- kmeisthaxYes. Unfortunately, we don't live in capitalism anymore, we live in feudalism. The feudal lords just so happen to wear the skin of formerly capitalist corporations. That's how we get the opposite but identical kind of failure, where basically any desirable city gets almost no housing buildout (because any idiot with a billion dollars can make it arbitrarily expensive to do) and families can't afford to even have one child.
- Neither the European welfare state nor China's authoritarian leftism are socialist. They are, respectively, welfare-state capitalism and nationalist "socialism" (aka Naziism).
On the European side, socialism is a question of who owns businesses. If the majority of businesses are owned by the people who are working at those businesses, you have a socialist economy. Welfare states, regulatory regimes, and high tax rates do not change the ownership of businesses, they are about who provides the infrastructure around those businesses. If you have an economy where infrastructure is owned by a liberal nation-state, and businesses are owned by whoever gambled capital on the venture, then you get a capitalist economy. If your infrastructure is privately owned by individuals, then those owners become feudal lords and you get feudalism.
On the Chinese side, you might point out that there are laws that require CCP ownership of all businesses, eat the party line that says the CCP is the representative of the working class, and say, "hey that's a socialism". But this ownership and representation is purely nominal. The average Chinese worker has more or less zero political agency; speaking out gets you censored and harassed. How is that worker ownership? If, say, America started punishing individual shareholders who voted against Trump-aligned board members, we'd correctly recognize that the shareholders do not meaningfully own their businesses anymore.
"Moving into Daddy Xi's house" would be stupid. The EU and China are not aligned on basically any core value; it'd basically be a surrender of one to the other. Actually, to be clear, the EU isn't even aligned on basically any core value with itself[0]. In fact, I would argue that's a way bigger headwind than European workers being used to a top-heavy welfare state. The EU has the resources to build a sovereign cloud, or run its own military, or source its own energy. But for each one there are challenges posed by the uniquely decentralized structure of Europe:
- Europe could build a sovereign cloud, but probably not one for each member state. So they're going to have to agree what country holds the data, and agree that that country can and will spy on all the others.
- Europe could fund its own military, tell NATO to pound sand, and re-colonize America for the trouble. But who runs that military? Given the history of EU politics, it would be France and Germany, and every other country in the EU has a history of being colonized by France or Germany. They are not trustworthy.
- Europe could fix its energy dependence, but Germany thinks nuclear power is Satan and wants to backstop renewables with the dirtiest-burning coal you can mine.
You'll notice a recurring theme here. The problem with Europe is not its fiscal deficit, the perceived laziness of its workers, or what have you. It's the lack of trust. The most trustworthy member state of the European Union was the United States of America, and so that's why everyone put their data on American servers, and let America dominate NATO, and so on. This is not Europe getting kicked out of the nest, it's the kids realizing their parent is a gaslighting asshole and that all their siblings, including themselves, are cut from the same cloth.
[0] Trump's current tariff actions and threats of territory annexation have galvanized the European public against America's government. However, prior to Trump coming back, Europe was full of far-right nutjobs that were just as cringe. Actually, a lot of them are still in power in Europe, and they're way more competent and cunning than Cheeto Mussolini.
- I honestly don't understand the court rulings regarding all of this. Like, "you need to allow someone to install your software for free" is easy to understand. And "you can ban software that doesn't pay you your chosen cut" is also straightforward (even though I'm a dirty OS Commie that wants that shit for free). Both of those follow clear-cut legal principles based in antitrust and intellectual property law (respectively).
But it seems to me that the court is trying to enforce some kind of middle ground, which doesn't make sense. There's no legal principle one can use to curtail the power of an IP holder aside from mandating it be given away for free. Indeed, the whole idea of IP law is that the true value of the underlying property can only be realized if the property owner has the power of the state to force others to negotiate for it. Apple was told "you can charge for your IP" and said "well all our fee is actually licensing, except for the 3% we pay per transaction". The courts rejected this, so... I mean, what does Apple do now? Keep whittling down the fee until the court finds it reasonable? That can't possibly be good faith compliance (as if Apple has ever complied in good faith lol).
- Datahoarders with hard drives full of pirated books are not nearly as much of a threat to writers as, say, AI slop making it difficult to market new books. If you pirate a book and read it, the author can still sell you the sequel. Not so much if you don't even know who the author is.
