I've used FinderPath (https://bahoom.com/finderpath/) for as long as I can remember, and I absolutely love it. It's intuitive and works well and is simple. Unfortunately, the devs never made an Apple Silicon version, so that means after Golden Gate it won't work anymore. That's a ways off, of course, but I'd like to think ahead a little bit and see if anyone had any recommendations?

I'd prefer something with minimal UI and minimal features. I love FinderPath because you don't even know it's there until you click at the top of any given Finder window and then you have a typeable file path.

https://preview.redd.it/w2qo0hyecoah1.png?width=626&format=png&auto=webp&s=41ea43049f72c58dc5e45da379ec850403ef16fd

I've used FinderPath (https://bahoom.com/finderpath/) for as long as I can remember, and I absolutely love it. It's intuitive and works well and is simple. Unfortunately, the devs never made an Apple Silicon version, so that means after Golden Gate it won't work anymore. That's a ways off, of course, but I'd like to think ahead a little bit and see if anyone had any recommendations?

I'd prefer something with minimal UI and minimal features. I love FinderPath because you don't even know it's there until you click at the top of any given Finder window and then you have a typeable file path.

https://preview.redd.it/w2qo0hyecoah1.png?width=626&format=png&auto=webp&s=41ea43049f72c58dc5e45da379ec850403ef16fd

Google's supposedly good AI can't do one of the most common and basic tasks: read my screen and create a full calendar event.

I'll get an email that'll have a date, time, and event details and I'll activate Gemini using Circle to Search and select it or circle it. And then type to Gemini "create a calendar event for this" or something to that effect.

It NEVER works. Not once. Pretty sure Google Now could have done this kind of thing. How is "advanced" AI this crappy?

Sorry if this is not technically on topic, but it IS related to Windows XP because I am trying to play an old Windows XP-compatible game on a newer OS (Windows 11, bleh) but the game keeps opening in a low resolution mode where only 1/4 of the game is visible on the screen.

This game would play fine on a Windows XP machine, if I had one of those right now, but for now I just need to figure out what kind of shortcut arguments I need to use to force the game to open in such a way that it's not mostly off the screen.

I have already tried:

- Run in 640 x 840 screen resolution

- Disable fullscreen optimizations

- Change high DPI settings > Use this setting to prevent scaling problems

An argument in the Target path after the file path of -screen-width 1920 -screen-height 1080

Any ideas?

I remember at some point seeing a reddit post or an OCLP blog post or something that listed out a variety of different Macs the OCLP team was testing out Tahoe on.

Obviously, I know Tahoe doesn't work—I've lambasted many, many idiots for trying to upgrade despite the obvious warnings not to do so. So don't worry—this isn't that.

I am curious, though, about all the various third-party forks that are attempting to get Tahoe working; I have a nightly build; etc. I sometimes come across old Macs online and was curious if anyone recalls what I'm talking about, as I figure the best candidates for trying to get Tahoe at least partially working would be on the models the OCLP team was initially doing testing on rather than just any random model.

Does anyone recall what I'm talking about? I swear I saw a list of like 5-10 Mac models for this.

I’ve made a terrible, horrifying mistake. And I am so deeply sorry.

I don’t know that I can undo what has been done, but perhaps my attempt to scream into the void will provide some penance for the afterlife—if such a thing exists, or if I have not broken that, too. I do not know who (if anyone) this message will reach, but perhaps, given the nature of the matters at issue here, perhaps I will be granted a mercy and perhaps someone from the past will read this and can stop me before it is too late.

My name is Marcus. I am—or was…or am? I’m not sure anymore—a post-graduate student studying experimental quantum physics. And I was obsessed with time (the concept, the philosophy, the implications) and wanted to be the one to figure out a “big breakthrough.”

How I wish I had not. And if you cannot stop me, then I am so, so sorry for what is to come.

Let me start from the beginning by copying revised portions of my journal notes (though I will intentionally omit certain key theoretical details so that someone else will not replicate my grave mistake).

