For anyone who was also curious what Justin Frankel got up to after the speculation at the end of the article, he founded Cockos Software and is the lead developer on the excellent REAPER DAW.
Oh, I had no idea. It's been a few years since I used it in anger but it was a very pleasant package to use, with an extremely friendly licensing scheme (purchasing a permanent license for <current.X> got you all releases up until version <current+1.max>)
Not to mention it's about as easy to use without a license as WinRAR, so you can trial it indefinitely and then pay the mere $60 for it when you're ready to release some music commercially
Easily one of the best values in commercial software if you have a need for what it does. I think I paid something ~$70 a couple of years ago. While there's a limitation on the number of updates you get based on release version, I'm still getting updates under the license a couple years on. All that and you get a genuinely professional level tool for much less than what similar software from competitors offer.
I'm no musician but I paid for a Reaper license just because the software is so good and useful and the licensing scheme is so reasonable. Like, it's kind of hard to beat that.
It's a shame, he's a genuinely cool guy! If I wasn't convinced that my kids would find a way to break it when I wasn't looking I'd definitely have an Acme Klein Bottle by now.
This might catch flak, but generalizing I would assume that the people banning things are the same people who would use excel for something where a database would be better, and if so, that is the reason Excel isn't banned on the same conditionals that would get sqlite banned.
The sane thing would be to ban Excel and promote SQLite. Excel is often used for tabulated text (issue tracking) not calculations. Perfect use case for a relational db
I mean, it might have been at first, but Microsoft figured out that the majority of users for lists without formulas in 1993 and they've strategized around that. IMHO, the biggest concession to this was when they added Power Query to core Excel in 2016.
You should consider knock-on effects of this brilliant idea. Now there would be copies of spreadsheets younger than a month that get replicated 47 billion times, exponentially compounding the problem you're trying to solve.
This sounds like how we pass so many stupid laws. Nobody thinks about 2nd order effects.
Which is very annoying and people will complain. People complaining can be then directed towards a better solution. As a bonus, mistakes will also rise, leading to further complaints, especially ones that reach higher. All this making the dogshit practice, and the idiots committing them, infinitely more visible and thus fixable.
The sheer volume of data that needs tending to may even grind certain departments to a halt! What a great opportunity! It'd appear I'm positively stellar at this!
No worries, was a bit of a gamble of a joke from me (sarcasm frequently doesn't translate in text, or can be inopportune), so I tried taking it accordingly.
For clarity, while I did have some rather perverse fun toying with the idea, I do not actually think it should be implemented, or at least certainly not in one fell swoop and as-is. Mostly for the aforelisted reasons. This is what I actually intended to convey.
Though for better or for worse, that doesn't mean I think the notion is completely meritless either, so I might still be deserving of at least some of your snark. But a lot of it was in jest from my side indeed.
This whole keeping an inventory, disabling items, and later taking them out completely is a chore I already do in other contexts. While it does work, it is anxiety inducing, doesn't really scale well, and it's quite miserable to go through with. It's the cost of keeping things organized as far as I'm concerned, with no real way around it in the general case. The best one can do is try and mitigate it, by monitoring for patterns and building out systems, to automate and streamline the tedium away.
I do sincerely not know of other ways to keep things in check though, in lieu of which you do get the makeshift shadow ops with all of its pitfalls. It's kind of just life.
PII sniffers are pretty good at dealing with excel files. Excel is seen more as an analyst tool than a dev tool. Any place that bans Excel needs to either let analysts use some other turing complete data tools, like python or R or something, or they'll have trouble attracting analyst talent. They'll have devs and data entry users and that's it.
The only way that works is if the dev team is large enough to be responsive to business needs, which almost never happens because devs are expensive. The juniors who are tweaking business logic every day are functionally doing a role analysts can do if you just give them a sane API and data tools.
Access gets used for a shared DB and that is quite easy to corrupt. It is much more cost effective to have that in a proper central database (I supse SQLLite is better here as well)
You can enforce classification and privacy labels (or something similar) in Excel and other document files, at least in a closed corporate environment. Azure also supports this. Also, everyone has Office installed (in a corporate environment), anyone can open and work with an Excel file.
