It's a real shame they got rid of target display mode. But then people would hold onto iMacs even longer.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
opendisplay - https://github.com/peetzweg/opendisplay - can make a old iMac's screen useful again. In my case, a 2015 27" iMac can be used as a monitor for my modern Mac laptop, connected via ethernet cable.
There's an 18 TB refurb from serverpartdeals right now. Or there are a bunch of smaller new ones in the $20s on Amazon. The analysis doesn't really change even if you're looking at e.g. $30/TB. It's still hundreds or thousands of items for a year of subscription cost; more than you could reasonably watch. Even going full 8 TB SSDs at $150/TB is still thrift store cost per movie when you amortize it ($2.25 at 15GB, or $0.30 at 2GB).
Of course then as another comment here said, you're more likely to realize you don't actually want any of it. And then when you realize it's not worth pennies to store, you also realize it's not worth your time to watch.
It's $30. It used to be $10, now it's $30. It's tripled in price but it's still cheap enough for pirated movies. If that's still too much, get the 1080p version instead.
This is about $/TB on bigger drives. If you only want a 1TB drive it'll be more like $50.
I also built something similar to solve this, but more aimed at inspecting the impact of changes to a concept - think a vertical slice or domain, or even a feature. Often the same thing might be referred to by similar, but slightly different names, or separate pieces of the codebase might not immediately look related when they do share dependencies. So symbols, phrases, and words are attached to concepts for either LLM-based or user-based querying via MCP.
An indexer crawls the codebase and maps slices of code to concepts, then groups related concepts. You can inspect a concept to see things related to it, or ask about the impact of a change and see second-order changes required - things not so easy to see that are related by basic symbol linking (although it does use symbol linking - it heavily relies on Roslyn, since it's all C# focused).
It also returns confidence scores with everything, which adjust based on a dozen or so factors like whether the user defined the concept or the concept was auto-generated during the code crawl. Low confidence score === fall back to grep.
It was a super fun project and ended up being very useful, as much for people as the LLM. But, I'm not convinced it is materially better than grep in some ways and just haven't had the time to really focus on improving it.
Sounds like you fundamentally misunderstand the thing people have against using AI for these pursuits. If your imagination or capability needed LLMs in order to unlock their full potential (as in, if you waited until AI removed the barriers between a beginner and their future craft), maybe your potential wasn't that great to begin with. And all you're doing is producing things closer to the median, instead of somewhere toward one end of a bell curve.
"Your potential" is part of a greater fairy tale told to gifted students to make them contribute significantly more to society at the cost of their mental health, especially when the promised rewards never materialize.
In this case it's not a context menu, it's just a menu. User experience is degraded, see GP's case. There is an expectation and a common paradigm which is intentionally ignored because the OS developers thought they knew better than the users.
This reminds me of frequent conversations with other developers when presented with a bug report. "That's not a bug, it's working as intended." The intention is wrong, then -- the bug is in the design, not the code, but it's still a bug.
Not working for your particular preferences isn’t a bug; your preferences are just wrong for the vast majority of users.
The hubris of HN posters never fails to astound me. The most niche of workflows, then wonders why regular users don’t all learn esoteric keybindings and use TUIs.
I don't know if this is aimed at me or not. I don't use this workflow; in fact I'm pretty bog-standard in many of the ways I use my computers. In any case, I don't see how expecting to be able to bring up a context menu is in any way esoteric. We're in a thread about navigating GUIs using a keyboard. On many keyboards there's literally a key dedicated to opening a context menu, and on most OSs there's a pretty standard shortcut to do it as well, which is what GP was talking about and what sibling comments discuss being added more recently in MacOS. So, again, not very esoteric.
I also don't see how trying to emphasize empathy toward users translates to hubris. But sounds like you've got a bone to pick, so keep picking I guess.
I’m really curious how many people run this kind of skin unironically. Unironically here means they’d actively seek out to make their desktop OS look… 30 years old?
No shade at all, just curios.
I def have all kinds of warm feelings towards the moment I first installed W ‘95 but wow I can’t imagine having that UX as my daily OS today.
If I were to transition my 70yo mum from Windows to Linux, the first thing I'd do would be to add such a skin. Yes, there will be differences, but the value of re-injecting some familiarity with the fundamentals cannot be underestimated. She already hates anything post-XP and would probably be delighted to go back.
A few years back I threw Mint plus this theme on my old Thinkpad T430s. My intent was to use it for one thing and one thing only: writing. The theme helped me trick myself into thinking the machine was unusable for anything else.
I don't run this kind of skin unironically but I do think that desktop GUIs used to be a lot more intuitive in some ways. They were still educating PC users on how to use PCs and so there was less of a temptation to hide features and smooth things out for the sake of pure aesthetics.
(The slide-to-unlock on the original iPhone OS comes to mind as an analogy on the phone: babies could figure it out, but by iOS 7 they figured enough people knew how to unlock that they could make it less obvious.)
I absolutely agree that the interfaces up until 2005s and, in case of Mac, early 2010s or so were better in terms of usability, but somehow it’s hard to imagine coming back there from the modern UIs with all their shadows and transparencies and such.
There has to be a middle ground somewhere in this.
>I’m really curious how many people run this kind of skin unironically
Most avoid gimmick Windows/MacOS themes, as they know these tend to be unmaintainable over the long-term.
Keep in mind most Linux desktop options tend to be power-user focused, high contrast for outdoor use, and eye candy entertainment options just waste peoples time. =3
In every part of Thailand I've been to outside BKK, there's a gas station almost every few kilometers on every major road. Almost every gas station has a public restroom that's open 24/7, unattended. The ones that don't have a public restroom are typically right next to a string of restaurants that have a restroom you can use during the day for free if you ask.
For the most part, yes, but I've gone much longer stretches without seeing a gas station in the US. To be fair, there's also no point in building gas stations at regular intervals in the desert or the many other long stretches of nothing across much of the country.
I've driven from Mukdahan to Kanchanaburi to Trang provinces so my experience is not centered around the major cities at all. I don't know what poor luck or exotic adventures you may have had, but I never once struggled to find a bathroom.
I mean, Raymond Chen has been writing The Old New Thing consistently for over 20 years. Nearly every single entry is interesting, informative, and illuminating, aimed at every facet of software engineering, old and new, over the decades. He may be part of the final bastion of quality and care for detail at MS, dwindling and faint as it is.
Windows doesn't need or deserve defending. It's atrocious. But this is a silly comment.
Today, you can use software like Luna or Duet, or native screen sharing to control an iMac from another Mac (or vice versa). I have a 2019 iMac, bought for pennies and upgraded after to max out; way better value than buying the display on its own or a comparable monitor alone. The screen quality is just great.
I use it both as a daily driver and as a "thin client" for all my other machines with the software above.
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