I find it hard to believe shifting spending from welfare to cash won’t result in inflation. It’s about accessibility and how liquid the assistance is. It’s also about how evenly that’s distributed.
To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of UBI.
Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income buyers, cheap products wouldn’t even exist in a freely capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.
It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world that wasn’t subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in a freely capitalistic system.
The point is that, if limited to a level that just covers essential goods, it won't change their distribution, just their payer. If it did change the distribution of the good, then it wasn't essential (because it's the floor; without it, the consumer of the good would be dead; above it, and the vast majority of people immediately spend their income on luxury substitutes).
That is, to be clear, a much lower floor than what many people mean by "essential," which has undergone a kind of concept creep in modern discussion that, depending on the person, might be a cell phone, to an education at a private university, to owning a condo in San Francisco. My essential here means enough to afford enough caloric and nutrient intake to maintain a livable body mass; a couple sets of plain tee shirts and jeans; and a minimal shared living space in a low cost of living area. That's quite below what the US considers the current poverty line and a quite bleak existence (and most people would wonder what's even the point of it).
Income beyond that would drive inflation, at least in the short term.
I think it’s always worth it to consider feature requests from your users. Other comments here reference video games. This is nothing like video games. Video games have arbitrary constraints anyway and should be carefully crafted to preserve the vision. If you don’t like it, make a new game.
Software’s constraints are not arbitrary, they are attached to specific use cases and any new feature that benefits any of those use cases should be considered.
The real issue is when these companies (especially VC backed) add new features and BS that no user has ever asked for. Features that exclusively benefit the company’s bottom line or support some quiet pivot to a new audience leaving everyone else to the curb.
Because unlike natural life, which has evolved to be highly competitive and self-interested, we would explicitly set the AI's objectives to always benefit society.
That will definitely be a problem, but I suspect and hope that there will be governing AI models that can be "prompted" with clear and concise instructions that will be demonstrably free of bias towards any group, either by a direct reading or by evaluation with trusted 3rd party models.
If the public does not trust the fairness of the AI prompt, that will hopefully lead to revolution and replacement of the prompt with something more principled, similar to how rigged elections (sometimes) trigger revolutions.
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Pay for the service.
Then pay more to remove ads.
But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.”
And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
No databases, views, nested pages, automations, or collaboration. It’s a flat list of files with folders. You can supplement these features with plugins but it’s not the same. Notion is objectively more powerful but if you care about data ownership or minimalism you might prefer Obsidian
For a web developer local-first only describes where the state of the program lives. In the case of this app that’s in local files. If anthropics api was down you would just use something else. Something like OpenRouter would support model fallbacks out of the box
Tahoe is uniquely bad in so many ways, so I tried the Asahi Fedora Remix with Gnome on my M2 Mac Mini. Aesthetically I was more attracted to Gnome, it feels like what we lost with Tahoe. Tahoe to me feels like a really chopped Android skin or something. I made it a few weeks on the Fedora Remix but ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues. Plus there’s little OS things that Mac does that make it really hard to go elsewhere.
>ended up having to switch back to Mac over missing webcam drivers and other random hardware issues
This has been my experience every time I try Linux. If I had to guess, tracing down all these little things is just that last mile that is so hard and isn't the fun stuff to do in making an OS, which is why it is always ignored. If Linux ever did it, it would keep me.
One solution to this problem is to buy from a vendor that installs Linux for you (e.g. System76). Much like with Apple, they can sell you a fully functional computer that way.
My understanding is that the asahi team have been doing incredible work exactly with doing the non-fun bits. They just chose to do it on the hardware of a company that's extremely hostile to this kind of effort.
I have to say that almost everything worked out of the box. The webcam is known to not mesh great with Asahi quite yet. Otherwise:
- Machine failed to wake from suspend almost 50% of the time (with both wired and BT peripherals)
- WiFi speed was SIGNIFICANTLY slower. Easily a fraction of what it was on Mac
- USB C display was no-op
- Magic trackpad velocity is wild across apps
- Window management shortcuts varied across apps (seems Gnome changes a lot, frequently)
- Machine did not feel quicker, in fact generally felt slower than Tahoe but granted I did not benchmark anything
I would happily try it again when the project is further along
Shortcuts are (probably) never going to be consistent across Linux apps; that's something Mac, and to some degree Windows, developers just historically care about more. I've also never found a better hardware trackpad than Apple's, nor found better OS-level drivers for trackpads than Apple's. (I'm sure somebody out there is ready to tell me their experience is different, but I've used many Linux distributions, many PC laptops with trackpads and at least two different PC desktop trackpads, and many Macs over the past quarter century and at least for me I'm going to stand by that.)