I don't have Office installed, nor do a significant majority of my peers. Given that sqlite is installed by default on Macs, a sqlite file is far more portable than an Excel file.
I’ve worked at some organisations that have strict rules (not always strictly followed) about what can go in Excel spreadsheets, and where they have to be stored. The C drive is verboten. Some also have standards about classification and labelling of PII and sensitive data.
Man, Access could've been so good if they just made an app around SQLite. Or since it's Microsoft and they need to do everything their own way, it would've been so good if they made a flat file DB à la SQLite, but with T-SQL (or a subset thereof) instead of JET-SQL.
Increase interoperability. Funnel data people from Excel into real DB technologies.
And if they did more to blur the lines between spreadsheets and databases, and make it seamless to work out of both Excel and Access, add more spreadsheet features to the data views, etc.
It's not just that, Notepad++ is built around Win32 APIs and is designed for Windows. He's got some non-portable optimizations baked in. At its core, Notepad++ is just another Scintilla wrapper (like SciTE or Textadept) but it's targeted at and optimized for Windows. There will not be a Mac or Linux port.
If you want an editor with the same core as Notepad++, but fewer batteries included and more extensibility, Textadept is worth a look.
why though it is open source the only problem the original dev has is that they are using his name and trademark they could name it something else and it will be okay.
Touch and mouse are two very distinct forms of input that need to be kept separate. Every convertible Windows laptop I have ever used has convinced me of that.
Mouse interfaces can be incredibly information dense because mice are both incredibly economic from a space and motion standpoint, and also somehow incredibly precise. You can flick your wrist to select any target the size of a grain of rice on a 32" screen. Touch interfaces require larger targets because fingertips are larger than a cursor point, and also require smaller screens because your arm now has to move the entire length of the screen, which is slow and tiring.
Where touchscreens excel is tactile experiences, things that mice cannot replicate. Multi-touch, pressure sensitivity, pen angle. Sweeping motions are difficult to control with a mouse. Manipulating multiple analog controls is nigh-impossible with a mouse.
When an app tries to accommodate both input styles, it inevitably ends up catering to one style or the other, unless two separate interfaces are built. And because a touchscreen laptop can be touched or have the mouse moved at any given time, it's not really possible to switch between the two input styles seamlessly.
I would really enjoy having a device that is capable of both, since the iPad has a gorgeous screen, a great form factor, and a lot of killer uses. But it can't cannibalize mouse interfaces or we wind up with the direction that MacOS is going.
There is nothing wrong with having a keyboard connected to a touch device per se, but the gross arm motion required to move between the touchscreen and the keyboard, and the awkward angle the keyboard puts the touchscreen at sort of nukes the usefulness of the touchscreen. And again, jumping in text is the sort of small target action that mice excel at.
Touch and mouse are complementary inputs that must be included. Working on a Windows laptop with touch and an iPad with Magic Keyboard have convinced me of that.
Don’t make the mistake of thinking that having touch means you only use touch. Same for a mouse/trackpad pointer. Each has strengths and weaknesses and it better at some tasks than others. The pointer is good for clicking on small UI elements or doing small movements. It suffers with larger movements across the screen. Touch is good for scrolling, zooming, tapping buttons, tabs, and sometimes links. It’s good for jumping around the screen and moving things.
The keyboard is a third input/control interface and can be even faster and more precise than the mouse pointer. When the mouse first came on the scene, people derided it as less efficient than a keyboard and complained that you had to move your fingers away from the keyboard to use one. They swore they would never use one.
Where these work best is a mix of input modes using different ones for different scenarios. Having a mix if broad and precise inputs means you don’t need to tailor the whole interface for just precision or just broad strokes. The interface can be designed to accommodate the presentation of information and let the choice of inputs be up to the user. A side benefit of having difference input modes is that your hands move in different ways for each. You are less subject to repetitive stress from doing the same hand motion for everything.
