IIRC, Ricky Gervais advised the showrunners of the US adaptation to make Michael Scott more optimistic than his UK counterpart. Quite savvy on his part.
As much as I love American upbeat-ness (I'm American) I think that our hatred of failure and our strained optimism puts a tremendous psychological pressure on us. Sometimes, we fail, and that's okay. Sometimes, we lose, and that's just life. I think that's an essential part of growing up, and our collective denial of that makes me feel like we, as a people, are not quite mature.
I think (we) Americans hate failure only when people give up.
We have a very long tradition of failure leading to success, everything from Edison trying hundreds of lightbulbs to Don Draper in Mad Men reinventing himself after failure.
Our bankruptcy laws are different from other countries in how lenient they are towards the debtor. And, of course, the entire culture of Silicon Valley is about failure after failure followed by success.
And it's not even conventional, economic success that we want. We're happy when someone finds happiness even if not financial success. The rich-person-gives-up-everything-for-love is a familiar American trope.
We don't like failure, but we forgive it, as long as we keep trying.
I think you're over optimistic about the mindset of the majority of Americans. Americans love a winner and hate losers, that's why they elected Donald Trump.
At least for American technologists (if not technologists more broadly, or Americans more broadly) failure is not at all seen as a bad thing: it's seen as a data point that XYZ didn't work, so now we'll pivot to ABC and give that a go.
Edison's quote about not having failed, but rather, discovering 1,000 ways not to do something captures this well.
It’s a good counter point, but I don’t think it mimics the kind of failure embracing that Clark talks about.
It is more a reframing of failure as a success of learning and growing. E.g, while the project failed, you didn’t. You learned lessons and are stronger and better for it. You succeed.
Truly amazing software. I only recently learned that Crossover, which enables running windows software (mainly games) on MacOS, is built on Wine and significantly contributes to Wine Development.
they employs many devs of Wine (including the project lead, Alexandre Julliard). but technically Wine is still an independent open-source project, and has many contributors from outside Codeweavers.
I think the point was that there is way more people involved in Proton that the people/work coming from Wine, not to trivialise the amount of work integrating a bunch of projects take.
I love Linux and use it daily, but this paragraph gave me pause:
"I’ve spent dozens of hours combing through Reddit threads, analyzing old Stack Overflow solutions, and, in times of true desperation, asking AI chatbots like Mistral’s Le Chat and Anthropic’s Claude for help deciphering error messages. Luckily, the Linux community is also very supportive. If you’re willing to ask for help, or at least do a little troubleshooting, you’ll be able to work out any problems that come your way."
There are many people -- like my Mom or Dad, for example -- who will never find this appealing and are likely to dig themselves into deeper holes trying to fix system issues on the command line. That's why Steve Jobs was on the money when he talked about a computer that was as intuitive as an appliance -- it has to "just work" for most normies. While I'm as frustrated with Windows as the next person, I'd probably just hand the average person a Mac mini instead of popping a linux distro on their machine if they needed a new computer (though if all they are doing is just browsing the web and reading emails, a ubuntu install is probably fine).
I find a major difference is that Linux support is harder to understand but OSX support is harder to get.
I've found support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com to be incredibly wanting. This isn't helped in the slightest by the fact that OSX changes tools, even in major versions. If anyone is doubting the "harder to get" claim then I encourage you to search (you can use LLMs) to figure out how to print the SSID you're connected to from the CLI. Such a task is really really simple. I can tell you a bunch of ways to do this on linux with tools like `iw`, `iwconfig`, `nmcli`, or `iwgetid` but I can no longer tell you how to do this on OSX. The linux answer is hard because the tool might change based on your distro or you can install a tool. That requires more understanding. But on OSX, this category of problems don't exist.
If you want the old answer you can see here. None of those work, even with sudo, nor does wtallis's answer, despite this working on an earlier version of Sequoia (FWIW, I'm now on 15.7.3): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41633547
On Sequoia this command shows you the history of SSIDs, not the current SSID you're on. For easy verification turn off your WiFi and run the command, you'll get identical output.
