Cue xkcd on standards. I've been interested in mesh radio, and I keep hoping that a winner will emerge. Probably won't until a large commercial vendor gets interested and picks one.

Can confirm, friend who moved to Mac after 30+ years on Win ecosystem and all of the discussions we have are basically "but on Windows..." They specifically have lamented the unavailability of Notepad++ because of a specific hanging indent behavior they are used to.

Most people do not have the cognitive flexibility to really adapt to a tool that is more or less domain equivalent but different in any way. These small differences create more friction than learning something that doesn't have any close mapping to what you knew before.

wants to use something familiar => does not have cognitive flexibility

It's amazing how people find ways to flaunt their 'superiority'.

Cuts both ways too. I am finding Windoews harder due to using the mac as daily driver. Haven't got the hang of finder yet. I use CLI as much as possible making use rare enough not to master.

Goes for Linux too.

I have the flexibility to adjust to platforms other than macOS but I’d rather not have to. My setup works for me and having to change it is annoying and drags down productivity.

In my case it’s more intense than usual because I’m a visual person and my productivity suffers for things like my desktop environment, theme, etc not looking “right”. When using Linux for anything more “serious” than studying with Anki I get pulled down a bottomless rabbit hole of trying to “fix” everything, which is futile because many of the problems can’t be fixed without a huge number of project forks.

Recent editions of MacOS look so bad that Windows might actually be better designed (if it weren't for all the windows ads and spam).

Gnome is starting to become the nicest desktop environment lol.

I've never seen the appeal of GNOME 3+, the design seems so user-hostile to anyone who has used computers for a while: hiding menus for no reason, having super limited menu options, etc.

I'd rather use LXDE, XFCE, or KDE.

I’ve not been a fan of the Liquid Glass changes, but it’s similar enough that I’ve been able to get used to it.

Fluent on Windows doesn’t look too bad but MS hasn’t made particularly great use of it and parts of the OS still don’t use it.

GNOME/Adwaita get some things right, and other things wrong (the padding everywhere is way too thick, its crusade against menu bars is odd). It’s also so minimal that it makes macOS look maximalist, and as such isn’t my cup of tea.

Gnome is the only linux DE that tries to be consistent (probably due to more centralised decision making). I think that makes it most likely to be most user friendly over time.

The consistency is one of the things it gets right, but it’s undermined by its sheer bare-bonesness, which brings people to try to augment it with extensions, but those constantly break due to functioning by way of monkeypatching GNOME internals.

I think the idea of a “blank slate” DE that you build up with extensions is actually great, but a highly capable stable extension API is non-optional for that to actually work. I can’t have half my customizations vanishing or breaking overnight due to a system update.

Nope. Not even close.

Yeah the Mac GUI has declined.

But it’s still far better than the incoherent mess of the last 15 ways MS were totally the future mashed together in random places.

Windows has had great points. 95 era was fantastic. 2000 too, and I liked XP though third party apps went nuts.

Modern Windows is none of those. I’ll keep my somewhat messed up Mac.

I thought that MS had a good thing going on with the refinements in Aero brought by Windows 7. It nicely balanced a modern theme with a traditional desktop model and it still respected the user while bringing some massive QoL improvements.

Had Windows 8 been further refinement into the Fluent design language along with unifying lingering Win9x style panels into the Vista/7 style, it would’ve been massively popular and more beloved by users than XP or 7. Instead, Microsoft decided to forget non-touch devices entirely and saddle the desktop with an ugly theme reminiscent of Windows 1.0/2.0 in a botched attempt to make it fit in with the flat Metro touch UI bits.

They might have. I moved to the Mac during XP. I never used Windows 7.

I have used the server version that’s designed to be a bit like 8. I may have used 8 too, I can’t remember for sure. I’ve definitely used 10+.

I have a PC at work that I use from time to time, plus I remote into various Windows machines. Between those two I’ve gotten a taste of the more modern versions.

>"their"

It's an entirely different management team.

My approach is that for critical sites like banking, I use the site URL stored in the password manager too, I don't navigate via any link clicking. I personally am fine with thinking when my entire net worth is potentially at stake.

It's not only about how you get there, but that the autofill shows/doesn't show, which is the true indicator (beyond the URL) if you're in the right place or not.

Rouge browser extensions for example could redirect you away from the bank website (if the bank website has poor security) when you go there, so even if you use the URL from the password manager, if you don't use the autofill feature, you can still get phished. And if the autofill doesn't show, and you mindlessly copy-paste, you'd still get phished. It's really the autofill that protects you here, not the URL in the password manager.

