When the Republican Party has been largely purged of opposition to Trump (except for senators Rand Paul, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski and a tiny handful of people in the House), and when six out of nine Supreme Court justices are generally loyal to the GOP, then there are effectively no checks and balances.
Trump learned during his first term that he can bypass checks and balances by making sure the GOP is thoroughly MAGA. People who stood up to Trump have been sidelined, such as Justin Amash, Mitt Romney, and, most famously, Mike Pence, who stood up to Trump on January 6 and paid a heavy political price for it. That’s why Vance, not Pence, is the current VP.
Short of enough Republicans finally declaring enough is enough and deciding on impeachment or the fourth clause of the 25th Amendment, the only other option is for pro-impeachment senator candidates to run as Republicans in the primaries, which begin as early as March. Theoretically, if enough Republican senators up for reelection get primaried due to their refusal to rein in Trump, this may put pressure on the rest of the GOP’s senators to remove Trump this year, and this may also encourage the House (which only requires a majority to impeach).
Of course, the challenge is convincing the electorate in red states that Trump’s antics regarding Greenland are catastrophic enough to warrant his removal, given the stranglehold MAGA has on the Republican electorate.
You're completely dismissing all extraparliamentary means of opposition.
Protests. Riots. Strikes.
Y'know, the sort of thing that toppled Yanukovych in Ukraine, lotsa Middle Eastern dictators during the Arab Spring, British rule in India, Soviet control over the Baltics, etc etc etc.
Your politicians are use- and spineless. It's time for your people to step up.
The sad reality is Americans really don't care about foreign policy -- the only thing that could actually lead to major strikes or protests large enough to move the needle would be if large numbers of American soldiers were dying (i.e., Vietnam).
Plus, I just saw a little segment on Fox News where it was portraying this whole Greenland deal as a way to "help Greenlanders boost their economy, each person will get X cash, blah blah". So anyone only watching Fox is probably convinced we're doing Greenland a favor, liberating them from Danish oppression, just like we recently liberated Venezuela from oppression (in case you didn't know!).
Only 4% or so approve of going to war to conquer Greenland, so if it gets that bad you might expect sentiment to keep turning. but his approval floor has been pretty steady at no lower than ~30 percent through every controversy so far.
I hope I'm wrong but I don't see American citizens rioting over international affairs unfortunately. Hopefully he'll be unpopular enough to lose senate, and his successor won't be as insane. That would be the best outcome.
Americans have a history of rioting over economic and social conditions, however. An attack on Greenland may open a Pandora’s box of consequences that will devastate America by us becoming a pariah state, which will lead to economic pain.
For the sake of the country, I hope that this is finally the red line that will get enough Republicans representatives to finally have the courage to rein in Trump, at least on this issue.
To add, this 56% is not evenly distributed politically. Protests in California, Minnesota, and New York (all blue states) are not likely to get red state representatives and senators to threaten Trump with removal. Blue state congresspeople are already on board with removing Trump, but removal can’t happen without 2/3rds of the Senate getting on board, which means this can’t happen today without some Republican support.
I’m a Californian. It’s one thing for me to write Alex Padilla or Adam Schiff; they’d vote to convict if they have the chance. But they won’t get a chance unless people like Ted Cruz and Lindsay Graham say “enough is enough,” but I don’t live in those states.
It is a virtue of Americans that they are unemotional and resolve disputes at the ballot box. [...] Nothing is so important that it can't wait until the next election.
MAGA does not fit that bill. January 6 was a direct attempt to overthrow an election outcome and by extension the government. The current executive is anything but emotionally well-regulated.
I'm curious what you think the AOC/Mamdani left is even like. MAGA is the culmination of decades of escalating extremism. I was in OKC when the right wing terrorist killed so many innocent people, and that was what, 35 years ago? Meanwhile, AOC/Mamdami are lunatics who want ... better healthcare? Less inequality? What is so objectionable about their ideology that it justifies that absolute craziness that has consumed the right wing?
> Meanwhile, AOC/Mamdami are lunatics who want ... better healthcare? Less inequality?
