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Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

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Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#291

Post by nonethewiser »

lapcat wrote: post #285
nonethewiser wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take Figma for example. Couldn’t have been a web app 10 years ago. Users would have needed a desktop app in that case. You emphasize “need” but it seems you mean “want.” You bring up a great point about hardware too. People don’t need as much hardware given the increased connectivity and cloud computing. Again, I’m not suggesting all this is good. But of course users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10…

> Again, I’m not suggesting all this is good. But of course users _need_ local compute and native apps less than 10 years ago. Isn't this a problem for the future of Mac, though? It seems to me that dumbing down the Mac is the opposite of what Apple should do. Why not place emphasis on what makes desktop special, rather than morphing the Mac into an overpriced iOS device that only runs web apps?

That’s an interesting point. I don’t necessarily think it will go that far for the record. But Mac is probably comparatively well suited to make a profit off fancy devices with low computing power.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#292

Post by ramrunner0xff »

amelius wrote: post #214
adamgordonbell wrote: post #77

I was at the talk, and it's strange this what people take from it. You should watch the whole thing and see what he built over years. I was a bit disappointed that most of the questions ignored his talk about a very cool jukebox he built and focused on OS drama. He built a jukebox with all hit songs he could find in it 1900-2000 and for prerecorded music, got a player piano and sheet music and midi and integrated the…

That's cool but I can understand the audience: you don't have to be named Ken Thompson to build a RPi based jukebox.

what about designing the DSP/memory scsi disk that managed to do realtime ripping to PAC, then changing all that to mp3 using LAME, and the most important, creating usable metadata and finding all these CDs, and even finding ways to find a top-N song collection from dates that didn't have any relevant publications. I think you're underselling his achievement a bit ;). I found the talk to be an epic geek journey.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#293

Post by CamperBob2 »

phkahler wrote: post #287
kitsunesoba wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

>> I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually What I'm about to say may seem wrong, stupid, or crazy at first. I think permissions often belong in the GUI. Applications would get no access to the file system directly, but they could use an API in the gui to open files - only files that are granted access by the user, often by selection in a File->Open dialog or other…

At some point you have to trust the user to choose the apps they want to run. That's simply not the OS's job.

To the extent that it is the OS's job, you don't have a computer anymore. You have an appliance. Sometimes that's OK; I don't complain because I can't run Doom on my dishwasher. But let's be clear about what is a general-purpose personal computer, and what is not.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#294

Post by wutbrodo »

oefrha wrote: post #286
noisy_boy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By whatever mechanism the OS has to verify that you have the privilege. E.g. sudo. Not by raising a plethora of hurdles.

An admin password prompt is hardly a deterrence to people doing stupid things. A young physics PhD friend of mine fell victim to a tech support scam, happily installing whatever spyware “Apple Support” told her to install over phone. That was a few years ago. The average person is too easily social engineered into allowing anything.

Sure, I don't think either this[1] commenter or Ken Thompson were trying to say that the product category shouldn't exist. A computer is vastly overpowered for what the average user is capable of or interested in doing[2], which is why toy devices like iPads are so popular.

I interpreted both of their comments as claiming that the direction MacOS is taking is a poor fit for those who still get value from powerful, general-purpose computers (myself very much included! I occasionally have the misfortune of using Macs, but am much much happier on systems where I can dig as deep into its layers as I need to solve my problems or scratch my itches)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=35219381

[2] Though I do think it's a minor tragedy that the increasing amount of guardrails has narrowed the opportunity for an inquisitive youngster to explore his computer's internals

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#295

Post by kitsunesoba »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #293
phkahler wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually What I'm about to say may seem wrong, stupid, or crazy at first. I think permissions often belong in the GUI. Applications would get no access to the file system directly, but they could use an API in the gui to open files - only files that are granted access by the user, often by selection in a File->Open dialog or other…

At some point you have to trust the user to choose the apps they want to run. That's simply not the OS's job. To the extent that it is the OS's job, you don't have a computer anymore. You have an appliance. Sometimes that's OK; I don't complain because I can't run Doom on my dishwasher. But let's be clear about what is a general-purpose personal computer, and what is not.

> To the extent that it is the OS's job, you dn't have a computer anymore. You have an appliance.

In my opinion, that depends on the existence of an escape hatch. If it's like iOS where there effectively is none, sure, but if it's like macOS where SIP, Gatekeeper, etc can be temporarily disabled to make changes and then re-enabled or disabled entirely it's a different story.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#297

Post by tsuujin »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #130
milgra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful little tool for MacOS ( https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder and harder to install it because apple added more and more restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to listen for eve…

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

“Click yes syndrome” is so prevalent is has an actual name: banner blindness.

Last year you might have heard a court case talking about a nurse who killed a woman by accidentally giving her the wrong medication. She took responsibility but talked at length about how the system in place encourages workers to blindly click yes on alerts about medication because there are many of them. The training they got was basically “just click yes three* times” (* I don’t remember the actual number but three seems right).

One of those warnings could have saved a life had she read it, but she had been clicking yes many times a day every day for a long time and she no longer even saw the banner for what it was.

Interesting stuff from a UI/UX perspective.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#298

Post by lapcat »

sys_64738 wrote: post #259
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think there are specific issues. The problem is that with each release of macOS usability, reliability and performance regress. If you're interested in these things and not so much in "bling" and questionable new features, then you'd share probably Ken's "atrocious" opinion. An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually unusable.

> An example is the latest System Preferences. It's virtually unusable. Most people are familiar with the iOS model already. It's rare to find Mac users who aren't.

It's a bad model, because the iPhone Settings app itself is bad.

The order is seemingly random. You can't reorder, pin favorites, or hide unwanted settings. Many things are buried deep in hierarchies.

Not to mention that iPhone Settings is based on a small, non-resizable window and a touch interface, neither of which are true of the Mac.

Familiar crap is still crap.

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#299

Post by ramrunner0xff »

slim wrote: post #226

I feel privileged to watch this. I live in north Africa and I feel like taking a flight to California to go visit him, inquire about his health, tell him about my children progress at school, show him how much I love him and how much I'm grateful.

completely agree with you. ken and the not so big group of people who has positively shaped all our technology really need more appreciation from us users, although i'm sure he would be weirded out by it like any proper geek. That been said: thanks ken!

Re: Ken Thompson's 75 year project: A century of popular music in a jukebox [video]

#300

Post by jasonjayr »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #130
milgra wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the exact issues but might be related to the issues why I left Apple : I was developing a very successful little tool for MacOS ( https://github.com/milgra/macmediakeyforwarder ) which listened for keypresses. From 2016 to 2019 it became harder and harder to install it because apple added more and more restrictions to apps like this. By 2019, you had to enable the application explicitly to listen for eve…

I think permission systems are bound to wind up in all desktop operating systems, eventually. They’re already on Linux for those using Flatpak. Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users. That said, I agree that the macOS implementation has issues. It’s tricky though, because if they make it as simple as confirm/deny dialogs, you’…

> Trusting random third party binaries with access to everything is increasingly too much of a gamble, even for more technical users.

Regardless, I'd still like the final say in making that decision, otherwise it's not really my computer anymore, is it.

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