The fact that Brightline can take you from Miami to Orlando is wonderful, and I'm really happy Florida is embracing more efficient, less dangerous, and less stressful forms of transportation.
But using it to make a subtle jab agains CAHSR isn't really fair -- they're two very different projects (for one of them, it's genuinely a stretch to call it "HSR") in two very different regions.
Yes, it's harder to get big projects through the red tape in California than it is in West / Panhandle Texas or Central Florida. Go take a drive through those regions and you'll quickly see some reasons why, besides just NIMBYism, Californians are a bit more protective of their landscapes. If a massive wind project were proposed across large swaths of the Texas Hillcountry, you'd see a lot more push-back.
> But using it to make a subtle jab agains CAHSR isn't really fair -- they're two very different projects (for one of them, it's genuinely a stretch to call it "HSR") in two very different regions.
Well, CA HSR doesn't exist. It's missing the R part of the HSR. So that must be the one it's a stretch to call "HSR".
Brightline is too slow to call it high speed. But we have it today which is worth something unlike maybe some year with all the other options - so brightline gets the win today. things are likely to change in the future but I don't see anything I'd bet on (but I only bet very sure things)
> or one of them, it's genuinely a stretch to call it "HSR"
How fast is California's HSR?
That's both sarcasm and an actual question. It doesn't go anywhere now but I keep hearing it's speed get downgraded as they encounter the real world. Plus, the goal of LA-SF is practically abandoned and now it takes you from a place you don't want to be to a place you don't want to go.
You really can't compare the two because one exists only as a goal and the other is an accomplishment.
Here's where I'd normally complain about how our economic system requires prices to increase while product quality degrades to ensure ever-increasing profits for shareholders.
Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?
Because it’s more profitable to have something that is paid for AND has ads.
Same thing happened with cable TV when it first came out, it was advertised as ad free. Then it filled up with ads, and the streaming services came along promising no ads. Now the circle is repeating itself.
> ...critics say that the use of sponsorship could make cable programmers more vulnerable to censorship or control by advertisers, particularly in light of recent efforts by organizations such as the Moral Majority and its offshoot, the Coalition for Better Television.
40+ years later I think it's pretty clear this was an accurate prediction.
> A much-cited - and widely disputed - study by the Benton & Bowles advertising agency found that the public would accept advertising if it meant a reduction or a holding-of-the-line on subscription fees...
This is great until a year later when YoY revenue growth is flat and prices are increased anyway.
The article doesn't once say cable TV never had ads; it only says the public had some perception that would be the case. In fact, it even talks about how cable channels were bringing in millions of dollars in ad revenues despite being very small markets at the time.
In reality, cable TV had ads from day one, decades before this article was published. Originally every cable TV station had ads, because they were just retransmissions of broadcast stations which ran ads. The first nation-wide cable TV station had ads, and many of the early cable-only channels (CNN, USA, others) had ads.
The problem is that the most lucrative advertising market is to advertise to those people who are willing to pay extra to not see ads. The people who are willing to save money by seeing ads, are also the people who don't have excess discretionary cash that they'd be willing to spend on the products advertisers are advertising to them. This is the paradox that keeps driving this industry around in circles, swallowing its own tail.
There was an interesting interview with a long timer with google on a podcast I listen to (freakanomics?) where the concept of ads came up. Apparently very early on google did the analysis and found that google search provided something like $50 (can't remember the exact number) of actualizable annual value to a typical user. Which is to say they could charge around $5 monthly and it'd still be worth it for most people to pay. But the ads. They could make way more than $50 per user just during the christmas season alone. And so it was a no brainer for them to go with ads (despite anti ad sentiment being a key part of the papers that led to the creation of google...).
So, to answer your question. I think we do value our time less than advertisers do. Worse, is I suspect your eyeballs becomes more valuable to advertisers the more your willing to pay to not see ads...
I'm sure this has been going on for a while but I'm noticing an even bigger obsession with companies manifesting ad inventory locations everywhere possible. Biggest standout recently is Lyft placing large ads in their app while I'm waiting on a ride that I'm paying them for! I too used to think something that was paid for directly with actual money meant no ads but not anymore.
I think this was just a short reprieve from ads in some spaces as we were adopting new tech, not a norm that is just recently being broken. Cable TV, newspapers, magazines, and even many taxis and municipal buses have had advertisements for decades.