It's not about their goals, it's about first world versus third world approaches to achieving those goals. The first-world approach is about shared sacrifice and building systems with the correct tradeoffs, incentives, etc. That’s how you end up with a system like Sweden that has high middle class taxes to support a robust welfare state along with extremely competitive corporate taxes. It also fosters efficiency because middle class people have a lot of skin in the game.
The third-world approach instead is tribalistic. The bad tribe, rich people, have the money, and the job of government is to expropriate that money and give it to the good tribe. In that kind of politics, you see a strong emphasis on identity and class warfare, and very little talk about tradeoffs, system, and sacrifice. It’s a type of politics that works equally well in Bangladesh, where the population is barely literate, as it does in Queens. (Of course, MAGA is like that too. Trump is the third world version of Reagan or Romney. It’s not a coincidence that no Republican in history has done better in Queens’s “Little Bangladesh” than Trump in 2024.)
The devastation from AOC/Mamdani politics is far worse than right-wing terrorism. In 1960, South Korea had a GDP per capita around $150, while Bangladesh was at $100. But my parent’s generation Indians/Bangladeshis were AOC/Mamdani socialists. As a result, Bangladeshi grew to just $260 by 1989 when we left. By then, Korea was at $6,000. And of course today Korea is a first world country while Bangladesh is still a third world country.
Around 2010, Bangladesh adopted neoliberalism and tripled its GDP per capita in just 14 years. So there was nothing about Bangladesh structurally that prevented the same kind of growth you saw in South Korea. It was all cultural and political. If my parent’s generation hadn’t been AOC/Mamdani socialists, I’d still probably live in my homeland. More importantly, millions of children would be alive today who instead died in poverty because of delayed economic growth.
This is not a problem specific to very poor countries. Latin America is largely a lower middle income continent with slower growth than developed economies. From 1960 to 2018, Latin American GDP per capita grew just 1.8% annually: https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/latin-america-economic-gr.... Latin America actually fell further behind the U.S. since 1960.
Your previous statement was flagged so I couldn't reply, but I wanted to pick up on this one thing you said:
MAGA is a necessary response to the AOC/Mamdani left
But MAGA officially began in 2015, when Trump announced the launch of his Presidential campaign with a speech including a string of vicious remarks against immigrants. AOC was elected in 2019 and Mamdani (to the NY state assembly) in 2021. MAGA has been a populist movement from the outset, seemingly motivated by conservative dislike of the Obama administration (anything but populist) and the prospect of a Hillary Clinton administration (likewise), as well as an atavistic dislike of immigrants.
The devastation from AOC/Mamdani politics is far worse than right-wing terrorism.
The populist politics of AOC and Mamdani seem motivated by exasperation with the prejudice, corruption, and general lawlessness of the Trump administration and the larger MAGA movement, and I doubt they would have enjoyed their electoral success if the Republican party had selected a staid institutionalist over Trump in 2016.
It's interesting to hear context about the economic history of Bangladesh, but I don't think comparing the grinding poverty of cold-war era Bangladesh with the economic and strategic hegemony of early 21st century USA is even slightly illuminating or useful.
We can just look at the current situation. AOC/Mamdani policies have been the norm in the US since ... oh wait, never. We are run by the billionaires, not by the socialists.
Maybe your argument is that our GDP is doing great? Except the entire point of MAGA is that a whole class of people feel like GDP is not describing their own situation accurately. It's almost like all it really describes is how successful the billionaires are. The US lags behind a bunch of western nations in important metrics, and we are decidedly to the right of them and have been for a very long time. Trying to lay blame for this on the paltry excuse for 'the left' that we have in the US is pretty lame.
I agree that there’s always been toxicity on the Internet, but I also feel it’s harder to avoid toxicity today since the cost of giving up algorithmic social media is greater than the cost of giving up Usenet, chat rooms, and forums.
In particular, I feel it’s much harder to disengage with Facebook than it is to disengage with other forms of social media. Most of my friends and acquaintances are on Facebook. I have thought about leaving Facebook due to the toxic recommendations from its feed, but it will be much harder for me to keep up with life events from my friends and acquaintances, and it would also be harder for me to share my own life events.
