Fluorescence

> I think people just have very different tolerances for latency and slowness.

I wonder if it's because of a form of "touch typing". I'm not really looking at text appearing as I type. My fingers work off an internal buffer while my mind is planning the next problem. If not so deep in thought to almost be blind, I am reading other docs / code as I type. I am not an ultra fast typist but if I mistype, I can feel it and don't need the visual feedback to know it. I might be this way because I am old and have used tools with lag you measure in seconds.

I only care about latency if it interrupts me and I have to wait and that's typically not typing but heavier operations. I am utterly intolerant to animations. I don't want less I want zero, instant action. I don't want janky ass "smooth scrolling" I want crisp instant scrolling. I have no idea why animations are even popular.

Some of the text-editor latency discussion reminds me of high screen refresh rates for office work. When people "check the refresh rate" they have to do that violent wiggling of window to actually have large content moving faster enough to see a difference. You have to look for it to then get upset about it.

The worse case would be if it's more of an illusion like fancy wines - a fiction driven by context. Lie to someone that an editor is an electron app and they will complain about the latency. Software judgement also has toxic fashion and tribal aspects. Something unfashionable will accrue unjustified complaints and something cool or "on your team" will be defended from them. I'm reminded of Apple fans making all sorts of claims about rendering unaware that they were using Apple laptops that shipped not running at their natural resolution and visibly blurry. Your lying eyes can't beat what the heart wants to believe.

Vscode is very snappy for me on less powerful machine Ryzen 3900 (Ubuntu, X-windows). I have a good experience running multiple instances, big workspaces and 70+ actively used extensions and even more that I selectively enable when I want them. It's only the MS C# support that behaves poorly for me (intentional sabotage?!).

I wonder if you have some problem on your machine/setup? I'd investigate it - try some benchmarking. It's open source so you don't me afraid looking under the hood to see what's happening.

> I'll save a file and it will be like jank...jank... File Save participants running with a progress bar.

I don't see that at all. Saving is instant/transparent to me.

There is so much possible configuration that could cause an issue e.g. if you have "check on save" from an an extension then you enter "js jank land" where plugins take plugins that take plugins all configured in files with dozens of options, weird rules that change format every 6 months e.g. your linter might take plug-ins from your formatter, your test framework, your ui test framework, hot reload framework, your bundler, your transpile targets...

If saving is really slow then I would suspect something like an extension is wandering around node_modules. Probing file access when you see jank might reveal that.

I don't notice much of a problem from multiple windows. I sometimes have a dozen going.

It's the language extensions in the windows that can cause me problems e.g. rust-analyzer is currently using more than 10GB! If windows are just for reading code and I'm feeling some memory pressure then I kill the language server / disable the extension for that window.

I have more problems with jetbrains. 64GB isn't enough for a dev machine to work on 10s of Mbs of code any more...

I've lived in a number of hotspots. Locals rarely use the same businesses as tourists. Any "attraction" that is not the historic buildings / culture / scenery etc. are likely trash. Tourist infrastructure is dead space for a local, not an asset. Any claim that e.g. transport is an asset, is typically only solving a problem tourism has created.

When people say they "bring money in", worth seeing where the money goes. Tourists spend in the most scammy cynical price gouging businesses and in multinationals. The profit margins of these businesses is not local wealth - the financial impact locals see is property price inflation. In most tourist cities, you don't need to walk far from the main attraction to see desperate poverty.

There is opportunity cost. When a political administration leans into the "tourist industry" they are not growing other industry and enterprise that creates high value jobs for locals. The jobs tourism creates are entry level service workers that will likely served by immigrants also attracted by the same dynamics as tourists and more easily exploited by a loathsome industry.

> But in australia the dell alienware is 6000ish aud

The Alienware m16 R2 actually looks cheaper in Aus than UK, you just can't spec it with 64GB/2TB for some unknown reason. If you could for the same percentage bump as the UK, it would be 3577 AUD.

https://www.dell.com/en-au/shop/gaming-and-games/alienware-m...

Hmm.

> a m3 pro 16”/96gb/2tb costs 7700aud

You can't buy an m3 pro with more than 36GB in the UK. A Max with 64GB is £4,699 (8,900 AUD).

A 64GB/2GB Dell Alienware is £2,399 (4,550 AUD).

That is not my experience: ctrl-a jumps to the start of a command. I've not seen any issues with Ubuntu, tmux and fish.

All tmux and fish keyboard shortcuts have worked without any alacrity configuration (that I can recall).