One of my favorite examples is LCD screens on gas pumps - yelling at you about various deals in the store, as you're standing there _giving them money for the fuel you're pumping_. Some at least have a mute button...
I will go to a gas station with those loud screens exactly once. After that, I have written them off. There is a station in my in-law's town with those. I had to fill up there once about 10 years ago as my fuel light was on. I'm 95% sure they got rid of the screens a while back but I will never go to that station again if I have a choice.
I've accidentally hit those sorts of gas stations a couple of times. I didn't even bother getting gas at them, though. I got back in my car and drove away. I'm not willing to pay a company to abuse me. There are other stations that actually value their customers, and I'll go to them.
This same attitude is also why I stopped doing any business with Amazon years ago. They became intolerable.
If I go to those I'll lean with my hand over the speaker if they don't have a mute button. I'm not listening to whatever garbage they put together there. I wish I could do more but I need gas... I hate this world sometimes.
Monopoly is the best position to implement anti-competitive behavior. Copyright is monopoly. It should be no surprise that Copyright has resulted in anti-competitive behavior.
No one can afford to compete with large media corporations, because Copyright explicitly turns media corporations into monopolies.
Copyright is literally a monopoly over the redistribution of a "work". That's what the word means. Without the concept of monopoly, Copyright is meaningless.
If your assertion is that the concept of monopoly somehow keeps itself exclusive to that specific context, then I sincerely disagree. The system is what the system is made of.
> If your assertion is that the concept of monopoly somehow keeps itself exclusive to that specific context, then I sincerely disagree
That's fine, but you're using a strange definition. Monopoly is something that's bad. I own my house, which could be called a monopoly. I am my kids' dad - another monopoly, in the world of strange definitions. It's not useful to use words with specific meanings, particularly negative meanings, and repurpose them for everyday, non-negative situations. It's the opposite of useful. And that's why I hope you retain your monopoly on this silly definition.
On the contrary! I'm choosing my words carefully, based on their meaning.
Property and monopoly are similar, but not the same. Monopoly applies to a set of items, not a single item or group of items.
For example, you can "own" a copy of Pulp Fiction. You can watch it, you can break it, and you can sell it. What you are not allowed to do is sell a copy of the one you own. You are not allowed to do so, because Miramax LLC was granted a monopoly over the set of all Pulp Fiction copies.
You can own your house, but that is not the same as monopolizing the entire market of houses.
You don't copyright a book, you copyright what's written in it. Copyright for a novel doesn't decide who owns each printed book, it creates a monopoly over the entire market of books containing that novel. If you own the copyright to a novel, no one but you is allowed to compete in the market of books containing your novel.
Sure, they can compete in the larger overall market of all books in general, but they must avoid the segment of that market that you own a copyright to.
Absolutely, advertisers are big companies who don't really care how much they're spending on ads. Especially big brands, they have no idea how much advertising helps them, and they don't care about the budget that much. They'll absolutely pay more to put an ad in front of you than you think it's worth to remove it. That's the whole thing with ads.
> why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free?
We can. You just have to make it first.
This is not a question to ask of others, it a just question you ask yourself. Once you answer it for yourself, then just realize that same answer applies to everyone from their perspective.
But how? I don't have the resources to build something like this on my own. I'm skeptical I could convince many investors to give me money to build something pitched as "just like Prime Video but without the ad revenue" when Amazon has certainly already done market research and determined this is the best path to maximize profit.
> Instead, I'll complain about commercials: why can't we just have something that's truly paid and ad-free? Do we actually value our time less than advertisers do?
Yes, clearly, as revealed by the way most consumers act.
How many people do you know that actually pay for YouTube to get rid of ads? I personally do, and I encourage everyone else to do so, but I assume it's a tiny market.
It is paid and ad free. You just have to pay the new rate.
Perhaps they should have raised the rate of base Prime, and then offered a lower priced paid w/ads option. But there was probably an issue with the annual holders in that case.
So, instead they lowered the features and now folks can up to the new subscription.
Advertisers are sort of benevolent here, if not lesser victims.
Google, Facebook and now Amazon realized the big money is in brokering ads. As brokers, they know everything and control everything, exploiting both the viewers and advertisers.
