ndiddy

What I'm saying is that if you read about the history and creation of the US Constitution, the people who created it clearly and unambiguously expressed their distrust in giving too much political influence to the general public, and made limiting popular influence one of their main goals. Some examples of this are the way the Senate is apportioned and the 6-year Senate term, the Electoral College and the way that it's apportioned, how difficult it is to amend the Constitution, and the lifetime tenure of federal judges. If you're interested, there's a good paper going over the motivation behind the Constitution, how it was created, and how it was ratified: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3370359

For any non-Americans reading this, note that saying "x% of Americans support [vaguely progressive policy] (i.e. universal healthcare, wealth tax, $15/hour minimum wage, mandatory paid family leave) is basically irrelevant to whether the policy will actually get passed. The US system of government is is intentionally and explicitly designed so politicians are not accountable to private opinion, and so the representatives of a small percentage of the population can stop legislation that is popular with the majority from getting passed.

The result of this design can be found in studies like https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th... :

> When the preferences of economic elites and the stands of organized interest groups are controlled for, the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.

If doing a gig app job full time doesn't count you as unemployed, I think that's a decent explanation for those numbers. Those jobs can be gotten by anyone with a car, but a job with a formal employment agreement and benefits is still difficult to get.

Most job growth for the past several years has been in the private education and health services, leisure and hospitality, and construction sectors. Removing these sectors makes job growth negative for 2024 and 2025, and wipes out the majority of job growth in 2026. See https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/economy/spotl... . These sectors are harder to automate with AI compared to white collar office jobs, which have seen major losses.

I imagine it's because they need to put something on the area around the screen, otherwise it would look weird. Casio do make plainer variants of their watches so you can see what I mean: https://us.firstclasswatches.com/casio-black-382mm-digital-d... . It just kind of looks empty. The F-84W has stuff around the screen but is a bit more understated compared to the F-91W: https://i0.wp.com/centreseconds.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/...

What you're describing is how the watch market bifurcated after quartz watches came out. Mechanical watches were previously utilitarian devices, made to be as thin as possible and sold at a premium because they were the most accurate timekeeping devices that could be possibly made at that size. If you had a large watch, it meant it was cheap. After quartz watches came out, mechanical watches could no longer compete on size, accuracy, or features, so they took their current role of being personal accessories for men, a sort of socially acceptable jewelry. They got larger and flashier because the point of the watch became personal expression (or social signalling at the high end) rather than simply telling the time.

I recently saw this project, where someone got the Windows XP shell running as a Linux DE using a patched version of Wine. It supports both running Windows software under Wine and running Linux software. I doubt it's production ready yet, but it's pretty neat. https://github.com/mikuta0407/win4wine

There was a lot of popular software that used preemptive threads, as it was the only way to make use of the second processor inside multiprocessor Macs. Some examples are Photoshop, Premiere, Final Cut Pro, After Effects, Lightwave, and Cinema 4D. See https://web.archive.org/web/20210619165728/https://www.macwo... .

Well the parent commenter said "SE era machines". That era of machines (Plus, SE, Classic) had an 8 MHz 68000 and only supported up to 4 MB of RAM. The Low End Mac page you linked says that your Classic II is 1.8x faster than an SE. On the 68000 Macs, System 7 (especially 7.1 and 7.5) feels a lot more sluggish than System 6, and will use over half the RAM just running the OS with no applications. Being able to skip the "extras" you mention that became mandatory on System 7 is useful when you have a slow machine with limited RAM. Of course I'm not sure what any of this has to do with running the OS on a Raspberry Pi.

How did you implement that? Is it like a modified emulator with your enhancements added? How does the System 6 cooperatively multitasking stuff interoperate with the posix stuff?

Yeah it's interesting how similar what happened with Palm OS 6 was to Copland. They had a working, but outdated OS that had been hacked onto a new platform as a stopgap, then they couldn't get the rewrite meant to take full advantage of the new hardware out the door. Palm OS 6 was at least finished, but it never got used on a shipping device. There's an interesting Reddit post going over how the OS design was fundamentally flawed when combined with the ARM processors that were available at the time: https://www.reddit.com/r/Palm/comments/1422bqy/palm_os6/jn5o...

