I had been using Windows my entire life and using a Mac in 2009? was awful. How do I get to the menu bar? Ctrl-F2. They keep changing the behaviour of the menu so that cursor keys don't wrap at the bottom of a menu so you have to know which direction you want to go to get to a menu item - make your choice! Up or down!
How do I get to the dock so that I can open the Applications menu? Ctrl-F3. left left left left left up. Then the popup menu doesn't respond to any letters.
All of this contrasted with Windows which had Alt + key for the menu. I learned it from Windows 3.11 for incredible speed:
- Alt space - show the window menu
- Alt space x - maximize
- Alt space n - minimize
- Alt space r - restore
- Windows key - start menu
- Windows key > P > right cursor > N - notepad (the right cursor = accessories)
This was broken in later start menus. The modern start menu is absolutely useless and takes forever. Up until XP this worked fine.
- (with Quicklaunch): Windows + N (number) - launch that item. Eg. Windows + 3 will launch the third item across. No idea if they broke this in Windows 11.
Under Windows 98 all of these were lightning fast. Explorer behaved as you'd expect too.
None of this was possible on the Mac and using it was very very very slow with a mouse to wave around the screen.
I mean, all of this is available in MacOS as well, and configurable even—your main complaint seems to be that it works differently from Windows?
MacOS is a different operating system with different paradigms; instead of a start menu, you'd use Spotlight search for the same effect, which can be invoked with CMD+Space.
No, the main complaint is that you can't do half of those things with a keyboard. Eg. how do I maximise a window on macos with my keyboard?
I have been using macos for decades and use it daily at work so I understand it is different. I am just saying that the out-of-the-box functionality for keyboard usability is very poor compared to Windows (and Linux DEs which imitate Windows).
I end up using Rectangle on macos for moving windows and maximising them using keyboard shortcuts because else it's infuriating for window management to have to move from the keyboard to the mouse all the time. The usability under Tahoe for window edges etc. is even worse with a mouse than previous versions and a complete joke, so I am stuck on Sequoia.
> how do I maximise a window on macos with my keyboard?
System settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Window > Fill. Default on my machine is fn+control+f, but you can also reassign that there of course (which AFAIK is something Windows doesn't let you do, by the way.)
> I end up using Rectangle on macos for moving windows and maximising them using keyboard shortcuts
I also used to use Rectangle, but by now the built-in window management shortcuts fulfil the same purpose out of the box (almost, that is; where Rectangle can move Windows onto the next screen, that is arguably where the built-in shortcuts fall flat, only being able to arrange on a single screen)
I'm surprised you feel that way. I fight with my mac every day for one reason or another. At least it's not as bad as the days where some software used Cmd + letter and some used ctrl +letter, but for instance Cmd tab will switch to the wrong window when I go back and I have to use the mouse. Window switching in general is a lot harder if you only have the keyboard because the laptop is docked without a magic trackpad
strange. Some keyboard shortcuts in os x are kinda weird and not intuitive to linux or windows users, but they are there. It's totally possible to use mac without trackpad. even cmd+tab switcher has a lot of hidden (but googlable) things: while still holding cmd after initial cmd+tab, you can close apps with q, switch to other apps with tab and (cmd+)shift+tab or left/right arrows, show app windows with down, etc.
There's also a cmd+` for switching between one app's windows. I still find that distinction weird from usability perspective, but it's not too hard to adapt to it.
As I discover every time I have a mouse fail, it is exceptionally difficult to use a modern Mac without a pointer device because at some point, it became quite difficult to get from (eg) the settings nav panel to the settings panel. I can CMD+SPACE to open spotlight, type 'Settings' to get to a settings panel, type 'Bluetooth' to open the bluetooth settings, and where I feel like I _should_ be able to `Tab` or `Enter` into the devices list, or have SOME way to navigate over there, the only way I've found to be able to is to plug in a physical mouse
Moreover, I occasionally encounter modals that won't let me tab to their action buttons, requiring a pointer device click to dismiss
This is true for the most part, unless you adjust keyboard settings in System Settings to let all UI elements be focusable with the keyboard (for tabbing between UI elements). I think it used to be under "keyboard" but they might have moved it in the recent Control Center reshuffle.
Cmd+Space to open spotlight, type in the first 3 or 4 letters of whatever you're trying to do (an application to open, or a system setting to change) and then Return gets me about where I need to go most of the time. Cmd+Tab and Cmd+` for window selection. I don't do much else on the OS itself so my bases are covered.
Really? I find that on MacOS apps are very inconsistent about whether popping open a menu shows me hints for selecting items in that menu. Those same apps are consistent about it on Linux.
And then there's the bonkers window manager which can't move focus directionally (e.g. Super + left) and so you have to fall back to Cmd + tab tab tab tab but even then there's no consistency about whether you're switching between app instances or windows instances within the same app...
Display of shortcuts in menus is the responsibility of the app developer (especially in the case of use of foreign UI toolkits). If you don’t see them it’s because its dev dropped the ball and the Mac version is an afterthought.
I think its more about priorities. I expect touch related features to be a bit rough on Linux and I expect the same for keyboard focused things on Mac.
Annoyingly it doesn't even maximize properly. You have to use alt-click for sensible behaviour.
They also decided about 10? years ago to make it behave as a "fullscreen" button which was really useless to me on a Mac Pro with 2 screens, where it would only ever "zoom" to one screen and then make the other screen display the desktop wallpaper - not the actual desktop - the wallpaper.