More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads
> More specifically, the total revenue of ads + the people willing to pay $3/month is greater than the revenue lost when people cancel their service due to ads
The bundling makes cancellation particularly unlikely: you can't (or at least I don't know how to) cancel the Prime Video part of the Prime package alone, so there's no way to show your dissatisfaction with this short of cancelling the entire Prime membership. Which this latest push, however small on its own, has been enough to get me finally to consider doing, but it's still tough.
I consider myself lucky to have discovered how little value Prime has for shipping a few years ago when Target had a free Shipt promotion. I learned a couple things pretty quickly after I dropped Prime:
1. In most cases my Amazon orders took about the same amount of time to get to my house as they did with Prime: 3-4 days
2. Amazon has some terrible dark patterns. For example, on the product page you always see the lowest priced shipping option (usually free), but at checkout it defaults to paid shipping. It's really easy to accidentally pay an extra $5.99 for shipping, often with the same estimated arrival it would've had with free shipping.
Personally I find the shipping benefits of Prime vastly overrated. I just got a free trial of Prime, and they promised 2 day shipping... but it took 4 days. Why would someone pay for that? I tend to let items accumulate to hit the free shipping minimum and then order. Still tends to come in 2-4 days regardless.
I canceled Prime over this ad thing, and what I noticed was they seem to ship packages as the same speed, but they let the order sit for a few days before fulfilling it. It makes it seem like they find the efficiencies from treating every package the same during packing and shipping worthwhile, so they just hold the order in a queue for a few days before releasing it as a punishment for not being a Prime user.
I could be reading that wrong, but it was sure how it looked with my first few non-Prime orders.
I have a warehouse serving our entire metro area five miles from my house. Shipping takes two days after Amazon sits on my order for 2-3 days.
Their drivers are also the worst. The driver that covers my area tends to throw packages a good 10 feet at my door. Needless to say, Amazon is pretty much my last choice option these days.
I'll just watch even fewer things on Prime, I guess. Everything about the UI and watching experience seems worse than Netflix, but then ... that's been worsening recently as well in ways I can't quantify.
Same here. I had an additional cable channel subscription through Prime, which I've now cancelled, as I don't wish to tolerate any advertising in my video stream, so I will simply stop watching any video on Prime. And as you pointed out, the quality of Prime video offerings has been in decline of late.
Why won't I leave Prime (yet)? Because I have an "Amazon" visa credit card, with an admittedly serious 5% permanent discount on all purchases from Amazon (as well as companies they own, such as Whole Foods.) I won't stop purchasing products through Prime just yet; am simply careful to avoid anything that looks problematic, price-gouged, or needing aftersale support, and the discount lock-in is too attractive to me to ignore for now. But video? I can always find it elsewhere.
Same goes for "FreeVee" because "Free with ads" isn't free.
FYI, if you cancel Prime but want to keep that card, they will downgrade you to a blue Amazon branded card that still gets 3% back at Amazon. I don't know if you still get any discount at Whole Foods since I might only go there about once a year at most.
So if Prime is failing you in other ways, don't feel like you need to keep it to keep your discount.
I'm in the same position. I originally subscribed to Prime for the shipping benefits. We also started using the Prime Photos platform for our photo storage and sharing. Then I got an "Amazon" CC and I really enjoy/use the 5% cash-back program. I even have a FireTV Cube and outfitted several people with FireTV devices.
However, I'm seriously reconsidering my choices. Almost my entire family is in the Apple ecosystem and we recently purchased an Apple TV device to replace a FireTV, and I must say that it is a much better experience. And iCloud is a better photo/video sharing platform for us than Prime Photos ever was. Really, the only thing keeping me subscribed to Prime is the cash-back program.
As for Prime Video, it has always been the most crappy of the video streaming options. It's always frustrating when the things that I want to watch are not included with Prime and require a purchase or rental. And now that there are ads and lower quality, the chance that I'll watch anything on that platform is steadily declining.
I canceled my Prime a while back when AMZN's started quoting 5 day delivery to my location, though on the rare times when I do order something from AMZN it often takes 7 days.
The thing is I live less than 3 hours from a big warehouse (people who live in the same ZIP code as one of those warehouses often get 5-day shipping) but it seems that the residents of Upstate New York and New England are frequently treated as unpeople when it comes to facilities and infrastructure.
