dhruvmittal

As a Framework laptop Linux user: I agree-- it's really not a Linux-first device, but they have done some work after launch to make the device more Linux-friendly.

They've brought on dedicated staff for Linux support (Matt Hartley) and utilized LVFS to deliver seamless firmware updates. They've also continued to address Linux specific hardware/firmware bugs, which many companies prefer not to deal with.

I'm really hoping to see this Linux-friendliness continue with out-of-the-gate support for their new releases, particularly the GPU situation on the 16". It's certainly laudable to respond quickly to the enthusiast community, but it's even better to launch products with some level of testing on major distros.

During my first week at UNC Chapel Hill, I had an incredibly opportunity through the honors program where a handful of new students (including myself, an aspring CS student) got to hang out with Fred Brooks for an evening. I don't think I really knew who he was at the time, but I did recognize his name as the one on the CS Building.

When we talk about Fred Brooks now, we're usually talking about the things he's written (MMM, No Silver Bullet, etc.) or the impact he's had on computing (8 bit byte, founding the CS depts, etc.). He didn't talk about any of that with us freshmen. Other than a brief introduction, he didn't talk about any of that at all.

Instead, he talked to us about what he saw as the future. The most exciting thing going forward, as he saw it in August of 2011, was the development of the interface between biology and computing. One of the things that stuck with me was that he said he hoped students today looked at biology the way he looked at computer science back in the 50s and 60s, as a land of unlimited potential.

I'm too young to have imagined thinking about Bill Gates the way we think about Zuckerberg today but reading this, it occurs to me that people must have.

I had the same experience. Updated the computer, rebooted into the blinky screen. Powered off the machine & went to the BTRFS snapshot created immediately before my update. No damage to the screen that I'm aware of.

That said, I strongly recommend letting the distro hopping take you on a journey before you land on Arch-- don't skip to the end. It's nice to see how things are done elsewhere (defaults, etc.) so that you've got some opinions by the time you get to Arch and configure your own take on things.

While I prefer my personal machines to have 1440p or 4k resolutions, I'm perfectly happy with my work PC's 1080p screen for development and email. I'm hardly watching videos or gaming on that machine, and I don't find that fonts are noticeably sharper at the size that I prefer them on a 15" laptop display.

Reminder that the KDE Connect app also works with the Gnome Shell version GSConnect https://extensions.gnome.org/extension/1319/gsconnect/

Same! My first exposure to mechanical keyboards was back in 2013, very "all the cool kids were getting Das Keyboards." I didn't think much of it, but around that time I started developing some hand and wrist pain while typing. The company I was interning at paid a lot of attention to ergonomics and my mentor came back with a Kinesis Advantage 2, which was far less stressful than the flat Apple keyboards we were using. I don't even know if I realized it was a mechanical keyboard until someone told me.

I liked the Kinesis enough, but eventually decided to build myself an Ergodox. I wanted the complete split keyboard so that I could angle each half more aggressively to take pressure off my wrists. Back then I don't think you could buy a pre-built, so I bought into a kit group buy and spent a few hours soldering. It's a great keyboard, if not the most beautiful looking thing, and I've been using it every day at work ever since.

I lasted 8 years before I felt the need to build another keyboard, this time for my girlfriend's home office. We really did enjoy the sheer amount of choice on the market, via the well-developed hobby market. She needed a split, but she also needed it to fit well in her space. She's always hated the function over form aesthetic of my ergodox, with its clear plastic case, 3d printed risers, and exposed PCB/wiring. On the more functional side, she didn't love the ortholinear layout and wasn't interested in soldering (RSI, hence the interest in a split). We had a great time browsing the larger variety of switches, cases, and keycaps available to us, ultimately going with options that didn't exist in 2013 during my ergodox build to assemble a clean and functional split keyboard to exactly her taste. With hotswap sockets, it's also become normalized for the average keyboard to require zero soldering.

The growth of the keyboard hobby has made building keyboards, even niche ergonomic keyboards, so much more accessible to the average consumer.

I think working at a .NET shop for a few years gave me Visual Studio Stockholm syndrome or something. I'm past that job now, but I still fire up MSVS over other alternatives just because I know all the shortcuts (& because it'll typically work without any additional configuration on my corporate-issue pc).

Not iMac specific, but if your focus issues are similar to mine maybe some of the typical ADHD hacks might help. I think a lot of other folks I know (especially SWEs) that I know do things like this, but everyone has their own system that kind of works for them.

- Get rid of as many of the notifications as you can. Quit or log out of desktop email, discord, messages, whatever. Stuff shouldn't intrude when you're trying to focus. The relationship I try to have with social media is that I check it, it shouldn't check me.

- Instead of cutting distractions completely out of my life, I set aside specific times and places for them. I usually browse forums and things for about 30 minutes while I sip coffee in the morning, and then I'm done until just before bed. I find that making that place means I don't really get the urge to check the forums intruding into my workday. Sometimes if there's high drama or if I'm having a really pleasant interaction it might intrude, but I try to keep that confined to lunch.

- When I'm at work, I check Outlook near the bottom of each hour to see if there's anything I need to deal with, and when I'm done I close the program. This frequency works for me because nobody typically emails me about something that needs to happen asap, your mileage might vary. I usually leave a single, less-distracting "work channel" open. In my case, that's Zoom. If someone needs to message me on this, it's a work thing and it's not really a "distraction" to me. Nobody really messages me for fun on it, anyway.