- All of Cory Doctorow's books are DRM-free. Actually, he insisted on it as a contractual rider with his publisher, so he isn't available on any platform that doesn't have a DRM-free option. I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon re-allowing downloads for DRM-free is specifically because Doctorow's publisher is angry at them.
In practice, the biggest store that doesn't have a DRM-free option is Audible... which has a near-monopoly on audiobooks. So Cory Doctorow has to do crowdfunding campaigns for all his audiobooks. Of course, that doesn't stop his books from getting illegally reposted to Audible anyway, and Amazon doesn't care about enforcing rights they can't have. Which led to him actually publishing this gem on Audible: https://www.amazon.com/Why-None-Books-Available-Audible/dp/B...
- Don't forget that the reason why GNU won out over BSD is that the homeless man had already found out the hard way not to start off with someone else's code even if you intend to change all of it. Remember Gosling[0] EMACS?
[0] Funnily enough, James Gosling also made Java, which is why I suspect the FSF was so ready to pounce on "the Java trap".
- Classic Mac OS has a certain charm to it.
As a programmer, I can point out all the many, many flaws with its technical architecture. Or how Apple's managerial incompetence let Microsoft leapfrog them technologically. Or even how Microsoft eventually figured out how to give Windows its own visual identity[0].
But at the end of the day, people were buying Macs despite the company making them. Apple had built an OS that made everything else look like a copycat, by worrying about the little details that few else cared about. It's the only reason Apple survived where literally every other non-Wintel PC company died. Atari STs and Amigas might have been fondly remembered, but their fanbases all jumped ship for PC the moment DooM came out, and the companies in question all got sold off for peanuts.
[0] My personal opinion regarding Windows visual design:
- Windows 1.x-3.x (and also OS/2 1.x): Really clunky and piss-poor attempt at cloning the Mac. It has the "programmer art" feel all over it. 3.x is slightly better in that they actually figured out how to pick a good default color scheme, but it still doesn't even have a proper desktop, instead using the root window as minimized window storage.
- Windows 9x/NT/2000: Not only does Windows finally get a real desktop, but it also gets a unique visual design, and a good one. Hell, they actually leapfrogged Apple on this one; as Mac OS 8 would take a few more years to ship its Platinum appearance.
- Windows XP: Cheap. Toylike. Microsoft saw OSX's Aqua and realized they needed something for Whistler, but they didn't seem to know what, and this is what we got. Media Center Edition would ship a slightly less toylike Windows visual theme.
- Windows Vista / 7: The absolute pinnacle of Microsoft's visual design chops. Aero is the thing that Liquid Glass wishes it could be. The glass effects were a perfect way to show off the power of GPU compositing, and Microsoft managed to do it without sacrificing readability or usability.
- Windows 8/10/11: Flatslop.
- Let's Encrypt, you're not even a for-profit business; there's nobody you need to shield the blow from. Just say "we're reducing certificate lifetimes to comply with CA/Browser Forum rules". You don't need to do the cowardly "replace lower with change" in the headline thing.
- A good chunk of the difficulty in the TMNT dam level comes from the fact that it has a lot of poorly implemented mechanics. Displaced Gamers has a really good video breaking all of it down here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHiFNWJXWgI
- If I mentioned every operating system that Apple was involved in, my original post would be twice as long. Acorn, Psion, Newton, and Palm in particular are historically relevant today[0] but have no bearing on what Neal Stephenson was writing about. He was talking exclusively about desktop operating systems running on personal computers. That's where I drew the line. If you didn't ship something that ran on a normal PC[1], you didn't make the cut.
Ok, I also swapped out Be for NeXT, mainly because NeXT was the one that actually got bought by Apple and ultimately had a lot more influence.
Xerox, Apple, and IBM were all releasing products concurrently to one another, so I kinda just had to pick a (wrong) order and stick with it.
I wasn't trying to make a ding at mopeds, I was trying to make a ding at the classic Mac OS. I guess if you want to fix that metaphor, the classic Mac OS was like a nice moped that had a bunch of shit added onto it until it became a really unstable but nice-looking car, while Microsoft just made a real car that looks like dogwater. If that still feels too American, well, I'm sorry but Neil started with a car metaphor, and I've already exhausted my permitted number of dings at American car centric urban design with the Linux bit.