Their market research clearly saw me as some kind of anomaly if that’s the case.
If they had simply raised the price of Prime, I would have been mildly annoyed for 30 minutes and moved on with my life, as I had done many times before. Instead, on top of my yearly Prime membership, I was going to get charge a monthly fee… this just hit all the wrong notes for me. It felt so cheap. Here I am paying for a premium service and they are going to nickel and dime me with a monthly charge on top of the yearly one. Not a chance in hell. I cancelled my Prime membership after 15 years over this move and have no regrets.
I hope I’m not alone in that. Prime Video is my least watched steaming service and waiting a few extra days for free shipping hasn’t been a big deal.
When cancelling there was no point where they asked why, which I found interesting.
I am a person who will pay to avoid ads. I have YouTube Premium and pay for the ad free Hulu tier. I also always pay extra to get the Kindle without ads, and pay to remove ads in any app I download within minutes. I even pay for my search engine (Kagi) instead of using Google or DDG. I’m the person they were after, but not like this.
I’m curious how many people they expected to pay for this. A modest price hike for everyone would likely have been more profitable and been mostly ignored by everyone. If they wanted to start breaking down the services to offer cheaper options to people looking for it, they should revamp the whole system. Present the 50 Prime offers and let people pick what they want, or have a few different bundles. Shipping and Videos were basically the only 2 things I used, so everything else was of no value to me.
Yea. This is failure masquerading as improvement as far as I can honestly tell. The idea that someone thought it was a good idea to put out a press release or whatever is a little baffling.
It should read, “FCC once again fails to substantively improve the lives of consumers OR address data breaches and the loss of consumer data by countless companies.”
Its baffling. But it’s still better than the TSA. ;)
I'm of the opposite opinion. I think there's some Dunning-Kruger-like effect at play on a macro scale and it's causing researchers to feel like they're closer than they are because they're in uncharted territory and can't see the complexity of what they're trying to build.
Or maybe I'm just jaded after a couple decades of consistently underbidding engineering and software projects :)
> The Onion couldn't come up with this. It's so embarrassing. And yet, as I type this, dozens of people are taking this premise seriously and debating it on its merits. Humans really are doomed.
Personally, I find discussion about hypothetical, albeit completely impractical, ways we could avoid killing each other a much better use of time than a lot of other topics, like discussing ways we could kill each other more efficiently.
A lot more people, as a percentage, died during medieval wars than do today in modern wars. Read about the crusades sometime. They would lay siege to cities and massacre the entire population. Not a single survivor.
They didn’t need advanced weaponry to kill tens of thousands of people. A few thousand soldiers would go through a city, house-by-house, and put every single man, woman, and child to the sword. They then looted what they wanted and burned the house to the ground.
Thousands more died during the siege, long before any soldiers reached them, due to disease and starvation from overcrowding and dwindling food supplies. It was absolutely horrific and it happened mainly because swords, spears, and bows were useless against city walls so long sieges were the rule.
The massacres that followed could be chalked up to deep resentment on the part of the attacking soldiers for the defenders holding out so long. I think another part of it is simply that the commanders of the day had less power over their soldiers, so looting and pillaging was part of the bargain to encourage them to fight.
Looting was in large part the payment for soldiering. Whomever raised the army might pay a bit regularly for maintenance, but all the real money was in the spoils, and everyone involved knew it. Many is the army that failed to destroy a defeated foe because the victorious soldiers mostly wanted to loot the enemy camp.
Erm, no, I don't think so. Can you give a source for that claim?
Medieval wars were in general shorter, more regional, used much smaller forces and affected the civilian population less than in later ages. Of course it is very difficult to give any numbers, but various infection diseases, childbirth and infant death were major causes of death. (E.g. women life expectancy overtook that of men only in the 19th century.) Also at least in the 13th and 14th century in Europe main reasons for a significant temporary population decline - during a time of general population growth - were black death and hunger, the latter being partially caused by limitations to agriculture technology and available land.
Medival wars in Europe were smaller and shorter because of weakness and fragmentation of European states at that time. The Mongol conquest cost the lives of 50 million people and left huge swathes of Europe and Asia uninhabited.
>affected the civilian population less than in later ages
lol. lmao, even.
