With little what I know of Voyager, the beautiful machine has broke all previous estimates. And thus hoping it will last until we have another such machine overtake the distance before this one goes into total shutdown
Unfortunately the lifetime of the plutonium RTG is very very predictable (due to the half life of the isotope they use). They are constantly shutting down parts of the probe exactly because the RTG is providing less and less power, and at some point it won't even be enough to heat the probe and run the computers.
Around 2030–2036, the power will likely drop below the level needed to run even a single instrument. At that point, Voyager 1 will officially "die" as a scientific mission.
But Voyager will keep going forever.
Because there is no air resistance or friction in the vacuum of space, Voyager 1 doesn't need "fuel" to keep moving. According to Newton’s First Law of Motion, an object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force. Since there's nothing out there to stop it, it will continue its journey long after its systems go dark.
In 40,000 years: It will pass within 1.7 light-years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor.
In 300,000 years: It might pass near the star Sirius.
The Long Haul: It is expected to orbit the center of our Milky Way galaxy indefinitely, potentially for billions of years, carrying the "Golden Record" as a final message from humanity.
Fun Fact: If Voyager 1 were to hit a pebble-sized object at its current speed, it would be catastrophic. Fortunately, space is so incredibly empty that the odds of it hitting anything larger than a dust grain for the next several billion years are nearly zero
Street parking makes suburbs worse, too. Almost everybody in my neighborhood has their garages piled to the ceiling with junk and parks in the street, which makes it a pain to weave through even for someone driving a compact crossover… I can’t imagine what kind of hell it is for trash and delivery drivers having to squeeze huge trucks and vans through without swiping peoples’ cars.
This is where legislation can come in - when I bought my house, one provision was that I can't change the front to a garden, it has to remain usable as a parking space for a car. Even if I don't have a car. There's limited extra / visitor parking available. Of course, a lot of people have two cars so it's kinda moot but still.
Don't take this the wrong way but to anyone who has read the book "The High Price of Free Parking" this contribution to this thread reads like someone who came late to a meeting and missed half of the discussion and keeps asking questions that would have been answered had they joined earlier.
I can see why you might ask this, but the book very much focused on the idea that a piece of land much preserve space for a parking space. It might sound innocuous but it is the source of many issues within cities, a contributor to housing inaffordability, why so many buildings in the US are surrounded by miles of parking, why some of the lots in your city are derelict, etc.
The book very much addresses why mandated parking minimums even in suburban residential lots are also bad (specially the mandated minimum less so the carpark itself), I highly recommend the book mentioned above.
Now, instead of letting car owners pay for the public space they use (street parking), you are forcing anyone without a car to waste their own private space, in case somebody wants to park there.
The subtle difference is between American parking minimums imposed on property owners - “you must reserve space on your private property for this many cars whether you own them or not” vs Japanese parking requirements imposed on car owners - “you must reserve space on some private property for your car if you want to own it”
In my area street parking is banned on collection day until 5pm. This is also when they do street cleaning. Somehow everyone finds room for all their cars on this day. Otherwise its similar to how you describe.
Guilty of garage as a storage shed, but its also crazy to me people don't store their second most expensive asset inside their garage.
I have space in garage for car at times of year when plowing may be needed. But plenty of space outside on driveway at times of year when it's not. Live in a very safe area and it's easier to just pull up in front of the garage door. Not sure what's crazy about that.
It doesn't help that under-main-roof garages seem to be designed to only just fit small to medium sized cars despite the significant, rampant inflation of car sizes over the past few years.
My family tend to opt for smaller cars, because we're practical and don't have the faulty 'keeping up with the Joneses' gene, which means we can fit two cars in a two car garage.
We may still be in the majority, but it feels like it won't be for long.
UMR garage sizes should be inflating with the average car size. The Ford Ranger, essentially a fucking truck, and completely impractical, is the highest selling car in Australia because of backwards-thinking tax incentives from a few years ago, and then the ensuing Joneses effect.
Garages are the easiest way to get cheap storage space attached to or close to your home. Apart from garden sheds.
The issue is really the perverse incentive: if there is free onstreet parking, its usually more useful to put your car on the street and use the garage for something else. For many people that might even hold true if they have to walk a bit to the next parling spot
That's really hard to escape unless you remove free on-street parking from large areas at once
I think it's a corollary of Parkinson's Law: Crap expands to fill the space available for it. It's one reason I've never gotten a shed rather than just depending on my garage to store stuff in the winter when I need to get any cars off the driveway for plowing. Too much temptation to just fill spaces up.
