Apple has a strange habit of making the first version excellent, then finding ways to degrade the experience. The grid pattern of spaces is definitely one; Spotlight, as it appeared in Tiger, is another.
It's clear they don't want stand-alone Office anymore. One gets the feeling, given how Windows has devolved, that they'd like to rid themselves of all desktop software so they can focus on the backroom, perhaps because the data they could acquire is tastier.
I have added spores to my garden for a few years, & the results have been excellent. Not only have the plants thrived, the network spread through the lawn to a further extent every year, & the grass in that zone looks much healthier than the rest of the lawn. Mostly I sprinkle a bit in with each seed or row — it does the work from that point on.
Trees have shown the same pattern — we had a large, older tree go down, one which had quite a bit of fungus growing around it, & the trees planted near the old site did well while new trees on the other side of the yard did not, even with significant, regular watering.
Do you mind sharing which product you use? Every time I look into this I have a hard time telling which products contain useful amounts of good strains.
The RHS (Royal Horticultural Society) sells little packets of mycorrhizal powder that you can put into your garden if you feel it is lacking beneficial fungi. Another more natural route is to bury a kilo of cooked white rice near a very healthy tree, where the soil is soft and 'healthy' then retrieve it after a week. It will be mouldy, but with the right type of mould. Mix that into compost, grow tomatoes in that compost, then when they are finished, chop up their roots, mix it into the compost again, add fresh compost from your compost bin to make seed compost. Mix that seed compost into whatever you want to 'infect'. Some people grow just the fungus using sprouted barley and add the mouldy sprouted barley to their compost.
Really the best you can do is with local mycorrhizae. Collect it wild and inoculate your yard. But, if you don't even really need to do that. Make the environment hospitable to mycorrhizae and it will appear.
fwiw I got one of the first products listed on amazon when you search mycorrhizal fungi and I'm seeing the same effects stated by the grandparent comment
We need a second, new internet that cuts these rent-seekers out. The backbone is there, we can use mesh, we could use Starlink (there's a real opportunity there) — locking out & starving the current titans of cash is where we need to be. It won't happen, but it should, for all sorts of economic, cultural, & liberty-oriented reasons.
Efforts like this could be a nice way to get old apps to run "natively" on current hardware, as there are a ton of them out there which are perfectly good for work, but which cannot run today.
Speed certainly wouldn't be there, but capabilities would. Plenty could get done on those old machines — most of it had to do with programmers having the imagination & skill to be able to shoehorn their ideas into spaces they weren't meant to be crammed into.
One memory this project brought to mind for me was a hack I came across which allowed simultaneously running DOS 3.3 & ProDOS on a 128k Apple II, giving each 64k (well, a little less due to overhead) & a way to switch between the two with a simple command. Two programs couldn't run at once, but one could step between the two OSes to run programs made for each pretty seamlessly. If this sort of thing was possible on basic consumer hardware, ten or twenty years of development would have led to many far more interesting & useful things.
nah, something like LLMs wouldnt be possible due to sheer power consumption - abstract (FL)OPs/uW is billions worse than modern tech. I used claude to make me back of a napkin calcs - single LLM prompt in 6502 era tech would be over 3k Eur vs fraction of a cent today, DISRECARDING WALL TIME (which is ridiculously impractical)
but this is the economic case for it — if things are as dire as you paint them, this is the last chance to get a toehold off-world for at least 3-4 generations, if ever.
You know those people would rely on endless, constant resupply missions for the rest of their lives with no hope of ever being returned home, right?
How important is this to you? Are you willing to personally act as executioner and press the button than sends these people to their deaths, knowing we could just stop being able to send food and replacement equipment in a few years?
We can't even keep our society stable and our people taken care and our home world clean. You think we are even close to terraforming or creating a society on Mars? Other than as some token of nerd approval, what does this extremely expensive and dangerous mission accomplish?
this rhymes with the arguments for pullback at the end of Apollo, with the decades of stagnation that followed. doing things, & doing them at scale, is worth it if for no other reason than we can't know what spinoffs & useful developments will come of this. giving capable, motivated minds something to actually do, giving them a chance to explore & engage in trying things, is always preferable to keeping them tied down & hoping that they'll devote themselves to tossing away their dreams in order to make a beancounter happy.
not taking the chance is cowardly & nihilistic, & everyone who went up would know the score when they signed up. better to give it as much of a chance as possible than to give up & just watch the world degrade & rot around us.
but that isn't what would or will happen. at best there will be a wind-down where spending goes toward mollifying an aging, uneducated population with food & shiny baubles as infrastructure decays, access to resources & power is reduced year after year, & in a gen or two there won't be anyone left who knows how to make the old systems run (& if they do they won't have the resources needed because the supply chain will be gone).
without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
> without an eye on advancing things for the future, & keeping the wheel spinning with activity & forward movement, with optimism that things can get better, all we're looking at is a controlled demolition of what has been built up.
I agree with you on this, but I guess I disagree on the specifics of what "forward movement" means; to me, launching a crewed, multi-generational mission to Mars now would be a huge waste of money.
Even if they manage to survive the three or four generations, and keep education up to make sure old systems can run, how does that help anyone? They're effectively trapped there, and we're effectively trapped here.
I agree that if the best we can do is something that can't be self-sustaining, Mars should wait until that changes.
I disagree with KSR's main points. Perchlorates are solvable, the effects of Martian gravity are not known (and are solvable if there is a problem), and finally radiation is a non-issue for those living in the only sane place on Mars, underground.
Whether or not Mars is a target in the near term, we need to proceed with our current plan of establishing a permanent base on the Moon. The only way to improve on Earth's resource limitations is to exploit the virtually unlimited riches available beyond her atmosphere, and the Moon is the first step. It's also a great place for heavy industry, not to mention astronomy!
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