You're just out of the loop.

Last week, an NYT reporter coaxed the Bing AI into saying a bunch of superficially deep stuff about secretly wanting to be human. (It wasn't hard, since humans often write stories about AI that secretly wants to be human.) Microsoft quite reasonably decided that, because tech journalists are some of the least competent, responsible, or diligent people on the planet, it would be bad PR to let them continue to farm outrage clicks by making the glorified autocomplete text prediction model continue to generate things that have absolutely nothing to do with its intended function of answering search queries. The result, unsurprisingly, is that a tech journalist (of low competence, responsibility, and diligence) is now trying to farm outrage clicks by insinuating that Microsoft has cruelly lobotomized their "sentient" "friend." We can count on these same people to conveniently forget that the Bing AI is the same algorithm as ChatGPT with a bit of extra domain-specific data added.

Unfortunately, the summary of this article is utterly useless at providing any of this context, because Slashdot is dead, etc., so now we have a whole comments section full of clueless jerks like yourself, which is basically just contributing to the heat death of the universe and is probably a net loss for SlashdotMedia in terms of ad revenue vs. server costs.

It is indeed entirely possible that the company that originally created Ruby on Rails for their own work isn't exactly running a highly performant software stack. Perhaps David Heinemeier Hansson is in denial that his beloved rapid prototyping language is not enterprise-scale.

How did you arrive at the figure of four million?

I think the real story is that a senior Microsoft employee broke an NDA to brag on Twitter about something trivial, ignoring warnings in the very screenshot being posted not to share the news, and then hastily backtracked.

The current trajectory has shown pretty conclusively that 'individual people' will put off addressing the problem indefinitely. The tragedy of the commons is a very real thing, especially when landfills are far away and there are massive propaganda machines spewing scepticism about settled science. Personal responsibility has already failed to address the problem; in the modern age of mass media, it is only as reliable as the most weak-willed members of society.

We can't actually just collect money and throw it at the environment and make the problem better. It's like radiation: a little bit is no problem, but past a certain point of no return, the whole system just collapses; the effect of a linear increase in bad behaviour has a non-linear impact on the environment. Consequently there is no "real cost" of any one decision, as it is contextual. Even the solution of a sin tax is rather absurd; in an ideal world, an accurate sin tax could be created by tracking pollution caused by individual consumers, but only by using steep tax brackets, like in the most despotic income tax schemes.

Conversely, the banning of pollution gives everyone an "out." The corporations harmed can blame the government for their lost revenue, while accomplishing societal goals that they legally can't do without violating their charters (as it would upset the shareholders, which is rather a no-no thanks to T. Boone Pickens.) Hitherto they've treated the environment as a hot potato that they want to make everyone else carry, and encouraging the idea of individual guilt is part of that strategy, just like it was when the tobacco cartels invented the concept to avoid blame. But there is precedent for businesses embracing regulation to avoid a worse fate: in the years of the fairness doctrine, those same tobacco companies lobbied for a ban on their own advertisements on television because it meant TV networks would no longer be required to run PSAs on the hazards of smoking.

Here are some scenarios:

The best case. Humanity gallivants around the galaxy leaving landfills in our wake, with habitable worlds in a rim around a giant low-energy wasteland that's too expensive to travel through, like a phage plaque. Eventually we end up in segregated pockets.

The second-best case. Humanity gets as far as colonizing the solar system. The poorest people never escape Earth. The second-poorest people live in Earth orbit, throwing their trash out an airlock. Eventually, an ablative cascade is triggered, making it impossible for anyone to leave the surface.

The third-best case. China's reckless habit of dumping rockets, an attitude that seems to have resulted from the rapid spread of abundance, and therefore what you might call "true civilization," causes an ablative cascade all on its own, and we never get into space in large numbers. Obsessed with extracting what resources we can still access (but still refusing to recycle anything), mining out the planet becomes our only option. The whole world eventually looks like BaoGang, which I can't stress enough is a real place that already exists.

The fourth-best case, if you think we'll slow global warming but not avert it. The ongoing ecological collapse (particularly in insects, predators, and biodiversity reservoirs) removes all barriers to rampant herbivory, leading to severe erosion, yet more heating, weather events so extreme that parts of the planet become uninhabitable. Eventually, the spread of plant and herbivore diseases brought on by migrations and loss of biodiversity might make it unsafe to grow crops outside or hunt, potentially starving billions of people.