Is Tahoe doing something different? If so, honestly that only exemplifies my point of how Apple is creating a difficult ecosystem to navigate through, where the correct incantations change, even through minor versions.
*IT IS MADDENING*
> There's also get-ssid: https://github.com/fjh658/get-ssid
I think the README is quite illustrative of the problem here. Seems like John ran into the same issue I was! He even mentions the issue with the `-getairportnetwork` flag for `networksetup`.
But get-ssid still has a problem... it requires root. For my original use case I was wanting to run ssh proxy jumps and rsyncs based on the SSID I'm connected to. This doesn't really work for those cases. Escalating to root just creates a major security concern and I definitely don't want automated processes doing escalating unless absolutely necessary.
Opposite experience here. My aging mom had been on Windows XP for years and years, and then someone gave her a cast-off laptop running Windows 10.
That was such a culture shock. Endless pop-ups to do this and subscribe to that and so on. And it has gotten worse since then of course.
Instead I set her up on a nice mature Linux desktop - Mate - and that was fine. Chrome, Thunderbird and not much else. And solid reliable and nobody reaching in from the cloud with the latest attempts to monetize something or push AI onto you or whatever. You turn on (unsuspend) the computer and it's the same computer it was yesterday, working just the same.
There are plenty of folks with some (or lots of) technical capability who’d rather not have to deal with these things, too.
I’m in favor of Linux becoming more dominant as a desktop operating system but there is still plenty of work to be done in making it suitable for mass adoption. Denying that only slows the timeline on Linux’s ascendance.
> Linux isn’t especially complicated on a daily basis, but you have to be willing to solve your own problems
That being said, given the huge uptick in Linux articles lately, I can only believe Canonical is funding something here. It's just too sudden of a surge.
I'll probably still game on Linux, but who knows if that will last after a few more "freeze on resume" situations. These just don't happen on Windows and most Linux sentiment seems to be coming from anti-Onedrive feelings, which is fair, but the popups are easy to click through. Random Linux instability, not so.
I now say that these Linux success stories are just like saying you've been married for a year and everything is going fine. It's great that you made it to the first big milestone, but that doesn't mean there aren't legitimate reasons Linux is a bottom contender for user OS. A long, scarring evening of frustration and pain is very likely coming down the road. Will The Verge publish stories about these problems, too? No, they won't!
I wonder if this is due to Linux being harder to work on or because it is possible to fix some errors which would be catastrophic on other OSes?
Back when I used Windows a lot (Windwos XP times...) I also had the "long, scarring evening of frustation" rather often. It was usually solved by a reinstall.
In recent times, the “standard” seems to be smartphones (I use Android). The logic of smartphones it: It works or it dosen't and if it doesn't there is nothing you can do about it. Like ... not supporting some docking station because its network interface is called usb0 rather than eth0 ... no bypass, no solution, buy another docking station.
Of course this is faster than debugging the issue and maybe fixing it for good or maybe waste the evening on it.
Effectively Linux giving you the option to do something about errors doesn't mean the workarounds from other OSes like “reinstall”, “buy a new one”, “use a friend's system because it doesn't work here” are still readily available?
If only this were the whole story, but my Windows gaming desktop has been running more or less without issue (barring hardware failure), no reinstalls, since 2019. I tried so hard to use Linux on my laptop for two years but eventually gave up; i reinstalled Ubuntu three times in those two years.
Now, my Ubuntu server has also been running continuously since 2019. Linux can be that solid for the right use case. I've got a Linux HTPC that's pretty worry free, too.
Linux just legitimately has some hard-if-not-impossible problems on random specific consumer hardware, sadly. Until manufacturers start actually supporting it, that'll always be the case. Manufacturers have gotten better about it too, though, and I'm hoping valve continues making official Linux support more appealing for device manufacturers.