With that said, the degradation of Facebook’s feed has encouraged me to think of a long-term solution: replacing Facebook with newsletters sent occasionally with life updates. I could use Flickr for sharing photos. If my friends like my newsletters, I could try to convince them to set up similar newsletters, especially if I made software that made setting up such newsletters easy.
No ads, no algorithmic feeds, just HTML-based email.
I agree. Six years ago during COVID I wrote a document describing my idea of a dream personal computing environment, where all functionality is accessible using an API, enabling scripting and customizable UIs. UIs are simply shells covering functionality provided by various objects.
Unfortunately I haven't had the time to implement this vision, but Smalltalk environments such as Squeak and Pharo appear to be great environments to play around with such ideas, since everything is a live object.
It's not a novel idea: I've also invented that, as have most people I know who've thought about this problem. (This is a good thing: it means it'll be fairly easy to bootstrap a collaborative project.) I never got as far as writing up a full document, though: only scattered notes for my own use. Would you mind sharing yours?
This is not the most developed form of this idea that I've seen, but it does contain a good justification section. I don't think I've ever seen someone trying to justify this before. (I'd challenge the idea that touchscreen users liked Windows 8: afaik, things were most confusing for them, unless they were already used to the much-more-sensible Windows Phone interface. Lots of important stuff in Windows 8 was hidden behind right-click, and Metro did not make it obvious that press-and-hold was doing anything until the context menu popped up. Don't get me started on Charms: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180828-00/?p=99... tells you all you need to know about the extent to which they were actually grounded in UI research.)
For a system like this, you can't just have objects: you need some kind of interface abstraction. One example from current OSs is the webview: you want to be able to choose which of LibreWolf, Vivaldi and Servo provides the webview component. But you also don't want to be tied to one interface design (e.g. this is what is meant by "rich text", now and forevermore), since that constrains the art of the possible. If you want to preserve backwards-compatibility, this means you need to allow interface transformers / adapters provided externally ("third-party") to the components they allow to communicate.
Treating applications as monoliths isn't ideal, either: most applications are actually toolsuites. A word processor has multiple operations which can be performed on a document: some of these are tightly-linked to the document representation (e.g. formatting), but others are loosely-coupled (e.g. spellcheck). We can break these operations out as separate objects by constructing an interface for the document representation they expect: this would provide a kind of mutable view (called a "lens", in academic literature; known as "getters and setters" to most programmers), allowing GIMP plug-ins to see a GIMPDrawable while exposing a Krita Document to a Krita plug-in. (Or ideally something more specific than "Krita Document", but Krita's documentation is awful.) (These would, of course, be very complicated translation layers to write, so it might make more sense to do things the other way around to begin with: produce a simpler interface, and expose the resulting tools in both Krita and GIMP.)
In principle, documents can get arbitrarily complex. Microsoft's OLE architecture was a good first start, but it was still "composition of monoliths". You couldn't run spell-check on an OLE document and all its child documents. Perhaps a solution for this lies in ontology logs, though for pragmatic reasons you'd want a way to select the best translation from a given set of almost-commuting paths. (The current-day analogue for this would be the Paste Special interface: I'm sure everyone has a story about all of the options being lossy in different ways, and having to manually combine them to get the result you want. This is an inevitable failure mode of this kind of ad-hoc interoperability, and one we'd need to plan around.)
For describing interfaces, we want to further decouple what it is from what it looks like. If I update Dillo, I want all right-click context menu entries from the new version to appear, but I still want the overall style to remain the same. There are multiple approaches, including CSS and monkeypatching (and I've written about others: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28172874), but I think we at least need a declarative interface language / software interface renderer distinction. Our interface language should describe the semantics of the interface, mapping to simple calls into the (stateful) object providing our user interface (sitting on top of the underlying API, to provide the necessary decoupling between the conceptual API, and the UI-specific implementation details). The semantics should at least support a mapping from WAI-ARIA, but ideally should support all the common UI paradigms in some way – obviously, in such a fashion that it is not too hard to convert a tabbed pane into a single region with section headings (by slapping another translation layer on top, or otherwise).
