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Meta: I didnt see an explicit date on the page and am ballparking 1999 because the <meta> GENERATOR tag says Netscape 4.51: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_(web_browser)#Release...>

16:9 60Hz kinda sucks though :/

Yes I realize the Pro Display XDR has those same specs. 16:10 or 3:2 120Hz or 144Hz would be ideal to me.


I posted about the new Kuycon 28” 3:2 aspect 4.5k monitor I discovered recently today:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46647190


I've got an eye on the CES Samsung Odyssey offerings at 32" 6k 165hz. I'd prefer 16:10 and currently run two 16:10 30" displays, but nobody making them.

> I do admire that they dared to do something different and took a big gamble on it. So many vehicles, especially in the truck space, are almost indistinguishable and lack any kind of imagination.

I 1000% agree with this, in fact I love the way it looks, like something out of a SEGA Saturn game. But I would never buy one for the same reasons I would never buy any Tesla, or in fact any EV, or any post-2014 car at all. But the looks of it are not one of those reasons :)

I do have to laugh every time I see a Tesla with one of those “Bought this before we knew Elon was crazy!!” stickers, because to me they just read as “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. It's weird to me to think that other people are thinking that way about their automobiles, because I bought mine (Prius C) based on its features and how they fit into my needs and my life. I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.


> Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. I

I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.


Nobody thinks you share the same views as the CEO of your car company. Jesus. GP is right. It makes them seem utterly self-conscious.

People were absolutely giving attitude towards people in Teslas in general, and Cybertrucks in particular, around the peak of all the DOGE nonsense.

Still are, for Cybertrucks


Nonsense?

Yeah, you're right, the US Federal government is a peak engine of efficiency and it's nonsense to think massive sums of money are wasted.


If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.

You just made a massive non sequitur. The government does have waste, as does any large organization, including in the private sector. Whether or not DOGE saved money needs an independent analysis, not numbers which DOGE itself produces.

Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.

Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.

Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:

https://www.npr.org/2025/06/02/nx-s1-5417994/former-doge-eng...

After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.

Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.


I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.

I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).

I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).

You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.

My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.

I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.


Nonsense in how they approached things. Clinton-era we had govt. cut backs all over the place. It was done according to a plan and according to the law.

This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.


Not that you share the same views but at least directly funneling money to someone harming many.

You do that merely by using the monetary system at all.

"You criticize society, yet you participate in it!"

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...


If only you knew how bad things really are. https://i.ibb.co/7NTZdSC8/intelligent.jpg

Even were I to be more charitable to your original comment, it is nihilism, which I dislike. "Don't criticize any particularly immoral component of our system, because it's all bad and resistance is futile".

Nihilism is a self fulfilling prophecy.


You shouldn't confuse disinterest with The Spectacle and its siren song to Support or Oppose every new storyline with belief in nothing at all. I am definitely not a nihilist.

My bad. It's just that when someone criticizes a person for some small, specific action or boycott by saying "don't you know that does nothing and that other places also have their flaws", it usually comes off as nihilism and discouragement to having values.

Surely you recognize how someone could think buying a car from the company owned by a near trillionaore who helped a fascist get power and now tweets about the need for White solidarity is a bad thing.


You won't survive long without using the monetary system, but you could go your whole life without supporting many of the companies who you see as harmful. Now that money is speech and corporations are increasingly running the oligarchy there are very few levers people have left to try to influence their government. I don't think boycotting massive corporations will be any more successful than trying to get our representatives to care more about our wishes than the bribes they get from those same companies, but at least it feels like doing something.

I'm not sure how that adds to the conversation. Let's say North Korea puts out a really cool phone. Are you going to go: "yeah buying it supports a dictator who is brutal to his people but so does participating in a monetary system so nothing matters so it's okay"

I would buy a North Korea phone if it was cool, band-compatible with my domestic carrier, and wasn't embargoed (i.e. if sale was possible), yeah. I already daily a China phone and depending on who you talk to that isn't much better: https://redmagic.tech/pages/redmagic-9s-pro

People absolutely do. Elon, Trump, and his supporters have politicized the cars (https://www.the-sun.com/motors/11906310/trump-rally-cybertru...) and now the connection is to be expected.

