This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.
Pardons should be changed to be subject to congressional approval (and rate limited). It’s clearly been demonstrated that the temptation to abuse it is too great.
As a young engineer, I was once visited at my work desk by my CEO and the HR team because of all the Dilberts I had up on my cubicle wall. They felt they were harming morale. The engineers around me loved them, but they made fun of management, the real issue. I was surprised it merited the attention. I won a short battle over the issue and was allowed to keep them up. I still have a photo of that cubicle with them up.
Once, before the web existed, I emailed Scott and joked that perhaps he was someone at my company, looking over my shoulder. The comics were often absurd but also so accurate. He replied something friendly, I forget what.
The extent of my writings are here in HackerNews comments. I don't have the time or discipline of Andy to be able to sit down and write like he does. Maybe someday, but for now I am using the free time I have outside of work to make music and ride bikes as fast as I can.
Full agree. The TouchBar was a genuine innovation that gave new ways to interact with data and context. But without the function keys (and the real ESC) there were frequent accidental touches on the bar and a real tactile loss for existing function key intuitions. And now an extremely rare, genuine, programmable HCI innovation is scuttled because of an unthought-thru roll out. A missed opportunity. (I keep my 2019 MBP with the good keyboard largely for this, but ultimately the laptop was ruined by the super hot Intel cpu, which also makes the touch bar uncomfortable to use at times.)
Bret Victor being behind the touch bar explains so much about its potential. Apple has such a weird track record of releasing really interesting stuff that they let languish without enhancement. And then you have weird episodes where they have too much conviction on the wrong things, like the butterfly keyboard, where they release multiple iterations which all end up failing.
I didn’t notice that it hasn’t been updated since ‘21 (TM2), but I still use it every day. Just a reliable, minimal, fully native (no electron, etc) editor that is flexible enough to keep adding new bundles to. I’m sad it’s not in development, but happy it’s an oasis from AI coding.
One can make Spaces deterministic by turning off Automatically rearrange Spaces. Add keyboard shortcuts for quick access to each. On multi-display setups, you can have the whole group of displays work in lock-step on a project by turning off Displays have separate Spaces. These are the first two things I uncheck on a new system. Each Space can be dedicated to different projects using any number of apps instead of trying to correlate Spaces with specific apps. (Sadly, you can only have up to 16 Spaces.)
Side plug, I have a utility that lets you associate names with each Space: https://github.com/hyperjeff/NameSpace (Apple should’ve made naming Spaces standard, but no.)