Friday, April 28, 2028

After months of tinkering, the finished device finally sat on my workbench, the way a tumor sits inside a body: unassuming, patient, waiting to be noticed for what it truly was. Malignant.

It was not beautiful. I never cared for beauty; I cared about results, and results are what I hoped to achieve. It was a tangle of copper coils wound around a central core of neodymium magnets, threaded through with fiber-optic cable I’d salvaged from a decommissioned server farm. The casing was a repurposed thermos, and the device had a small digital clock face embedded in the side, with red numbers blinking.

I called it the “Lemniscate,” a term for the infinity symbol in geometry. I was quite proud of the name.

The theory had come to me during grad school, in the margins of a paper on quantum decoherence I’d been reviewing (I did double duty as both a research and teaching assistant for my advisor, Dr. Priya Anand). She had called the marginal notes “charmingly deluded” but given the paper a pass anyway. But I had not forgotten the words. Charmingly deluded. I wrote them on a Post-it and stuck it above my bathroom mirror, where it yellowed over the next few years.

The theory was this: that time, at the quantum scale, was not a river, but a surface, something closer to the skin of a drum. A drum, as you know, is capable of vibration, capable of being struck at one point and propagating that strike outward, backward, forward. My theory was that this nature of time—whether “charmingly deluded” or not—could be tapped into using the right frequencies and technologies.

The difficulty in execution, of course, was the issue. That difficulty was not conceptual. The problem was energy. I needed, according to my calculations, roughly the output of a small nuclear reactor compressed into a single pulse lasting no more than forty microseconds, applied to a localized field no larger than a room. Otherwise, the vibration that I sought to capture would dissipate. And if that happened, nothing would change.

The solution—and this was the part that would have gotten me arrested, had anyone found out—came from tapping directly into (i.e., stealing) energy from the power grid at the Jameson Lake Nuclear Power Plant fifteen miles south of the city. With the rise of AI in recent years, small nuclear power plants became increasingly prolific, so I knew I had something to take advantage of. I actually moved to be closer to the plant and obtained access to the facility under the guise of doing research (something common for students in the area). I used my access to covertly build a secret siphon, allowing me to eventually have a covert tap into the power plant’s energy output. The details aren’t important (though I did nearly get caught several times). What matters is that I got away with it.

On the morning of April 28, 2028, I sat alone in my kitchen, drinking black coffee, and it was that day that I activated the Lemniscate for the first time.

Nothing appeared to happen.

I looked at the clock on the microwave: 9:07 AM.

I then pressed the activation button…and the world lurched.

It wasn’t painful. That surprised me. I had kind of expected pain. Instead, it was more like the sensation of missing a step in the dark when going down the stairs; that plunging, weightless instant before the floor catches you, but it stretched across approximately four seconds. My vision blurred. The coffee cup on the table was gone, then present, then gone. The light through the window shifted: dimmer, then the same. The microwave clock read **9:00 AM.** Seven minutes. Exactly seven minutes.

I sat very still for a long time. Then I smiled. What power.

May 2028

I spent the first week being careful. I’d read enough time travel stories. Of course, in retrospect, this was the last week I was ever truly careful about anything.

I tested the Lemniscate obsessively. I established its parameters with scientific rigor. The loop, I confirmed, was precisely seven minutes, no more and no less: from the moment of activation, the world rewound exactly four hundred and twenty seconds. Objects returned to prior positions, biological states reverted (a cut on my finger, if inflicted within the 7-minute window, vanished on reset), and most crucially, my own memory persisted across the reset while everyone and everything else forgot. After testing on some lab mice, I determined that any creature within a 15-foot radius of the Lemniscate would (for reasons that would later become clear) retain their memories, hence my ability to remember.

I quickly saw myself as the eye of a temporal hurricane. Stationary while the world blew backward around me.