It's not surprising since people don't really have meaningful representation in government and have to resort to trying to hit companies where it hurts in order effect change whether that means boycotting a car company because of a CEO, or boycotting a beer because of a trans person in an instagram ad.

Unfortunate as it is, what you buy and where you shop is very much a political statement.


You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

It's juvenile and silly and screams "midwit overly absorbed into political news."

Enjoy your unearned moral superiority. It's a thin blanket against the cold wind of mediocrity, but you do you.


In 2026, if you're genuinely unaware of his white supremacist opinions, perhaps you need to be more absorbed into [sic] political news.

He's alluded to thinking that Asians and Indians are "better" on some metrics so supremacy still seems a bit sensationalist. He certainly doesn't think all races are equal.

> You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.

Nothing except his antisemitic tweets, his posts defending Hitler, his support of Alternative for Germany, his support of prominent white supremacists, his chatbot which praises Hitler, his endorsement of racist conspiracies, and the occasional "Sieg Heil". What exactly would "something" look like to you?

Being morally superior to that is an exceptionally low bar to clear and it's earned easily by everyone who rejects the hate and lies he publishes, supports, and encourages.


The man is officially a dear friend of Israel, he has never defended Hitler, he indeed supports the German far right party, his chatbot had an alignment issue that has been patched within 16 hours.

What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.


If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then we have to entertain the possibility that we are dealing with a duck.

To me it looks like Musk is overly concerned about discrimination against whites as well as woke ideology, also out of personal experience with his child.

The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.


> Elon was a nazi nutjob

I find it hilarious that people think this because he did some tangentially Roman-salute-esque gesture once. His political platform is nowhere near Nazism. He would actually be a much more interesting person if it were.


Then sell the car. Putting the sticker on the car won't make you look good in the eyes of either Elon fans or Elon detractors.

Selling the car is complicated by market conditions and tariffs which could make the cost of a replacement and/or the terms of the sale much worse. We can cut people some slack for making a stupid purchase under very different circumstances. They're already being punished by owning the shitty car as it is.

This seems like it is speaking from privilege. I have not even paid the car off, 5.5 years later. I am not going to sell a perfectly working (if not very good IMO) car at a loss. And buy what instead? No, I will stick with my functional but terribly unergonomic car now built by a nazi.

Let me get this straight. You bought a "statement car" but not for its statement, and then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?

Yes, anybody who puts a sticker on their car apologizing for owning it is somebody who bought it to make a statement. I bought mine because I researched best gas mileage, lowest ongoing maintenance cost, and dimensions that fit the the city, and that's what I came up with.

>Yes, anybody who puts a sticker on their car apologizing for owning it is somebody who bought it to make a statement.

Or the opposite, buying the car wasn't a statement at the time and they don't like that driving it feels like a statement now so they got a bumper sticker to acknowledge that their continued ownership is not a statement of support for Musk and his ideology.


Real ones wouldn't be thinking about it at all.

Lots of reports of Tesla's getting keyed. I know Tesla owners who bought the sticker just to avoid getting keyed.

My favorite is the cybertruck with the T O Y O T A decal on the back

The world's richest man did a nazi salute. Real ones would fight WW2 against him

So it all boils down to "No True Scotsman"? How about I offer you an alternative:

We don't try to guess why you bought what you bought, or why you need to so actively rationalize it, and you stop assuming that those stickers are something other than "Please don't key this car" signs. Less dramatically some of them are also "I bought this before the guy started throwing celebratory HiterGruß on stage and carving up important parts of the government for nonexistent savings."

Which... for people outside of your bubble is something important.


How are you defining "real ones"? Because it seems like you're implying that someone can't have political opinions while also occasionally making apolitical decisions.

Until someone who hates Elon (not saying that's wrong per se) throws a brick through the window (which IS wrong per se) and you're on the hook for paying for it.

Then you are really bad at research

The 175k miles I've put on it over the last decade say otherwise :)

> then you assume that other people driving a different "statement car" bought it because of the statement?

He assumed that people who drive a statement car emblazoned with a big sticker that says "HERE'S THE STATEMENT I INTENDED TO MAKE" bought it because of the statement. I think that's a reasonable assumption.


How is a Tesla a "statement car"? A Cybertruck, sure. But Tesla's are as normal as anything on the road nowadays.

Depends on the market. In Australia Tesla is much pricier than all the Chinese options (more the norm). In my area people who would have probably bought a Tesla are looking at BMW's range.