My tmux config adds shortcuts to behave like a conventional tabbed window without any issues e.g. ctrl-n (new tab), ctrl-w (close tab), ctrl-page-up/down to navigate tabs.

For others who also didn't know this one:

https://www.theonion.com/apple-introduces-revolutionary-new-...

"It remains to be seen if the Apple Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work instead of just dicking around" resonates for whenever Apple/Meta claim a VR headset is a productivity/business tool.

"everything is just a few 100 clicks away"... sounds like Apple's regulatory compliance. Might become mandatory if you want to use side-loading/3rd party app stores.

Sarcasm, irony and euphemism are modes indirectness, like gallows humour, to help us talk about the horrific without the equivalent of burning our eyes out staring at the sun. It's a coping mechanism.

Sincere and explicit statements of horror have paradoxical outcomes because such words wear thin. They are overused by the disengenuous to wound others. The sincere are forced onto a semantic treadmill seeking different ways to express themselves.

> Let's turn the question around: why would car makers want to...

The tech giants are not component suppliers you can symbiotically partner with to add value to your product. They are predatory and parasitic goliaths. They are wolves more powerful than governments with designs on your hen-house. It is frankly insane to let them own the primary interface to your customer and auto will likely regret letting them get this far.

Google/Apple infotainment ventures cannot even be called trojan horses given how open they are in their investments and desires to seize the auto industry the moment tech/profit makes it feasible. Unattractive low-margin manufacturing keeps them at bay but they are gambling on "software eats the world" long-term. For now, they will drain every available high margin service for themselves.

The wasteful step is to order more food than you will eat. Someone not finishing their meal is what I don't recognise. If someone has a small appetite I am used to them enquiring about portion size and arranging to split dishes with others rather than expect to bag up an excess. There are always people keen to get their hands on anything going spare anyway.

I only see it happen if someone falls ill, is called away or there was an error in the order e.g. you manage to order four entire chickens instead of four portions.

> To most users, the data is what is important in a spreadsheet and the formulas are implementation details.

In my experience of erm... hardcore-spreadsheeting (engineering, finance)... the cells whose value matters and become a final report that motivates design/decision-making are a tiny percentage of the total cells. Most of the cells in a spreadsheet are either raw data or intermediate values. Their values have no real meaning to the author, just steps in a long calculation. They might look at them for sanity checking but if they need to verify their values then that is better as another calculation not by repeated manual inspection.

Of course there are many types of spreadsheet user. Every cell value matters for your Vinyl collection or whatever :)

> Not being able to see the of formulas is just a mode switch away

"Show formulas" is fine if it's "=A1-B1" but for real work, formulas get long with lots of filters and look-ups etc. I break them across multiple lines just to read them. If I toggle visible formulas, I only see the first few characters of such formulas that fit in the data cells. Even if it did work, reading every cell when you have 1000s of rows just sucks for spotting errors caused by a fill down error or a cat on keyboard or something.

The only way I can be confident with a spreadsheet is to have a validation sheet that performs a bunch of error-checking. For serious stuff, I think you almost need to keep an entire duplicate of the data and recreate the results with a different process because it's just so hard to catch everything e.g. heartbreaking to open an old important spreadsheet and see a line of data got duplicated somehow. Spreadsheets are just so damn mutable. A keyboard shortcut with the wrong application in focus and who knows what damage you might have just done to a spreadsheet.

I remember how birds learned that the silver-top milk had a thick lay of cream so if you didn't fetch it in pronto, you'd find all your bottles would have the tops pecked through.

Gotta juice your government contract. Charge a scrappage fee for removing the naughty crane, charge full price for a new crane and a special surcharge for over-night installation... and then have the chutzpah to explain that yes, Chinese and American cranes do look very similar... convergent design something something <cough>.

Why is that particularly relevant?

There have been lots of hacker for hire companies from around the world. You want to embargo India because of Appin, Italy for Hacking Team, Israel for NSO Group? If you are worried about "state-backed hackers" I mean... what is the NSA again?

I guess you are not very familiar with addiction?

> the moralistic explanation

It is not a moralistic claim at all. Quite the opposite. It's a very common human struggle and to realise you are trapped in an addiction is the way to break free. Understanding that there it's something in the addictive substance that hooks humans, means it's not your fault. It lets you escape the crushing feelings of shame, blame and weakness. Better still, there are a lot of resources about recovering from addiction.

> "the inner food-addict concocting excuses for an XXL pizza"?

Ok so this is not a barb but jargon. Your inner-addict is a personification of the self-talk that tries to pull you back into an addiction. Your inner-addict is like the cartoon devil on your shoulder. You are not an addict anymore, but you still carry this annoying little inner-addict that you sometimes just have tell to shut the hell up.