> Mouse interfaces can be incredibly information dense because mice are both incredibly economic from a space and motion standpoint, and also somehow incredibly precise. ...
There's exactly one feature of touch interfaces that can be incredibly input-information dense, easily rivaling the mouse, and that's swiping gestures with 1-to-1 fluid animation for feedback. Usually seen with pie menus and the like. Drag and drop, the mouse equivalent, is extremely clunky - and mouse gestures that don't even involve clicking even more so.
The surface pro argues otherwise. Using Lightroom classic on the Pro is largely best done from the keyboard, but there are certain workflows where using the touchscreen or a stylus is much better than a touchpad. The fact that it's limited doesn't mean it isn't a good idea.
Not wanting to install an OS package to do something as simple as sending some bytes a couple years back, I wrote a shell script to send WoL packets. Its only dependencies are netcat and bash so if you have busybox it should run almost anywhere. It just takes the mac address and interface as an argument and sends a WoL packet on that interface
#!/bin/bash
hex="\xFF\xFF\xFF\xFF\xFF\xFF"
mac_hex="\\x`printf "$1" | sed 's/:/\\\\x/g'`"
wol_string="$hex"
for i in {1..16}
do
wol_string+="$mac_hex"
done
printf "$wol_string" | nc -u -b -w 1 "$2" 9
It took me a while to find an explanation of something so simple, I can't figure out why everyone relies on huge binary packages and libraries to do it. I just needed something on my router so that I could wake my machines from outside the house. I ended up just writing a couple shell scripts that called it and triggering them with nginx via FastCGI so I could click on a link to wake up my machines.
To me the buns still look far too perfect and fluffy. I don't know if I've ever received a wrapped McDonald's hamburger that hasn't been smashed flat to some extent, with cracks in the bun. The ones that come in boxes fare a little better but they still look as if they've weathered some turbulence.
I'll admit to McDonald's Japan being a guilty pleasure of mine. Most things I get are pretty close to the picture. It's not perfect of course, but it's McDonald's, I'm not exactly expecting gourmet food and presentation. The fries kick ass though, I almost always get them hot and perfectly golden brown.
The quality of the fries is directly proportional to how good the attendant at the fries station is at following procedure and not dumping loads of pre baked fries in the keep-warm bin (don't know the English McD's phrase for it). They get worse from being under the heating lamp for too long or being left over the frying pan too long dripping. It's not rocket science but many don't want to be shouted at when the station runs out of fries so they overdo it on the supply. This is exaggerated when a rush is winding down and the production isn't scaled down quickly enough.
If I remember correctly there is a small trouble shooting section in the floor managers quality guide (small booklet with all procedures, weights, temperatures, stack height of boxes etc) which hints you at what is going wrong if you ever want to know and get your hands on one. Though that will have changed since mine is ancient.
I figured as much, and I would expect a Japanese mcdonalds employee to give slightly more of a shit than say, an American employee so that probably explains the discrepancy in the average experience if you were to compare them.
That reminds me of when I worked at a movie theater. We used to serve the popcorn scooped directly from the popping machine into a bucket. But then they had a corporate guy come in and install warmers so we could pre-load a bunch of buckets/bags of popcorn and hand them out when ordered. Of course the ones from the warmers aren't as good as the ones freshly popped, and this guy gave some bullshit about "ackshually popcorn right out of the popper isn't as good, it needs time to dry". It's not like the customer is about to take their popcorn into a multi-hour sitting activity where they have time to "let it dry"...
I always tried to hook up the nice customers with the fresh stuff when I could, it felt criminal handing them one out of the warmer.
I realize the purpose of the essay, and I agree with the author's sentiment that our possessions ask more of us than is necessary, and more than ever before. But I disagree that any object is finished. That Casio that the author mentions, yes it goes 7 years without a battery change, but the day the battery dies will be the day that you have to buy a new battery, figure out how to open it, and change it. Or (as many people will unfortunately do) throw it away and buy a new one because it's beat up now anyway.
