Based on lots of human interactions, I think there are a lot of human beings out there who mentally aren’t much more than “next word predictors” who happen to be made of meat+neurons instead of silicon+code.
Same here, I’ve gone from Apple fanboy to slowly dropping all of my Apple products as it becomes time for new purchases. They are just no longer looking at users like me. They keep focusing their efforts on things I don’t care about, while locking me out of control over my system more and more each macOS release. That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old… why bother fighting that?
The only thing in the Apple world I’ve become hopelessly dependent on is iMessage. It’s going to be painful to leave all those group chats. Everything else I use has a great Linux replacement.
2026 is finally going to be the Year Of The Linux Desktop for this former Apple user.
> That and the fact that Apple and their third party application ecosystem abandons computers when they become a few years old
Say what you will about Apple (I loathe so much about my work macbook), but this seem untrue unless you have a pretty loose definition for "a few". My inherited 7 year old iPad is still getting updates, and this year's Mac OS is the first to not support Intel hardware, the most recent hardware being 6 years old.
The last 20 years we've only seen Apple enjoying the good times. What they did when the money was gushing in from every angle is not really an indicator of what they'll do in the hard times. We're getting into the hard times now, IAP revenue is plummeting because of competition for payments and a whole bag of things are impacting consumer purchase behavior.
This has resulted in positive outcomes like services have largely gone global this last quarter but it's also resulted in negatives like more ads and service price increases in many countries.
Yes they do offer security updates for what, 7 years? That I consider “kind of ok.” Not great. And yes most Android phones are even worse than that. But OS and application updates? You’re dead to them after 4 or 5 years. AND the whole ecosystem follows suit, so if your Mac is like 6 years old, almost nobody is writing software that works on your system anymore.
I’ve managed to move all of my inner circle family and friends to Signal. We always had one holdout android user and now we don’t care that he’s on android. As a bonus, because I’m on a computer much of the day, I can use a keyboard to send signal messages.
There’s one non-tech sister in law who won’t install signal (but is somehow ok with Snapchat) so she’s just not included on the group chats.
That is literally the only reason anyone has invested in outer space. Even scientific missions are done with a dual national defense purpose. Think of it like PR whitewashing of the military and geopolitical reasons that motivate funding.
Notice how the US space interest rapidly dried up with the death of the Soviet Union. I’m not sure if China really motivates the same thing because it’s an authoritarian semi-capitalist society - it’s the communist “people owning the means of production” that gets capitalists really worried.
Not that I have a solution, but isn’t that kind of disappointing? Why don’t we just do it directly, rather than only as a side effect of needless conflicts?
People suffered under the totalitarian regime and corruption. The central planning was also a problem in terms of making sure that goods production could meet what people needed. China’s semi-capitalist system with the authoritarian government stepping in when the companies don’t cooperate is an attempt to adapt to retaining communism while letting go of central planning. And this system is acceptable by western capitalists. This is a criticism of the West and its adherence to capitalism rather than liberal ideas, not an endorsement of “communism”*
* most people use communism as short hand for central planning which IMHO was the major economic problem that caused economically slow growth and lack of goods. combined with the authoritarian repression that caused a different kind of suffering. But neither of those is required by a communist political movement.
There have been 20,000 voluntary communes in the US. They all failed. Communism doesn't work, whether it is forcible or voluntary. No commune or centrally planned economy has ever managed to feed itself. Hence the suffering.
In Israel about 74/270 are still communal with the rest having privatized, but they’re still communal living arrangements.
It’s important to remember that most movements and experiments fail, same reason countries and companies also fail. A lot of them failed due to mismanagement, idealogical disputes, children not sticking around (ie no new members) etc. building sustainable communities is hard and not a unique problem for communes.
btw these are all the same reasons open source projects fail yet we wouldn’t call open source a failure despite it having all the same problems and looking more like communism than capitalism.
Also you’re overstating the failure rate. Amana Society, Inc is a cooperative structure that evolved from a commune. REI is also a cooperative corporate structure although not quite like a commune. So clearly there’s a path to evolve to that’s sustainable and does work and looks quite a bit different from capitalism. And there’s a difference between communal living and cooperative commercial entity which is good to separate.
Not sure where this claim comes from. AFAIK Kibbutzes are financially independent from the state. Are you perhaps confusing the early days when they were getting set up vs the situation today? Or are you talking about the contentious settlements?
Twin Oaks Community in Virginia has been running for 60 years now and does income sharing between the residents.
The Bruderhof Communities have been running for a century now.
And my point regarding REI and Amana is not that they’re communes but that they’re non-capitalist organizations. If those models took any kind of serious hold at a government level, they’d be fought tooth and nail just like communes.
When the Kibbutzim lost their government subsidies, they became capitalists.
The Twin Oaks community has a population of 100 and annual turnover of 20%. That's pretty high. I suspect Twin Oaks' only success is being able to constantly recruit new members and get them to turn over their assets to the commune. Then they get disenchanted with communism and leave.
The Bruderhof communities average around 120 people. I couldn't find any statistics on how long people stay in them.
Congratulations, 2 communes out of 20,000 have survived! It still rounds to a 100% failure rate.
All the sources I’ve found say most became privatized. Can’t find a single source claiming all. Where are you getting this claim? The numbers I’ve found are that 10-15% are still communal.
