Speaking as a Linux desktop dev, that one's right. We have a lot of homework left to do, and accessibility is an area both Windows and MacOS are more fully-featured and mature in.
Part of treating users really well is also being honest about our shortcomings (and fixing them).
Hard agree. I work in digital accessibility, use Macs and Linux at home and work. It's unfortunate, but Linux is a long distance from how accessible Windows is. It's improving, but there's a ways to go.
I don't think there is anything more accessible than lines of text in a grid. Maybe you don't need to make every button of every GUI program ever accessible.
I think it's fine for the "sinking in a lake" case too? The water pressure prevents the door from opening, and my understanding was you want the car to fill with water fast enough you can take a breath, let the pressure equalize, then open the door. You're likely not going to get out through a broken window while the water is pouring in through it (I guess if you're fast enough to still be above the water line), so by the time that stops it doesn't seem like there'd be much difference between opening the door and maneuvering through the much smaller window.
I used to think that therapists were ridiculous. But after having one for six or seven years now, I realize that it’s literally just someone you pay to help you be the happiest and best version of yourself. Maybe everyone doesn’t need that, but I don’t think anyone is inherently always the best version of themselves. What’s the point of not trying to be a little better?
I feel like the world would be a much better place if literally everyone did have a therapist. Having a neutral, trained professional you talk you for 45 minutes twice a month about things that are tough in your life is not something that should alarm people, but being vehemently against it honestly kind of is...
The main issue is that therapy is expensive, and it's very middle-class to have the money to afford one long-term like that. Working class people have had to suck it up, or (preferably) have a good support network themselves.
While I am inclined to agree that most people would benefit from having a professional to talk to, it'd need to be economically viable as well.
But we're seeing this happening in real time; on the one side there's lower cost online councelling available (but whether that's actually certified professionals is debatable), and on the other ChatGPT became the biggest and most popular therapist almost overnight. But again, not sure if it has the necessary certifications, I suppose it's believable enough. I also want to believe OpenAI and all the other AI suppliers have hired professionals to direct the "chatbot as therapist" AI persona, especially now that the lawsuits for people losing their sanity or life after talking to AI are gaining traction.
You are definitely right about the financial barriers. I’ve struggled to find one every time I have switched or lost a certain insurance coverage too so there is a shortage even if you can afford them.
I’m inclined to think chatGPT would probably be good enough for therapy basics and could help people that have never encountered them, but would probably become much worse after needing any specialized help. Online platforms like BetterHelp are complete trash and just make the therapist and the person feel hopeless.
I have been in therapy on and off through most of my life. There are parts of the process and the profession that are helpful. There are also parts that are paternalistic bordering on abusive. “Literally just someone you pay to the be happiest…” is a small part of the picture. I take issue with this view of therapy, and the idea that it is somehow a universal force for good that will benefit everyone.
I have met some pretty unhinged therapists - both as a client and socially. I won’t even go into the history of psychiatry and clinical care.
One of the questions I like to pose is, what are we doing as a society by sending so many people to therapy? What do these practices do at a large scale? And to all those who decry things like gun violence: if you think our current mental health system would somehow be able to address the larger ills of society if only they had more funding, I have some serious questions about your view of its overarching effectiveness, and the specific effects of these practices.
Oh I was oversimplifying for sure and like most things in life it is very dependent on who you are and what type of therapist you have(lcsw,psychiatrist,psychologist,practicing RN, etc), also just the views and opinions of the people involved will vary greatly on the outcome.
I’ve had plenty of bad experiences which exacerbated my hopelessness but overall I feel I’ve found help when I most needed it.
I think the introductory things in almost any form of therapy will help people, after that it gets much more complicated and it’s up to the individual to find something that fits or decide it’s not for them.
Do you mean therapy is designed to teach outcasts how to fit better into the machine? I would agree with that, and while I hate that it is partly true and reject anything like this for myself in general, individual happiness sometimes correlates with greasing your wheels to be a better subject.
In theory, at one point people will be done with therapy. I think a better analogy is a physical therapist; you go to one because of an injury.
A personal trainer is for boosting your physical health / performance. For mental health, you'd get a coach, training, or read one of many self-help books, not a therapist.
There are multiple kinds of psychological counseling. Some "supportive therapy" really is more of an ongoing thing, like having a personal trainer. Some kinds of psychological therapy always aim to have a terminus, like physical therapy.
Having a personal trainer for your physical fitness is something I'd expect a very low percentage of very wealthy individuals to have access to. Therapy appears to be more prevalent.
By "personal trainer" I just mean someone that you pay for a training session 1-3x per week. It's a comparable expense to therapy (depending on qualifications etc...).