Just an army moving through a region - just walking, scouting and "foraging" (this doesn't mean bushes, this means looting from rural villages) - guarantees a famine for those involved. Only the invention of the railway prevented (no, lessened) this.
If you want to see some really brutal wars, you need to go back from the Middle Ages into Antiquity.
The ancient empires were able to gather armies much larger than any medieval king could, and, at the same time, people had few qualms about genocide. There weren't even religious reasons not to commit one, much less any chivalry codes etc.
The Romans in particular had the principle of "aries murum attigit", which meant that a city had time to surrender until the first battering ram touched its walls. After that, the captives would be put to the sword.
Agree, but then humanity spent a considerble effort since the dawn of time exactly on that: developing ways to kill things faster and safer for oneself.
It is, sadly, part of our nature. And because of that I prefer hypotheticals that actually have some basis in reality.
By the way so, during the time of bow, arrow, sword, spear and shield, we still managed to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
This comes up now and then. But it doesn't hold water, because if true then people would on average be killing people roughly at the same rate, regardless of epoch, geographical area or society. But nations and tribes that were constantly warring have over time become good, peaceful neighbors, while the opposite is the exception. In spite of the impression one might get from the daily news, person-on-person violence is at an historical low.
Why is this explanation still popular, despite the obvious falsity of it? Good question, not sure. Maybe for now suffice to say that it isn't true whenever it pops up. Eventually we might start scrutinizing the real reasons (or lack thereof) for going to war, and the mindless slaughter it necessarily entails.
It's part of the nature of a bomb for it to blow up, but you should note a bomb spends 99.999999% of it's life not blowing up, and many bombs never blow up before they are disassembled.
There is no obvious falisty here. Any intelligent entity has the ability to kill, it's part of the nature of intelligence. The question you're asking, which is different is "What drives more killing at particular times, and can it be avoided".
And here is the answer you don't want to hear.
No.
This is just game theory in practice. Every player has the option of cooperating or competing. If they decide to compete it is likely they will choose to escalate in order to win.
Maybe the model didn't take all parameters into account - a primary characteristic of all models? Such arguments may first seem like a plausible description of the world only to become arguments for a course of action.
In short I would not rely too much on a theory that says "we must go to war and kill thousands if not millions of civilians otherwise the opponent will" as a lame excuse to leave other options unexplored. We're getting close to that phase in history where other such options seem ever more realistic IMO.
You're seemingly shifting your point, which originally was that humans at times and for varied reasons kill each other. In which I was replying that this is innate and not a removeable part of the system. You may be able to quell said behavior, but you can never be sure your system is stable, or if your system is only quasistable. Any new variable added to your system at any point in the future can have a non-linear effect which is not predictable/non-computable before hand.
I think we can agree to disagree at this point. This is why I think so:
The argument that I originally objected to was that it is in "our nature" to develop ever more lethal means of warfare. Your objection to this is that (according to game theory) there is no way to stop this, so although it might not be in our genetic nature then it is in the "nature" of game theory (with rational players that might as well be robots). My objection to this stands: you can't know all the parameters of the game even if it probably is possible to retrofit the theory to past events so that it looks all encompassing. In systems as complex as total world history you simply can not pin down all the parameters sufficiently so that you can foresee all possible outcomes - no matter how much one might wish for such powers. It is a temptation that many, perhaps mostly mathematicians, have succumbed to: replacing the world with the model, or the terrain with the map if you will.
So, even this kind of "nature" is false, even if less obviously so. I don't expect you to agree, but I think we can agree that this is the point of contention, and since our beliefs are simply different (and I don't expect you to be swayed as a consequence of our little exchange here) there is no use arguing further.
You're simply submitting that a model exists where we can all get along, and handwaving why as too complex. Your model is as simply unpredictable as my model is. But with any models where there is a large amount of unpredictability, is you look at model probability. What is more probable? That everyone suddenly starts getting along with no defectors. Or that some groups play along waiting for the right time to defect?
I'm not predicting, or saying what is probable, I'm saying that something is not impossible, and pointing out a direction that might be possible and something to strive for. You can call that a model if you like. As a contrast models that use "nature" as a concept are deterministic: referring to human "nature" in terms of warfare is another way of saying that peace is impossible, and therefore meaningless to strive for. It is reflected in the language you used: "(...) can it be avoided [?] (...) And here is the answer you don't want to hear. No. ", i.e. very assertive, as if proven.
