I only use Grok through the "Gork" personality in the Tesla, but find its responses to be very realistic, often genuinely funny, and occasionally useful.
> And cars lasted much longer back then and were much easier and cheaper to maintain.
I lived through those "amazingly affordable" decades, and while the engines were simpler (if you're driving a '68 Caprice 327 V8 without all those pesky environmental gadgets), no way they were more reliable. What was reliable was oil leaks, and burning oil. My parents popped a bottle of champagne when the station wagon hit 100k miles! 100,000 miles is table stakes for auto reliability these days.
My father was a quite capable home mechanic, but most people weren't. I guarantee you cars spent more time in the shop then than now.
Go to a car show and compare the interior of anything from this Golden Era to Nissan Versa somebody else mentioned, and tell me you'd take the old thing.
I have nostalgia for the decades I grew up in, but it's for the people I loved and simpler life of a child, not the stuff.
I grew up in that era too (born late 60s). My dad repaired the cars we had, and they definitely lasted a long time. Granted, I grew up in Europe (we had Peugeot, VW, etc.) so maybe the build quality of the US cars was worse--I can't say.
Yeah, they used way more oil than today, and they were more polluting, and they were less safe, and there were less rules (I can remember six of us kids piling into a VW Bug with my dad). But we're discussing affordability.
The argument that cars weren't more affordable is that... cars were replaced much more often? Meaning people could afford to replace them with new ones more often?
Totally agree. I was non-professional smoker for a long time, and quit many, many times. Even after years, I'll get this "you know what'd great?" tap on the shoulder.
One cigarette is not a slippery slope, it's a vertical cliff drop.
I love booze in all its forms, but it doesn't have the same pull.
I've gotten those taps on the shoulder. Every time I went for it, I ended up thinking, "Geez. What was I expecting to be good about this? This experience is awful."
I even still dream of smoking sometimes, after all this time. And I know I shouldn't be smoking in the dreams. Really shows you how addiction messes up
your brain. I'm happy I never really tried anything harder.
It was a weak joke I made-- I _could_ quit or go without, but I was always nearby to real addicts and ended up smoking a lot for a long time. Also, I didn't inhale deeply or hold the smoke like the "professionals".
Crappy? I use MacOS everyday, and it's a goddamn delight compared to the (perfectly reasonable) experience of Windows 11 + WSL. Anything that doesn't "just work" was replaced by very thoughtfully written third party software a long time ago.
Yeah, like you I lived in Linux for years and delighted in the freedom to recompile my video driver with every upgrade, but then I had kids, and a life to live, and found that accepting some limitations of the excellent OSX was a worthwhile tradeoff. Today I couldn't tell you what I'm missing that can't be fixed with a 30s Google + `brew install`.
And complaints about default choices, or limitations with easy work arounds, on Hacker News are just weird. No one typing on this message board runs default anything.
Please share specific (legitimate) gripes and win my sympathy.
Take a photo on your iPhone and wait for it to sync on your Mac. You might get lucky and it syncs nearly immediately (which is still typically a minute or so, even if your phone and Mac are on the same network and have gigabit internet). But you won't know when. And it might not be immediate.
Both sides will tell you they're up to date. You can't force a sync. They'll be synced when Photos is ready, not you. And if that's ten minutes or more later? So be it. You'll just deal with it.
This is a very good example of a disruptive bug that destroys the ability to work. I’m making a document on my laptop and using the phone as a camera to take pictures, I am working on, now. Same WiFi, same person, same cloud, inches apart. No work.
Saying that it sucks less than the execrable mess that is Windows doesn't prove anything.
Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Mac OS examples: Apple removed the "get new mail" button from the Mail toolbar. So all those millions of people who log into their bank accounts and are told to check their mail for 2FA are left hunting for it or simply waiting for Mail's next poll. There's no excuse for removing one of the most-used buttons from a sparsely-populated toolbar. What is driving this attack on usefulness? It used to be Jony Ive.
Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
Garbage like this is scattered all over the UI now. I needn't beat the dead horse of the hated System Preferences panel here.
Meanwhile, Spotlight still doesn't show you WHERE it found stuff, and neither does the inappropriately-named Finder. "Location" or "path" isn't even an OPTION in the column headers you can add to the results list. So you can't discriminate between identically-named files or irrelevant volumes or backups as you scan the list to find what you're looking for, or sort by location.
The removal of Launchpad is another blunder. Apple didn't even replace it with anything. So now you have no comparable way to group your applications.
"Center Stage" is a profoundly defective POS that ruins my family's weekly Zooms by randomly swooping the camera view around and cropping one of my parents out, when they're sitting side by side. Utter trash that there's no universal way to disable, shoved on all users by default without permission. That's Apple today.
> Apple appears to be chasing Microsoft down the toilet. Its exhumation of the circa-2002 "transparent" UI fad is one example, coupled with other baffling UI regressions.
Windows 11 is perfectly cromulent. I don't prefer it, but with WSL, it's like a slow almost-MacOS. The anger over the transparency is I guess personal, I genuinely don't notice it. I certainly haven't stumbled over it. (I might have changed a setting?)
> Then take a look at Music. Apple moved the playback controls from the empty area at the top of the screen to the bottom of the content browser, and made them "transparent." Now they overlap and blend with the thumbnails and text in the content browser.