For example, this little devil might be pestering you non-stop (what might be called 'food noise' these days) but the funnier aspect I wanted to reference is how your inner-addict comes up with the dumbest reasons to break your sobriety. These absurd reasons just pop in your head and if you are not paying enough attention, you might believe them. However if you manage to take a beat, you can realise it's the most laughably absurd nonsense but you were nearly tricked e.g. "I will never be a great writer if I don't smoke", "it's amazing how little I crave a donut, I should eat one just to prove how much I am not interested in them", "I should celebrate my 100 days sober with a cocktail!".

You can see how "I should get fat again to not be seen" has the suggestion of one these absurd justifications. If someone has lost a lot of weight they will have been through absolute hell with months of deprivation and struggle. It's a massive achievement. A rationalisation to excuse throwing away all that effort is insane but that is how addictions work.

> consistent with the notion from evolutionary theory

Ok, kind of funny. Evolutionary psychology suffers from "just-so-stories". It is possible to tell a nice story, but they have no epistemic value because there is no limit to the number of nice sounding stories and they are untestable. "Consistent with evolution" should only be said as a punchline. To be blunt, the story itself is speculative Freudian subconscious schlock which is why I believe I hear something similar from those fresh from therapy.

Until they are inherited by a confused youngster who puts dad's weird old trash on the kerb :(

The problem is it's not a horseless carriage... it's more like a hang-glider or something.

For the some niche things, fantastic, it's unique. Feeling inside a 3d scene, two handed manipulations of 3d objects... it's the hang-glider jumping off a mountain which no horse can do. If you currently render something in 3d on a monitor, VR might help and some new things like training for physical tasks might be cool too.

The hang-glider just isn't useful for commuters getting from A to B which in this case, is office work. It's text, it's numbers, it's organisation, it's communication. Throwing things around in 3d is just a gimmick that will likely slow you down. Moving your head or waving your hands around are not better ergonomically than a good monitor, keyboard and seating. Using a keystroke to flip the app/tabs in your field of view is more comfortable than turning to look at your wall.

> VR Immersive IDE

This is like every 3d scifi UX you could see in compsci department since the 90s. I get it, everyone wants to create that cool looking scene from Prometheus but sadly no-one wants 4 lines of code exploded into a huge visual call-graph with dozens of nodes, interconnections everywhere and translucent text. VR won't change that. No-one really wants to drive around a city to find their files in a Gibson either.

For VR, you don't want to look at text that's far away, you don't want to look at text at weird angles... so what is a 3d environment adding? The ideal is to bring perfectly sized legible text at a comfortable focal distance into your gaze, that's what an automobile will need to do.

My father has some plastic camping dinnerware that has been heavily used since the 60's. It's been wildly abused around the world, up mountains, on beaches, by generations of family, kids and bitey babies.

It's not even scratched. I have no idea what it's made out of but it's super impressive. I try not to think about because of whatever the biosafety standards were back then... but the lack of visible damage gives me hope not much of it has been ingested at least.

> I usually don’t care how much I weigh, as long as I look fit.

Who are you going to believe, the scale or your lying eyes?

It's kind of crazy how much weight you can gain without noticing it in the mirror. It's a combination of frog-boiling and the very weird psychology of self-perception. Modern stretch fabrics add to this curse lol. Back in the day your very non-stretchy denim would raise an alarm bell.

If you are trying to do something, lose fat, gain muscle, the scale is a simple measuring tool for what the eyes can't see.

You seem to describe using BMI in casual conversation or as a personal goal but there are other issues.

Doctors use BMI as a filter for medications, surgery and such. With increasingly tele-medicine, I only get to fill my height/weight in a box and not treat a doctor to the gun show.

I don't know what other uses it has - insurance maybe, medical fitness standards for jobs etc.

Other criticism is about not capturing the variation between different ethnicities or builds so applying a numerical limit can be quite prejudicial.

On the otherhand, in some cases, weight is weight. There are some things where body-mass, muscle or fat, increases the relevant risk.

> gaining weight can be a way to become invisible, a non-threat

I have become a little sceptical about this one because of how frequently I now see it claimed. While there might be real cases, it has become part of the therapy patter around weight-loss. It has become a "realisation" that rationalises someone's eating. It wasn't out of control, it wasn't about desire but an unconscious plan! It paints them as the noble victim and gives them a path to becoming more confident and slimmer.