Gravity kind of cuts both ways. Closer to that of Earth is nearly guaranteed to be better for long term human health, but there's a possibility that martian gravity is "good enough" when supplemented with excercise while also making heavy operations and getting back out of the planet's gravity well easier.
It can be both if for the majority of layoffs, AI is just a scapegoat to act as cover for cuts made for financial reasons or offshoring and not the actual cause.
From what I've seen many efforts to replace roles such as customer service with AI are being rolled back or downscaled due to intolerably high error rates and general incapability. While these segments won't come out unscathed I don't think the actual impact will end up being as severe as feared.
You're apparently assuming that AI related layoffs are rational, based on those making the decisions having good information about what their own organizations are achieving with AI.
I think this is far from the truth. In many companies AI has become a religion, not a new technology to be evaluated and judged. Employees are told to use AI, and report how much they are using, and all understand the consequences of giving the wrong answer. The CEO hears the tales of rampant AI use and productivity that he is demanding to hear, then pats himself on the back and initiates another layoff. Meanwhile in the trenches little if anything has actually changed.
OK, but your post reads as if you think that AI being the cause of layoffs can't be true if AI is "worthless" (less capable than they are assuming), which is false.
CEOs are laying off because of AI because they think it will save them money, but are doing so based on misinformation, largely due their own insistence that everyone uses AI, and report how much they are using - they are just hearing what they asked to hear (just like Mao hearing about impossible levels of rice production during the "Great Leap Forward"). I'm not making this up - I've seen it first hand.
You can see the proof of this - companies laying of because of what they mistakenly believe AI can do - in companies like Salesforce, forced to do an embarassing U-turn and hire people back when the reality sets in. At least Salesforce were quick to correct - most big companies are not so nimble or ready to admit their own mistakes.
We seem to have reached mania-like levels of rice-production reporting, with companies like Meta now taking AI token usage as a proxy for productivity and/or a measure of something positive, and apparently having a huge leaderboard displaying who is using the most (i.e. spending the most money!). The only guaranteed outcome of this is that they will indeed see massive use of tokens, and a massive AI bill, and then in a year or so will likely be left scratching their heads wondering why nothing much appears to have changed.
Also, in the 2010s a lot of old guard UX designers got circulated out in favor of designers who either had backgrounds in other mediums (e.g. print) or were generalists with little understanding of user interfaces or technical capabilities. This didn't help matters.
For real though, when UX became an actual official discipline wasn't too long before a lot of the arse fell out of graphic design and a load of them moved over. A lot of people from newer generations of UX/UI people are possibly worse, often just rolling out conventions wholesale with little thought. Hiding behind design systems and clutching Figma files like they're pearls.
Contrary to what the author says, actual idioms are more common than ever before. They've just cherry picked older examples. He's talking about an era of software where one of the Windows media player skins was a giant green head (No shade, I loved that guy) the real issue is in the superficial changes and the aforementioned lack of consideration when rolling them out
Not really true if what you want is a full macOS-style desktop experience with a few choice features from elsewhere bolted on. Linux desktops are predominantly Windows-style or minimal tiling thing, with the exceptions (GNOME, Pantheon) bearing only surface-level Mac aesthetics and being more comparable to superpowered tablet OS experiences.
MacOS is neutered for any advanced or even power user compared to practically any Linux desktop experience. Trying to just resize or remove a window should convince you of that instantly.
That statement makes no sense. X11 works fine on macOS and running it in rootful mode with Gnome essentially works the same way it would work on an OS that uses the Linux kernel.
Granted, it will not integrate with anything hardware-wise by itself (unless there's a package for it - if not, macOS still handles it, and Aqua/Quartz will keep running in the background anyway), but if what you wanted was something that is KDE or GNOME running with its own WM on its own X11 server, doing the exact same thing you'd get if you're running a Linux distro, that's been natively possible for over 15 years.
If a power user loses their power based on what GUI happens to be in front of them, how much of a power user was the power user to begin with?
There is a major difference between losing your power and having to constantly fight the UI to keep your power. And, for example, window management on Mac is clunky as all hell.
It's just a matter of what one is used to. As someone who's used macOS since before OS X was released (alongside Windows and Linux), moving and resizing windows rarely poses issues.
I'm talking about the desktop environment explicitly, not the underlying OS.
To me, GNOME and Pantheon (elementaryOS DE) strongly resemble e.g. iPadOS or Android running on a tablet for a few reasons:
- Chunky heavily padded touch-optimized UI elements (even when no touch capability is present)
- By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
- Near total abandonment of menubars in favor of mobile-style "hamburger" menus
- By default, no desktop icons (not even an app grid!)