The old school way to do I/O on desktop was via the parallel port, which I imagine would still work if you get a PCIe parallel port card. For a more modern way, the FT232H chip supports UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG and raw GPIO over USB, and there are break-out boards available.

Some former Be employees have commented here in the past saying that Apple made the right decision to buy Next and not Be from a technical perspective, as BeOS had poor code quality and was far behind NEXTSTEP in important areas like networking and printing. They also implemented the OS API directly in C++, which tied them to a specific C++ compiler (some mid-90s version of GCC) due to the ABI getting broken in newer versions. The 32-bit version of Haiku (modern BeOS reimplementation) supports BeOS software, and as a result still needs to be compiled with that mid-90s GCC release.

Beyond that, I'm not sure if buying Be would have fixed the managerial problems at Apple. Would they have been able to add the required features to BeOS to turn it into a production OS without the project turning into another Copland? Would the existing Apple management have slimmed down the massive Apple product line that had dozens of nearly identical models? Would it have gotten rid of dead-end projects like Newton and Pippin? Etc.

I imagine the conversation went something like:

"Hey dad, what's this trip I hear you talking about?"

"Well son, even though you're 8 years old, I've decided to spend the next 28 years walking around the world."

"Gee dad, that sure seems like a long walk. Are you sure about this?"

"Well of course I'll be taking breaks rather than doing the whole thing at once."

"Great, so you'll be able to visit me, your 8 year old son, right?"

"Nope! I've decided to add my own self-imposed rule that I can't visit the UK until I've completed my walk. Instead, whenever I don't feel like walking, I'm going to fly to Mexico and hang out there. Then when I do feel like walking again, I'll fly back to where I was and resume my walk."

"So you're leaving me, your 8 year old son, to go on a 28 year long, non-contiguous walk around the world where you'll rarely see me? And by the time I grow up we'll barely know each other? And you'll end up missing the birth of your granddaughter?"

"That's right, son! I hope you're excited for the first of 4 times we'll see each other, 6 years from now! Aren't you proud of your dad for being such a great explorer?"

"..."

Windows 10 reversed a lot of the controversial UI changes from Windows 8, but the mouse/keyboard UX was still largely a regression from Windows 7 due to the introduction of giant padding regions on any new/redesigned software so people could use their fingers. Maybe people haven't noticed this as much because the economics have worked out such that most software is now designed for web/mobile first, so having giant padding regions on desktop is more normal.

Macs had managed to avoid this degradation for a while because they didn't have touchscreens, but Apple put in the giant finger-friendly padding regions as part of the UI changes in Tahoe, which got a lot of negative feedback. Now that they're introducing touchscreen laptops, it's unlikely that they'll ever fully revert those changes since it will make the touch experience worse.

It already has, see the massive increase in UI padding in Tahoe and later. Windows and GNOME both sacrificed their UX to support touchscreen laptops years ago, Apple was one of the holdouts before that point.

The Macbook Pro with M5 Pro/Max came out in March, while the Macbook Pro with M6 came out yesterday.

It's interesting that they've decided to release a new high-end model this year even though they aren't coming out with new high-end M6 chips. Apparently they have decided to not make Pro/Max versions of the M6 in favor of accelerating development of the M7 series, which will have improved support for on-device AI. https://www.macrumors.com/2026/06/25/2027-macs-m7-chips/

> Lenovo's business/prosumer line is one of the best in terms of firmware that I've seen so far

A few years ago Lenovo put out a buggy firmware update for the Thunderbolt controllers in a couple generations of Thinkpads (the list is here: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/ca/en/solutions/ht508988 ) that caused excessive writes to the controller's EEPROM. This would eventually wear out the EEPROM, which would stop the controller from functioning. You would then have issues like USB-C devices not working, display over USB-C not working, and charging over USB-C not working. Lenovo released a firmware update to fix the issue, but everyone whose controller had already broken needed a motherboard replacement. If your device was out of warranty, Lenovo made you pay full price for the new motherboard even though it had broken because of their firmware update.