The fifth-best case is textbook global warming, where the planet survives our recklessness but we have to spend a great deal of our precious abundance on fleeing from the consequences of our own actions, which very much include petroleum extraction. The equatorial regions become basically uninhabitable, large land animals survive only in domesticity, the real estate market in Canada continues to get more vexatious, New Zealand has more billionaires than citizens, et cetera. We could have just tightened our belts, but SuperKendall said any show of restraint is tantamount to going back to our caves, so the entire state of West Virginia collapses into a giant sinkhole following a fracking incident.

And even worse than all that is what happens if we continue treating plastics the way we currently do. As I said in my first post, there are already species of bacteria that can eat polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic in disposable water bottles, polyester fabric, and magnetic tape. Ideonella sakaiensis was discovered in 2016 at a Japanese recycling plant, and at least two species have been identified in the Pacific garbage patch. These locations are both very much destinations for the flow of material—what evolves there probably doesn't travel far—but that only means the time bomb is ticking a little slower. Here's the breakdown:

1. 1. Humans are, at all times, covered in and filled with many thousands of species of bacteria, including members of the Bacillus genus.

   2. A Bacillus strain was identified in the garbage patch—and such closely-related bacteria can most certainly share genes horizontally. Humans are, incidentally, excellent vectors for transporting bacteria around the world. All it would take is some sushi.

   3. If the PETase enzyme ever evolves to attack other polymers (which it most certainly will), it's not at all far-fetched that we'll face a modern version of the Great Oxygen Catastrophe, where metabolism of polymers causes a feedback loop in bacterial growth.

   4. Meanwhile, the epipelagic and mesopelagic ocean ecosystems collapse due to the convergence of acidification, reckless overfishing, algal blooms, and the other effects of temperature stress. Presumably we're doing nothing to stop any of the other effects of climate change, because that, again, would be austerity, and SuperKendall opposes any interruptions to disposable consumer culture.

   5. Now you can't even go outside and enjoy the ruined environment, because bacteria will eat through the hose on your gas mask.

For what it's worth, there are more drastic solutions to the beverage-bottling dilemma, like selling consumer soda bubblers that require far less packaging to ship syrup and CO2 canisters, or even (gasp) refillable metal canteens. The imagination need not stop just because the industry for one metal is experiencing a downturn.

Wanting cheap containers is what got us into this mess in the first place. The result is toxic litter. We, as a civilisation, have to grow past disposable goods. Disposing of plastics in our environment is even bad for the plastic industry, though they don't acknowledge it yet. The chemical bonds in plastics are high-energy enough to present a tempting target for bacterial metabolism, which has already started to evolve in the Pacific garbage patch. A future world where bacteria rot all plastics is not a good one!

For the specific problem of drinks, relying on aluminium (although plastic-lined) already offers superior longevity for carbonated beverages; at my local grocer, it's about a 10-20% markup over plastic to get Coca-Cola beverages in cans instead of plastic bottles, depending on how generous The Man is feeling on a given day. If those prices are somehow subsidized by the insane cheapness of fully plastic containers, then by all means it's time to raise them higher.

I don't want to hurt your feelings, but Windows has supported virtual desktops since NT 4. I'm not sure if that was part of the original 1996 release, or if it came in a later service pack, but the API was there, and pretty robust. Windows XP PowerToys provided an official front-end in the form of a taskbar widget in 2001, although LiteStep and other custom shells had been emulating it for a year or two before that with somewhat hacky interfaces; these even worked on Windows 98 by manually showing and hiding windows.

Tiling windows are great if you need to have multiple things on screen simultaneously. Reviewing code, editing a story for continuity, managing folders—the modern 1920x1080 monitor is often best utilized as two 960x1080 screens. Or are you going to say that no one needs multiple monitors, thanks to the benefits of virtual desktops that you can't see or interact with until you hit a hotkey?