Now in your latest comment, you start talking about various probabilities instead, which speaks a different language than the one used previously. High probability based on historical and, as such different, circumstances is not same as predicting with absolute certainty what will happen, as I'm sure you agree.
Which brings me to reiterate what I said at the start of this thread: It is not part of our unchangeable nature to be ever more destructive towards fellow man. And, I might add: to insist that it is (in our nature) is not only false, it becomes an argument for not exploring the sorely needed avenues for peace that exist.
> I can tell you for certain this is what they're trying to combat.
> There are ways to implement this without the need to do per-device pairing, but doing so in a secure way is quite difficult.
Is this based on first-hand knowledge? I'm skeptical on both fronts because I neither see any evidence this is what's being combatted, nor do I see the technical difficulty of being able to self-authorize your phone's parts to be used in repairs.
Sure it takes some engineering effort to get there, but I wouldn't expect it to be particularly challenging from a technical point of view. The phone is already linked to a user account, and the phone's parts are apparently already linked to the phone that's currently using them.
So, the technical challenge is related to managing the following things (all simultaneously):
* Apple wants to make sure components in an authentic phone are not capable of being stolen and resold (this is a problem today, even with the pairing, although it is less valuable due to pairing)
* Apple wants to make sure that if you change components, that the replacement component is authentic
* Apple wants to make sure that if you change components, that the replacement component is not stolen
I can't comment on specific implementations, but allowing users to just re-pair devices in the current state would not allow the above 3 goals to be met. By restricting who has access to the pairing tools, they can achieve those 3 with the downside being obviously it leads to a crappy user experience for repair.
If you send a permanent unlock code for parts being re-used in a repair, then that fully accomplishes 2 and 3 and almost entirely accomplishes 1. With no need to know anything about the host device.
And brand new parts could lock themselves to the first device they're put into.
It wouldn't be ideal for repair but it would be much better.
My point is that Apple currently does not appear to have tight control over the serial numbering or whatever on the external components (display, etc) in a truly secure way. If you let anyone re-pair devices, then that opens the floodgates to 3rd party vendors being able to make devices that appear as 'authentic' components, which does not accomplish #2.
As it stands today, you can already use any random components, you'll just get a pop-up telling you it can't be authenticated.
Can't speak for California or LA, but in Dallas we had a plastic bag ban for a short period and it was sold as a way to reduce local litter, not reduce greenhouse emissions or protect the climate.
I didn't realize how effective it was until about 6 months when I was walking Downtown and noticed a plastic bag tumbling down the street. Prior to the ban, they were a regular sight and nothing I would have taken note of.
I once did a lunch and learn at work where I tried to teach coworkers how to use vim efficiently. It turned out to be the absolute worst lunch and learn I ever did.
It's just so unintuitive and trying to teach it in a "here are some good shortcuts that will save you time" way was a near-total waste.
vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain. Once you learn to make your neurons fire in the right way to move the cursor to the right spot, it's easy and there's no better way to edit code. Describing the neuron firing order to someone else, though, is futile.
It's like learning to to use your fingers to pick something up for the first time as a kid: you just have to try enough times until it sticks.
> vim is the closest any editor comes to interfacing directly with my brain.
It's funny you mention that. Just today, I had this moment where I realized that if someone asked me which key letters are used to move up/down/left/right, I'd have to pause and think about it.
I've been using Vim for years. Like, my index finger rests on the down key, so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up? Do I actually have to move my index finger to go left? What is my pinky doing most of the time?
It's just funny how all this stuff is burned into my brain but I wouldn't even be able to tell someone the basics without a keyboard in front of me.
It's even weirder for me as I use the Colemak keyboard layout.
When I first switched to Colemak, around 2010, I remapped the movement keys so that they were in the same physical location as hjkl on qwerty.
Then I realised I'd lost compatibility with other readline based software. So I just learned to use the new, not particularly ergonomic, positions under Colemak.
At this point it's almost always from muscle memory now and couldn't tell you what I press half the time.
Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction and using it since the 90s has been like learning to play a musical instrument.
