ifyouwantto's comments

Oh god, that's deeply weird.

I've felt for some time they're overdue for an "almost nothing but bug fixes and performance improvements" major release like we got a couple times in the 20-teens :-/

Weird, I tried "1+1=" before and after and it disabled it for me.

[EDIT] A quirk: I do have to hit "done" on the window before it seems to apply the change, toggling doesn't do it until I hit "done" (I just tried again to double-check and noticed this)

[EDIT 2] Nb I don't not-believe you, we could be on different OS versions (I'm on 15.1) or something else could be causing the difference.

This smelled like one of those things where they've applied a certain behavior to an entire class of widget for consistency's sake, and TextEdit just happens to use that widget. If so, it'd be controlled at the system settings level.

Sure enough: System Settings -> Keyboard -> (under the "text input" area) Edit... (button next to your primary keyboard language) -> toggle "Show Inline Predictive Text"

If you want to easily switch between having it and not, I bet you can set a second keyboard with the same language but a different setting there and use the quick keyboard switcher widget/shortcuts (I did not try this, though). Or there's probably a way to shortcut it with AppleScript or some other automation thingy with ten minutes of effort (mostly googling).

Shrug. If I had to go back to desktop Linux, and I could pay to have Preview, Safari, Terminal(! yep, I like it better than my Linux options), Digital Color Meter, Apple's office-alike suite, Notes, and various other first-party Mac apps, on Linux, I'd absolutely click the "buy" button. And I spent 20 years on Windows and Linux before seriously giving Mac a shot, and still regularly use both for various reasons, so it's not that I don't know what else is out there—Apple's first-party apps are my favorites in their categories more often than not (big, glaring exception for Xcode, hahaha). They're mostly really good, stable, and don't eat my battery like it's free.

Pinball machines are in an interesting middle ground where it seems like a good physics simulator should get you damn close to the real thing, with such a limited scope and size of play field. Like, convincing video pinball ought to be achievable. Nobody looks at, say, football and goes "we should be able to very closely recreate the experience of playing football as a video game" because it's plainly impossible short of a real holodeck. You can have football video games but they can't replace football, they're totally different activities. Pinball? It looks so tantalizingly close.

But the physicality's important. You play with your hips, it's not just button input or even physics limited to the explicit input interface. Hobbyists get sort-of close with lots of time, money, and clever tricks on DIY systems, but you're never going to get as many of those around and as accessible as real machines that you can go play without building one yourself. Certainly, you can't get terribly close on a general computer or gaming system that's not purpose-built for pinball as a real pinball-machine-sized object. [EDIT] I should add that these lose out on the ability of pinball machines to be different sizes—you build one of these, you're got a max size in both dimensions. You also don't get a real 3D playfield that changes depending on how you look at it, lets you peek around the sides while not playing to get better ideas of how to play or what's going on, and so on. It may be (usually is) rendered in 3D but you can't change your perspective by moving yourself around it—the screen's still flat. Even the very-best simulators are pretty far from the real thing.

There's also something magical about what people can accomplish in the designs within the constraints of having to actually move physical steel balls around. It's like modern movie making-of videos where the answer for every single thing is "a computer did it" and it's just so boring compared with when people had to hack reality to make the magic.

Not dance it, though. Personally I’d only have a prayer of identifying it because I’d recognize it as “not Flamenco… probably?” and that’s nearly the end of old-timey dances that I know the names of, so I’d guess waltz. Not because I actually know what it is, though—you could probably trip me up by picking any of several other kinds of non-waltz dances to show me, and I’d call them waltzes too.

I’m solidly middle-aged and I’m reasonably certain I’ve never even known anybody who could do a name-able dance of any kind, aside from briefly and not-very-well mimicking meme dances. Earliest I recall was the Macarena. I don’t even know anyone who could convincingly do the Carlton.

My best guess from the headline would have been this was about food.

The only time I’ve ever been taught a dance, or even been present when anyone was learning a dance in anything resembling a serious fashion, was when they taught us the Minuet in 1st grade for some unfathomable reason.

I am not at all confident I could describe or recognize Swing at all, versus any remotely-similar dance (like, if you showed me swing on one video and someone doing the stanky leg on another, I could guess that correctly, but make it much harder and my odds will be reduced to chance)

I’m fairly sure the above is more-or-less the case for a large majority of adults I’ve ever known. The exceptions are a handful who did ballet as young kids.

Maybe there are strong regional effects at play? Or something SES/class related. I also don’t know anybody who did the hardcore college-prep thing that lots of folks on HN take as a given for any college-bound kids, though nearly everyone in my circle did attend college. I even know a couple who went Ivy, but they didn’t do that. Maybe that sort of thing is more likely among (though I don’t mean exclusive to!) the set who’re pushed to collect activities as a kid and carry that on into college and young adulthood.

[edit] I don’t mean to imply dance is bad, in fact it’d be sorta neat to be decent at dancing, it has just not been my experience that it’s at all a common skill—I know a lot more people who can play at least one instrument sort-of OK than people who can dance, like, at all. Actually I know more people who can play several instruments decently than who can dance at all. And I don’t run in musician-heavy circles.