They also avoid buying certain cars to make a statement.

You're right about it looking like something out of a game. I passed one wrapped in fluorescent green at a gas station the other night (owner was checking the tire pressure) and it indeed made think 'low polygon count'. I would not have been entirely surprised if the driver had looked similar.

Thing is, after the initial momentary amusement the novelty quickly evaporates. It doesn't have the compelling presence of, say, a Tumbler. https://brucewaynex.com/pages/tumbler


> “Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”

The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."

I understand you don't think it's a good car, which is fine, but most people who bought one did not agree with you.

Your comment is a little confusing because you obviously understand this concept, you bought a Prius because you thought it was a good car, not because of a political statement others may have projected onto your purchase. The same is true of most Tesla owners.


> The correct interpretation for most people is "I bought my car because it was a good car and now for reasons beyond my control it may appear to be a political statement. Also sorry for giving that guy money, I didn't know he would spend it on Trump."

No, he had it right. Those stickers are idiotic. It won't make anyone like them any better. Sell the car if you don't like it that much.


They may not have put it there because they were "self-conscious" about their "statement car." They may have put it there in an honest attempt to avoid having their car vandalized for something they had nothing to do with.

> I guess the Prius line was a popular “statement car” of the pre-Tesla era, though, like how Brian drives one on Family Guy, or the “Smug Alert” episode of South Park, but it was never that for me.

... So you admit to falling for Toyota product placement in cartoons.


Did Toyota pay for "Smug Alert"? Wasn't that the one where owning a Prius was smelling your own farts?

Learn to read. I actually didn't see that episode until years after I both owned a Prius and lived in San Francisco, and I found it very funny :)

There's a language called SLang inside Goldman Sachs used for their SecuritiesDB, and that's how I read it at first glance even with the dollar sign lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Dubno#SecDB

That's what I thought too. The $ sign seemed quite appropriate given Goldman's line of business.

See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-Lang (https://www.jedsoft.org/slang/index.html), a (stack-based) scripting language implementing a terminal UI toolkit. Mutt can use use S-Lang instead of ncurses.

I wonder what a program written in that language looks like.

Slang? The IDE looked like Turbo C++ of old (blue, text based interface). Shortcuts are weird, so you need to remap keys to get sane defaults.

Probably the most unique feature is that the language supports spaces in identifiers. So you'd have variables like "Option Portfolio Risk" or functions like "Calculate Estimated PnL". Visually obviously different from Python, but it gave me Pythonic vibes.

It's also nice that it supports preconditions, so you can specify the valid range of arguments etc. It has some kind of OOP support but tbh it felt bolted on (understandably).

But the most value adding, IMHO, is the DevEx and deep integration with SecDb. Say what you want about the DOS-like IDE and the old (20+ years old for sure, maybe 30+) language, but you can deploy your code SO easily into production, with guardrails in place.

Out of curiosity, I implemented a toy language (thanks to Robert Nystrom's Crafting Interpreters) that supports spaces in identifiers (https://github.com/rayfdj/gaul-lang) as well. Makes for an interesting weekend coding project, and it helps me understand more the tradeoffs that Slang designers must have gone through.


   fn Calculate Portfolio Risk(Initial Investment, Risk Factor) {
      let My Very Special Adjustment = 0.95
      Initial Investment * Risk Factor * My Very   Special Adjustment
  }
that is so cool; this is actually something i've been looking for a long time

and jam karet looks interesting; `if input ~= "yes"` made me smile.

i also liked the keyword replacement for multiple languages as well, that could be super usefull for children learning programming i'd think!


Thank you for the kind words! I had great fun implementing it. Robert Nystrom is such a hero for writing Crafting Interpreters.

its a big inspiration for me because thats on my list of things to do

i tried your repo and it works just as you say; so cool

i may introduce it to some acquaintances who have trouble learning programming caused by reading english characters/grammar troubles


See also the Slang shader language, it's a pretty recent development! https://shader-slang.org

Want to submit to HN and email us (hn@ycombinator.com) so we can put it in the SCP? (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308)

“If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.”


Pardon my pedantry, but Facebook Chat was never XMPP-based. They ran an XMPP gateway into their proprietary messaging system, but there was no S2S.

