> The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.
Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.
Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.
> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.
1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.
2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.
With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.
Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.
We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.
That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.
As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.
I’ve always been a “remap capslock to escape” kind of guy (vim), so I didn’t mind much. Access to the brightness (screen and keyboard) and volume slider was neat but superfluous with the OG fn keys. Context-driven controls were probably the best thing about the touch bar, and I don’t think it got enough love to make that stick.
Adding to the list of grievances, the functionality and the options it presented differed from app to app. I understand that the function keys also change their function app to app, but the visual noise the Touch Bar (wow - the word even gets autocorrected to have the right capitalization!) added as you switched between apps was too distracting.
1) First generation made ESC button a touch button. Aside from ergonomics (or lack of them), at least for me, on a psychological level "abort" button needs to be something you can smash. Also, macOS already had the worst input handling under load, making it virtual button made it worse.
2) While "happy path" on macOS pretty much never requires you to use Fkeys, but my workflow does. Blindly using touch buttons is harder than real buttons.
3) I'm not huge media keys users, but I bet #2 applies here as well.
I liked the touchbar in every other sense. If it was just an addition to an existing keyboard, people wouldn't have hate it[];
[]: At that time it was hard to not be frustrated using mac (butterfly keyboard etc), so touchbar might have gotten more hate than it deserved because of overall frustration.
Also, the Touch Bar seemed to be abandoned as soon as it launched. It only ever launched on the Pro line. There were never any feature updates. They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
> They never made it flexible enough for people to customize it.
I feel like it was fairly customizable - the Mac system settings let you do a lot of drag and drop of controls, and
I recall iTerm having a similar interface for customizing the bar in its own settings.
I do think it should’ve been given a lot more love, but that’s Apple for ya I guess
I think a bigger issue was that so few applications used it in cool, interesting ways. It has the same appeal as the oled button boxes some people have, except it’s right there on the deck… but nobody did anything with it.
I sure did prefer the media controls on it, though. I still have a 16” here and am reminded of what could have been.
I actually think it would have done well if it was just like those button boxes / Stream Deck / etc. Like a row of transparent function keys with screens, but then that would have been a flexibility tradeoff.
It was extremely flexible in customization options, and there were SDKs to make it do additional cool stuff in apps, but nobody really cared for the most part.
I honestly think it was mostly a "we have a custom secure coprocessor now, what can we do with it?" sort of thing, which also worked out for Touch ID and disk encryption.
I still have a personal Touch Bar MBP, and I find it annoying.
My problem is that I lightly rest my hands on the keyboard (including the f keys), and this habit is harmless on most Macs, but inadvertently activates the Touch Bar functions.
I actually like the idea a lot, and would probably love it if it required a little more pressure to activate.
The touch bar and the butterfly keyboard were the only Apple features in recent memory I ever hated. I hated them because they introduced them for (what felt like to me) anti-consumer reasons. It felt pretentious and useless and prone to breaking and created problems instead of improving product use.
One more on top of others. Many people felt it was a solution in search of a problem. As in, there was no problem i had that it solved. And it was forced on us, in place of something useful. From the start i read that as: This wont be here in a couple years. Which then made it annoying to deal with in the meantime (the hate).
Things that stick around, are generally value adding across a large or complete subset of their users. Touch bar was always niche, and thus always doomed. I think a good counter comparison is Apple VR headsets. For me, i have no use and little interest. But i can see them as a hedge at the very least, or as an enthusiast entrant into an emerging market, where future products in that segment may become interesting. And on top, it doesnt impact me - i can ignore their existence until it becomes useful.
If touch bar were launched like VR, i suspect it would have gotten similar level of dismisals, but less hate.
I am fortunate enough to have both a butterfly keyboard MBP and a touch bar MBP. Obviously the butterfly keyboard has the known issues, but the touch bar MBP also has the very common issues with that hardware.
I can replace the butterfly keycaps myself. It's something like $10 from aliexpress for a full set of keycaps and clips and a minute's work to pop the busted one and replace it. Annoying, but not fatal.
The touch bar needs a full battery, keyboard, track pad, and upper case replacement to fix. I just have to live that that thing flickering brightly at me every day, or spend AU$500+ to get it fixed.
