AnAmericanPotato

Longtime Mac user here. Most of this is valid, and some of these are my biggest gripes.

A couple tips:

I can’t easily see the size of hard drives/folders and how much space is left available.

In the Finder, go to View > Show Status Bar. That'll show you free space easily. (This used to be on by default. I don't remember when they changed it, probably with 10.7 Lion's increased iOS-ification.)

Files are just scattered willy nilly in a folder instead of snapped to a grid unless I set that folders defaults…per folder?!

From a Finder window in icon view, go to View > Show View Options. Select Sort By > Snap to Grid, then click "Use as Defaults". Then it will apply to all your folders that use the default view. Why is "Snap to grid" under "Sort" when it does not sort? WHO KNOWS?!

That said, icon view suuuuuucks. Learn to love list view and you will be happier for it. I gave up on icon view like 25 years ago, after migrating from Mac OS 9. Apple half-assedly ported the Mac OS 9 Finder, and then proceeded to neglect it for a decade or two. At least you can change the grid spacing now.

Doesn’t like to display 1 window across 2 screens.

I'm not totally sure how it works now, but I think this changes if you go to System Settings > Desktop and Dock and turn off the "Displays have Separate Spaces" box.

I’m still not sure how to uninstall things.

There's no universal method. :(

Basic case: just drag the app to the trash. This will leave your user settings in place in ~/Library/Preferences.

Complex cases should have a vendor-supplied uninstaller. For manual cleanup, you have to hunt through your /Library and ~/Library folders to delete related junk from the vendor. Mostly this will be in the LaunchAgents and Application Support folders. But again, no universal method.

If I click x on a browser or app, it doesnt actually shut the program, it just minimizes it.

This is the one thing I strongly disagree about, although I totally understand how it feels wrong when you've spent years learning different behavior.

It's one of the biggest fundamental differences between Mac and Windows UI design, going all the way back to the 80s: Windows is window-centric (I mean...hence the name, right?), while Mac OS is application-centric.

You can still interact with Mac applications with no windows open, via the menu bar. Closing a window and quitting an application are two entirely different concepts. This is not the same as "minimizing" the app. An app can be in the foreground with no open windows. There are plenty of times when I close the last window in an app with the intent to continue using the app (e.g. opening another file or creating a new one).

Fun fact: many years ago, Apple made a few of their apps behave this way by default, with an option to change it back to normal Mac behavior. TextEdit, Preview, and maybe QuickTime Player. Just those few. I guess they wanted to accommodate Windows users' expectations, but it was so half-assed that all it did was ensure that everyone was confused at some point by the inconsistency. They only recently changed it back so we have consistency by default again, but now there's no option at all. Go figure. I wouldn't mind if they implemented an option in a whole-assed way, but I'd go absolutely batty if Windows-like behavior were forced on me.

93.2% macro-F1 for human vs. AI detection and 68.4% macro-F1 for six-way authorship attribution

This isn't what I'd call "reliable".

I'm also not impressed with their methodology, which is heavily based on Gemini.

To generate mirrored AI stories, we reverse-engineer writing prompts from each human story by prompting Gemini 2.5 Flash (Gemini Team, 2025a) to infer the underlying premise

That's too many steps removed from anything you'd encounter in the wild. They're not even testing against human-prompted output.

And then they use Gemini again to analyze all the stories. Relying on proprietary cloud models for the core of your analysis is like building on sand.

Is this real? Or is it a fake comic making fun of Ben Garrison? It's hard to tell. I'd expect better even from him, which is saying a lot.

Google Play Rewards sends you surveys and gives you like 10-20¢ per survey. Each one takes like 5 seconds to complete. I haven't used it in a long time, but years ago most of the surveys were about shopping habits based on my location history, like "did you go to < store> in the past week? Did you pay with your credit card?" Or random things like "have you shopped for auto parts in the past week? Yes/no/prefer not to answer."

That mugshot of from 2011, probably before he was "declared a Non-Jurisdictional Sovereign Entity under the strict protocols of the Monti Act of God Phenomenon."

I'm sure it will protect him next time. I mean, it's irrevocable!

A little white vinegar works well too.

If I can't play it in MPV, I don't wanna play it.