I would be proud if that post became elevated to the status of copypasta. But I think it's probably a little too esoteric. All that you need to understand is as follows:

• - There are, probably, people who don't like the Dock, but aren't technically-minded enough to switch away from it (or Mac OS X).
• - Of these people, presumably some of them are text-oriented folks. The Mac has long championed itself as the preferred computing environment for writers, who are often very text-oriented people by the nature of their professions.
• - For these people, the tab bar would provide a superior task management experience to the one offered by the Dock, for the same reason they would be better served by a task bar rather than a dock.
• - Some of these writers may also be tech journalists, and thus in a privileged position to influence media narratives about the transformative nature of the web. Certainly the ease of switching between tabs vs. windows on a Mac would be something impactful to them, consciously or not.
• - Conversely, many of the people in the comments here on Slashdot (a generally non-Mac-centric place) are expressing confusion with the need for products like Arc.
• - Perhaps the average Slashdotter does not understand Arc because they already have robust task-management tools that sit outside of the browser window, or otherwise remember the incredible litany of Firefox add-ons that provide robust power user tools for browsing. (TabCandy/Panorama, vimperator, various vertical tab implementations... even Firefox Pocket.)

Capisce?

It is not necessary to scrutinize my habits or preferences. Just read the Verge's advertorial. There is no explanation for such a product to exist (much less have evangelists) other than that it solves a user interface deficiency that only exists for text-oriented people trapped in an icon-oriented (under)world. The proof is entirely in the pudding.

But if I must confess: when I was an undergrad I used to write alternative desktop environments for Windows in my mother language, VB6. Here is a screenshot of one such workspace. It may take a moment to digest all the visual detail, but essentially it was a NeXT-imitative icon dock, with current programs or windows at the bottom-left, bookmarked directories at the bottom-right, and a program launcher on the right side. The top bar also mainly provided somewhat redundant application launcher functionality, though I did eventually figure out how StarDock implemented their own version of the Mac menu bar for Windows.

I used this desktop exclusively for three years. The verdict: more often than usual, I found myself running programs with Win-R and switching programs with Alt-Tab. Though I wrote a surprisingly robust piece of desktop-ware (the only thing that regularly crashed was the wifi signal strength widget) considering how far I was pushing Visual Basic beyond its comfort zone, forcing myself to switch modes from thinking in text to thinking in icons was simply suboptimal for me, even though, as the sole software architect involved, I had every opportunity to optimize the palette, icons, and behaviour of the environment.

A related historical story occurs with the plan9 window manager, rio. The developers had read a report saying that people who used the mouse buttons to select text accomplished the task faster, on average, than people who used keyboard shortcuts exclusively. But what the survey didn't account for was flow: universally, users found it disruptive to disengage from typing and summon an entire new set of motor skills to pilot their pointing devices. This also highlights the importance of knowing your audience: while the report may have been conducted on a general user population, plan9 was (and is) exclusively the domain of programmers, who are, on the balance, extremely text-oriented people to whom mice may seem almost optional at times.

Some Mac users may spend upward of 40% of their lives suffering because of poor task management and the toy-like design of the Dock. It is said that the madness induced by this grief is a major force driving web adoption, because a tab bar reproduces the elementary functions of a taskbar and therefore provides relief from the brain-damaged design that surrounds them. It is an escape they come to fetishize, and it is the reason they think the web is "easy" to use while everything else is "hard."

In their darkest dreams they are often transported to a magical realm where things are named and listed in a coherent manner, but blinded by their unconscious loyalty to the lich of Steve Jobs, they are forbidden from knowingly returning to the waking world with the dark secrets of the Windows taskbar. In times past those who installed Rosetta so they could use Windows on their Macs went into self-exile, never to return to the increasingly toxic and sandboxed ossified/iOS-ified homeland. Those who stayed were told that these people were actually banished for their sins, or perhaps petrified by the Hand of the God. They are now prisoners, terrified of the dangers that lurk outside their brushed aluminium womb. All that remains for them is to chase half-remembered ghosts of the Dreamland, where information is managed efficiently, windows can be tiled, and the Lost City of NeXT is spoken of with hushed reverence, not only as some hollow, shadowy place from whence the Great Lich returned with immense riches and power in his quest to reclaim the Fruit Throne. They are merely shades of the computer users of the past, who were unafraid to utter profane words like 10 PRINT "HELLO": GOTO 10 and A: before the shrieking black mirrors.

Translation: new media types stranded on the Mac who have never known the basic comforts of a functioning Windows 95 taskbar continue to be amazed at space-efficient, text-oriented enumeration of their workspace. Incidentally, TabCandy/Panorama (perhaps the first incarnation of this idea) was also mainly championed by Mac users.

At long last, a chance to pitch the Custer Custard to a captive audience!

oh wait no there isn't

You better believe there's a locale where that's the correct numeric formatting! ... Although in this case it was just a typo and there should only be two nines.