They didn't start from "everything is in the Start menu" for no reason. The initial Windows 95 design had different buttons for different functionality. They ended up combining the buttons into a single "Start" button because during user testing, they saw that users found multiple buttons hard to use. They had to learn which button did what, and it was often confusing because sometimes the functionality overlapped between buttons. To find something in Help, do you click the "Find" button or the "Help" button?

Because of how much of a radical departure Windows 95 was from previous UI designs, and because of how driven the design was by user testing, there's a lot of information available going over why the design is the way it is. For example, there's an article going over the iterative design process here: https://socket3.wordpress.com/2018/02/03/designing-windows-9... and there's a detailed document explaining the UI for reviewers here: https://web.archive.org/web/20260209083725/https://tech-insi...

I imagine that the UI changes since Sequoia regarding the giant buttons and whitespace are because Apple plans to release a touchscreen laptop (most rumors say it will be announced tomorrow) so they've decided to make the UI touch friendly at the expense of bloating the UI for everyone who doesn't have a touchscreen. Microsoft made this same decision with the Windows releases after 7.

The turbo button came out of "turbo XT" PC clones, rather than being some sort of defined standard. Whether or not "turbo enabled" meant "runs at normal speed" or "runs at 4.77 mhz" was entirely dependent on how your case and motherboard happened to be wired, as there was no industry-wide standardization effort at that point. There's a great video on how PC clones evolved over time here if you're interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGoM3Sqr2-w

> Being gray and having small buttons doesn’t make it automatically more powerful or functional.

If you read through old HIGs, they generally have actual concrete reasoning behind the choices they made. They're pretty interesting to read because back then they did scientific user studies to try to make computers more usable.

For example, Microsoft didn't make the UI gray because of some aesthetic preference. They chose gray because black-on-gray text is easy to read, and because it makes it immediately obvious what's UI vs. what's content (vs. if they made the background white or something). They made all the buttons three-dimensional because it makes it immediately obvious that something is clickable. Getting rid of stuff like this makes the UI prettier, but it also gets rid of hints for how to use the software.

From the article, the time to beat is November 16, 1992. This might be possible on one of the BSDs, as FreeBSD and NetBSD both document support for running a.out executables with the 4.3BSD ABI. I guess it would depend on whether anyone had ported X11 to run on a BSD on i386 before then. Alternatively, maybe you'd be able to get something running on SCO OpenServer (if you count that as a current OS, it IS still getting security patches). It documents support for XENIX x.out binaries ( https://www.scosales.com/ta/kb/126704.html ) so you might be able to run software compiled in the late 1980s for XENIX/386.

Someone posted the terms on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/1xg0c5o/microsof...

> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.

> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.

> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.

Someone posted the terms on Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/microsoft/comments/1xg0c5o/microsof...

> 1–2 weeks’ pay per semester of tenure, based on level; six months of fully covered COBRA (remaining 12 months paid by you) and two vesting events in February and May.

> L65-L67 get 4w of pay per year of service, while L64 and below get 2w per year. I’ve been with MS for 10 years, so I qualify for the max payout of 39w.

> Eligibility this time is up to L70, not sure what the package is for L68-70.

Due to how Touhou is liberally licensed, there absolutely are people who are fans of the characters/story/music/fangames but have never played any of the actual shoot-em-up games. Within the community they're referred to as "secondary fans" since they only engage with the franchise through derivative works. I haven't heard of people who are hostile to the idea that Touhou is a shoot-em-up franchise though.

To add some further context, all the Touhou games have been playable by Westerners for years due to fan translation patches. Even for the PC-98 games, the community has made preconfigured emulators packaged with all the games pre-patched to English so it's easy to play them without any technical knowledge. The reverse engineering project is orthogonal to this and is mainly intended to document the games' behavior as well as make them easier to mod. Having the source code available would make it possible to port the games to modern platforms, but they are pixel art 2D shooters so from a gameplay perspective there's not much of a benefit over playing them in an emulator.