I tested it dozens of times that first week. Little things, like a broken mug, a spilled dish, a burnt pizza, an injured finger—it worked impeccably. I could not, of course, prevent major disasters or accidents, though the thought crossed my mind. With a seven-minute window, I could not, say, prevent a car accident on the highway or report a crime after it had happened. Even if I could learn enough information within the short time window, I would not be able to go anywhere fast enough (with the Lemniscate located securely in my house, connected to my stolen power supply) to make any meaningful change.

Of course, I could place bets and gamble on the stock market—which I did, but money was not my primary concern. I had grander aspirations; I wanted to own time itself.

I now realize that had not been sane, technically speaking, since the Post-it note above the bathroom mirror.

I began to notice the cost somewhere in the third week.

It was not physical. My body was fine. My bloodwork, when I ran it with a kit from the internet, showed nothing unusual. The cost was cognitive, or perhaps something deeper than cognitive…maybe something philosophical? Spiritual? I don’t know. Of course, every time I reset, I was the only person who remembered. Every phone conversation I had was the last draft of a conversation I’d already had seven minutes prior. Every dessert I ate I might have already eaten, again and again.

No, what it was was that I began to have trouble sleeping. Not because of nightmares, but because sleep required surrendering the one thing the Lemniscate had given me: control. In sleep, I could not reset. In sleep, whatever came, came. 

So, naturally, I moved my mattress into the same room as the Lemniscate, with the button under my thumb at night. Just in case. Just to feel the activation stud under my fingertips. For the occasional nightmare.

I told myself this was rational.

There is a class of scientific paper that never gets published. Not because it is wrong, but because it is written by someone who has stopped caring whether anyone believes them, and so it is assumed to be wrong. I found several such papers during my research, circulating in the grey literature of preprint servers and personal websites maintained by those who had lost their university affiliations under circumstances that were never fully explained. Seeking to expand my knowledge and potentially advance my development, I turned to such forums in search of further answers.

One such paper was titled: On the Entropic Consequences of Localized Temporal Reversion: A Theoretical Framework for Catastrophic Resonance. It was authored by a Dr. Emmeline Voss, formerly of the University of Zurich, and it was dated July 2027—fairly new, so I was not surprised I had not seen it before. The personal website hosting it had not been updated since.

I read it three times over two days. The argument Voss made was elegant and terrible. She proposed that time, understood as a surface—consistent with my own framework—did not merely vibrate when struck. Rather, it “remembered” being struck. Each reversion left what she called a “resonance scar”: an imperceptible but cumulative distortion in the temporal substrate. Like striking the same spot on a drum, over and over.

For a while, a drum will hold. The vibration will dissipate. The surface will return to rest. But a drum struck often enough, in the same place, at the same frequency, would eventually break. To be clear, it would not crack, or split, but it rather would eventually lock. The membrane would become rigid at the point of repeated impact. It would cease to be capable of returning to rest.

Voss called this state “Temporal Resonant Fixation.” She estimated, based on models she freely admitted were speculative, that—should time be reverted—after hundreds of times, Temporal Resonant Fixation may occur, depending on the energy input and the precision of the frequency. 

Of course, who would pay any mind to such a paper? Time travel is a fiction—or so all assumed. Until me, and my arrogance, of course.

Calculating backwards from Voss’s predictions, for a device with the approximate specifications of the Lemniscate, her theory estimated the threshold at somewhere between three hundred and eight hundred time reversions.

I had, at the time I read this paper, activated the Lemniscate four hundred and twelve times. I sat with this number for a long while. 

Then, foolishly, I told myself that Voss's models were speculative. That her website had not been updated since 2019. That she was probably one of “those" people: brilliant, unmoored, ultimately wrong.

I kept pressing the button.

July 2028

I found the anomaly in early July.

It was not subtle, once I knew what I was looking at. When I activated the Lemniscate, the reset had always been near-instantaneous: that four-second lurch, the world snapping back like a rubber band. But…there started being a delay. A fraction of a second longer at first. Then a full second. Then, on the morning of July 9th, a full three seconds longer during which the world seemed to hang suspended—not resetting, not continuing—simply paused, like a film caught in the gate of a projector, beginning to smoke. But then it would revert and all would be fine.