I mean, that’s what they meant too. They’re expensive! Kinda a stereotypical rich thing to have, more so than therapy. One distinction that you might be thinking of without saying between individual sessions and group workouts which are cheaper.
Personal training sessions with experienced staff at my David Lloyds in London are around £50-60 for 45 minutes. That's entry-level cost for therapy, which can easily go north of £100 per hour around here.
I reckon the reason people use therapy is not because it's cheaper, but because they're less confident about how to do "mental exercise" than they are physical exercise.
What do you mean by “has a therapist”? Do they just mention it in passing, or do they bring up takeaways from their sessions in everyday conversation?
If it’s the latter, I’m not sure that’s really about mental-health openness. It feels more like a broader social habit, the need to present yourself as someone who’s constantly working on every aspect of your life. That’s a different modern-society quirk altogether.
To be honest, every time I see something this paper-thin yet slick and polished, I just assume it's mostly AI slop. The barrier to launching vaporware has never been lower.
Content over presentation is a signal for quality more than ever.
The designer, BTW, was born in Hong Kong long before it was handed back to the CCP, spent his childhood from age 6 onward in the Netherlands, and now lives in Belgium. It was originally sold by a Hong Kong company in Taiwan before the product line moved to China's Pop Mart. The character is inspired by Northern mythology illustration books he read as a kid.
I'm not into Labubu and don't buy stuff like that, but that a global fad has thoroughly blended West/East origins seems rather appropriate and very fine.
You know, I'm sort of frustrated that all the recent entries in the Alien franchise have been nostalgia bait. At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them. A most unwelcome dilution.
Cameron doubled down on the aesthetic in Aliens, he just changed the genre from horror to action. Both films were "peak 80s" (Alien was '79) and just ooze with what must be the absolute pinnacle of science fiction vibes.
If you haven't seen these two films, you need to fix that this week. It'll change your life.
Scott tried to expand the aesthetics with Prometheus and Covenant. I felt the films did a great job of refreshing the look and feel while remaining faithful to the 80's. Unfortunately, the writing was trite and Scott's directing is averaging .200 at bat these days.
Romulus was not bad, though certainly not a masterpiece. At least it was better written and had better character arcs than Scott's recent films.
I'd rather have the performance of this series than whatever Jurassic Park or Star Wars have become.
Predator, oddly enough, has strangely been improving if you don't count Shane Black's entry.
I'm happy they keep making these, and I hope the writers and directors at the reigns keep experimenting rather than conforming to "safe" or "understandable by a general audience".
Alien and Aliens were masterpieces, but I've been consistently disappointed by everything after.
Let's agree to ignore the awful VS Predator crossovers for a second. I'm not sure they are canon anyway, and they are obviously cash grabs and not made with the same care of even the worst Alien movies.
Alien 3, while it has a cool idea (prison planet), is a mess as a result of executive meddling (the story can be read online). And they killed Hicks and Newt... bastards!
Resurrection was awful and awfully badly acted. I like Jeunet, but this was a hard miss. It has some cool visuals at times, typical of Jeunet, but the movie itself was embarrassing.
Prometheus was atrocious. Badly acted, badly scripted (characters making the dumbest of choices at every turn, professionals who don't know their profession -- xenobiologists who pet alien snakes, geologists who get lots at the first turn -- this has been discussed countless times). And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works. Aided by technology, Scott "pulled a George Lucas" and forgot the cardinal rule of scifi horror/mystery: less is more.
After this, I exercised the good sense of avoiding Covenant (the plot summary seems bad), and Romulus, and now the new TV show.
I think overall the gravest sin is that the Alien universe was meant to be sketched in the broadest strokes, and details and mystery kept, not overexplained.
I wish they had let the first two awesome movies rest in peace.
Extended universes suck.
P.S. same applies to Blade Runner. Then again, I didn't even like the sequel, so I'm sure I'll dislike the upcoming show :(
I tend to agree with your take on these movies, but I find I can enjoy some of them to a greater extent by rejecting the notion of what's "cannon".
For instance, I like the bleakness of Alien 3 opening with Newt and Hicks both dead. That doesn't spoil my enjoyment of Aliens, which ends on a triumphant note. These are different stories, and they can be treated on completely different planes. If you want, you can imagine the movies as representing alternate branching universes, where one branch led to Newt and Hicks dying in hibernation, and in some other branch that's too uninteresting to be put to film, they live happily ever after.
I also liked Blade Runner 2049, but I don't need to retroactively reevaluate the original Blade Runner in light of any of the questions that are settled in the sequel. In Ridley Scott's original film, Deckard's humanity is still open to question, regardless of what's presented in Villeneuve's version.
