It works great on Macbook. I don't know why they don't suggest it to folks when car or train movement is detected! I have a feeling a lot of people don't know it exists.
I wish my Pixel 9 had it but I guess it hasn't trickled down yet. I think it's in the latest Android on latest Pixel devices though.
> I don't know why they don't suggest it to folks when car or train movement is detected
Apple whole idea to UX seems to be "Mostly hidden by default, let people trigger it accidentally to learn about it, or reading about it somewhere else" as even after having my iPhone 12 Mini for so long, I still "discover" new things every now and then that nothing or no one told me about.
Like how are people supposed to "discover" the whole "shake the phone to undo" shortcut unless they accidentally trigger that? I see nothing in the UI that indicates when this is possible either, some apps use that for reporting feedback instead.
Younger me used to "explore" the OS or any software by clicking all the things. It was part of growing and learning. I was never afraid to click the wrong thing. It's similar to those that take things apart just to see what's inside. I had no idea that I was the edge case of personality types.
Things that are "hidden" are just discoveries waiting to happen for those that look. For those that need their hands held and guided through the world, those things might stay "hidden". Just as you feel irked that things are hidden, I feel irked by people that don't go looking. Push all the buttons. Turn all the knobs. Click all the things.
I disagree. Things that are hidden are not meant to be discovered and utilized by everyday users.
When I write software or apps and there is a feature that I want users to utilize I do not gate it behind the rare chance that a user will activate it by shaking their device or rotating it 360 degrees or something else obtuse that nobody ever does.
I grew up with custom android ROMs with all the customization I could want and now live in an age where I can take just about any software and use an LLM to customize it to meet my needs, I use Tasker and have scripts out the woohaa on my Linux desktop. I hate it when companies add "hidden" features and don't tell you anywhere.
It's somewhat intentional. Apple always pushes to prioritize the "Happy path" flow, including making it better and "Just works", and part of the way you do that often ends up making it harder, or take more work, to step off the happy path.
It's also Apple, so it's a marketing thing. There's a reason Snapchat sorta developed this feature style, and Apple targets the same demographic, or at least did for a while.
Unfortunately, this has heavily leaked into Android and Windows, and I hate it.
Yep - it's a game changer on the Pendolino trains I get to work as they tilt going around corners. Most people seem to be fine, but for me, it was impossible to get some work done on my commute until vehicle motion cues were a thing and I got > M2 MBP for work.
Presumably they meant to write "to some again manually". On the one hand I'm kind of surprised when typos make it into major publications these days. Now, it's kind of a reassuring sign that an article was written and reviewed by humans though.
That command takes 6 seconds I believe as well if I remember correctly. And likely there isn’t a ton of churn on the script. So having it make a new venv each time is kind of annoying. I was trying to aim for a good balance of fast and developer experience.
Basically if there’s an upgrade everyone needs to be using the most recent version, I didn’t want to rely on a pr dance to pin versions, and I also didn’t want to rely on everyone running a command when there’s a change
I think there are many people (myself included) whose plans would change dramatically upon discovery of Alzheimer's, dementia, or some other degenerative disease. I might consider moving to somewhere with more liberal assisted suicide laws for example.
Notarizing any wishes against some medical procedures in case a sudden accident ruins your ability to dissent prevents doctors from being forced to keep your body alive as long as possible.
That doesn't apply to Alzheimer's disease directly though. If you don't want to live when your conscious life is limited to short flashes of awareness among a deeply terrifying melange of visions of the past and hallucinations, DNR laws don't in any way force or even allow doctors to euthanize you. You can persist in this state for many years without ever triggering a DNR check.
My genetics are such I'm more likely to drop dead of a heart attack too young.
If I were likely to develop alzheimer's, I'd make more and more expensive accommodation for power of attorney and trusts to shield assets while I was competent to do so.
> Gaming works astonishingly well on Linux these days
They have certainly made a lot of progress, but there are many of us that will be stuck unless all the new AAA titles are supported. Battlefield 6 is a notable recent example of a wildly popular game that you can't play on a Steam Deck.
Seems like it's really just the anti-cheat that is holding things up. I wish every game studio out there didn't have to come up with their own anti-cheat system. Is this something Valve could solve once and for all with their OS & platform? That seems like something that would make the 30% tax a lot more appealing to game studios.
I wonder if the solution would be multi-booting. Keep the OS open, but games with anti-cheat would boot out of its own partition, with a secured bootloader, and secured lightweight OS, just enough to load the game..
> Curious what the purpose of calling a pay phone is? (wasn't possible in my country)
If you want to let somebody know you can't talk right now but you will call them back in 10 minutes, this makes it possible without having them use another quarter (coin currency in US) to call you back in 10 minutes, or requiring them to feed quarters in while you wait on hold for 10 minutes.
Also plenty of other reasons that we've all seen in spy movies :)
Also in Neuromancer when Wintermute wants to talk to Case and is ringing all the pay phones. I’ve read that book a dozen times and never thought twice about it. It was recently pointed out to me how incongruous it is to be in the future with AI and cyberspace and orbital colonies but there are still pay phones.