Tools dull, and people neglect to sharpen them. Filters clog, and people neglect to clean them. Oil needs to be changed, guitar strings lose their brightness, lightbulbs flicker and die, rooftops gather moss. We live in a world where our possessions require maintenance, and the only solution to that is to have fewer possessions. Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)
The iPhone that the author mentions gives many tools to silence notifications from apps. The real problem is the social expectation that we are always paying attention, always ready to respond. I had a phone free week last year and now frequently will leave my phone in another room on silent for hours at a time unintentionally. It irritates my friends and my wife when I don't respond to their texts immediately. And it's frustrating that these features are being foisted on us more and more. But ultimately all things require maintenance, including relationships, and ultimately we set the standard of how much we have to give and are willing to put up with.
As far as the watch goes, personally I wear a Casio Tough Solar w/ Waveceptor because in theory they should go decades without needing a battery change or needing me to set the time, unless I travel. The WVA-M640 is reasonably stylish, and G-Shocks are virtually indestructible. As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.
My dad once told me that just because he had a phone (landline), that he was under no obligation to answer it. I thought it was funny at the time but I wish he was still around for me to tell him he was right.
When iPhones became common, my ex-wife would get upset when I wouldn't reply to a text message. Sometimes I was busy and missed the notification, or couldn't answer (like in a meeting, driving, etc). Or I knew that the message would be better answered in person.
The social expectations part is hard to overcome. Societal contracts, whether implicit or explicit are very hard to ignore.
Common... I've got tools I "inherited" from my grandpa that are still fine (brothers and I basically inherited the house and the tools where in the shed and whenever I go there on vacation, I use those tools to fix the house). I've got a screwdriver which I definitely remember using as a teenager, in the late 80s (and which I used for a variety of DIY jobs ever since) to assemble the trucks on my skateboards. And that screwdriver is a prized possession of mine: it's got a story. Hammers, saws, stainless steel scissors, hoses (to water the plants), multi-tool tools (don't know if they're stainless steel but they still look good), etc. Plenty of stuff still totally usable decades later.
You cannot compare tools that can outlast humans (like my grandpa and now myself) with an Apple watch that's going to be junk in a few years at most.
Even for oil that needs changing, things that needs lubricating once every blue moon (like, say, a mechanical watch): it's quite different to drop a tiny bit of lubricant inside a mechanical watch that's already 30 years old compared to having to update the firmware of whatever Internet-of-insecure-and-shitty-Thing gizmo that's going to be a thing of the past in a few years.
And if you really let a nice mechanical watch idle for decades, at least someone can do this:
"Restoring a Vintage Rolex Submariner with the Original Box, Paperwork... Even the Receipt!"
While I'm really not sure there are going to be people out there keeping a connected wristwatch from 2026 going in the year 2066 (not sure about the value of that either).
When The Force Awakens, I spent $99 on a toy version of BB8 that you could control from your iPhone. It was a cool toy. Then after a while the app was no longer supported... Sad times.
I also owned every iPhone from the first through iPhone 7 and kept each as I replaced the old one. After a while, none were usable due to changes in cellphone tech. And I realized keeping LiO batteries around was a huge fire hazard...
If it’s the same BB8 I had, there was a repo on GitHub that allowed you to control it from your computer via Bluetooth. Might be worth looking around if you want to bring it back to life
> Some people choose to rent instead of buying because they don't want to deal with property upkeep (which is undoubtedly a bad deal, but one that some choose to make regardless.)
Is it? My understanding is that strictly return-wise, index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries, especially if you factor in all the maintenance cost and risks. Some countries have pretty good tenant protection, which is another big factor in practice.
Separately: Personally, I've really enjoyed and benefitted from not having to deal with the complexities of ownership, and it is well worth it in my own time/money/hassle/annoyance calculation. My own time is the single most valuable asset I have; one could say: it is ultimately the only real asset I have. Everything else merely translates to that.
The rent vs own argument is a detailed and deep one, and anyone who comes down 100% on "one answer" (even things like "house hacking") is likely missing something.