I increased my documentation, filling three notebooks in fewer weeks. I ran calculations again and again. The numbers concerned me. How I wish I had stopped even then.

What Voss had described as resonance scarring, I began to think of in different terms. I grew up in a household where my Catholic grandmother kept the Book of Revelation on the nightstand, not as religion, but as literature. I had read it, as a child, fascinating and wondering at the symbolism and mystery, and at the cosmic horror of the afterlife.

I thought then of the word abomination. Not in its moral sense, but in a structural sense. Could there be something so wrong that the universe itself recoiled from it? A thing that should not be? Voss seemed to imply the answer was yes, but I returned again and again to her mantra: “This theory is only speculative.”

But the delay grew. By July 14th, it was six seconds. By July 17th, eleven.

On July 19th, I used the Lemniscate to reset when testing another theory, and for one horrible moment, the delay stretched to what felt like twenty seconds. I stood in the stretched white silence of a world that was neither past nor present, and…I heard something. It was not a sound, exactly. It was more like the idea of a sound, sort of like how a room hums after a very loud noise stops, the ghost of vibration, more in your ears than anywhere else—but real nonetheless. Like such an echo, this ghost of a sound came from everywhere—and not just everywhere, but, a part of me knew, from everywhen. It came from the future. It came from a place that did not have a position in space but had a very specific position in time.

I know now that it came from the end of things.

But I told myself I was sleep-deprived. I had been grinding for weeks upon weeks, in search of a way to expand the Lemniscate beyond the limitation of seven minutes. I told myself my nervous system was perhaps merely responding to the electromagnetic effects of the device. In fact, I told myself many reasonable things in the weeks that followed. I wish I had acknowledged that, deep down, I knew I believed none of them.

I activated the Lemniscate six hundred and eight times before the end.

August 2028

August 2nd arrived bright and hotter than usual. Ninety-three degrees at 8 AM. I woke at 7:46 having not really slept, the Lemniscate clenched beneath my right hand, its warmth against my palm, its presence soothing to me.

I made coffee and stood at the window looking out at the trees in the distance, visible between nearby houses, gray-silver and restless. A normal Wednesday. The world going about its business.

I had not activated the device in eleven days. I truly had been trying to stop. I had been trying to let the resonance, if that’s what it was, dissipate. Voss had said the “membrane” could recover, if given enough time. Of course, she’d said it with the qualifier "theoretically." I’d been choosing to hear only the qualifier.

At 8:14 AM, I went to my workbench and held the Lemniscate up to the light from the window. The digital face showed the time, as it always did. Patient. Blinking. The red numbers casting their small wash of color across my palm. 

I swear to you, I had not intended to activate it. But my thumb found the button the way ayour tongue might wander to a loose tooth in your mouth as a child—both repulsed by but drawn to the pain that results from pressing, the body doing what it had done six hundred and seven times before thinking could intervene.

I pressed it.

And the lurch came. The four-second plunge, coupled with the extended delay of nearly thirty seconds now. The rubber band snapping.

But this time, the snap did not complete.

Immediately, I thought of Voss's paper, of the drum, of the final strike on a rigid membrane causing it to lock, pushing it beyond its capacity to return.

The reset began, as it always had. The world blurred backward. I felt the familiar dissolution and reformation of the immediate past. The coffee cup moved on the table. The light shifted.

And…then it stopped. Not paused. Not delayed. It stopped. I was standing in my kitchen. The clock on the microwave read 8:14. The coffee cup was half-full. The light through the window was morning light. Everything appeared entirely normal.