Your twin oaks assessment is also off. New members don’t turn over their assets - you keep your preexisting assets. You are forbidden from spending those preexisting assets while a member. So I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s sustained by constantly tricking new members into turning over assets.
So where are these 20,000 communes that are not privatized? Do you think that 100 people in a commune with massive turnover shows that communism works in a country of 350,000,000?
> So I don’t think it’s fair to claim it’s sustained by constantly tricking new members into turning over assets.
It's the "agency" bit that really annoys me. The Computer is no longer Personal. I expect my personal computer to only do things that I choose to invoke. It should not do a laundry list of things that the device manufacturer wants it to do, nor a laundry list of things the OS vendor wants it to do. I shouldn't have to turn things off. They shouldn't be on to begin with, unless I deliberately turned them on.
Of course this doesn't extend to obvious things like "running the kernel" and "initializing the filesystem." But in general I want to be the person responsible for running things, not some product manager 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley.
I think the fundamental problem is one person's "Only do the things I choose to invoke" is another person's "Why do I have to do all this stupid setup". Especially given that most people aren't computer people, and they want to use their computers to get other tasks done, not to be system administrators themselves.
Should your computer automatically build search indexes for your files? For most people, fast search is more useful than the disk space this takes up, but it would be doing something you didn't explicitly invoke.
Should your computer turn on global spell check (and even basic auto correct) for text fields? Again, you didn't invoke it explicitly, but most people probably think it's a good idea.
So you might say "well anything that just runs locally is ok" but even that's thorny. Obviously much of the AI stuff apple has been implementing is running locally and some of it has been around for a while (image classification in Photos for example). But not everyone wants the AI, even with local models.
And then there's things like "should your computer default to using NTP time?", again most people would probably say yes, especially given how important accurate time is for modern computer security. But it requires your computer doing network requests to make it work.
"Should your computer automatically check for updates?", again for most people the answer is probably "yes it should". But again it requires your computer to do network requests to make it all work.
"Should your computer automatically scan for malware?", probably yes it should, but keeping those malware lists up to date is going to require network requests and access.
There's always a tension between "being helpful and useful out of the box" and "doing stuff the OS vendor wants".
Anyone who wants an OS that does nothing out of the box is always free to grab any x86 box and install ArchLinux on it, but most people don't do that for the same reason that Spacemacs / Doom Emacs is more popular than a raw emacs install, and things like Sublime, or Notepad++ are more popular than those. Defaults matter a lot.
Yeah, whatever happened to the personal computer, a kind of capital equipment available to the masses, something you own and can direct towards your goals and wellbeing?
Instead it's like we're sharecropping on a device companies have established as a colonial outpost to monitor us for profitable compliance.
Whenever I run a “modern, online application” I feel like I’m part of some vast behavior modification experiment where the app company is watching me to see if I’m doing what they want me to do.
It's like saying that wind blows because trees sway.
There's clearly an agenda to double down on stripping away all remaining privacy. The internet as we knew it and remembered as free is just the medium to make that happen, if not purely a byproduct of this.
There's nothing more American than not knowing the price you're going to pay for something until you have to pay it. This applies to everything from income taxes to health care to big ticket purchases like homes and cars, to airline tickets, to cell phone and cable service, all the way down to restaurants with tips and service fees and everything on the store shelf, where sales tax is not included in the price of the good. Somehow the USA has normalized this throughout its entire culture.
In canada on many products the taxes are hidden in the shelf / advertised price iirc Gas, Alcohol, and Tobacco products have this feature. IMO it should be everything (still show the breakdown on the receipt, but instead of advertising the sub-total advertise the final price)
This isn't about math being too hard. It's about companies deliberately hiding and obfuscating what you owe.
Try this. My cell phone service is AT&T's "Value Plus VL" service with three lines. Tell me my exact monthly bill down to the cent. Do all the Internet searching you need and all the math you need to.
In a world where companies weren't actively hiding what you pay, you would easily be able to do this.
Some people are obsessed with free-riders and never happy until they know they're only narrowly paying for the smallest granular subset of things they use, and nothing that they are not personally using. This is why we have all these little fees for everything everywhere--to satisfy those people. This is why airlines are terrible now: they granularly charge for every little thing. "Why should I pay for meal service if I personally don't want to eat?" people are getting their way.
Exactly. Last time I moved to a new area, out of about 5 local family doctors, the shortest wait time for a New Patient Appointment was eight months. In the good ol' non-socialized-medicine USA. So for eight months, we had to rely on urgent care for every medical need.
I think we need to stop calling one-sided "terms documents" that are entirely written by one party, the party with 100x+ the monetary resources and power of the other party, with no input from that other party and not subject to any negotiation whatsoever, "agreements." They are not what any reasonable person would call an agreement. There is no meeting of the minds, and the terms are entirely controlled by one party.
Though presumably you would prefer the alternative; that such companies are unrestrained in what they may do and the population at large must simply bend over and grab their ankles with both hands?
Nope, I don't want that at all. What I want is a law with actual enforcement behind it and penalties that actually deter bad actors. You don't just write a law and then stop there declaring job done.
It's not Pi's responsibility to police what people do with devices after the devices are sold. If bootleggers are modifying the devices and reselling fraudulent versions, that's between the buyer and the bootlegger and marketplace site where the second transaction happened.
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