I hate getting startled, even when I realize right away that there is nothing to worry about. But the physiological effects, once set in motion, carry on. My heart seems to skip a beat and then rev up to a high rate and it's uncomfortable, taking some time to come back down to normal.
Some years ago, I discovered a technique to suppress the effect of being startled. I just breathe in sharply, using mostly my diagphragm, before my heartrate goes up and it keeps things normal as usual. I wonder if this is also using the vagus nerve to suppress being startled?
> I wonder if this is also using the vagus nerve to suppress being startled?
I don't know about vagus nerve, but I can propose a different explanation. Emotions can change the state of your body, your brain feels the state and triggers emotions. It can become a self-reinforcing loop. In particular, diaphragm contractions or tension can be such a state. For example, I have sometimes issues with getting rid of anxiety, and when it happens, it is because of my diaphragm. It becomes tensed, I feel it and so I feel anxious. To get rid of anxiety I need to a) rationalize it away and b) keep my diaphragm relaxed.
When you overload your diaphragm with some irrelevant activity you may be breaking the self-reinforcing loop. Or maybe this movements of your diaphragm trigger some other response that wins. As a wild guess, your organism expect that after a deep breath you'll hold your breath for some time, and so it limits the heart-rate to not burn oxygen too fast.
This is btw the whole idea behind Vipassana. The idea is that most of your suffering comes from your unconscious reaction to bodily sensations and you can train yourself to become more aware and equanimous.
You know, I studied psychology and I still feel sadness that undergraduate course will discuss Galen and his humors determining different types of personality (only to mock the very idea of typologies), but it keep silence about buddhism, which is still is a source of insight for "western" psychologists, because it was ahead of them by centuries or even millennia.
Modern historians like to attack Eurocentrism of the history, but why psychologists are afraid to admit that psychology was started in Asia, that western psychologists still have something to learn from buddhists.
It seems that Western psychology doesn’t look much into on how you can train your mind? Maybe because it is hard to test? In eastern psychology you have practitioners who have trained a specific technique for decades and then share their experience. It’s a completely different way of researching.
Western psychology tried that. In its special way, but still. Introspection was a big thing in XIX century. To become a subject of a psychological experiment you'd need to get a special education and training. There was that guy, Titchener that invented structuralism based on his introspective research.
It didn't work though. I can't remember why exactly it didn't work, can only guess.
Recall was enabled by default for me on a fresh windows 11 pro installation back in October.
A couple of months ago I opened the Clock app in an important meeting, to run a timer, and had to wait 10 minutes for it to update itself. For real. Same thing happened when I opened sound recorder.
It's probably not going to get better at this point. It's only going to have increasing amounts of online services integrated into the OS. The writing was on the wall when Windows 10 Enterprise shipped with Candy Crush
I found around 6-15% performance improvement in build times after implementing DevDrive (mounted VHD) on Windows machines, which uses ReFS. Deleting huge folders was also perceivably faster.
For a while I switched to mee6 pro's with some squishy foam cushions, they were around £30 and had a surprisingly flat response. Of course, that will sound bad to a typical listener until you realize the v curve you are used to has been hiding details in the midrange
I've noticed since getting a new mac, that on-device dictation is no longer possible, a modal pops up forcing you to hit agree in order to get dictation. Never clicking that.
The direction of major operating systems neutering themselves in favour of deep service integration does not fill one with hope
That's not true -- on-device dictation works just fine. You can verify for yourself by turning off WiFi/Internet and dictation works identically. As long as you have a modern enough Mac that supports local dictation, of course. (Older Macs were only cloud dictation, I remember.)
The popup on my MacBook says specifically:
> When you use Dictation, your device will indicate in Keyboard Settings if your audio and transcripts are processed on your device and not sent to Apple servers. Otherwise, the things you dictate are sent to and processed on the server, but will not be stored unless you opt in to Improve Siri and Dictation.
> your device will indicate in Keyboard Settings if your audio and transcripts are processed on your device and not sent to Apple servers
I have a reasonably recent (<2yo) MBP, which feels like it ought to be "modern enough", and in Keyboard Settings, it says "Dictation sends information like your voice input, contacts, and location to Apple to process your requests." It doesn't say anything about processing happening on my device. Yes, off-line dictation does work for me (with Wi-Fi turned off), but I'm curious under what conditions Keyboard Settings would say something about transcripts not being sent to Apple.
Not to mention that this is an absurd assurance. "Your device will indicate in Keyboard Settings?" So you're supposed to run and look at that for every voice command, to see if THIS one is being sent up?