The progress is vast, but at the same time, it feels overstated.
Linux still is not a great daily driver for video games in many circumstances, unless you're on a specialized device like the steam deck that gets extra attention to smooth out the rough bits.
On my gaming PC I haven't found a single game that runs noticeably faster in Linux. Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking).
Sometimes, with work (different versions of proton, startup options, configs, or even new kernels or compositors, etc) you can get around those problems, but... it takes work. Work that you just don't have to do on Windows.
> Most run considerably worse often while suffering various glitches (sometimes game-breaking).
That's an interesting experience, I'd be interested to hear more. There certainly are games that do not work well, no question, but as far as I'm aware it's a pretty small minority. To my knowledge, the two biggest issues are anti-cheat and video codecs, both of which are business/legal problems, not technical issues. Are those the main problems you're seeing? If not, are you possibly running fairly niche games, or on a niche distro or specialized hardware setup?
Re-reading that, "most" might be too strong a word - "many" would be more accurate. A few recent examples of games I've tried:
- Borderlands 4 was basically unplayable on my hardware (9800 X3D, 3080 TI) - though I didn't care enough to try and fix it.
- Dune Awakening was decent, but noticeably less performant, stuttery, etc. Probably fixable with some settings tweaks and other stuff, but the experience was markedly worse than windows out of the box.
- ARC Raiders runs fantastic - but even still, it had noticeable visual issues particularly with shadows
General issues:
- It seems to vary by desktop environment how confused steam and/or the games were as to which monitor to play the game on
- Steam itself required some futzing to get big picture to use hardware rendering (software rendering is very laggy)
- Multiple games seemed confused what my native resolution was
- Mouse issues with multi-monitor setup in several games (though sometimes this is an issue in windows too)
"Many" is definitely more in line with what I'd expect, yeah :) Sounds like most of your issues are multi-monitor & windowing related, which isn't surprising.
Games make a lot of assumptions based on how Windows's one-and-only window manager operates, stuff like windowing message and focus event sequences, effects of various windowing states on window sizes and chrome and mouse cursor behavior, and so on. Linux WMs don't match Windows's behavior or even other WM behaviors, so it's a nightmare trying to get every WM to align to how every game expects Windows's WM to behave. Then multi-monitor adds another layer on top of that, for things like reporting resolutions, cursor behavior, window focus, etc.
We focused on the big 2 (Gnome & KDE) on X11, and personally I use multi-monitor XFCE on X11 so I was quite motivated to get games working well there, too. Plus SteamOS's compositor/manager on Wayland, obviously. But there's so many combinations affected by so many things (I didn't even mention graphics driver behaviors on any of the above...) it's just really hard to get right as you add more little edge cases. And as you said, many games get it wrong on Windows, too. We'd often reproduce bugs on Windows just as they were reported against Proton.
All that is to say, yeah, I believe that has been your experience now that you've explained a bit more :)
Yea, ADHD attention is a like targeting system that has only one setting - it's constantly seeking the most stimulating activity nearby and never stops - sometimes the most engaging feeling activity even changes from minute to minute.
But the hyper-focus can be magical when it targets the task you need to do!
Indeed, I wouldn’t give up hyperfocus for anything. When it kicks in, it genuinely feels like a super power. It’s pretty much given me a career; but also just pure enjoyment from creating and making.
I always picture it like trying to force and hold a strong magnet flush against the like pole of another. It seems like it will be easy at first, but the closer they get, the harder it becomes and just as you are about to manage it, they fly apart and the magnet gets stuck to an even stronger one nearby.
You manage to pry them apart, but it goes flying through the air and only to get stuck on an even stronger magnet still. And on it goes, over and over, until the magnet is stuck on the biggest, strongest magnet.
Your attention is constantly being repelled from less engaging activities to more highly engaging activities, and eventually you land on whatever the most engaging activity is nearby. Sometimes without even realizing it
Speaking for myself, it's less of a yearning to write more code, than it is a yearning for tools that work a specific way.
I write plenty of code at my job, and generally don't have the desire to write more code as a hobby, except in rare cases when the mood really strikes.
Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.
Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.
> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.
1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.
2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.
With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.
Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.
We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.
That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.
As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.
reply