It might even be a helpful mindset but I don't think it's the true mechanism which is more about attempting mood-repair and getting trapped in a food-addiction cycle. I have only ever seen how weight-gain becomes a pain that feeds the need for mood-repair rather than anyone reaching an unconscious victory of becoming invisible. I see the converse happen - when over-weight we feel painfully conspicuous, to an almost paranoid extent.

I think it becomes more convincing when women lose weight and get unwanted attention. When the conceived fix is to start eating, is that a rational reaction or the inner food-addict concocting excuses for an XXL pizza? I know when I break an addiction that inner-addict comes up with some hella bullshit.

Invisibility might be part of the spectrum of our mental state in weight-gain but I'm seeing this as a primary explanation spike way beyond what I believe is credible for an "unconscious plan" theory. Female obesity is greater than Male obesity but I expect that is due to the greater hormonal and child-birth challenges than this theory.

I guess one issue is that our environment changes so that what was predictive for the past isn't for the present day.

Can gene expression be affected by pollutants more common decades ago like abestos, coal-dust or leaded petrol? It would be frustrating to only discover this in 15 years time.

> My handwriting was never really able to keep up with my brain

I found value in hand-writing by doing morning-pages as a regular high volume stream-of-conscious practice which allowed my hand-writing to free itself from the deliberate part of my mind.

The mind should be alive while you hand-write rather than, as a imagine it, a child spelling out the letters as they print them. Ideally it should be more of a flow state with multiple parts of your mind working in parallel. You can basically queue up a sentence for the more autonomous part of the brain to hand-write while the rest of your mind is thinking more strategically and refining arguments.

For me, hand-writing can be magical because that semi-conscious autonomous part can be a source of creativity of it's own. The conscious mind has ordered a vanilla statement but the hand has embellished it with unplanned rhetorical flourish which can take the observing part of the mind by surprise by it's beauty.

This can feel like a bit of dialogue between parts of my mind as I write. The planning part is reading what is emerging from the hand and getting inspired beyond it's own plans. I'd be curious if this has any genuine physiological basis with multiple parts of the brain because it does fit into those right-brain / left-brain type models.

I go in cycles and start assuming I'm getting the same benefit with typing but I then rediscover how the craft of hand-writing opens up something fresh I've been missing. There is something to the constant forward progression, the uneditable ink and the physical movement that helps. The way words appear is allowing for creative supervention. There is something about how ink on a page materially changes the world but letters on a screen are intangible vapour. For me typing, can always feel a little unserious and uncommitted. No matter how I might try to set my mind, there is a temptation to edit after every keystroke.

I think it's related to how some people can speak with simplicity and grace but they write turgid crap. Whatever that natural off-the-top-of-your-mind circuit we use to speak can become overpowered by an overthinking inner bore. For me at least, hand-writing can activate some different brain areas and find some freedom.

> However, it's following physical precedent that's well understood

The physical precedent would be to show the behaviour as the button image (play) and then the depressed/undepressed visual state would show if the behaviour was active or not. Software designers didn't follow this and invented swapping between the play/pause icons causing this new confusion. Not for any user friendly reason, more because skeuomorphic 3d buttons went out of fashion.

> It's also (usually) obvious

The only virtue of indicating the state at all is for when you have a problem. Very common for audio at least (muted sound, unplugged headphones, linux audio drivers have become borked again... sigh).

I still get that twang of cognitive dissonance when I see play/pause buttons and have to think about it and might just double toggle it anyway when I've got an issue because I can't be 100% sure what a pause button means.

Mobility is pretty important for compound lifts for both good form and injury prevention.

You'll regret getting strong and moving heavy-weight with bad mobility - you get those long term injuries you can't shake because now your own musculature is pulling things out of alignment too. The wrong muscles get activated in movements to overcome mobility flaws and they only get stronger and more dominant so it's like compounding interest on a debt.

When I read the music press in the 90s it was to get the latest news on tours, learn what was cool, chase the cool myself and read lurid accounts of whoever was injecting heroin in they eyeballs or whatever. It was to press the accelerator pedal of consumption and novelty instead of waiting for it to trickle through from other sources.

> subsets of its fanbase who are intolerable

I hear this relentlessly but I can't say I have ever seen what this is first hand. If R&M comes up on r/television I don't see anything unusual. Where do people run into this fanbase?

In the UK, we don't have those rolls near produce any more. Instead you would be expected to buy a reusable net bag.

Once forced to buy or carry bags, you quickly realise you don't actually need to keep everything in it's own little baggy fiefdom. Nothing bad happens if an onion touches a cucumber! You can just put loose produce in a basket, weigh it with it's friends, and put it into a reusable shopping bag.