Apple is on the record as being neutral at worst on the matter and at best weakly supportive. I think there was an article when the M1 came out where it was reported that the Asahi Linux folks met with some Apple developers where they were encouraged to explore the system and report bugs, but that Apple was not going to offer any support.
Apple has also done things such as adding a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. Which is only useful for 3rd party operating system development.
Individual developers at apple may be weakly supportive (at best), but apple as a corporation has tended in the opposite direction, of locking down macOS and iOS more and more.
Sure, some developer may have added things like raw image mode, but if someone on high says "wait, people are buying macbooks and then not using the app store?" or as soon as someone's promo is tied to a security feature that breaks third-party OSes... well, don't be surprised when it vanishes. Running any OS but macOS is against ToS, and apple has already shown they are actively hostile to user freedom and choice (with the iOS app store debacle, the iMessage beeper mini mess, and so on). If you care about your freedom and ability to use Linux, you should not use anything Apple has any hand in ever.
Almost everyone buying MacBooks installs applications outside of the App Store, the process for which has never changed (e.g., download it and run the installer or unzip it, use the free open-source package manager of your choice, etc.). I also can't find anything anywhere that suggests there are "terms of service" for Apple's hardware that prohibit installing another operating system on it, and part of Apple being "weakly supportive" of Asahi Linux is making deliberate design decisions to supporting installing third-party OSes on Apple Silicon in the first place. To copy from the Asahi Linux blog,
> Apple formally allows booting third-party operating systems on Apple Silicon Macs. Shortly after the Asahi project started, Apple even added a raw image mode to prevent macOS updates from breaking the boot process for third-party operating systems. This provided no benefit to macOS whatsoever; it merely served to help third-party operating system development.
There are a lot of reasons to be annoyed with Apple, but we don't need to invent new ones, and there's an awful lot of misinformation out there about Macs that conflates how locked down iOS is with the Mac (combined with the insistence that Macs are going to be locked down just as much as iPhones within the next few years, which I have literally been hearing since the iPhone came out in 2007). There are some things that are more difficult to do on macOS Tahoe than they were on MacOS Leopard twenty years ago (like, apparently, resize windows), but there is nothing that is "locked down" in a way that makes something I remember doing then literally impossible to do now.
The phrase was "apple is hostile to this kind of effort". "This kind of effort" is, I suppose, running non-official software on Apple hardware in general.
iOS and the third-party app store court battles makes it clear to me that Apple is actively hostile here.
It would have taken less work for apple to implement the EU "third-party app store" regulation as "anyone can install a 3rd party app store if they jump through enough hoops". They instead require that you live in the EU, as verified through many factors. They break it if you take too long of a vacation, they make using your new right to install a 3rd party app store as difficult as they can.
Apple clearly does not value user freedom nor users abilities to install their own software on their own devices. Apple would rather old iPhones and iPods become useless e-waste bricks than release an EoL update to unlock the bootloader and let you install linux to turn that old iPod touch into a garage remote, or photo-frame, or whatever.
Sorry but no. The comment I replied to was specifically referring to running Asahi Linux. This is not "Apple hardware in general" but specifically "Apple Silicon Macs".[0]
Your comments about iPads/iPhones may well be true but not relevant to my point. See also the comment from user Kina upthread.
Asahi linux would have been "a company that's extremely hostile to this effort."
They instead said "a company that's extremely hostile to this _kind of_ effort", which turns it into a broader category, which I believe quite reasonably includes their hostility to general "using their devices outside of the apple walled garden".
If you're going to be pedantic, please at least be correct, but "this kind of" clearly makes it more broad than just asahi linux itself.
I'm sorry, but you're wrong again. Person I responded to was replying to a comment around webcam drivers on a M2 mac mini. They wrote:
"the Asahi team have been doing incredible work .." -> the team working on porting Linux to Apple Silicon Macs.
"They just chose to do it on the hardware of a company that's extremely hostile to this kind of effort."
They -> Asahi Linux Team
it -> (note the singular) porting Asahi Linux
the hardware -> Apple Silicon Macs
a company -> Apple
My comment (the one you responded to): "it would have been shot down", (note the singular) it -> porting Asahi Linux.