Compare to Aqua and Platinum where every resizable window/pane had a big square drag target clearly labeled as such with some diagonal lines:

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...

https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/system/managers/filema...


It also - as seen in that screenshot, had large, always visible scrollbars where it was easy to see how far down you were in a folder or document, and could easily click and drag to scroll to where you needed. Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

The scrollbar thing is a more widespread mess. I've seen plenty of apps (cross platform) which hide the scrollbar as a tiny grey bar only visible when scrolling. Which on some TN panels is neigh invisible... If I can't see the scrollbar there is no additional stuff to read. I'm now pretty sure this is apple's bad design leaking though to the rest of the world.

Apple scrollbars have never looked uglier. I would prefer them to always show but they're so ugly I keep it default. On Aqua they looked great! On Windows they're still great!

> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

You can make them always on still. I've done so ever since their disappearing act started. It's not even much hidden, it's in the "Appearance" setting pane.


They're still too small and too light. Some times when a document is big enough I'm actually not able to find the scroll thumb on macOS Sequoia. Some times wiggling the scroll thumb around by scrolling slightly back and forth with my mousewheel/trackpad helps to make it visually appear, but other times I just have to give up.

Also I've noticed sometimes things don't even work correctly with "always on". Some developers don't test it because it's not the default.

These developers also haven't bothered to test with any mouse other than an Apple Trackpad, which turns the scrollbars on by default.

Of course we all make mistakes, but anyone who has made this mistake should really fix it!


The default modality changed.

Classic Macs were designed for the mouse or trackball. Modern Macs are designed for multitouch scrolling. When it's easy to get the scrolling infrastructure on demand, the desktop might not need the same click-first affordances.


You're missing the fact that the scrollbars also indicate where you are in their range, which is important regardless of how you do the scrolling itself.

I think their point also covers this - since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear and see where you are. And that's only if you haven't configured it to always display.

You don't even have to scroll. Placing two fingers on the pad makes the scrollbar appear immediately. I'm happy for each additional pixel of space on my screen, but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.

It should, unfortunately apple doesn't believe the same I suppose. I'm lucky enough that I'm happy with their defaults and don't spend much time thinking about tweaking stuff on my computers, but I can understand it being super frustrating if you're not okay with the available settings.

Yeah. Defaults should make the details of the system go out of the user's way, for >95% of the users, >95% of their time. The remaining <5% of users are power users and hackers, and the remaining <5% of usage are strong taste and individual hacks.

> but I also think a scrollbar should be completely configurable userland behavior.

It is configurable, right in System Preferences > General. (Or I guess it's "Settings" now on modern systems, don't know what menu it's in there.)


Based on some discussions of users that have already downloaded Tahoe, I was under the impression that this is no longer possible? Also, I think it’s not possible to have the scroll bar outside of the window instead of overlaying some content.

Hmm. I haven't used Tahoe myself, but this piece by John Gruber would seem to imply the option still exists. Maybe it got moved? https://daringfireball.net/linked/2026/01/12/macos-26-cut-co...

I dread the day I must find out :)

P.S.: seems like the setting still keeps the scroll bar on top of the windows content (e.g. a website), not outside of the content.


Traditionally the setting has moved the scroll bar outside of content. I can’t say for sure what they’ve done in Tahoe, but I’m not sure how else it would work—if the scroll bar is persistent it will persistently cover your content.

Many of the complains surrounding the former iOS7 and today's Liquid Glass are tied to the requirement of the interface never moving. Which isn't just an unreasonable requirement, but a ridiculous one.

Just like iOS7+ it is possible to position and layer interface elements in a way where the visual effects will render a screenshot difficult to read, but in practice the elements are frequently in motion or as you've already pointed out easy to make them move. That motion is what negates the layering problems, thus making visual occlusions rare, short-lived and easily resolved.

There is a certain unreasonableness in ignoring that reality, and also ignoring that there is a user setting to keep a full-sized version of the scroll bars always visible.

This isn't to take away from legitimate criticisms such as the issue with the resize hotbox not being updated to match the more rounded corners, but rather highlight that not all online forum criticisms comes from a bona fide place.


> since it's so easy to scroll, you can always just do a little two finger scroll wiggle to have it appear

That changes the effort required to show useful information from zero to more than zero. Which, while it not be a great quantitative change, is an enormous qualitative change.

