A "user" is anyone who walks through the public park and picks up a gadget that someone else left there.
They poke at it for a while, not knowing who built it or who dropped it in the park. It does some cool stuff.
Sometimes they can wiggle it and it makes colors that their friends enjoy. Maybe someone built this thing just to be a fun toy to play with?
They put it in their pants pocket and walk on.
Once in a while, the thing they picked up in the park just spontaneously catches fire and burns their pants off, leaving them naked in the middle of the town square and really embarrassed.
But usually, a "user" can mess around with technology crap and not get burned.
Until, y'know, they do.
And then it's supposed to be their fault.
Hey, thing-builders: If the thing you built hurts people, you should fix that. "They picked it up, it's okay if it burns their pants off" is not a good excuse.
Earplugs. Put them in as soon as you scan your boarding pass and are waiting in the jetway to get on the plane. Nothing that is said to you after that point will be important until you're off the plane; and if it is, you can just take out one earplug and say "say again?" You can avoid most of the annoyance of in-flight announcements and advertisements, screaming babies, and jet engines.
Drugstores. Your destination probably has them. You don't need to pack any toiletries that you can easily obtain in one. If you are flying to New York City, you do not need to bring toothpaste with you; they have toothpaste in New York City, and you can just buy it in the Duane Reade shop that's a block from your hotel. They have toothpaste in San Juan and Paris too. In any tropical destination, they have sunscreen there — and the sunscreen they sell there is actually safe for the coral reefs.
Water bottles. Many major airports have stations for refilling water bottles after you clear security. You can take an empty water bottle, fill it up, and carry it on the airplane.
Masks. In the old days before COVID, nobody wore masks in airports, and lots of people got colds or flu when traveling. These days, you can wear a mask and people may think you're weird but you are less likely to pick up random respiratory diseases. I regularly wear a standard 3M N95 mask in American airports and no longer get the sniffles every time I travel.
To be clear — what McKenzie is saying here is that Substack will continue to pay Nazis to write Nazi essays. Not just that they will host Nazi essays (at Substack's cost), but they will pay for them.
They are, in effect, hiring Nazis to compose Nazi essays.
Approval voting is similar to this. Instead of voting for one candidate, you vote for every candidate who is acceptable to you. The winner is the candidate who is acceptable to the most voters.
Eh, the difference between app bundles and resource forks isn't the functionality itself, but rather how the filesystem interface cuts through the functionality.
An OSX bundle is a Unix directory, whereas a classic Mac application is a file in a filesystem that supports multiple forks within a single file. Either way, you have typed objects (files or resources) that get carried around with a master object (the application).
Xerox's prototype desktop computer was called Alto, not X, and had some of these features in a very early form. It was never made into a product for the open market; it was used internally at Xerox and at some research universities.
Apple didn't "steal" from the Alto; Xerox invested in Apple and allowed Steve Jobs and Apple engineers to tour their facilities for product ideas.
You might also be thinking of the X Window System for Unix, whose modern descendant most Linux systems are still using. It's pretty different from the Mac approach.
The document-centric model of desktop applications largely originates from the early Mac. How do you open a document in a desktop OS? You double-click on the document, and the OS finds the correct application to open it with. That was a Mac thing. On most other systems of the mid-1980s, you run your application program (from the command line) and then tell the program to load a file.
Applications as "bundles" of code and data was a Mac thing too, starting with the resource/code division in the classic Mac System. Rather than an application coming with a mess of directories of libraries and data files, it's all bundled up into a single application file that can contain structured data ("resources") for the GUI elements. On a classic Mac, you could load an application program up in ResEdit and modify the menus, add keyboard shortcuts, and so on, without recompiling anything.
The Apple Newton had data persistence of a sort that we now expect on cloud applications like Google Docs. Rather than "saving" and "loading" files, every change was automatically committed to storage. If you turn the device off (or it runs out of battery power), you don't lose your work.
Croissants, or any other layered flaky pastry. Like, there should be a robot for this by now.