Of course when the sequel is complete trash, it's easy to ignore entirely. Terminator 3 being the obvious example.
While I agree that you can just mentally split the continuity and thus spare Newt from her fate, in doing so it means that the continuity after is meaningless. I did something similar with Star Trek Nemesis. It wasn't a great movie so I just rejected that Data died at the end. Everything else after is fan fiction and it's irrelevant whether there's some other android who carries his memories and returns.
I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.
> I think there's a similar issue with Marvel after Thanos. Not as much that Endgame was a bad movie, just that the continuity was derailed and never grounded itself. Did Vision come back? Did Loki? Is the Fox Quicksilver canon now? Eh, who knows, the "real" state of the world has moved so much that it doesn't matter anyway.
In a way, I feel like this makes it the comic-book movie that's spiritually closest to the comics.
You are right about everything from Alien 3 through Covenant. However! Romulus was pretty okay. It has some questionable plot decisions, and it's kind of soft continuity compatible with the two Prometheus-era movies. But it does work as an action-horror in the shared universe of the original films. Alien: Earth was also pretty good, it explores the setting without breaking it too badly, and it's fun with dangerous aliens that aren't THE Alien. There are some plot points that require very smart characters to be holding the idiot ball.
I actually enjoyed the series, much as I went in assuming I wouldn't. It works best if you pretend you've never seen another Alien franchise but read a summary of the first 2 movies.
> And the loss of mystery... nobody needed to know more about the Engineers/Pilot aliens, that's not how good storytelling works.
Yeah, remember when the network forced Lynch and Frost to reveal the killer of Laura Palmer. Broadcast executives typically don't get it, scenarists often get too infatuated with their own worldbuilding.
Romulus was pretty good actually. If you want great newer aliens universe play the game Alien: Isolation. It’s the best piece of media in the aliens universe since Aliens. It’s an amazing experience and blows all of the later films/shows out of the water in regards to keeping the original “vibe” of the setting.
> At this point I've seen those corridors so often I'm tired of them.
Heh, I can't get enough of them; it's a great visual design template to work from. And visual consistency of properties within a diegetic timeframe has to be taken into account, even if the newer entries' writers' rooms could profit from better talent...
That said, Alien: Isolation is still the best modern infusion into that universe, and one of the best games in my lifetime.
Alien: Isolation truly is an under appreciated masterpiece. One of the best video games ever made IMO. Aesthetic, sound design (put on headphones and watch the reactor purge scene or the spacewalk near the end it’s phenomenal sound design), emotional design, storytelling, it captures the setting in a way I don’t think anything has done since the first two films.
I'm a fan of the franchise but the fan service in the last movie was lame, it took me out of the movie a couple of times. And that's the reason why I resist to watch the series, afraid of more of the same stupid winks to the fans.
I love the franchise and my will to suspend my disbelief was strong yet the writing, acting and editing were soooo bad that I couldn't make it past the second episode. And that rock song ending entirely killed whatever was left of the vibe. I'm not even sure who to blame for this mess.
KiDoom I don't fully get. The website says "All components connected to a shared net; the PCB could be sent to a fab house (it just wouldn't do anything useful)" but I don't see any of the component pins hooked up in the demo video.
It means they're not actually "all connected to a shared net", no?
Something that actually connects the components and routes the traces in a way that makes it somehow still recognizable as the 3D environment would've been cool, otherwise this is kind of just like piping draw commands into a <canvas> from a hook in the Doom renderer. KiCAD just happens to be a complicated line drawing app.
Don't get me wrong, still a fun little hack. But some more PCB-ness would make it even cooler.
It might be that the website undersells it and there's more PCB-ness than I can detect in the visuals. Is it using layers and vias between them for the z-sorting or so? Both the website and the commits have a distinct AI slop feel to them and are somehow not very detailed on this part.
So the reason everything is on one net is so kicad doesn't need to calculate a ratsnest/air wires.
As for the drawing, we pulled the vectors as a list from the C, and used a painters algo and drew back to front using the distance from the player in the python code.
We then treated them as polygons to allow us to work out occlusion to hide things behind walls, but the data pipes to kicad/the headphone jack is just the vector/wireframes/outlines, filtered by what's left after the occlusion test.
So yep, using footprints as sprites was my (clunky) nod to electronics, as I didn't like the idea of drawing polygons. Kicad can definitely handle them, but they're less fun.
Now, if I'm really bored over Christmas, I may port it to fusion360, which will have a 3d engine.
I 100% abused Claude code to get here, and i tend to get it to write the bones of a write up, which I then populated with my own thoughts, else I can't get started. We are worryingly becoming more aligned.
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