Like Chesterton's Fence, it was there for a reason.

"At last (and at least) we have reclaimed that narrow vertical strip of screen real estate on the screens eastern-most vestige! Now to find a good use for it!"

The true annoyance is that in many cases explicitly enabling them does not restore the original functionality.


There is an imbalance between the harms you're pretending to endure versus:

1. The trivial ability it is to resolve, and

2. The existence of an easily accessible user setting to enable the behaviour that you desire.

Fundamentally your complaint thus comes down to a gripe that the OS's defaults don't match your completely subjective idea of how just one of many OS elements should work.

Which raises such an interesting question, because of all of the UX behaviours present on macOS - this is your hill?


At last (and at least) we have reclaimed that narrow vertical strip of screen real estate on the screens eastern-most vestige! Now to find a good use for it!"

...extra padding?


If one chooses "Always" under the "Show scroll bars" option on the Appearance System Settings panel. They will be rewarded with thick*, always-on scroll bars that do not disappear.

*They're the same thickness as Aqua.


Sadly, this doesn't restore the 'resize box', you just get scrollbars ending in a weird curve.

Yes, the scroll bars settings affects the scroll bars.

They are still very low-contrast compared to what was.

The scroll bars for those curious: https://imgur.com/a/uhVO8IA

> Now in the service of minimalism we have scrollbars that consist of a thin, semi-transparent line that fades out after half a second and is nearly impossible to click and drag due to how small it is.

This is endemic now. Cinnamon does it by default and I hate it. I only managed a partial fix, and then I had to do more work per-app (especially Firefox) to make them behave.


In the Aqua image the big bright blue scrollbars stand out far, far more than the content. That sucks, honestly. So does the percentage of the screen dedicated to their presence.

Also, horizontal scrollbars suck. One thing later versions of Finder did well was adjust columns to minimize the presence of them.

We just don't need UI that big anymore. These days our cursors are much more accurate, from the magical Mac trackpad to high DPI optical mice, and we're 40+ years into GUIs so the limited number of people who opt-in to a full computing experience can already be expected to know the basics.

Yes Tahoe sucks, but going back to Aqua or classic MacOS would also suck, just in a different direction. If you actually spend time using classic MacOS and Aqua these days, man is it frustrating to get basic things done. Everything is so slow and you're constantly resizing windows to see whats in them. I own several Macs from the 80s-00s and they are really in need of many quality of life updates that later MacOS revs added. On a modern Mac, enabling 'show scrollbars' gets you to a pretty optimal Finder experience, minus all the stupid Mac bugs and Tahoe nonsense like this article points out.


Hard disagree with all of this. I feel like I am constantly lamenting the simplicity and usability of old scrollbars and cursing their will o the wisp modern implementations.

Scrollbars used to be invisible to me. They only bubbled up to my consciousness when I needed them, and then there was no friction in their use. Now I am having to think about them constantly. To me that is 'standing out'.


Very much agree. Nostalgia is a hell of a drug. Not saying GP's opinion was pure nostalgia, but a lot of people certainly selectively remember only the good parts as they complain about the now.

I actually don't think there's anything wrong with horizontal scrollbars, as long as you're using an input device (like an Apple trackpad) that makes it equally easy to scroll either axis.

Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!

I do think that was better overall, and it's something I miss about Snow Leopard, but I can see why they changed it.


>Note that downside: you could only resize from that bottom right corner, not from any other edge!

This was one of the worst things about MacOS and why they lost me as a user early on. I used to be a Mac Sysadmin for 3 years, and the awful window system (and Finder) made it a living hell. I still don't find much to like about the GUI part of MacOS.



I don't see what's wrong with both, or even whatever combination you choose to configure.

It should be noted the drag handle was removed back in Lion. And the square cutout was removed in Panther, both of which were iterations of Aqua.

(and yes Lion was garbage, first upgrade I skipped since Tiger, and definitely the first "what the fuck are they doing").


Going back to Lion would almost feel like bliss compared to Tahoe. Hell, bliss compared to Big Sur.

Windows also used to have a "grip" indicator. Nowadays I only see this in resziable textboxes in browsers...

To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar. It's part of the Windows status bar design, not of the window design. Of course, many more applications used to have status bars than they do now, so that's why you see it less often.

> To be fair, this grip indicator only (and still) exists when the window has a status bar.