Index funds are almost always better than house appreciation over long periods of time; if you discount leverage - because it's "normal" to be leveraged 80% on a house, but you can't margin your index funds that high, and the government doesn't protect you from gambler's ruin on margin.
Owning usually tends to win out the longer you want (or have) to remain in the same location and same house, renting tends to win if you move relatively often (location or changing home type/size, etc) or if you're in a rental inversion (which much of the coasts are in).
At the extremes nobody suggests you should buy a house instead of renting a hotel room or AirBNB in a city you're visiting.
And it's not strictly a financial decision; it's also a personal one and people may choose the "financially non-optimal" because of other reasons.
This really depends 100% on how good your landlord is, over and above the tenancy protection you mention.
> index funds are distinctly better than property value in most countries
It's much easier to borrow £200k to buy a house than to buy stocks, and then you don't have to pay CGT on it. Housing is the only asset the general public can leverage gains on.
Land is not an investment (at least, not without explicitly improving the land). Buildings depreciate. If land (or the buildings on the land) are returning anything close to an index investment, an economy is seriously sick.
Edit: yes, you can rent the property out—but, societally, that's just shunting the problem down the road.
> As long as they keep changing the rules there's no escaping daylight saving time though.
I have a couple of Oceanus (fancy Casio) watches that adapt fine, to whatever DST is. Not sure how they would do in Arizona, though.
I also have a Junghans (more expensive), and it’s stuck in old DST.
I don’t wear any of them. My Apple Watch (cheaper than the others) does fine. It has a GPS-informed time setting. I don’t really use it for a lot of its fancier features, but I like that it allows me to keep my phone on silent.
I am “in the middle.” I don’t pine for “the good ol’ days,” but I also don’t get all hung up on futurism.
Agree about the watch - I wear a Casio LCW-M100TSE, which is also very robust (titanium case, saphire glass), never needs the battery changing and never needs setting (except for travel). But most importantly, it does what it does really well and never bugs me about anything. Downtime is important.
Agree, and funny also that the author shows the F91W.
It has a thriving hacker community built around it. You can get a new arm motherboard with a breakout for a sensor board. Sensorwatch have released a temperature sensor and an accelerometer.
Plus it is loud! But there is another mod I saw to make it quieter.
My point was that when it does go, it will go with no warning, and there is a non-zero cost to replacing it. Cheap, easy, yes, but nothing lasts forever.
I agree, I think the idea of products being done is a temporary illusion. Older analog technology needed a lot more maintenance over time. I doubt someone in the 1970s would agree with this; most things then needed to be regularly mended, fixed, tuned, serviced, repaired, refilled, what have you.
It’s only in the last few decades that materials and manufacturing have gotten good enough that you can expect gadgets to “just work” without regular maintenance. And we’ve also had products cheap enough that people normally throw them out rather than maintaining them.
I don't agree. Older tech was simpler, and often more reliable. They didn't depend on being able to connect to a networked time clock for sync, didn't need networking period. Today's systems are inherently fragile.
I grew up in the 70's. About the only thing I would say is less fragile are cars. Today's cars are just better in so many ways but are unmaintainable by the average user.
And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how. But that's changing as self-repair movements have taught millions. For example, the Kitchen Aid mixer. The original, built by Hobart and acquired by KitchenAid was a tank. However it had a sacrificial gear and people said that was a flaw because they didn't understand the purpose of sheer pins or sacrificial gears. Now it's pretty well understood thanks to YouTubers like Mr. Mixer that repairing these is easy peezy.
> And people throw out things instead of repairing them because they don't know how.
Part of it is the materials used now, though - many things get thrown out because the plastic bodyshell got old and brittle, and broke. (Plastic is particularly difficult to repair because the break usually presents very little surface area for glueing.)
I think I was unclear. I’m not saying now is better. What I meant is there was a short period, perhaps late 90s to early 2010s, when electronic devices became sophisticated and reliable enough to “just work” in perpetuity, but before everything was internet connected and subscription-based.