For you. I am not getting the experience you describe which sounds similar to how I was expecting this to work as it did previously in Sonoma on an Intel machine.
The options are different for me in the settings app, and using dictation is for me right now, impossible without agreeing to a modal displaying an agreement to send audio data to Apple.
Aside from the what the modal actually says (mine doesn't say anything about "sending" info, and I have a 2023 M2 MBP) I don't really think it's fair to put Apple in the same category as Amazon when it comes to sending data to the cloud, because they actually have more of a financial incentive to keep your data private than selling it to the highest bidder.
I also highly doubt that they will somehow later down the line magically change their minds given the millions (maybe over a billion at this point) of dollars invested in things like private cloud compute (1) and challenging the U.K. government (2) in court over E2E cloud backups.
---
Do you want to enable Dictation?
When you dictate text, information like your voice input and contact names are sent to Apple to help your Mac recognise what you’re saying.
[Enable]
Dictation Privacy (a policy)
[Cancel]
---
I think it is entirely fair to put Apple in this category, because they have effectively disabled offline dictation for me except if I agree to sent my voice data to Apple. I have used this offline dictation feature for years by the way
--- Do you want to enable Dictation? When you dictate text, information like your voice input and contact names are sent to Apple to help your Mac recognise what you’re saying.
[Enable] Dictation Privacy (a policy) [Cancel] ---
I do, but it's nowhere near as convenient as double tapping Fn anywhere there is editable text and speaking. It also requires much more system resources.
What interface do you use for using local whisper?
Word of warning: businesses, possibly including your employer, may consider you to be a robot, or a terrorist, or tell you to install Windows, or tell you to use your phone, or tell you that you have no right to privacy.
I recently had to go through a background check for a prospective employer. The background check website wouldn't even load. The support agent told me that it's a Firefox problem and told me that I needed to open the website on Chrome or Edge or on my phone, and that the website is working "perfectly". Alas, it worked fine with Firefox on Linux, as long as the user-agent reported that it's actually Chrome and Windows.
Yeah the website is indeed working "perfectly": perfectly enough to block employment of people who care about privacy.
I keep one Windows or Mac around always for work specific things, if Linux is unsupported I can switch. Heck you could get a free Windows dev VM from Microsoft (they rotate them out every 3 months).
It's not just about us, it's about less-technical people who might adopt libre operating systems if they're easy to use, but not if web services intentionally refuse to do business with them.
> but not if web services intentionally refuse to do business with them.
And in many ways, I'd be fine with that if they'd be up-front and honest about it.
Alas, Microsoft certainly is not. Cloudflare is not either. Many of these services just sit there and pretend like they're loading without showing any sort of error indication. Much like a tarpit but it's malicious on the business side and with little to no recourse on the real human side.
Microsoft may be malicious, buy it's more likely it's incompetent.
Cloudflare is not malicious, but is between a rock and a hard place. By caring about privacy you are, indeed, looking more suspicious. In a perfectly anonymous world, reputation-based captchas couldn't work. It's OK if you think they shouldn't exist, but Cloudflare customers and most people like them.
Everyone else is not on some secret plan to destroy the Linux Desktop, they just don't test their websites on linux/firefox (because "nobody uses that"), which makes them unusable, which causes people to drift off linux/firefox.
Keep an eye on [Asahi Linux](https://asahilinux.org/), then. A cursory glance shows Me support not being complete yet, but I assume it will be in time (and the missing stuff may or may not be a show stopper for you).
I was just forced to migrate to MacOS in my new job and I can't really understand developers saying that Linux is not usable as a desktop machine. For me, it's the other way round.
- Things that should be system settings are instead apps (amphetamine, rectangle).
- There's no way to move focus around directionally between windows with a keyboard.
- "Open file" windows give you nowhere to paste a path (tip: cmd + shift + g summons a path prompt).
- Full screen windows now must be managed like they've just become an entire workspace, and the underlying app may or may not support the un-full-screen button.
- The error messages don't give you enough info to actually act on them (apparently "Docker" will damage my computer, and I should uninstall it, but it won't give me a path to the offending file, so I don't know how to install it, also this warning returns if I close it so it's just been hanging around for months.)
My strategy for maintaining sanity is to do as much as possible through zellij (a terminal multiplexer), that way I can use the same muscle memory on Linux as well. As for the rest, I just try to ignore it.