Here's a resizable window in Platinum that has a drag handle but does not have a status bar: https://guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/settings/appearance/ma...

edit: I missed "Windows" in GP comment. Well let it be known that at least Platinum wasn't like this :)


What's up with that, anyway? Statusbars are great. They are one of the most useful parts of the window.

Better in that it was clear, but worse that you had to resize from the bottom right. Made expanding to the left, or up, very annoying. I'd take the current situation over this.

True, but not a 1:1 comparison, because Classic Mac OS windows were much better at staying where you put them, even between sessions. John Siracusa wrote a lot about how this was missing from Mac OS X: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2003/04/finder/

People also didn't regularly plug classic Macs into external monitors, changing the screen resolution temporarily.

For this and many other reasons, I just don't think the paradigm would work today. It's philosophically smart but limiting in too many other ways.


Yeah that is also true. I have had that experience with certain CD-ROMs (maybe like two or three ever but has happened) on my PowerBook 2400c. If the authoring machine had a higher display resolution than my machine, and the author had the writable disc image's window open to a place outside my screen resolution, and the window positions got saved to the DesktopDB/DesktopDF, and the DesktopDB/DesktopDF got written to the CD-ROM, then it would open in the position outside my screen resolution every time my own DesktopDB/DesktopDF got erased. One particular artist's CD-ROM is completely outside of it which annoys me every time.

Relevant TA: https://web.archive.org/web/20090625152558/http://support.ap...


Great comment. I had forgotten how much better things were in terms of visual indicators. Slick looking design should never come at the expense of usability.

Why did they stop this?

It was parctical (just like clearly visible scrollbars).

And my conviction is that computers are for practical and not the pretty things primarily. Can be pretty but not on the expense of usability. This last one is increasingly and sadly untrue nowadays!


Man, I love platinum. I know the internet favours Aqua by a wide margin (and fairly so, it is gorgeous), but something about platinum just feels right to me.

Yeah, but scrollbars are bad and every bathwater has its baby.

(P.S. scrollbars aren't even bad)


I think this is the earliest-born person I've ever seen have a personal website like this — 1929 ! https://wichm.home.xs4all.nl/amsterdam1.html

R.I.P. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Rogge

I went ahead and mirrored this entire site, and his YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/MichaelRogge


I'd imagine there are a good few, but that for a lot of them their websites expired when the owner did. For example my Dad's is gone now and he was only a bit younger. Wayback machine likely has a lot of them in its index if you can find them.

i went down this rabbit hole and in fact Tim Berners Lee is/was not old (b. 1955), though one can argue George HW Bush (b. 1924) had the White House website running he evidently didn't have a personal one

and then there is Olive Riley (b. 1899) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olive_Riley



I was looking for Blues News, but its heyday was really pre-2000

They've been planning this outcome for a long time. Here's Larry Ellison in 1997: https://youtu.be/Bk1_btV3oIk?t=402

“The personal computer was designed as a standalone device. There was no Internet around 1981 when the PC was invented. There weren't a lot of local area networks and corporations and schools and government agencies [online] back in 1981. The world has changed — there are networks everywhere; around the world and offices and schools and major governments and institutions. So why not have computer networks that are similar to television networks or telephone networks?

A television network is enormously complicated; it's got satellites and microwave relay stations and cable headends and recording studios, and you have this huge professionally-managed network accessed by a very low cost and simple appliance: the television.

Anyone can learn to use a television. 97% percent of American households have televisions. 94% of American households have telephones. They can have very simple appliance attached to enormously complex professionally-managed network. Why shouldn't the computer network be just the same?”


While businesses hate being a dumb pipe and love vendor lock in, lots of customers choose dependence on big tech. Each retail business that only has a Facebook page to save the cost of hiring a web developer reinforces this dependence.

Those people didn't chooso Big Tech; they chose the path of least resistance to getting themselves online and in front of as many eyeballs as possible, because Big Tech stacked the deck over many decades to make it that way.

Who is "they"?

How the hell should I know? Do you have any comments on Mr. Ellison's interview, or are you just here to nitpick my wording?

It's not nitpicking. I read the quote and I don't see anything about "planning this outcome", so I took that as something you added, so I asked you.

He's zipping around between topics and I would have said websites already fulfill what he's talking about.


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