>Vim is like the Great Glass Elevator, it has a button for moving in every direction
Actually vim is more like the Great Glass Elevator cum Excavator, because it has buttons and levers (to extend your simile) for moving in every direction and performing operations of every kind, and most importantly, all sorts of combinations of the two:
So, if tomorrow, either more movements or more operations were added to vim, they would automatically play well with the older ones.
This is orthogonality (1), and genius, IMO :)
(1) As they mean in microprocessor ISA design (, I think, not being a hardware guy, but have just read about it a little here and there, while doing assembly language programming years ago).
> so J is down. I think? And so on... My middle finger rests on the up key, so K goes up?
Nope, j is down. J combines the current line with the next line, reducing whitespace between to 1 space.
Back when I first figured out what J was doing (having typo'd it regularly) I thought it was useless, then one day I just started reflexively using it when manipulating function arguments.
Likewise, k is up, K looks up the word under the cursor in a man page.
Passwords are the same way for me. I can type my password on a keyboard, but if I have to enter it on my phone, I have no idea what it actually is. Thankfully, a password manager deals with most of my passwords but there is a few that I don't use it for.
A few weeks ago I was unsure of my PIN code because I got it wrong on the first try, the keypad somehow seemed different (I was getting cash, which I don't often do), and I just completely blanked. I got something from a store and paid by PIN there to make sure I got the right code, and then got my cash.
Does the analogy hold for ^M which is carriage return?
Anyway, I remember that stuff. Had a lot of "fun" on Unixes back in the day using things like ^J, ^M, ^H, stty sane, stty -a, stty icrnl, stty onlcr (or is it the other way around), fiddling with termcap and terminfo, and much more ...
> The use of the HJKL keys for moving the cursor in the vi editor and its descendants originated from the ADM-3A [...] The ←, ↓, ↑, → and Home labels printed on the H, J, K, L, and ~ ^ keys were a visual reference to the control characters Ctrl+H, Ctrl+J, Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ that were required to move the cursor left, down, up, right, and to the top/left corner (or "Home" position) of the terminal, respectively [...] The Ctrl+H and Ctrl+J functions were the standard ASCII backspace and line feed respectively, but the interpretations of Ctrl+K, Ctrl+L, and Ctrl+~ ^ were new to the ADM-3A.
Seems almost a happy accident. I personally like the placement because the most common movement in a document is down and it's placed right under the most dextrous finger, the index finger, by a coincidence between ASCII encoding and the QWERTY layout. Up being the second most common movement was put under the second most dextrous finger. Nice.
Yeah, I think you'd have the same issue trying to teach people to play guitar over the lunch hour. It takes a lot of practice to learn vim but it's super rewarding once you do!
As a side note: "Lunch and learn" is work for me. I have a strikt rule, that whenever someone talks heavily about work at lunch, I consider it a meeting - just as "lunch and work". Therefore I will take a work break afterwards.
I know exactly what you mean. At work people constantly ask me what keys do what and the moment they do my mind goes completely blank. To the point that I even forgot how to use vim for a short while until the conscious part of my brain is preoccupied with something else and suddenly I can use vim again.
I think all quick learning session of vim invariably turns into bootcamp style "learning to code". Jumps straight into what but not how and why.
To know what modal editing is and understand that first is going to help - but then your learning session is over like that without teaching any "tricks".
You can get vim simulators in most editors too. Even Emacs. The interesting question becomes whether you still prefer VIM as an editor. One advantage is you can use the same editor over SSH. If it is not there it is quick to install.
The issue with Vim for me is that it takes years for the keybinds to be picked up as muscle memory. Learning takes effort, people can’t learn everything. And there’s an endless amount of things I can learn other than Vim that will give me a more fulfilling life.
In my case, it only took a few months to be more effective with Vim than without it. Since I spend most of my time working, Vim is a great improvement to my quality of life. The benefits of Vim include not just productivity, but also comfort.
But using it to make a subtle jab agains CAHSR isn't really fair -- they're two very different projects (for one of them, it's genuinely a stretch to call it "HSR") in two very different regions.
Yes, it's harder to get big projects through the red tape in California than it is in West / Panhandle Texas or Central Florida. Go take a drive through those regions and you'll quickly see some reasons why, besides just NIMBYism, Californians are a bit more protective of their landscapes. If a massive wind project were proposed across large swaths of the Texas Hillcountry, you'd see a lot more push-back.