on all of us, whether we want to use our screens as touch surfaces or not.

This is basically what happened with Microsoft - Windows Vista and 7 were installed in plenty of laptops with touchscreens, and customers would complain about not being able to maximize windows without closing them, not being able to open menus without touching toolbar buttons, etc.

Eventually Microsoft listened to them and we got Windows 8. Now this is the beginning of the same process for macOS.

And yet Astra is as good if not much better coding than opus 5.5, both in the code generated and its guardrails. In fact in the last 3 weeks at work I’ve had opus 5.5 histrionically freak out about examining security issues with our app multiple times. What good is that?

It’s just that Codex, the harness, is hot garbage. I’m going to invest some time in using Astra with OpenCode to see if I can live with that but going back to Anthropic is very low on my preference list.

It’s not even that Astra is bad at coding - it’s magnificent at coding. But it’s like it’s pure Id - all energy and first order logic but no taste or reason or preference. I guess that’s what we’re supposed to be doing now.

It’s actually kind of startling just how bad, as measured by open issues, Codex is. There’s a huge issue with conversation locking that nullifies one of Codex’s key advantages (GUI<->CLI interoperability) and last night I learned that conversations can get into a permanently-locked state where even shutting down every Codex process won’t unlock a conversation.

You add to that all of the weird confusion over Chat/Work/Cloud Work/Work Local modes and marooned conversations, broken connectors (will OpenTable ever work? Will the Chrome connector ever be reliable on restart?) questionable UI decisions, and I start to worry a whole lot less about being replaced by AI.

People will buy Macs and iPhones even if they don’t have AI. In fact at this point, based on revealed market preferences, it’s almost a value add. And if the AI capitalization bubble bursts, most people would be ok with OpenAI or Anthropic going bust. Both of them going bust would be really disappointing, but even that wouldn’t be the end of the world. And Meta going bust would almost be a side benefit of a market crash.

But Apple going bust would be a genuine loss for the world. So I’m glad they’re being conservative.

(Not that I would be happy with either anthropic or OpenAI going bust - I hope they can weather whatever is ahead).

Read Miran’s paper.

Read the Miran paper. It’s not about imbalances. It’s about negotiating leverage. Australia in particular is going to be the most interesting case in the world.

Strategically, Australia is more sympathetic to the US, but your trade with China is many multiples of your trade with the US. If you join the US you’ll have to raise tariffs against China and if you don’t you’ll naturally fall into China's orbit. Interesting times!

Because Trump himself isn’t really that smart?

Like I said, he takes the advice of the last person who talks to him. He’s very suggestible. The best parts of his presidency, so far, have been when he follows the plan in project 2025, which you may not agree with, but is at least sane and coherent. The worst bits are when he adlibs, like the stupid tariff escalation with China.

Ultimately the biggest problem with Miran’s plan is that now that Trump is tearing up these trade agreements, no one has any reason to believe that the new one is worth the paper it’s printed on. He has no integrity and no one signs agreements with people who have no integrity.

And yet the near-term interest is to keep buying Volkswagens from Hitler.

I agree with you, but I also think you have this idea that trade is currently governed by largely linear and symmetric rules in Ricardian harmony, and that just isn’t the case.

Every industrialized exporting country in the world has optimized for exporting to the US, and there’s plenty of govt policy involved. Trade barriers are the norm, not the exception. If other countries optimize their trade rules, regulations, and money supply to optimize for a sizeable trade surplus with the US, they can change their policy to reduce the surplus.

Give up your whole notion of “should”. There is no “should”. The formula is for aligning incentives. It’s no longer enough for other govts to claim compliance with abstract requirements while clandestinely working against them - they need to be committed to helping importers succeed.

If you read Miran's paper, the point of the tariffs is to bring US trade partners to the table to negotiate the alliance, so really they could be anything at all. It could have been 420% or 31.4159% or whatever, right across the board.

But the amounts are actually kind of clever and it reflects the fact that there's a more mature understand of trade barriers now vs when the WTO was negotiated.

How much do you know about trade barriers? Beyond tariffs, they're extraordinarily complicated and rely on regulations, trip-wires, and unequal application of rules.

Canada has "free trade" with dairy, but only on dairy imports up to a point, and after that heavy tariffs apply. But no one ever imports enough to incur those tariffs, so, that's free-trade, right? But actually, no one considers the Canadian dairy market worth the trouble without being able to import large amounts of dairy. So Canada can legitimately say that the trip-wire isn't applied, but it's a long ways from "free trade" because large importers are kept out.

China requires that foreign companies must partner with local companies to sell into the Chinese market. This effectively leads to a lot of technology transfers. It's not a tariff, but it's pretty clearly a "trade barrier" because companies that want to protect their IP are denied access.

In the 80's when US trade reps were negotiating with Japanese trade reps, the Americans would try to convince the Japanese that free trade was best for Japanese consumers. The Japanese reps would just respond, "how much do you want us to buy?"

The Japanese really didn't believe in free trade, and they were actively manipulating the value of the Yen at that point (it would be a few years still before the Plaza Accord), so they knew that just lowering tariffs wasn't going to make US goods sufficiently more competitive in Japan.

What's changed in 35 years is that the US doesn't really believe in "free trade" anymore either - not after all of the grief the WTO brought. The simple formulas are a no-bullshit approach to trade - the same ones that motivated those Japanese trade reps.

"I don't care how your trade barriers work - currency manipulation, tariffs, excess regulation, unequal rules - just fix your sh*t to reduce the trade imbalance."