Perhaps this is specific to the Mac port.

I just installed the Mac version again to test it, and the first thing that appears is the playlist window with an icon telling me to “drop media here”.

Opening a file also shows the playlist window, which then expands to show the video instead. When you close the video, you’re left with the playlist, which now contains that file.

mpv. I like the minimalist UI. I have it configured to show no titlebar, just the video, and open by default in the corner of my screen at up to half the width of my display. It’s easy to customize with keyboard shortcuts, and by default it has sensible shortcuts for nearly everything. It’s easy to make videos with hardcoded letterboxing fit my full screen. It handles HDR and even Dolby videos (use gpu-next if you aren’t already). I can set default brightness/contrast/gamma settings, and then adjust them during playback if necessary with a single keystroke. I can adjust playback speed with a single keystroke. I can fix the aspect ratio of warped videos, again with a single keystroke.

As for VLC, well, it’s fine, really, and I’m not in the best position to say since it’s been a very long time since I used it regularly. So my experience is likely outdated. But back then, I found the UI a bit much, putting playlists front-and-center when I really just wanted to play individual files 99.99% of the time. It had too much going on besides the video. The GUI is great for discoverability but the more time I spend using something, the more I appreciate command-line usage and simple text-based config files.

VLC is my go-to recommendation for beginners, because everything is in the GUI, but mpv suits me better.

Functionally, both are similar. A few times over the years, one has adopted a critical feature a little bit before the other, like hardware acceleration for some specific codec, but for most videos they both do the job just fine.

In that case you’d want them on something faster than an SD card, or loading times would be brutal.

The older models didn’t. Only the newest one does.

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.

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.

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.

It’s still an open question where the eventual sweet spot will be in terms of model size and speed once the dust settles.

Nobody has the hardware to run frontier models in their personal devices. Even the larger open models are out of reach unless you’re ready to spend $10-20k on hardware. You can’t do shit on 8GB of memory.

That said, I don’t think there’s any great use case for trillion-parameter models in the long term. You can get good results for cheap from much smaller models with smarter workflows, and eventually that will become as easy and accessible as using cloud products. The big players have done well staying 6-12 months ahead, but that’s really not a lot in the grand scheme and they can’t keep it up indefinitely.

Their only play is regulatory capture and they’re pushing hard for it.

The coolest, and often most confusing thing about computer science, information theory, and perhaps reality in general, is how everything becomes more or less equivalent if you boil it down and twist it around a little.

Everything is sorting. Everything is compression. Everything is geometry. Everything is language. Everything is music. Everything is, like, waves, man. *puff*

Or more accurately, everything can be expressed in any of those other things’ terms.

These are not new ideas, but computers have made them provably and demonstrably true in many contexts, and I think that’s super cool.

Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.

Okay but what if that’s my fetish?

🤷

I don’t find the theory in the article very compelling because it says nothing about why this specifically took root, instead of a nearly infinite number of possibilities that are similarly SFW as and non-copyrighted.

The WWDC presentation yesterday was hilarious. Almost everything they said about the UI could be boiled down to: “We’re undoing some of the incredibly bad decisions we made last year. Not all of them, but some of the big ones!”

They then went on to demo the new improved Siri, and as someone who doesn’t use Siri, all I could think was “wait…Siri couldn’t do this 10 years ago?!”

What a sad state of affairs.

Ew

This is why they’re trying to lock down everything. Nerfing ad blockers in chrome, semi-banning all unapproved apps in Android.

And don’t get me started on smart TVs. They were broken right out of the gate.

It’s just crazy how many Bluetooth devices have broken (or completely absent) authentication and pairing security.

It’s very difficult to tell when they’re encrypted, too. Your Bluetooth keyboard and mouse could be broadcasting everything keystroke and click unencrypted to anyone within 100m or so.

And that’s just the accessories. There have been tons of exploits of phone and computer firmware over the years as well. Security is an afterthought at best with Bluetooth.

You mean Emacs?