The Homer is a Simpsons reference. The joke is that Homer Simpson designed a car in almost the same way that managers decided what features shipped in Copland.
[0] If this was a mobile OS discussion, I'd be dropping IBM, UNIX, and XEROX from the discussion to make way for Psion, Newton, and Palm. Microsoft would be pared down to "Well around the same time they were shipping real desktop OSes they also shipped Windows CE and Windows Mobile".
But even then, I almost feel like mentioning the actual inventors of the PDA is overindulgence, because absolutely none of those companies survived the iPhone. Microsoft didn't survive iPhone. Nobody survived iPhone, except Android, and that's only because Android had enough Google money backing them to pivot to an iPhone-like design. Even flipphones run Android now (or KaiOS). It's way more stark and bleak a landscape for innovation than desktop was in 1999 when Windows was king.
[1] OK, yes, both early Mac OS and early Windows were built in Pascal, not C. But neither of those are operating systems, and normal users would not be able to tell if their software was written in one or the other unless it crashes.
- I absolutely love this article, but every time I see it do the rounds online I have to nitpick at least one thing from it. Last time it was the anecdote about MPW[0], and today I'm going to nitpick the car metaphor.
The metaphors for Windows and MacOS are swapped. Windows' technical underpinnings were - from the start - way better than Apple's. Microsoft actually bothered to copy everything from XEROX PARC, albeit poorly, while Apple saw the fancy windows-and-desktop UI and ignored the object system underpinning it. This isn't me making a jab at Apple - Jobs himself said it when he was at NeXT. Windows 95 and NT also both brought memory protection to the existing Windows API. Apple had spent several years trying and failing to build a memory protected Mac OS before just giving up and buying NeXT.
The correct metaphors are:
- Someone working at the phone company secretly designs a tram (UNIX). They're actually prohibited from selling vehicles, but they license the design under the table to a bunch of universities. A bunch of tram manufacturers make trams based off the phone company design.
- A wheel factory (Microsoft) sells wheels for bicycles. Bicycle dealerships crop up everywhere using their wheels. Even the railroads (IBM) want to get in on it, and they ship a terrible bike that everyone copies because it's the railway bike.
- Phone company designed trams are really popular and every city has like five of them. Except they keep breaking down and all the control cabs are just slightly different, so it pisses off the operators. Some kids at Berkeley try to make their own standard tram design (BSD) but they get sued by the phone company and nobody uses it.
- A car dealership (XEROX) moves in. They sell SUVs (Xerox STAR). They cost $100k each, and they only sell them in huge fleets to big corporations because XEROX wants to compete with the railroad. Nobody buys them and they leave town, but not before giving a demo of their tech to the last bicycle dealer (Apple) not using the railway design.
- The bicycle dealership decides to build their own SUV (Lisa) and a moped (Mac). The SUV is a huge flop while the moped is a minor success. Their CEO gets fired by the board and starts a trucking company (NeXT).
- A homeless man that lives on public transit and thinks vehicles should be free starts working on his own tram (GNU), but he overengineers the engine (Hurd) and it doesn't work at all. Still, he's not being sued by the phone company, so people start putting his parts into their trams anyway.
- The wheel factory learned how to make a moped from selling wheels to the moped dealer. So they sell their own moped upgrade kit (Windows). It works with any bicycle, but it looks like shit, even though it has the same power as an SUV engine.
- The wheel factory also starts work on a joint venture with the local railroad to produce their own trucks (OS/2). They can't agree on anything and divorce after a few years.
- Turns out mopeds suck! They break down constantly and need an oil change every 400 miles. The moped dealer starts work on a station wagon (Copland). A prototype is produced that's about as elegant as The Homer. It is unceremoniously cancelled.
- The wheel factory also has problems with their moped kits breaking down, but since they sold a lot more of them, they're the ones getting the reputation of selling an unreliable vehicle. They decide to design a truck of their own (Windows NT) and a car made out of moped parts (Windows 95) and sell the design to all the bicycle (now car) dealers.
- The moped company is ridiculed by the car dealers and nobody buys their elegantly designed mopeds. They wind up buying the trucking company.
- Someone in Finland designs an electric motor (Linux) that happens to fit in the homeless guy's tram. People hail this as a revolution in public transport, even though cities are full of NIMBYs who tore down the tramways and put in buses that ride worse and get delayed in traffic.