But the Lemniscate was…it was screaming. Not metaphorically, though of course it was not organically alive. But the device emitted a sound I had never heard it make—not a sound it was designed to make, not a sound any part of it should have been capable of making, for it contained no audio hardware—a high, sustained frequency that I felt in my back teeth, in my inner ears, behind my eyes. The digital display was no longer reading the time. It was now cycling through numbers at a rate that made my vision swim. Not random numbers. It was counting up. And up. And up.

Past 7:00. Past 8:00. Past a day. Past a week. Past a year. The numbers cascading with increasing speed until they were no longer numbers I could parse, until they were a smear of white light and I had to look away. I dropped the device on the table, but the sound continued. I covered my ears and ran outside to escape the noise.

Outdoors, the morning was very bright. Unusually bright, in fact. I looked up at the sun.

The sun was the wrong size.

This was not the slow red giant death of stellar evolution, that gradual swelling across millions of years that astronomers discussed in lecture halls. This was something else. This was the sun as humanity had never been meant to see it. I watched the sun as it would appear at the endpoint of something I could not name, bloated and trembling at its edges, its corona whipping in shapes that had no analogue. The sky around it had gone white, overexposed almost, of too much light. Blinding.

My neighbors were outside now, too. I could see them—I can see them—on the lawns nearby. Mrs. Cabrera from across the street, standing in her driveway in her bathrobe, shielding her eyes with one hand. The Thompsons’ dog was barking, but it seemed so very far away. Eternal barking. Eternal gazing. 

I felt (I feel?), at this moment, two things simultaneously. The first is the deep, tidal terror of confronting a category error; of being present in a moment that should not have a witness. The second was the knowledge I had craved for so long arriving in a flurry, understanding so complete and so devastating that it arrived not in words but in pure sensation. I had broken time.

I rushed back to look at the Lemniscate on the table. The counter was no longer counting up.

It had stopped at a number I couldn't read—the display was not designed to show that many digits. Then, slowly, with the certainty of a mechanism doing exactly what it was designed to do and doing it catastrophically wrong, it began to count back down.

I rushed back outside to see sky contract. The bloated sun, that terrible swollen thing at the end of everything, began to vibrate. The sun trembled. The corona collapsed inward. The white sky went orange, then red, and then some color without a name, the color of something burning from the inside out across a timescale compressed into a fraction of a second.

The explosion arrived as light first, as it always does. A wall of it. Pure and absolute and indifferent.

I know now that I was watching the death of the sun that first time. I knew in that moment, though, that this was not merely a reset for me, but for Ohio and Mrs. Cabrera in her bathrobe and the Thompson dog and the forest, and for everything else within eight light-minutes of this star, for every living thing that had ever existed on this warm wet rock, for every piece of music and every face and every word written in every language and every dream and every morning. I had drummed one too many times, and now all of it was ending, because of the tangle of copper wire and neodymium magnets in my house.

Eight minutes later, the explosion reached Earth. It killed me. But…then I returned. And that was the worst part.

The Lemniscate, locked in its fractured state—its counter plunging back down from whatever terrible apex it had reached—reset. The membrane of time, rigid now, unable to vibrate naturally, did the only thing it could do, the only motion left to it. The one groove worn so deep into it that nothing else was possible.

Seven minutes. Back. Seven minutes. Back. 

The light vanished. The sun was the right size. The morning was bright and unseasonably warm and Mrs. Cabrera was not in her driveway. The coffee cup on the table was half-full. The microwave said 8:14.

I stood in my house, breathing. The Lemniscate's counter began climbing again. Rapidly, far too rapidly.

And I understood, then, what had happened. What Voss had called Temporal Resonant Fixation. What the drum did when it could no longer return to rest. It did not stay rigid. It found the groove. It played the groove. And…it played the groove forever.

Seven minutes.

The device worked, as I had known for months, by resetting time back seven minutes. And now the scar in time, the wound that would not close, looped at exactly that interval. Seven minutes, forever, before the end of the world, again and again and again. Because that was the final straw. That was the last strike on the drum. That was the frequency locked into the membrane of everything.

Seven minutes before time rushed forward, before the sun exploded, before all was consumed.