I just hit Play and the music comes on. I'm not crazy about their search, but it's not that big a deal. The Podcasts app now... THAT is a complaint I can get behind. I would use something else but for the integration with the car.
> Spotlight and Launchpad
Spotlight seems good enough to me. I tried Alfred and Raycast, but never used any of the helper functionalities. Just used it to open apps and files.
I never used Launchpad. I do forget the names of apps, but I just open Applications.
I am a long time mac user and I agree with all of their points. I guess you disagree, but I am not sure why you are being dismissive. Each point is a legitimate criticism from many peoples' points of view.
I acknowledge the complaints, I love a good complaint! My issue is that these superficial, and in many cases, easily remediable annoyances add up to a "crappy OS". MacOS has to satisfy a very diverse userbase from Paris Hilton-types to grumpy Hacker News readers (but thankfully not Bank of America), and I think they do a better than decent job at it.
I don't consider the Mac's less-than-half-assed search facilities to be a superficial problem. I don't see how you can argue that a search that doesn't show WHERE it found hits is competent. Beyond that, it often just doesn't work. You can be sitting in a directory full of JPEGs and search for .jpg and get zero results. Zero.
And dismissing the asinine removal of the "get mail" button from Apple's default E-mail program because YOU don't happen to use it isn't exactly respectable, is it?
Mac OS DID satisfy a great many people; I've seen no credible (or even incredible) argument that the recent raft of faffing about with the UI has brought new users into the fold. That's the foundation of so many people's outrage over it: The changes offer no improvement and don't address any longstanding user requests. But it IS demonstrably regressive, and subjectively dated and tacky.
"Transparent" UI came and went 20 years ago for good reason.
It has been a while. And I should say when I stuck to distro-tested options, I didn't have many issues. But I always ended up installing and configuring things that ended up causing conflictions, and all too often did clean installs instead of in-place upgrades.
Strong disagree. I gave up my Macbook for an iPad + (Mini + Jump). I do a fair amount of penciling and consumption, but most of my time is booping around in the window environment with the Magic Keyboard case. Emails, YouTube, WhatsApp, Obsidian, Remoting into more capable machines, sometimes I touch the screen, most times I'm using the trackpad or a mouse.
You're one of the (relatively) few who found the iPad useful for getting actual work done. There are others like you, just not that many. (I tried and failed to make the iPad + Magic Keyboard my only machine.)
I'm a >90% FSD user, and I approve this sentiment. My wife hates it for the mistakes it makes (eg. seems like there is recent shadow recognition regression) and "errors in judgement" (not getting in the turn lane in a timely manner), she would never use it on her own.
I've got plenty of experience, and (feel as though) I know most of it's failure points. I had to drive my 30 minute commute last week, and it was decidedly unfun. I have seen the future and I don't want to go back.
96% here, including DC and Baltimore. Besides the bizarre Navigation choices and waiting to long for lane changes, FSD has reached essentially zero interventions outside of bad mapping situations. I really wish Tesla would use better map data, for sure.
It is getting more and more difficult for me to see moderation here as unbiased. The charitable take is that people are often not aware of their biases. I am sure I suffer from that to some extent, though I really try to go out of my way to be self-aware about this. And yes, of course this comment could be evidence of my own bias.
I am afraid that soon, actual sea pirates, e.g. in Central and South America, Africa, etc. will start using naval mines in their regional seas, demanding crypto payment from passing ships.
If it was just to 'hide' payments then they could just use USD and using crypto would just be an improvement in convenience. A bigger reason is that they won't be indirectly attacked with monetary policy and that the acceptance of USD with entities willing to do business with them is probably low right now.
The person launching them sure does. This scenario reminds me of the time Russian hackers took over a US pipeline a couple years ago then immediately apologized saying they didn't want to cause a international incident and they would vet their targets better in the future. There are not many people who want that kind of heat. Like the first ayatollah is dead and the second is reportedly in a coma. The Iranian government is willing to pay that price and that's why they won. How many pirate leaders do you think are willing to pay their life so that their third of fourth successors can maybe collect a toll? Or how many are like Venezuela and you can kidnap one guy and the whole house folds.
Cryptocurrency has had many legal real world uses cases. It is used heavily in prediction markets. Serving as an inflation-resistant store of value that is orthogonal to gold also is an implicit real world use case. Permissionless and easy international transfer of funds between individuals has been the biggest real world use. It's not only for collecting and trading. Obviously, those wanting to suppress it will keep finding excuses.
Some bets are less gambling than others. For example, if you bet "no" on the US leaving NATO this year, just how much of a gamble is that? There are many such bets, some a lot less uncertain than this example. Anything can happen in today's environment as yesterday's ceasefire showed, but in aggregate, statistics and commonsense are not lost. The regulation you speak of is oppressive, legally unchallenged, and is considered undesirable by people who appreciate personal freedom.
'It's not gambling. Look at what a sure thing this bet is!'. Again, wild.
The regulation is often at the state level, the most representative form of legislation possible, often varying from state to state creating the freest system/market where you can chose to live in a less or more regulated state.
When at the federal level it is as the DIRECT result of the social impact it previously caused not because the government just wanted to restrict freedom but freedom was tried and in this situation not sustainable on a societal level.
The same people have no idea what's coming for them even when it's in their face as with the posted news article. If the US doesn't act now to restore the use of USD in Hormuz, it's the beginning of the end of the for the USD as a currency for international trade.
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