I have a lot of complaints but I would say my three big gripes are:
- Window navigation within (rather than between) open programs. Mainly if one is on an external monitor, this is just a nightmare and I end up using expose and clicking the window instead.
- Window positioning (I installed 3rd party software called Rectangle for this last year so it’s kind of solved but if we’re talking about the vanilla experience this is a big one)
- Having to switch focus to the dock and navigate one by one through shortcuts to open them instead of the Super+Dock position shortcuts that Windows and KDE expose
Interesting, those are problems I don't have, I guess due to my work and workflow.
Command-` works for window switching as I expect, probably simply due to being used to it so I know exactly how It works.
Window positioning is an interesting one. I can't stand windows being positioned through tools, I stack them like you would with papers and shuffle through so the edge overlap is really important. Probably showing my age there!
And I never use the dock. Spotlight gets me everything I'd need from there.
They kinda added window positioning with Tahoe -- there are things I like more about it than Rectangle (resizing), but I found that it was janky enough I switched back to Rectangle.
I rarely use the Dock, it's somewhat eye candy I leave up, or add stacks for folders that I use, but typically for keyboard action I reach for spotlight (cmd+space). Now, spotlight occasionally shitting the bed, that's another issue...
Humans are really bad at counting groups larger than five (might be related to the amount of things you can point on at once). So the choice of using ten polygons seems suboptimal to me, especially given the 12 hour system used. I think using only six shapes might work better for an actual clock.
For that matter, they aren't really Arabic numbers, Europe got them from the Arabs though. Hindu-Arabic would be little more correct.
Liber Abaci by Leonardo of Pisa (Fibonacci) is an important interesting book to read. There he is trying to convince the readers to shift to this Hindu-Arabic system he had picked up from the Arabs.
The Fibonacci series is also introduced to the Europeans for the first time through this book. I don't recall whether he calls the series the Hindu series in this book or somewhere else. The series was known to Indian mathematicians (Pingala, Euclid's contemporary, roughly) as an enumeration sequence of short and long beats that an interval of time could be broken into.
But what’s your expectations here? Should companies pretend LLMs don’t exist and just continue as before, or do we need some way of acknowledging there’s a new technology that, when put to good use, can increase productivity?
It remains to be seen whether LLMs actually increase productivity. The jury is far, FAR from delivering the verdict on this one. All I'm seeing out there is blind hope, hype and executive-level excitement about cutting staff.
What percent of dollars are tied up in in-flight oil transactions? And I suppose also in accounts that will be used for oil transactions in the planned future? That’s the mechanism for that supporting the value of the dollar, right, like, increased dollar demand via being used for oil market transactions?
The point is that the Petrodollar system requires countries to buy US treasuries to be able to buy oil. That is what makes borrowing cheap for the US, and what keeps the dollar demand up.
I'm not clear on how the Petrodollar system actually works.
If oil is sold in dollars, that only has to affect dollar demand for the time it takes to transit through some other currency to dollars to oil. So however long that takes to settle.
Where do the additional demand components come from? Why do countries have to buy US treasuries to be able to buy oil? Don't they just have to use dollars for the transaction?
Skills no longer needed… as long as you have access to an AI model provided by a handful of companies at an arbitrary rate; with training cost so high that only huge corporations have the funds to pull it off, building an ever-growing moat over time.
This sounds like a great future! Nothing worrying here at all.
This assumes that the way things are now is the way things always will be.
Right now AI is in its mainframe era (thin clients connecting to expensive compute somewhere else that you don't control), but I firmly believe that the AI version of the personal computing revolution is on the horizon. Democratized computing probably seemed pretty out of reach when all we had were mainframes, but in retrospect the progression from mainframe to personal computer to supercomputer in your pocket seems ordinary and almost expected.
I have no doubt that the technology needed to democratized personal AI will also advance in similar ways, and we will have no shortage of next generation's "640K ought to be enough for anybody."
We only got PCs because IBM screwed up. Every other ecosystem is walled off to various degrees. And absolutely every current corp knows about IBMs failure and definitely does not want to repeat it.
Nintendo? Walled garden. Playstation? Walled garden. Mac/iOS? Walled garden? Clouds? Obviously walled gardens, the higher the walls the more advanced the services. SaaS? Walled gardens. Social media? Walled gardens.
"Past performance is not indicative of future results." and "Don't count your chickens before they've hatched." except in the world of the AI advocates, where they confidently assure us that it's perfectly fine to count our AI chickens before they've hatched because reasons.
Maybe. Alternatively, things will veer further towards centralisation because that is where all the VCs bet on getting their investments back, and where they historically have seen the most revenue. I’m not convinced AI follows the same trajectory general computing did 50 years ago; the world has changed massively since then.
I think the problem is a stochastic one: More options seem to exist for this technolgy to abuse humanity via it's "owners" than do it to democratize anything. It's not like it's helping to wage war, molify the public and entraining pre-existing racist for the last decade.
These are all things happening today via AI, so really, this is an argument thats like, entropy. There's always way more ways in which things fall apart than they build to stability.
Being optimistic seems more like religiousity than any real accounting of the current system you're operating in (unless you're a billionaire).
No, that falls flat. A car can be produced by a sufficiently motivated group of people with reasonable funds. A competitive frontier model cannot.
And in contrast to the car, you don’t even get to own the model, you can only purchase access to it; as long as you have the money to pay, and a corporation decides to accept it, with the government always having a veto.
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