- Simplistic ecosystem apps with mobile-like philosophy of eschewing functionality that doesn't fit in toolbars and hamburger menus
- Little to no presence of progressive disclosure (enabling power user functions to be present without falling in the path of novices and tripping them up)
- Limited extensibility and scriptability (more so than macOS in some ways), with what exists (GNOME extensions) being fragile and breaking constantly due to needing to monkeypatch UI code
While it's not my cup of tea, KDE and even less trendy DEs like XFCE do a better job at acting like an actual desktop environment and surfacing the capabilities of the system.
> By default, minimize button not present in titlebars
This is explained by the ElementaryOS H.I.G.:
> Apps should save their current state when closed so they can be reopened right to where the user left off. Typically, closing and reopening an app should be indistinguishable from the legacy concept of minimizing and unminimizing an app; that is, all elements should be saved including open documents, scroll position, undo history, etc.
> Because of the strong convention of saved state, elementary OS does not expose or optimize for legacy minimize behavior; e.g. there is no minimize button, and the Multitasking View does not distinguish minimized windows.
Ah. Well then I'll argue my original statement holds. Op himself likened his product to gnome 2. Gnome 3 was released 15 years ago so if anything I was generous in my original comment.
I have their Q60, which is a retro-themed HHKB layout 60% board. Paired with a set of beige-Mac-themed MT3 Extended 2048 keycaps, out of my collection it's one of my favorites and sees some of the most use. It goes head to head with pricier one-off hobbyist boards.
I wonder how suitable these CAD files would be for either CNCing or resin-printing a translucent fruit-colored plastic case for a different flavor of retro. That'd be really cool.
Both variants are great but I'm particularly fond of the PBT version. The slightly rough/matte texture that doesn't wear away easily and exaggerated dome shapes are sublime to use.
I think the bigger issue is that way too many devs still live in the extremely dated paradigm of “anything has access to everything all the time”, even though this model has repeatedly proven itself unworkable (particularly for anybody using proprietary software, which is notorious for sticking its fingers in places it has no business touching).
The way macOS handles permissions with user prompts might be the wrong UX, but giving every program carte blanche by default is definitely not the answer either.
It’s dangerous, particularly for those of us who are developing and publishing software that’s used by many thousands of people — we’re juicy targets and every time we disable protections in the name of convenience and carelessly run random third party software with unfettered access we’re playing with fire. I find myself consistently stunned by the flippant attitude SWEs take towards securing their systems. Our confidence that we’re too smart to fall victim is entirely misplaced.
This is similar to how I use Spaces. I haven't hotkeyed desktops, but each one is designated for a particular task or theme. The concept extends further with a secondary display, with the primary monitors' spaces being assigned "main task" duty while the secondary displays' spaces get "aux task" duty — so e.g. IDEs and browser windows immediately relevant to the task at hand go on a main monitor desktop while secondary display desktops are used for things like chat, music, and documentation.
This is a core part of my workflow and is one of the reasons why I would have a difficult time using Windows as my primary OS: its virtual desktop support is far too weak in comparison. It can't even switch desktops independently per-display.
Clever hack. Now if there were some way to bring back the OS X 10.5/10.6 2D spaces grid… the linear design in place since 10.7 has always felt overly simplistic.
That is indeed the biggest thing I missed so much. When I finally moved from macOS to KDE I got the grid desktops back and I love them so much.
I have 9 virtual desktops and a 3x3 grid is so much easier to navigate than a row of 9. Also, Apple makes them dynamic now. I have each desktop assigned to a specific purpose. It's like having 9 computers at my fingertips.
Almost every release of macOS after 10.6 or so dropped something I used and the replacement if any was rarely good enough. So it started rubbing me the wrong way, more and more with every release. I'm so glad I'm no longer on an opinionated OS but that I have a desktop environment that cherishes configurability and options.
In keeping with this, for the transition animation you can choose several options like a fade and a slide, you can turn them off completely (as this hack does for macOS). You can even set the speed of some transitions. I have it set to slide but faster than normal. So the sliding gives me a little spatial awareness of where I move within the grid, but it still feels snappy. All just by ticking some options. I love KDE <3
I've tried KDE but unfortunately too much of it clashes with my preferences, even after spending quite a lot of time tinkering with its many config options. It's a nice project but I don't think it'll ever be for me, despite carrying features from older versions of macOS.
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