I guess all I'm saying is, some things on Linux still actually just can't be fixed, and every platform is gonna give you a night of extreme frustration from time to time.
> but my Windows gaming desktop has been running more or less without issue (barring hardware failure), no reinstalls, since 2019
This also describes my Linux desktop.
> I tried so hard to use Linux on my laptop
Unfortunately comparing a laptop to a desktop is not a fair comparison. Things are better than they were in 2019 but display and battery are constant issues (especially if you have a laptop with an nvidia graphics card).[0]
I'm not trying to say Linux doesn't have issues, but I do need to point out that your logic has a strong bias to it. I'll also add that while I have no problems gaming on my Linux desktop (thanks Valve!!), I don't usually play online games or MMOs but my understanding is that this is problematic for Linux systems as anticheat is a pain.
[0] My friend has a Framework laptop which has PopOS on it and he's said he's had no issues with it. He's used other Linux laptops before and has expressed this has been a very different experience. I think it helps that they're more aware of the hardware and can do more robust testing on that hardware.
There is a difference between someone like my grandmother who I've had on Ubuntu for years, and this user and people like me who are trying to do more advanced operations. My grandmother doesn't need to research for hours to open her internet browser.
It gave me pause in the sense that it doesn't feel true.
I mean, yes, I've had to look things up to see how to do things in Linux. I've also had to do that on MacOS. (Just the other day, I couldn't remember what the Task Manager-equivalent on MacOS was, and nothing I typed into the launcher was coming up with an appropriate app, so I had to ask the robot what it was named.)
But dozens of hours? Maybe back in the Red Hat 4.2 days, but not now. Some of that is obviously just that I have a lot of knowledge about things, but even so.
Some advanced uses from Windows that are very easy can be very difficult on Linux still. PipeWire, for example, while more stable overall, has made getting my audio routing all correct (e.g. for streaming) much more difficult than it is on Windows. Once it's set up it's just as stable but it took me longer to set up.
I could see that among other things totaling dozens of hours for a Linux beginner. Power management on laptops is still a common sticking point; i probably spent more than a dozen hours on that alone before giving up and going back to Windows on my laptop. And I've been using Linux for 20 years.
You know how much time I had to spend doing desktop support for developers who couldn't get their own Zoom/Teams meetings to work on Windows? Its not as intuitive as you think, you're probably just used to it.
Persistent input to output mappings in PipeWire is impossible without third party tools or custom scripts you run on boot. Something windows just does automatically. It's not even about ease in that case, just literally what you're able to do.
As for Microsoft, I've never found it to "just work". I've daily driven Windows machines because work has given them to me but I always try to get a Mac instead. Windows just breaks constantly and with silly things like using Windows Hello breaks Outlook and can cause it to go into a log{in,out} loop.
For OSX, I mostly agree but think "just works" is a bit too strong of a statement too. There are definitely fewer errors but they aren't non-existent. These seem to have dramatically increased with OSX 26 as well as the fact that the UX has significantly changed and in ways that contradict how things worked before. I get frequent calls from my parents. We'll set aside how often I'm searching how to do things and my absolute hatred for how little support there actually is online (good fucking god how utterly useless are support.apple.com and discussions.apple.com?!?!)[0]
I've also handed them linux computers. Truth is that they can't tell the difference. But it also depends on what type of user your parents are. Mine just browse the internet so they already know to use Firefox and they're good to go. Probably the most confusing thing for them would be to navigate the app store (I have no expectation for them to use the CLI) and understand what apps they need because the names are different from what they're used to. I think people under-appreciate how big of an impact this type of lock-in actually is. Search is still a pretty difficult problem and frankly older people don't even understand very basic search. (My mom still types in www.google.com every time she wants to search. Yes, I've showed her she can just type her query into the url bar...). That said, they also switched to DDG on their own accord (I did not tell them).