You don't need a autofill for a indicator. Simply bookmark your banks login page, even if it gets silently redirected later you will notice as the page wont be bookmarked anymore.

> even if it gets silently redirected later you will notice as the page wont be bookmarked anymore

What? Are you not talking about browser bookmarks? They don't change because the target website starts redirecting somewhere, at least not the browsers I typically use.

In firefox at least the bookmark star indicator disappears if you leave the site and the url does not match the orignal bookmarked anymore = phishing protection without installing more unnecessary software and increasing attack surface.

If you have rogue browser extensions installed, the browser extension can surely read the values that got filled into the login page without having to redirect to another site.

Not necessarily, a user could have accepted a permission request for some (legit) redirect extension that never asked for content permission, then when the rogue actor takes over, they want to compromise users and not change the already accepted permissions.

Concretely, I think for redirect browser extension users I'd use "webRequest" permission, while for in page access you'd need a content-script for specific pages, so in practice they differ in what the extension gets access to.

What they did not say is how many of these vulnerabilities were addressed by LLM-created fixes, if any.

I can only speak for SpiderMonkey, as that’s the team I’m on, but we humans are definitely writing and reviewing the patches for these bugs. Sometimes the AI suggestions are good, often they’re not, and we never send off a fix for a security bug unless we thoroughly understand the problem and have assessed its severity ourselves.

It helps them by making it somebody else's responsibility to get it right and thus shields them from liability.

The OS should start labeling everybody as a child by default. Forbid Facebook to show ads and any harming content by default. The OS has little less to lose with this approach than FB.

So it lets them know for sure who is a child. What liability does that shield them from, and how?

FB etc. may argue "device says this user is an adult", even though device may say that only because the parents don't set up separate user accounts e.g. shared family iPad, or because the kids being more tech savvy in the first place like we all were when I myself was a kid.

It has nested folders. But it will continue to have the problem of not being exactly whatever you are using now.

Maybe post your brilliant solution to commercial companies with hundreds of millions in funding unrestrained bot scraping the Internet for AI training instead of complaining about people desperate to rein it in as individuals.

Anybody can prompt Claude to implement this, which was my point, it doesn't stop bots because a bot can literally write the bypass! My prompt was the proof of work function from the repository, asked it to make an implementation in C that could solve it faster, and that was about it.

This is fallacious and extremely disrespectful (or even malicious?). You don't have to propose a way to fix a broken thing to point out that it's broken.

Normal and sane people understand this intuitively. If someone goes to a mechanic because their car is broken and the mechanic says "well, if you can tell that you car is broken, then you should be able to figure out how to fix it" - that mechanic would be universally hated and go out of business in months. Same thing for a customer complaining about a dish made for them in a restaurant, or a user pointing out a bug in a piece of software.

You have a truly Magic Mouse if yours charges in 15 minutes. In my experience, it is hours to charge from zero, which until I put an always-running monitor in the menu bar for the mouse battery level is what you are guaranteed to have since there is no other indicator of mouse battery level.

I used to roll my eyes at the complaints until I actually had one of these, and it is appallingly bad engineering. Especially since the previous design, which was functionally identical just needed a 10 second battery swap.

The Krishnamoorthi Senate loss was a shock, he had more money than virtually the rest of the field put together and had name recognition and was a sitting 5 time House representative. Nobody knows who the Lt. Gov. was, even with Pritzker's backing.

I'm fond of telling people that Krishnamoorthi called me personally, on the phone, twice, to raise money in elections he ran unopposed in. Each time he had a story for why it was important I donate to him and not some other Democrat in a contested race.

Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.

Chicagoland progressives fucking love Juliana Stratton, by the way.

Your statement is one of those "not even wrong" pedantic ploys that falls apart at the lightest sneeze in its direction.

Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives. If you think that has no effect on elections then you are about as antisocial and antipatriotic a person as I can imagine.

> Money is the only way to exert pressure on society and narratives

It’s not. Every piece of state and federal legislation I personally wrote language into passed before I was wealthy. Showing up is incredibly hard for a lot of people. Being decent and eloquent when you do is impossible for the rest.

I’ve donated to get power and gotten involved. The latter absolutely smites the former, to the point that donors are almost being taken for a ride outside a few idiot candidates who unfailingly lose.

You were paid by rich companies to write those laws, or else given access by people with more money and influence than you. These things are often done in ways that result in those same people making more money. It is incentive and reward all in one.