Then, there should be interface-editing interfaces, which will be relatively simple to produce once all the underlying work has been done. The interface-editing interface will, naturally, let you draw on backgrounds, spell-check your labels, change fonts… using the same tools and toolbars as you use in any other program – or a toolbar you've cobbled together yourself, by grabbing bits from existing applications.
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Since translation can get quite involved in this scheme (e.g. if you're trying to use an Image Editor v1 pencil on an Image Editor v43 canvas, there might be 18 different changes to pixel buffer representation in the pile of compatibility layers), this system would benefit from being able to recompile components as-needed, to keep the system fast. We'd want a compiler with excellent support for the as-if rule, and languages high-level enough to make that easy. We'd also want to make sensible decisions about what to compile: it might make sense to specialise the Image Editor v1 pencil to use the Image Editor v43 interface, or it might make sense to compile the Image Editor v1 – Image Editor v43 compatibility chain into a single translation layer, or it might make sense to use a more generic Raster Canvas interface instead. This decision-making could take into account how the software is actually used, or we could make it the responsibility of distro maintainers – or even both, akin to Debian's popularity contest.
Recompilation tasks should be off-loaded to a queue, to give the user as much control as they want (e.g. they might not want to run a 30-minute max-out-the-processor compilation job while on battery, or an organisation might want to handle it centrally on their build servers). Since modular systems with sensible interfaces tend to be more secure (there are fewer places for vulnerabilities to hide, since modules are only as tightly-integrated as their interfaces support), we wouldn't expect to need as many (or as large) security updates, but the principles are similar.
This would only become a problem after a few years, though, so the MVP need not include any recompilation functionality: naïvely chaining interfaces is Good Enough™.
I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but I’m sympathetic to the idea of restricting social media access to children for two reasons:
1. Even in the 1990s, there were problems with child predators using chat rooms and Web forums to talk to minors for inappropriate, illegal purposes.
2. Social media “algorithms” (recommender systems) that are designed around increasing user engagement are a big problem.
I’m very cautious about poorly written legislation with too-broad definitions of social media that restrict useful forms of Internet access for children. However, I believe that algorithmic social media is harmful, especially to minors, and I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
> I lean libertarian and I resent the nanny state, but ... I am sympathetic to restrictions for minors provided that the laws are well-written.
Then you know that "but think of the children" is the most common fear-mongering approach to justify increased authoritarianism. I've seen no way to craft legislation on this issue that uses government force to achieve your desired outcome, that don't also create massive undesired effects like invasion of privacy or outlawing anonimity. Can you point to some model laws on this that you like?
There are plenty of apps that parents who care can install on their kids' devices or ISP and carrier services to limit kids' social media access.
To me, it seems like Apple’s traditional culture is dead. On one hand, while I like the classic Mac OS and Tiger-Snow Leopard Mac OS X, Apple’s UI guidelines aren’t sacred scripture; they should change as we discover new insights about human-computer interaction, and I’m open to changes that improve my productivity.
Unfortunately, in my opinion it seems that Apple’s software promotes form over function. It’s been this way for over a decade now, but macOS 26 and iOS 26 are severe regressions. It seems that there isn’t anyone at Apple in charge that is aware of what makes Apple distinct from its competitors. It’s more than just sleek visual design; it’s how the interface works. A long time ago Apple had people like Bruce Tognazzini and Don Norman. When Jobs returned, he was a major influence. Apple today, unfortunately, has neither advanced its platforms to lead the way in human-computing interaction, nor has it upheld the traditional Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. Instead Apple is on this weird luxury brand path.
Apple’s saving graces these days are its excellent hardware, the state of Windows, and the Sisyphean nature of the Linux desktop ecosystem’s development. However, the Linux desktop works for many people, and it’s increasingly gaining ground this past year as an alternative to Windows and macOS.
I wish there were a company that pushed personal computing forward again, much like how Apple did in the pre-iPhone, pre-Cook era.