- I installed iPadOS 26 specifically for the new windowing features. I like the glass look as a concept. But the actual implementation of it is total dogshit. I cannot go a day without seeing the OS render black-on-black or white-on-white text, especially in the status indicators at the top of the device. There are so many little things regarding automatic color contrast in UIKit that are just poorly thought out or broken.
The thing is, Liquid Glass is already using a shader to render the refraction effect on top of the other UI layers. But - at least from my own developer experiments - it doesn't actually use anything graphical to determine what background color it needs to contrast against[1]. Instead, it looks through the view hierarchy for a view on the same edge as the toolbar the widget is in, and then grabs some undocumented[0] property from that view to determine its background. This fails if there's a split. Build, say, a toolbar layout and put two views inside of it, split 50% vertically with one having a black background and the other white. Put items in your toolbar on both left and right sides. They will either be all black or all white, only contrasting with half the screen.
[0] Or, at least, I have yet to find out what this property is.
[1] Hell, for icons and text they could XOR the alpha mask with the underlying pixels, or a blurred version thereof, to make text that will always contrast.
- > Long-term, on average, post-college careers still blow the trades out of the water in earnings.
That average has a lot of outliers. There are a handful of degrees which almost guarantee you gainful employment. Like, someone getting a law degree or prepping for hospital residency will make waaay more money than maths, liberal arts, or anything on PhD track. The latter do not have anywhere close to the same job prospects.
Furthermore, some degrees are extremely expensive to get. My guess is you got an engineering or CS degree, which in terms of "degrees with job prospects" are still reasonably priced. You can graduate and go into the work force with little debt (or at least, I did, YMMV). Less so for the lawyers and doctors pushing up the college average, who have to go to more expensive schools and even more expensive post-graduate programs. They rack up lots of student debt in the process. Even if it gives you a higher salary, you might not be comfortable with a decade and change of debt slavery.
- College is optional. Actually, if you're just looking for "a skilled job" trade school is a better bet than college now. But the only people actually saying that are conservative nut-jobs trying to fight a culture war against a balanced education. People send their kids to colleges for the same reason why they demand more car lanes instead of better buses and trains: it's a status symbol.
The thing about status symbols is that you are buying them to feel better than someone else. So they almost have to be scarce - and therefore expensive. That's the basic idea behind cost disease; scarce things in an economy of abundance become more expensive, not less.
- I'm genuinely surprised Microsoft's attitude towards "wndprocs don't have a context pointer" was "let's JIT compile a trampoline to hold the context pointer" and not to add support for a five-parameter wndproc into USER.dll, or have a wrapper that grabs GWLP_USERDATA and copies it to the register this lives in.
- I have to wonder if we need, say, a special "secret data" type (or modifier) that has the semantics of both crypto/subtle and runtime/secret. That is to say, comparison operators are always constant-time, functions holding the data zero it out immediately, GC immediately zeroes and deallocs secret heap allocations, etc.
I mean, if you're worried about ensuring data gets zeroed out, you probably also don't want to leak it via side channels, either.
- Flixbus owns Greyhound now
- RDMA is a networking standard, it's supposed to be switched. The reason why it's being done over Thunderbolt is that it's the only cheap/prosumer I/O standard with enough bandwidth to make this work. Like, 100Gbit Ethernet cards are several hundred dollars minimum, for two ports, and you have to deal with SFP+ cabling. Thunderbolt is just way nicer[0].
The way this capability is exposed in the OS is that the computers negotiate an Ethernet bridge on top of the TB link. I suspect they're actually exposing PCIe Ethernet NICs to each other, but I'm not sure. But either way, a "Thunderbolt router" would just be a computer with a shitton of USB-C ports (in the same way that an "Ethernet router" is just a computer with a shitton of Ethernet ports). I suspect the biggest hurdle would actually just be sourcing an SoC with a lot of switching fabric but not a lot of compute. Like, you'd need Threadripper levels of connectivity but with like, one or two actual CPU cores.
[0] Like, last time I had to swap work laptops, I just plugged a TB cable between them and did an `rsync`.
- Actually, intended behavior in general. Even on their own displays the UI looks grey when HDR is playing.
Which, personally, I find to be extremely ugly and gross and I do not understand why they thought this was a good idea.