I think at the time of writing payphones where still so common that it was hard to imagine a world without them. The payphones are also quite fundamental to hacking culture due to the roots in "phone phreaking" which is used in the story. So perhaps it was included due to association with those elements as it will give the reader some context of at that time the current day in this futuristic world and ground them in the fictional universe.
This is actually something I was thinking about lately: How science fiction (and future-predictors) mostly only extrapolates from our current ways of doing things.
Like those Victorian era drawings of people in posh dresses walking across lakes by having hot-air balloons tied to their bodies..
Even sci-fi games involving space ships and aliens have people using floppy disks, printouts, and faxes.. in years long after those things went out of common use.
Before the iPhone very little sci-fi predicted something like smartphones being so prevalent throughout global society. Today even some of the poorest people in the poorest countries have some form of personal mobile phone.
And even now, the best we can imagine is that people will still be using phones and laptops in 2060.
E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series, a sweeping, galaxy-scale space opera (arguably the type-example of the genre), first published in 1937 had some memorable examples of this - punch card computers and one diesel-powered space ship. But along with such anachronisms (and more SF tropes than I can readily list), Smith also described video calls, stealth vehicles, and may have invented the Combat Information Center.
There are tons of examples of course, but one that jumps to mind is Oath of Fealty by Jerry Pournelle where one of the plot points is an implant that gives the chosen few access to an encyclopedic database. Of course, today, a smartphone with cell access provides that (or at least a more chaotic version of same) to more or less everyone. You could also reasonably argue that the encyclopedia in Asimov's Foundation trilogy makes somewhat similar assumptions.
I do think some sort of AR interface is somewhere in the future but it's almost certainly a long way off for mainstream adoption.
Forgot Larry Niven was a co-author of that one. They tended to be a good pair on novel-length works. Niven's novels tended to end up as travelogues and Pournelle's ended up as military SF.
Conversely though, there is plenty of older sci-fi that assumes by the 2000s we'd all be zooming around in flying cars rather than in cars that are basically the same sort of thing they had in the fifties.
It was written in the early 80s on a mechanical typewriter, and released only a very few months after the first Apple Macintosh. Modems were insanely expensive back then and not many people had them.
So much of the things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist when Johnny Mnemonic was written in 1981, again on a mechanical typewriter.
The fact that it was written on a mechanical typewriter isn't very relevant as even today some writers prefer writing on those, in that time they where obviously still quite common (and more accessible compared to computers).
Modems where expensive but so was a computer, however perhaps people where able to experience the technologies through their workplace or schools investments.
The ideas of Networking/big networks & cracking/hacking/phreaking where not strange in this time. Actually it was probably in the right place to write fiction about. Since most people where not familiar with the terms but had perhaps heard them on the news, advertisements or similar media. Allowing them to reason/dream about networks and the potential of connectivity while the interfaces and had not quite solidified into examples you could easily point at.
For reference the movie Tron came out in 1982. And CBBS was around since late 1970s. And not to forget people in the 1980s where quite comfortable with the phone network. Pagers and early mobile devices (phones/laptops) became available, there was a certain hype/energy about what the "connected" future might hold.
A few years later saw the explosion of the BBS scene and technologies like Fidonet where developed and accessible for the computer enthusiast at home.
The point being that while "things in the book that we think of as familiar didn't even really exist" they didn't exist in the capacity we see today. The seeds of the technologies was there even in everyday media channels and it is not strange that a science fiction writer would extrapolate from that.
Sci-fi books are full of reverse anachronisms like that. Worlds with space travel, but no computers.
Asimov has some good stories where people no longer know how to read and write and multiply because everything is done on computers and all interactions with computers and are done by voice.
Also so The Machine can give you the encoded social security number of someone who is either going to commit a crime or become the victim of one so pre-conspiracy Jim Caviezel can come and save your life or blow your kneecaps out.
Definitely one of the downsides of aging is the shock of realizing that movies that you vaguely remember as being fairly new are now old. (I was expecting a movie from the '40s, not 2003.)
Somewhat different thing but it was also very common in college to make a person to person call through an operator and the person (typically parents) on the other end would refuse the call and call you back because it could be much cheaper for them.
I've been using Nextcloud for years, but I've never used the web UI. Windows desktop app for syncing my Documents folder, and Android app for synchronizing a few folders on my phone, as well as the "append only" upload of my photo reel that something like SyncThing doesn't support. Works great, never had any issues with Nextcloud. The real value is in the companion apps.
I use a cron job to back up Nextcloud to B2 and S3 Glacier.
I use S3 glacier on Scaleway (European cloud provider). Storing about 3TB costs me about 7€ per month including VAT. I've had to restore 1TB in the past and it cost me around 10€. Not bad for a worst case scenario. They also do mini VPSes for 3€ per month with unlimited traffic. Really nice provider, I've used them for many years.
I've only tested partial restores from Glacier since it is expensive. I've got a raidz2 array locally as insurance against having to restore from a backup.
> A 18 Tb NAS harddrive is about 320 USD. A 2 bay unifi unas2 199. It pays off in one year. Restoring data from it is free.
That single 18TB HD is hardly safe from a disaster or even plain old hardware death, and it's a single point of failure. You need at least 3 times as many HDs to start to have something you can actually rely on to keep your data for 3-5years.
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