cosmic_cheese

For me it depends on the state of the roads. If they’re empty, I don’t mind driving and can even enjoy it. If traffic is moderate or above, my opinion of driving takes a hard nosedive.

I’m not even a wild driver. Whenever it’s safe to do so I’m in the right lane doing exactly the speed limit. I just don’t like having to deal with other drivers.

I just wish that I could buy something akin to a modern EV version of a Honda Fit, Honda Element, or Toyota Matrix. Something that's affordable, not huge, and is a great town car but also brings utility and versatility highly disproportionate to its size and cost. I don't even care if it looks dorky.

This is the exact type of vehicle that manufacturers selling in the US seem to have an extreme allergy to. If it can't be badged as an SUV, isn't saddled with a needlessly space-inefficient interior, and can't carry an exorbitant price tag it won't be sold.

FWIW, it may just be a colossal misconception of my own, but I’d been of the mind that “partner” was in some cases more polite to use because it doesn’t make assumptions about the individuals in question or about the dynamics of the relationship between them. I am not part of the LGBTQ world, however, and am happy to be corrected.

What's so bad about Apple Terminal? I've tried iTerm2 and others but never found a compelling reason to use them over the stock app. I don't live in the terminal like some do, though.

Many seem to not want to admit it for some reason, but the truth is that desktop environments are an extremely personal, subjective sort of software. One person's nirvana is another's anathema.

This is why I think it's important that there's a wealth of different desktops available to use that represent a variety of different paradigms, particularly in the context of Linux on the desktop. Desktop Linux represents the ultimate in potential to mold the computer to the user instead of the reverse, and it really bums me out to see suggestions or implications that would-be Linux users should just accept a Windows-ish shape or tiling keyboard-driven shape and stop hoping for something more Mac-like (which as an aside, GNOME is not despite superficial appearances).

It’s not that what I do can’t fit on a laptop, but rather that I prefer to minimize weight in the machines I travel with, and if I need power while I’m out there’s always macOS’ built in remote desktop capabilities which work quite nicely with Tailscale.

So if I’m going to have a machine always sitting on my desk at home anyway, it may as well be a desktop with fewer compromises and no battery to slowly degrade while never getting used.

A nice bonus is that it takes a lot more to make the fans on a desktop noisy relative to what it takes on an MBP, and if there’s one thing I dislike about computers it’s fan noise.

My preferred setup would be a semi-beefy desktop paired with a highly mobile laptop, which with the current product line would be something like a Studio (or a high end 27”/32” iMac, if such a thing existed) and 13” Air. I ended up with an MBP due to constricted availability of the Studio/Mini, though.

I switch between a variety of displays throughout my day, ranging from 60hz up through 240hz and yes there’s an obvious visual difference, but I adapt to it in a matter of seconds.

It’s nice for games but I don’t really care for productivity use. In fact in that situation I’d take integer-scaled HiDPI density over refresh rate in that scenario.

They seem to want those who would’ve bought a high spec iMac (or briefly, an iMac Pro) to instead buy a midrange-or-above Mini or a Studio instead. With the M-series, the iMac returned to its roots as the “family computer” or “grandma email box” kind of machine.

It’s too bad. A high end iMac still holds a lot of appeal, especially for those seeking clean desk setups. I’m using an MBP hooked up to dual monitors through a dock right now and it’s fine, but I do miss how clean my desk was back when it was a VESA mounted iMac Pro and companion monitor.

In theory maybe, but in reality it’s a full-time job keeping up with changes from mainline with big projects like KDE, which isn’t very practical if you need to do other things to keep a paycheck coming in.

I’m using KDE on the gaming box I recently transitioned away from Windows as well as on a secondary single-use laptop where Linux has been installed for a while.

It’s not bad, but I find it still to be very much an acquired taste. It’s fine for my usage, where the DE has barely any impact but having been using macOS as my main OS for the better part of 30 years, it would probably drive me insane if I had to shift my main body of computer use to it. It’s not any one thing, but dozens of papercuts that can’t be configured away (I’d need to maintain my own fork to fix them) as well as the more Windows-like desktop paradigm.

I think there’s two separate things going on here.

One is that software started being designed in a one-size-fits-all manner for a “uniconsumer” that vaguely represents every user the software will ever have. Personally I think that analytics-driven development is largely to blame here; through those you don’t see user groups, just numbers going in whatever the product manager deems to be positive and negative directions. We don’t design for specific users, but rather to produce desired metrics.

Second is that professional UI design got flooded with designers from other disciplines (e.g. print design) who only really understand the visual half of software design. The functional, interaction, and user research parts completely fell by the wayside as the job became more focused on coming up with designs that would do numbers on Dribbble and look pretty in a product page or presentation and is driven mostly by vibes now.

Well, that or for this person the negatives outweigh the positives.

I have some good memories associated with open floor plan offices, but I totally get why others might not be so lucky. There were several days back then where the commotion surrounding me was too “loud” (e.g. people moving in my peripheral vision catching my attention) to shut out, even with good ANC headphones, and made it near impossible to work. I would’ve loved a cubicle or private office on days like that.

These days I work from home and don’t miss that aspect of modern offices a whole lot, even if they do enable the occasional serendipitous positive moments.

For what it’s worth, I’m about a decade older and have had similar feelings.

I’ve worked a 2010s tech office setting, but that was from what I can gather quite a different beast than working in a tech office in the 80s and 90s. The things we worked on seemed so much more frivolous than what our counterparts did back then and culture was more focused on becoming a unicorn or getting bought up than creating something great.

I dunno, I look at records of those times and wish I could’ve been there and worked on something meaningful instead of bouncing though SV working for companies chasing dumb trends that turned out to be dead ends.

It might be good to define “slop”. My definition is roughly, “was created with little to no human thoughtfulness in its architecture and doesn’t have the faintest hope of being maintained in the long term”. Using that criteria, easily 95%+ of AI-coded projects I’ve encountered are slop.

For me the key thing is that a program that cannot be maintained and improved over time without introducing numerous regressions may as well have not existed, because even those that were useful at one point in time quickly cease to be so due to bugs cropping up from the project being a quivering, duct taped together mass of misery or because it stopped getting updates when the project owner found themselves painted into a corner and broke with an OS update.

Note that I am not a hardline anti-LLM type. I have my reservations, but do make use of them. I do however see a massive difference in quality between knowledgeable devs using them to augment their own abilities and non-devs or newbie devs just telling Claude to bake the whole pie.