[0] On linux 95 times out of 100 I can find what I'm looking for with a search. But that's biased by years of experience and knowing what to search. Though I can use the same patterns as I would with linux, swapping out the tool for the OSX version and I will not get good results. If you want to see an example try searching for how to print out your network SSID from the CLI. You can even ask an LLM! In fact, I no longer know how to do this, even with sudo. I specifically mean "no longer" because I used to be able to... And let's be honest, what fucking reason is there to prevent one from seeing the SSID in the CLI? It's not private information. I can see it from the GUI no problem!
If you want a Linux for the average Joe, then you have immutable distros, (such as Fedora Kinoite) which are going to better suited also for old people, and those that don't need to fiddle with their experience.
> ubuntu install is probably fine
Ubuntu and Gnome should be avoided even as suggestions. Ubuntu has become less reliable than Fedora in my experience. And Gnome does Gnome things that are incompatible of the average users requirement from a desktop encironment.
Speaking as someone who knows people on both sides:
It's going to be very hard to convince most iranians that this is anything other than Israel/USA backed terrorism. Especially with Israel and the US openly bragging about backing it.
It doesn't help that they're probably mostly right. And looking at the genocide in gaza and how many of the people backing the protest are basically holocaust deniers, it looks really horrible to much of the islamic world.
For anyone who’s reading this, I speak Persian. If you translate the Iranian state media propaganda, it’s basically the same. That should tell you everything you need to know about the credibility of such comments.
Not to minimize the significance of this but prohibiting a portion of a reading is like slapping a "parental warning" on a Rap CD in the 90s -- if I was an undergrad, I'd only want to read those excerpts more.
The real barrier to students reading Plato has historically (and correctly) been the dismal quality of translations available. I always hated reading plato because the translations available to me were significantly more concerned with carrying into the modern day the wonky syntax and sentence structure of ancient Greek philosophical writing, and less concerned with translating the underlying ideas into language understandable by a 19 year-old engineering major who can barely spell their own name.
I think that it would be easier to get younger people to study Quenya to be able to read fragments of Tolkien in the "original" than it would be to somehow get them to learn to read classical Greek. But it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek, and then there's a lifetime of really great stuff that opens up for one to enjoy.
>it's not that hard to learn to just read Attic and Homeric Greek
I studied Attic, Koine, and Homeric, as well as a few other dialects for 10 years through college until I left my PhD program in Classics. Learning Greek was _very_ hard and even after that time I still had many gaps.
It's not all-or-nothing, though, and free sources like Attikos provide word definitions at a tap. Since I'm old, I also have a shelf of Loebs, and have no shame about skimming the dull bits by reading the trots.
I read an excellent parallel Greek and English translation when I was a kid, probably the one in the Loeb Classical Library.
They probably had this attitude, but I didn't find it objectionable at all, and I'm not a native English speaker. If a 19-year old engineering student can't read that, even in his own language, what's the point? The guy's a bore.
I think it's probably better to just read them having picked them off a bookshelf than in a class though.
You act as if there are not companion or derivative works ad-nauseam. The barrier is hermeneutic, not grammatical, which is a fundamental constraint on shared meaning. Thus the "real barrier" is innate and your particular fixation only serves artificial ones. But please do add more than a complaint to our canon of meaning, I do not mean to devalue the act you are advocating, just the notion of neglect in this respect.
I mean to say that the only time I've ever needed to diagram a sentence to figure out what was being said was while taking Philosophy 1010, because the cheapest translations available of e.g. The Republic was a bit too opaque for me.
There's certainly a lot to be said about the manifold interpretations of Platonic Idealism; what I'm saying is that when we've historically introduced new philosophy students to things like Jowett's translations ("But tell me, Zeno, do you not further think that there is an idea of likeness in itself, and another idea of unlikeness, which is the opposite of likeness, and that in these two, you and I and all other things to which we apply the term many, participate-things which participate in likeness become in that degree and manner like; and so far as they participate in unlikeness become in that degree unlike, or both like and unlike in the degree in which they participate in both?"), there's also a grammatical issue. Yes, I can deconstruct that and reassemble it in more colloquial terms. The problem is that for a lot of students, they don't develop interest enough to engage in the deconstruction until after they've gone through the arduous process of reading that and thinking "WTF?!"