Over and over.

Over and over.

Over and over.

Now, I stand at the window most days.

I’ve stopped counting the loops. I counted for a while—for what felt like years, though years no longer meant anything. I reached somewhere in the high hundreds before the mathematics of it became a kind of…prayer I didn't know how to stop praying, and then I stopped that too, because the prayer became meaningless.

I stand at the window and watch the sun. I watch it the way you watch a storm coming across open water when there is nowhere to go. I watch it with the attention of someone who has stopped wanting anything.

At the seven-minute mark, the sky goes white.

The sun swells. It trembles. It arrives at that color with no name.

The light reaches me.

And then it is 8:14 again, and the coffee cup is half-full, and Mrs. Cabrera is not outside yet, and the trees are restless between the houses, and the Lemniscate sits there with its counter climbing, and I stand at the window.

Waiting for the white.

I think about Voss's paper sometimes, in the quiet of the seven minutes. I think about the line near the end of it, which I had read as a theoretical warning and which I now understand as a description of something Voss had either witnessed or come very close to: “The instrument, under conditions of resonant fixation, does not stop functioning. It cannot stop functioning. It does precisely what it was designed to do, at the frequency it was given, for as long as the substrate endures. The question of how long the substrate endures is, at this juncture, left to the speculative theorist.”

The substrate, I have learned, endures. The substrate endures the way a fly endures in amber. It is not living, nor is it dying, though it eventually ceases to breath, but, perhaps for a brief few hellish moments, the fly is alive, suspended in the medium of its own catastrophe. At least the fly will finally stop.

So now, I write this, dear reader. I click post. I have clicked “post” hundreds of times. Maybe this time something will be different. Maybe it will reach someone beyond my time. I can dare to hope. You learn to type quickly when you’ve written the same story hundreds of times.

The sky is brightening now. That too-bright quality that is not clouds.

The sun has begun to vibrate. I can see it now…that shimmer at the edge of the corona, the death-shudder of a star compressed into a spectacle no one was ever meant to witness even once, let alone hundreds of times. I have witnessed it, by my last count, eight hundred and forty-three times. I have witnessed it so many times that I no longer close my eyes. I must watch for what I have done.

∞

The light is coming.

The light is always coming.

It arrives. It takes everything. It is absolute and total and complete. It is the end of every person who ever lived, every word ever spoken, every star in the system's sky, all of it folded into one perfect, blinding, indifferent moment.

And then it is 8:14.

And the coffee cup is half-full.

And I stand at the window.

And I wait.

---

In April 2028, I will live at 450 West Williamsburg Lane, Toledo, Ohio. Please, stop me, before it is too late.

I've always pronounced words that end in "s" and that then become possessive in such a manner that makes verbally clear that I am making the word possessive:

"It's the dogs' playground." (Here, dogs' would be verbally articulated as "dogs-iz")

"I'm going to my parents' house this weekend." (Here' parents' would be verbally articulated as "parents-iz")

This is consistent with how you'd say "It's Alexis' book." You would not pronounce that as "It's Alexis book." That sounds utterly wrong; you would instead say "It's [Alexis-iz] book." Same deal here.

I would thus pronounce the bolded words above differently than I would in the following sentences:

"It's the dog's playground."

"I'm going to my parent's house this weekend."

In the first two sentences, verbally articulating the fact that a word is both plural and possessive is critical for clarity. Otherwise, if you pronounce the first two sentences like the second two sentences, it becomes audibly ambiguous as to whether the playground belongs merely to one dog or multiple dogs, and whether I am visiting the house of one singular parent (did the other die? did they get divorced?) or of both parents.

I have seen conflicting information online about whether it's proper to pronounce it the first way (making a verbal distinction between singular possessive and plural possessive) or the second way (making it ambiguous as to whether the party/parties doing the possessing are singular or plural).

Is there a correct, official answer here, from some authoritative source, or is this something that people say differently based on where they're from?