You cannot torture the sentence to encompass the broader Apple ecosystem when the the subject is very obviously and solely the Asahi Linux team and Apple Silicon Macs. You're welcome to your views, just drop them somewhere more relevant next time.
I think this is true with an arm mac (and would be tricky to fix that, props to the Asahi folks for doing so much) but for a lot of other hardware (recent dell/asus/lenovo, framework, byo desktops) I find Linux complete. I'm sure there is hardware out there that with struggles but I've not had to deal with any issues for a few years now myself.
Bringing random hardware from vendors who never intended to support an OS is a weird criterion to judge an OS' "readiness" by— and one no one seems to apply to macOS or Windows.
It can be very device specific unfortunately. Thinkpad tend to work quote well. I had a Framework that my wife took from me and it's truly fantastic, works out of the box.
iMessage, Apple Pay (w/Touch ID), native Apple Music client, iCloud (if you're invested in the iCloud ecosystem) along with its seamless integrations with photo apps like Photomator (among others), shared music and movie library across my Mac, iPhone, and Apple TV.
There's probably a lot more I'm not thinking of right now. Point is, if you're an iOS, macOS, and iCloud user you give up a lot of quality of life bits going to another platform. There are times I want to go back to Linux, but when I think about the stuff I'm going to loose I talk myself out of it. macOS isn't the greatest, but it's not the worst either and Apple's products and services just tie in very well with each other. I get annoyed by things like the shitty support for non-apple peripherals, needing 3rd party apps to make them work decent, crappy scaling except on the most expensive monitors and no decent font smoothing when running at native resolutions. But... I stick with it because I either like or love the tight integration and added quality of life that comes with it.
Ah, I get it. I don't like integration of this sort, because it quietly screams "lock in", but do I see how it can be very convenient. So I make do with my own, likely inferior, using Syncthing, and Google Photos for browsing. My music is mostly CD rips, Bandcamp, and some YouTube, and I don't do TV, so it's just easier for me than for normal folks. I can listen to my collection anywhere over a Wireguard connection on my laptop or my phone.
It's a different set of trade-offs; less polish, more control.
Syncthing is great. I'm closer to the poster you're responding to -- I tried Asahi Linux and liked it, at least when I ignored the "Mac users will probably like GNOME more" and switched to KDE Plasma (this Mac user, at least, thinks it's way better), but still ended up back on macOS Tahoe despite having a myriad of nits to pick with it. But when I was playing around with it, I set up Syncthing so I would be able to keep working on documents on the Linux laptop, other Macs, and the iPad, and Syncthing worked fast and basically flawlessly, better than either iCloud or Dropbox in my experience. I may eventually set it up as a local sync solution between the Macbook Pro I'm using for everything and a Mac Studio that's become my home server.
Most of my gripes are probably Gnome specific in this case
- When you screenshot something it pins the image temporarily on the screen. If I drag into any open app it avoids saving it to disk.
- Pressing CMD W or Q consistently closes any app (works on some gnome apps)
- Mac keychain passkeys (I don’t own a usb stick)
- Third party window management (through accessibility privileges only)
- Apps respecting dark mode settings
- The app menu (file, edit, window, etc) being in the same spot every time
Definitely not exhaustive since I only spent a few weeks with it. There were also plenty of things I liked about Gnome more but not enough to tip the scale for me
I use macs at work and Linux at home. There's no uniform way to make a Linux machine accept things like cmd right arrow to jump to the end of the line, etc.
Around 1am Friday morning, a Make.com automation uploading YouTube videos to a website, began uploading dozens of YouTube’s latest videos. Despite querying a specific channel ID, YouTube API was returning any newly uploaded video.
As you can imagine, the videos were pretty gross.
I doubt this is related, but if so, we’re lucky it was a finance livestream.
To the parent comment’s point, if UBI is evenly distributed across everyone (“Universal”) and exists as liquid spending power (“Income”), there’s no way that doesn’t result in a rate of inflation that perfectly counteracts the existence of UBI.
Prices are only low when the seller wants to scale/reach more buyers. If low/no income buyers disappear, why would prices stay low? If there were an infinite number of high income buyers, cheap products wouldn’t even exist in a freely capitalistic system. Instead we have a limited number of buyers in a wide range of income levels, which drives a wide range of prices and sellers competing at every price point.
It feels like the laws of physics, once you cut off one side of the scale it will fling in the other direction. I also hate everything I just said, I would love to exist in a world that wasn’t subject to these forces. Just seems impossible in a freely capitalistic system.
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