I had only the Jowett translation and probably gave up on passages like that. What got my attention was diagramming. I diagrammed Koine Greek sentences every time in assignments with Apostle Paul or Luke. Greek is intensely inflected (different word endings for subject, object, for starters) A lot of meaning is packed in which makes word order very flexible.
I want to go try some Plato in Greek. Do you have the reference for that passage? (Thankfully I got the unabridged Liddell and Scott lexicon which encompasses Attic not just New Testament words so I’ve been able to read Homer.)
I’m speaking from my own informal reading of the Cooper edition, which I genuinely enjoyed for its prose. Even so, it took me years to work through the whole thing, and I trace my difficulty quite easily to gaps in my earlier education and reading habits.
I’m not convinced that better translations are doing much to fix the deeper issue in most readers: the lack of broad exposure to the Western canon which seems to cultivate a real preference for rigor over comfort.
The difference is people wanted to listen to Eminem or whatever because it's enjoyable, trendy music that's played on the radio and all their friends were listening to.
Plato is not exactly burning up the airwaves right now. Most likely the only exposure most people will have to this work (or any of the libraries of work that's been banned in this manner) would be at college, assigned to them for a class.
The undergrads won't hear about it. The material will just silently not be on the syllabus and they'll never know. In this case the interference has broken containment, but this won't be the norm.
Similar vein: reading in general is down, overall. Especially among young people. "Banning" a book isn't affecting anyone, it just gets a bunch of people riled up on two political tribes.
Now, if they actually banned a book, like "you will go to jail for having this" I would be concerned.
I am highly sympathetic to this sentiment, but I think it's hard to name things in software because a) it's easy for the obvious names to get overloaded and b) many of the things we are dealing with are basically abstract relationships with arbitrary properties.
The irony is if I quit social media, I start devouring youtube, including both high quality video essays and general video slop. If I quit youtube, I'm inclined to binge watch TV. I sometimes wonder if I need a more dramatic act of "unplugging." As writer Manu Joseph says on substack:
"Yet, I do not believe it is true that attention spans have changed significantly over the decades. People’s minds have always wandered. They have always struggled to focus. And most of them couldn’t bear to spend too much time with their own minds.
The real world, outside the phone, is so glorified today. But consider this thing that happens in the real world. You’re at a party and someone comes up and says that inane but useful thing, “What’s up?” And even as you answer, he looks behind you for something more interesting, which is never there. This has happened for decades, and not just in conversations. In everything people did, they looked beyond to see if there was something more interesting, which they never found."
...
"I don’t say there is no substance to the lament about modern attention spans. The fact that human attention was always fragile does not diminish the fact that the modern world has created extraordinary tools to facilitate distraction. A distraction is a kind of boredom that looks like entertainment, which saves you momentarily from another kind of boredom. Today, a slab of metal and glass at nearly everyone’s disposal captures the wandering mind and carries it far away, to some limbo. You could be working and reach for your phone, or an icon on your laptop, and suddenly ten minutes of your life are gone just like that."
That rings true to me as an observation, but the trouble with the smartphones and social media is not just that we happily consume it and have always been susceptible to mindless distraction, it's that the devices and services are actively designed to pull you back in and for as long as possible as much as possible.
Books don't do that, TV does that poorly if it does try.
Yep, it's just that the world is extremely competitive, and you are constantly forced to think about your “productivity.”
If you are not hustling and generating some value, you are “wasting time.”
Of course, that's nonsense. You are living your life to do whatever you want with it, and if that's spending a lot of time on social media, you just need to be OK with that (as in, it is a conscious choice, not an addiction).
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