It would be interesting to talk with a victorian-era chatbot, including victorian-era ethics. would be interesting to see how much divergence from modern era ethics it would have.
in your "demo" image the menu bar is completely missing.. this seems like a very confusing choice. I can barely make out the menu bar icon against the background image.
I agree, I think the problem is the seamless integration, where it renders only the application against the macOS environment. I'd much prefer something more like the cocoa-way example where there's a window that has its own background, and the applications run inside that. Not sure if Xquartz supports running a compositor or windowing manager.
XQuartz used to support rooted mode. I played with an early version back in the PowerPC era, and ran a regular desktop with WindowMaker and everything, using software from MacPorts. It was kind of a "parallel universe", as XQuartz would take over the whole screen in rooted mode and you had to switch between it and the Mac desktop, but it looked and functioned like a typical Linux or Unix desktop of the early 2000s.
I tried that a few times back in the day, but I found it so jarring & ugly against the macOS GUI. The problem was that it was rendering the application alone, for a seamless integration. I don't remember if there was even an option to run a compositor or window manager such that you had a proper window with it's own background and the linux apps show up inside that (like the cocoa-way example).
The problem is when the environment is already optimized for car use, when everything is massively spread out. Hard to get people to stop using cars when infra for walking is an afterthought.
It's car optimized because the 110F weather makes it un-walkable in the first place. When I lived in a walkable city, I would prefer to walk 30 minutes than drive. When I lived in Phoenix, I did not want to spend more than 30 seconds outside in the summer.
You can always start small and over decades grow the area. After all that is how cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam became bike friendly, not just a few years, but decades of work.
As a fellow European: we're prone to underestimating how uninhabitable bits of America are that nonetheless have people living in them. Those are port cities and therefore stable and temperate. You cannot green Arizona.
Just FYI there's a lot of ways to re-green a desert without actually being wasteful with water. There's some really impressive case studies out there. Shaping the land with berms and swales, building walls of trees to prevent water from being leached away by the wind, etc.
100F days are fine, cakewalks, even, especially with misters + shade. We had 70+ days of 110°F two years ago, and over 20 days 115°F+. They are not the same. Those days are unbearable nightmare fuel, and worse, they turn into insanely miserable nights where the low temperature rarely dips below 95°. It is absolutely awful, dry or not.
I'm pretty sure this is what happens in the iPhone at least, so I'd imagine it is the same in Android.
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