It’s not about whether I trust Sam Altman or any other Big Tech executive. It’s about the disturbing amount of power these executives have and their ability to act in ways that have profound consequences downstream, from cornering the RAM market to making the world less hospitable to the vision of computing empowering everyday users, not just vendors.
Remember Apple’s 1984 commercial where IBM was personified as Big Brother and where Apple was liberator? Today I feel that Big Tech is today’s Big Brother. I love computing and I have a career devoted to it, but I don’t love Big Tech, and my opinion has soured in the last decade. I used to dream of working for Google, and I still think one of the highlights of my career was working on Spanner as an intern. But that was when Larry Page and Sergey Brin were still in charge, when Google still had “don’t be evil” as its motto.
I’m still trying to think about ways to make a living outside of academia where one can make and sell great, user-respecting tech solutions. I have a lot of ideas about what I’d like to build, but I struggle to think of ways to monetize them.
I quit eating out in the Bay Area over a year ago (except for socializing) because the prices feel painfully expensive to me while my pay hasn’t increased anywhere near the rate of restaurant price hikes. $14 for a burrito that cost roughly half as much a decade ago is painful, while my salary hasn’t doubled (I’m not a FAANG engineer). It’s not just burritos; it’s $10+ fast food combo meals, $15 deli sandwiches, etc. Prices steadily increased before COVID-19, but I didn’t feel priced out of eating out until sometime around 2022-23, when prices seemed to have exploded.
I make six figures but I have resorted to making eating out a rare treat in order for me to maintain my financial goals. This harkens back to my childhood in a low-income family, though I do remember my parents taking advantage of fast food deals in the 1990s and 2000s. I pack lunches and dinners to work, and I regularly cook, sometimes resorting to frozen meals for convenience’s sake. Eating out is reserved for social gatherings and for travel.
What’s interesting is the situation isn’t that much better in Sacramento, my hometown and where I visit family members. While Sacramento has lower housing prices, eating out isn’t substantially cheaper.
On the flipside, I’m in Tokyo now on a trip, where eating out feels cheap. $10 in the Bay Area or even Sacramento doesn’t get a satisfying meal these days (it’s not even enough for a fast food combo meal in many cases), but ¥1,500 (roughly $10) in Tokyo can buy a satisfying meal. Even ¥750 can buy a satisfying meal if one looks harder.
The situation in the Bay Area is demoralizing. I’m still in the Bay because of my career and because of social ties. It’s one thing to be priced out of buying a house, but it’s another thing to feel priced out of eating out. I don’t know if the situation is better in other parts of the United States, though; I’ve heard of people in other states complain about the high price of eating out these days.
It's not just SF. The $10 lunch of 2015 is now $15. Default tipping of 20% on things that we never tipped on in 2015 (takeout, fast food) is also adding alot to the total cost.
I don't know how people are affording the various delivery services and their fees on top of it.
A random stall by the road in LA will charge you $10 flat and the same one in SF will ask for $20. Neither will have a screen for tips. THAT would make your SF purchases simply stratospheric. I have lived in Jersey City, NJ and New Orleans, LA. Neither one holds a candle to LA prices outside some random roadside vendors. Walmarts in greater LA are vastly more expensive than those in NOLA. But grocery shopping in SF is straight up nightmare where they dont seem to respect Murican money all that much if at all. LA could never.
I see a lot of references to a “K-shaped” economy where there happens to be enough well-off people who are continuing to spend to push prices further upward, even though more people are forced to cut back since they can’t afford higher prices. There’s still enough people ordering $14 burritos and having them delivered in order to sustain both $14 burritos and the delivery companies.
It’s the same with the RAM situation. Prices will continue to skyrocket as long as there are enough buyers paying whatever prices the sellers set.
It's not just SF, I'm in Philly and the situation is the same for me. Eating out used to be almost a daily ritual, now I'm down to getting a pizza once a month at best.
I will have to try this out when I get the free time! I’ve been periodically checking on the GNUstep ecosystem since 2004, and this is the most exciting development I’ve seen since Étoilé from the late 2000s. Judging by the screenshots, the desktop appears to be Mac-like while also not being an exact clone.