I have found the same for mac, it has all the downsides of windows, and all the downsides of Linux, and almost no upsides of it's own. Sure the hardware is doing plenty of nice things hard to find elsewhere, but the OS is so god-damn hostile to the kinds of people who can appreciate the hardware that it kind of defeats the purpose.
Oh I wouldn't go so far as "all the downsides of Windows". So far Apple has not been targeting me with a phishing campaign designed to get me to use their browser of choice.
I would use Linux if it supported offline installers.
As is, I'll be sticking with heavily tweaked Windows to work with my several HDDs full of old software, and avoid the Linux headaches of repos disappearing, deciding between Snap/Appimage/DEB and general incompatibility with office documents, industrial tooling and Adobe software.
I'll only use Linux where I'm paid to at work. Thanks to Linux Torvalds' terrible software distribution model, I've had to do black magic to work around Anon's deprecation of Debian/Raspbian Stretch on which our industrial network gateways run.
I was on POP for two years now, I switched to an Arch derivative called EndeavourOS which makes installing Arch a breeze. I did discover someone working on an Atomic version of Arch (where the core OS is frozen for a set period of time, to ensure total stability, and nothing can break during this window) called Arkane Linux, which I might try.
I installed a copy of Windows 11 the other day for a new machine and it was INFURIATING.
In order to install without internet or an offline account, you MUST know a voodoo command and how to enter it. Used to be their dark pattern was at least on the screen, they’re out of their damn minds now.
Everyone has their breaking point with Microsoft, I hit mine and it’s been nothing but good for me.
The MacBook air 11" in 2012 was my favorite laptop by far. Maxed out with an i7 and 8GB RAM it handled everything I needed to including multiple InteliJ projects. The resolution today seems obscenely low, but it was completely usable and the compactness was of great utility, practical for use while traveling.
I've bought tablets multiple times thinking it could replace it, it just isn't the same. It's a real shame that particular form factor has been lost, as we could probably easily have an m4 air in that size. I'd buy one in a heart beat now that Apple has remembered how to make good keyboards again.
The 12" MacBook (not air, not pro) from 2017 was my dream machine... Except for the thermals limiting the performance. That issue could easily be solved with an M-series machine in a similar chassis, but alas.
The current 13" M-series Airs seem a little confusing to me -- the two largest dimensions are practically the same as the current MBP, so for my use-case (i.e.: not carrying a backpack) I basically have to carry a bag the exact same size as if I were going to carry the MBP, and the extra 300g (or 0.7 lb) is meaningless in terms of portability.
It feels like the Air is no longer really so Air-y, which is a shame.
I agree that the 12" MacBook form factor is what I'd go for. I have a 13" M1 but it's a bit heavy as I carry it around all day. 12" with a M processor and at least 2 usb ports.
Really was a brilliant machine. I still have one on a desk paired with a Cinema Display. Weighed nothing when out and about and turns into an iMac at home. Mine is in its dotage now because the battery only lasts about an hour so it never leaves the house or does much heavy lifting, and it’s been replaced with a 14 inch MacBook Pro M3 alongside an 11 inch iPad Air. So pleased that Apple got rid of that pointless Touch Bar and returned to function keys. My M3 is like a platonically good laptop even though I wish it was a touch lighter. I managed to type out a 140,000 word book on my iPad when travelling. Having started on 8-bit home computers I’ll never stop being amazed by the world of computing hardware perfection we now live in.
Why not just go for the MBA instead of the MBP? The MBA is lightning fast and can have 32 gb RAM. It seems like exactly what you want - a touch lighter (.7 lbs lighter!) and smaller but still crazy good.
I had one, and I really liked it, but the 13" MBA just edged it out for me due to the added comfort and visibility. I've had various MBPs, but I continue to prefer a 13" MBA over a decade later. Any other laptop I try just feels inferior.
The bezel size on the 2011 11" air vs the current 13" air with its Retina display makes that upgrade a no-brainer. 2011 11" was my prior fav, but 2024 13" air is the new king.
I recently spent 2 hours working on an airplane in economy class on a 16" pro, and all those extra specs didn't help me ssh to a cloud instance, and that large size made it extra tough. Air is the best.
The new 13” Air isn’t quite a replacement for the old 11”. It’s just enough bigger and heavier that I notice and it affects the handiness of it. The center of balance isn’t as good either, it was close to the hinge on the old wedge shaped Air which was perfect for carrying it.
I miss that little computer. It was just about perfect and I wish they had kept that form factor.
I do the 'double sharp inhale' method for the anxiolytic effect occasionally - not really something you can do at the office however.