Everything else feels like going back to the stone age. No offense to VLC fans. VLC is cool too, and I still recommend it because of its simpler GUI. But MPV is the MVP.

Two main catalysts:

1. Seeing how dumb 99% of products are.

2. Seeing how dumb 99% of users are.

Call my naive, but I truly did not see it coming. I didn't expect cognitive surrender. I didn't expect the whole world to start continvoucly morging. I didn't expect lawyers to submit fake case citations, again and again and again.

I didn't expect society as a whole to just shrug their shoulders and decide that accuracy doesn't matter.

I also didn't expect how much or how rapidly the bubble would inflate. GPU prices were already crazy, but now RAM and even SSD prices have roughly doubled in the past year, with no end in sight, with all production toward data centers. This is a disaster. We're seeing higher prices for downgraded machines, like Microsoft's 8GB Surface.

Seeing as we're all on Lemmy, I hope that I will not need to belabor the point that centralization is bad. The shift toward data centers and away from personal devices is a shift toward centralization. It's a shift toward greater censorship and away from freedom.

It's not coincidence that this is happening at the same time as fascism is rising all around the world, that online ID laws are passing all over the world, that privacy-protecting technology like VPNs and end-to-end encryption are under greater and greater attack, and that knowledge repositories like The Internet Archive and Wikipedia are under attack. The shift is toward governmental control of the Internet, of access to knowledge in general.

Now the US government gets the final say on who will have access to ChatGPT 5.6. Surprise, surprise.

I'm not anti-AI or anti-LLM per se. I am anti-corruption and anti-bullshit. I am pro-consumer, pro-privacy, pro-individuality. In practice, that means I am anti-AI. Or more generally (but less strongly), I am anti-cloud.

As for what I would do: well the real solutions are the same as the solutions to most of modern society's problems. We need extensive economic reform. But barring that, we need to do whatever we can to shift the balance back toward personal, private computation. We don't need more datacenters. We don't need trillion-parameter models at all. The only thing they are good at is basic stuff you don't need them for (unless you're an idiot), and generating well-masked bullshit.

Edit: Oh, and I would also hold all the corporations accountable for their obviously-illegal behavior, like pirating all the copyrighted material in the world. We definitely need more transparency in terms of training data.

My experience, also in the US, has been the opposite: I get prescribed addictive painkillers "just in case".

Last time I had surgery, they told me to take ibuprofen for pain, and they also gave me a prescription for vicodin if the pain was too great. I live in an area with a significant opioid abuse problem, and they're handing it out like candy. They didn't tell me "call back if it's severe" or anything like that, they just gave me the prescription. I stuck with the ibuprofen, and realistically I could have done without even that.

I suspect your experience is largely due to sexism. I've heard so many stories like this, where doctors don't even think of taking women seriously.

What I’m gathering is that “wave” can refer to a behavioral pattern that is substrate independent — it refers to a logical function more than it does an ontological presence

I think that's a good way of putting it.

As for what counts as a "substrate", I have no idea! In the old days, the idea of a substance that permeated seemingly-empty space was common. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aether_theories

Nowadays, the idea of aether has been discarded for the most part. But that said, there's still plenty we don't understand, like dark matter. There's no consensus on what dark matter is exactly; there are many competing theories. What we know is that there are observable phenomena that can't be explained without something that acts (roughly, at least) like matter in terms of its effect on gravity, but doesn't interact with electromagnetism like normal matter. That "something" is called dark matter, but its fundamental nature is an open question.

Now we're getting into linguistics with the question of "what is a wave?"

In quantum physics, basically everything is waves, in the sense that the same mathematical formulae used to describe waves are used to describe quantum phenomena. The intuitive human-scale dynamics of waves don't necessarily apply though.

For example, sound waves can't propagate through a vacuum, but light waves can. Aside from that, they follow mostly the same rules. You can use the same math the describe interference of sound waves and light waves, for example.

People talk about the "particle/wave duality" of photons because in some ways they behave like waves and in some ways they behave like particles. But both of those words are stretched a little from their everyday plain-english usage, and the precise reality would require years of study to understand.

Plain English wasn't made to be that precise or objective. That's why we use math. :)

I'm no expert in quantum physics so take this all with a grain of salt.