Cars are perhaps the best example. Before this that time, you’d expect to do much more maintenance and you’d be impressed to get 100k miles out of it. Now it’s not unusual to get to 200k miles or more, but increasingly you have to deal with firmware upgrades and pay a monthly fee for advanced features.
Aside from this brief period, devices either required more maintenance and replacement (pre-90s) or updates and subscriptions (now).
Can you provide some examples from this time period? I'm having trouble squaring your statement with things like the Red Ring of Death with the X-Box etc.
Cars are actually surprisingly maintainable by an "average" user - if you maintain them the same way the repair shops do - replacing parts.
What old cars had was the ability to fix things without replacing parts - but most of those kinds of repairs (think: adjusting points, etc) are no longer necessary at all.
A modern car tells you what is wrong (usually) and you can have an auto parts store read the codes, search YouTube for a video on it, and order parts and replace it yourself.
You need to go back pretty far to find vehicles that can be repaired by the side of the road in Outer Mongolia with nothing but a hammer and a bag of random pieces of metal (iirc, this was in the extended features of Planet Earth, maybe the Snow Leopard episode - sadly, not about macOS at all ;).
Yes and no - while it's still simple enough to replace parts in some cases, and said parts are usually easy enough to track down, manufacturers are starting to go the Apple route and lock the ECU to a given part, or require what boils down to a very expensive dongle to perform even simple maintenance procedures. Some of this is due to an actual need to recalibrate the vehicle due to minute differences in performance between parts, other cases are clearly laziness or malice.
For example, some modern Hyundai models require a very expensive ECU reprogramming tool to... release the electronic parking brake. So that you can change brake pads, a job that is normally well within the reach of anyone willing to get their hands dirty. I've seen suburban moms be shocked by how simple it is. And yet some vehicles now require a service at the dealership to change brake pads because they are the only ones who can command a parking brake unlock. What was wrong with the old pull handle or floor pedal parking brakes?
You can't tell me that all the features of an ECU reader couldn't be programmed into a modern head unit. The stereo is already on the CAN bus, why doesn't the stereo just pop up an alert that says e.g. "VSS Malfunction", "Oxygen Sensor Malfunction" instead of the cryptic check engine light requiring a special tool? Why don't our vehicles have a "maintenance mode" built into the head unit that can clear codes and recalibrate injector timings?
Even on early 2000s vehicles, there were usually procedures to do things like reprogramming key fobs by doing arcane things like cycling the key in the ignition 5 times while holding the brake pedal down. Old PCs had beep codes or blinkenlichten to tell you what the problem was when they couldn't POST, the only reason modern vehicles can't do the same is that automakers are looking for new revenue streams amid shrinking margins.
And this is aside from the fact that we have optimized for ease of construction rather than ease of repair, I saw a picture from a mechanic friend who works at a dealership recently, to replace a camshaft actuator on a modern Ford Bronco they had to lift the entire cab off the chassis. While I have seen home mechanics lift a cab a foot or two to access a part, it's well outside the ability of the average person to crane one of the heaviest parts of their vehicle several feet in the air.
This jives with something that’s occupied my brain a couple times in the last year, the separation of art and science.
Science is empirical knowledge and processes which can be transferred, art is gut feeling and subconscious knowledge applied automatically, which can’t be transferred.
Roughly I think this corresponds to how our minds perform cognitive offloading of repeated tasks. New tasks that require instruction following occupy our attention, but the more we do them, the more our minds wire the behavior into our “muscle memory”. Practitioners of the arts (or even the art of science, one might say) have a built a neural network that offloads tasks so that higher cognitive functions can focus on applying those tasks in expert ways.
It’s sort of like when we start out our brains have to bitbang all tasks (muscle movement, speech, etc.) but over time our brains develop their own TCP offloading, or UART peripherals. And you can’t just download a TCP offloading engine, it has to be built into the silicon. Hence why “expert knowledge” isn’t transmissible.
Which is why spaced repetition is an effective learning method. You’re hacking your brain to wire facts into the hardware.
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