If this desktop takes off, maybe we’ll finally see an ecosystem of applications that use GNUstep instead of GTK or Qt. In my opinion, the traditional charm of the Mac isn’t just the desktop; it’s the entire ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines. It would be cool to finally see this happen with a GNUstep/Gershwin ecosystem!
> “In my opinion, the traditional charm of the Mac isn’t just the desktop; it’s the entire ecosystem of applications that conform to the Macintosh Human Interface Guidelines”
Sadly this barely exists anymore.
Cross-platform Electron apps have replaced native AppKit. Cloud-based apps like Linear, Slack and Figma cater to the lowest common denominator of desktops by shipping their web client in a wrapper.
The last real native Mac app that was truly successful was probably Sketch ten years ago, and Figma ate their lunch.
Meanwhile Apple themselves have given up on the HIG. In the Alan Dye era, it’s been form over function across all the Apple operating systems. Their own apps don’t follow any guidelines and the latest macOS 26 is a UI disaster – probably the most inconsistent Mac release since OS X early betas.
I wholeheartedly and sadly agree with you. Seems like the idea of native apps on both macOS and Windows has been losing ground in favor of Electron apps. I understand the challenge of writing applications tailored to each platform and why Electron is so appealing to many companies, but I’d feel better about Electron if it were more conformant to platform HIGs and if it were less resource-intensive, especially now with RAM prices skyrocketing.
I hate how mainstream desktop computing has gone to crap in recent years. Thank goodness for free, open-source software.
I’m working on something similar for Linux. Would love to chat if this is interesting to you.
The idea is to bring the UX of OSX Snow Leopard back, adjusted for today’s possibilities (better developer experience, AI, etc.). I’m developing a DE, SwiftUI/AppKit-equivalent, and a bunch of reference apps I‘m personally missing in terms of quality (e.g. Raycast/Spotlight, Mail).
You would want to adjust it for today's display and input technologies. A high resolution OLED display deserves a different UI design than a 6-bit low-contrast TN LCD display did.
I agree that displays and input changed. But if you think in fundamentals, like clarity, readability, affordances, you tend to arrive at the right answers anyway.
Those principles survived CRTs, TN panels, Retina, touch, trackpads. They’re not tied to a specific technology.
Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?
> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?
There are a lot of places where I now see a miniature thumbnail preview of a file's contents, where in the 1990s you would only have seen an icon corresponding to the file type. Those previews are enabled partly by faster IO and processors making the preview rendering cheap, but also by higher resolution displays making the previews a lot more useful than they could have been at 32 pixels or smaller.
While it's not exactly a quality change as the driving force, the proliferation of dark mode UIs is a result of OLED displays that draw meaningfully less power with darker content, so pushing users toward darker UIs helps battery life. And it looks much better on a display with decent black levels than it would on a crappy LCD that washes out all the dark colors.
> Can you give me an example of a change in todays UI that was motivated by change in display quality?
The extremely heavy "pinstripe" Aqua UI existed because displays were so low contrast at the time that it didn't look nearly as heavy. A much higher contrast display that actually displays blacks properly means it'd look more like visual noise.
Sadly, GNUStep is hardly moving, plus last time I remember there were still issues regarding the adoption of modern Objective-C, given that it is only supported on clang, and they were focused on using only what was available in GCC.
That was not intentional but just a coincidence actually. I came up with Gershwin as something to be comparable to "Darwin" as a core OS. I originally wanted to combine the Linux kernel with a Userland "familiar to switchers" more like a BSD and build on that. I also decided early on it was best to focus on being a DE that could run on anything and make the underlying OS not matter as much. Everyone involved really liked the name, so I went with it.
Trump learned during his first term that he can bypass checks and balances by making sure the GOP is thoroughly MAGA. People who stood up to Trump have been sidelined, such as Justin Amash, Mitt Romney, and, most famously, Mike Pence, who stood up to Trump on January 6 and paid a heavy political price for it. That’s why Vance, not Pence, is the current VP.
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