- At home, when I'm working on classwork using my own computer, I just "get rid of" everything. Shut off all the desktop notifiers. Since Chrome's logged in to all my gmail/twitter/whatever accounts, I switch to Firefox to get stuff done. I haven't put the Bitwarden add-on to Firefox, so it's just mildly more difficult to log in and get distracted. While the barrier isn't really that much higher, it's just enough that I have to think twice before letting myself get sidetracked. Opening reddit and finding myself logged out is enough to remind me that I did this on purpose, and taking any more steps to pursue that distraction just feels like losing which is usually enough to dissuade me. I think there's "focus" software you can use to enforce your rules if you need a higher barrier?

- I do Pomodoro splits when I have trouble motivating myself to focus. It's easier to make a small promise to try for 25 minutes than it is to make the large promise to focus for a few hours. A lot of the time I find that it just takes getting started to actually get interested, and then I don't need the crutch to keep going. I use a physical timer for this because it's less to fiddle with on my computer i.e. alt-tabbing, using the computer at all if I'm trying to read a textbook, etc.

- I try not to put my phone on the desk when I'm working & I don't wear a smartwatch. I gave the smartwatch thing a shot a while back since people were saying they were less distracting than a phone but I found the notifications really intrusive and distracting. The phone's usually in my pocket on do not disturb at work, with a few specific people who I usually do want to talk to allowed through. I'm okay with getting a little distracted if my girlfriend texts me at work.

Power-tripping middle management is unfortunately a common issue. The question I'd ask is whether this behavior is limited to interviews, or whether it's just particularly visible in the interview situation with the largest power imbalance.

Are there other places whether the manager abuses power dynamics or makes life difficult to sate an ego? - Do they involve themselves in situations where they're unnecessary? - Do they make employees grovel and beg for vacation time? - Are annual reviews a cavalcade of negative feedback where people are just happy they didn't get fired? - Are people afraid to speak up in the workplace?

Thanks everyone, reading this was exactly how I needed to start out my last Monday of 2021.

Is this the same thing as Terminus? It looks weirdly similar, down to the logo, so I'm assuming this is a soft relaunch?

I've worked at places that are loaded with senior engineers/developers. It can be awkward from a business sense because: a) Most of your developers are too expensive, so you put very few of them on any project, b) Senior engineers usually have a lot of ongoing efforts that require their attention, while a mid-level or junior might be able to to focus more on your current spring, c) Senior engineers can (but not always) be more set in their ways on technology or methods and be resistant to embrace newer/riskier approaches, and d) There's no room in the org to promote your mid-level engineers, so they leave and become senior devs elsewhere.

At my first full-time development job, we had only entry-level and senior devs with no mid-level folks. As one of the entry-level folks, let me tell you-- what a mass of confusion that was. Hopefully Red Hat's targeting more of a well-rounded or balanced organization, rather than purely cost-cutting measures.

I think a slight improvement over this model is to have a forward-looking CTO/Lead Developer/etc. who incorporates new technologies into the overall plan with sane fail states. This allows the overall technology stack to remain fresh, the developers to stay motivated and current, manages the overall amount of legacy code, while also managing incurred risk effectively. It can also lead to company investment in those new technologies, i.e. training time/budget or conference tickets (depending on what's relevant).

Tl;dr: put your magpies on the top!

As another builder of a Linux gaming desktop, let me just say: nice! I ended up going with an Nvidia 3080 because I'm more familiar with CUDA than AMD equivalents (and I do still need to get work done). If it wasn't for that, I'd likely have gone AMD as well!

One thing that I'd love to hear more on is what Guix gets you as a package manager and/or as a distro. I'm not really following how it differs from other, perhaps more traditional, package managers.

I've stuck it out on Arch, mainly for software availability in the AUR-- i.e. getting out of repo gaming utilities like greenwithenvy and the glorious eggroll proton fork without having to navigate flatpak/snap/etc. My last experience with Steam in a snap on Ubuntu was particularly bad: the application wasn't able to see the mounted drives where I was installing games, nor was it able to detect proton-ge-custom. I've heard the flatpak experience is better, but I haven't played with it at all.

As someone who got a CS degree in the early 2010s, I both 1) agree wholeheartedly that engineers should learn to critique work effectively and 2) disagree that engineers aren't taught this in school. At least my degree program included some efforts at code critiques and reviews.

At multiple instances both early and late in the degree program, I was required to offer feedback as part of class assignments. This started with the first "Foundations of Programming" class, in which we'd submit written code reviews of other students' programming assignments as homework assignments. The professor/TAs would evaluate our reviews and provide their own feedback on how to write more effective code reviews. My senior year I had an entire "Software Engineering Lab" course, which required code review notes along with other deliverables for the course (team) project. Again, guidance was provided from the instructor on how to do effective code reviews.

Write enough code and you're probably not going to have the headspace to remember it all...

While I like the concept, I get the feeling that you're taking the aggressive posture an inch or two too far. If this is a serious business concept, you're running the risk of being mistaken for parody.

If this is parody, well done.

That's what Android Auto does in my car as well-- as soon as I turn the on the car on a weekday morning, it gives me directions & traffic to work. Ditto for the commute home.

My experience with this (circa 1 year ago when I last had a PC running Windows Home) is that they periodically come back as the OS updates.

I've had to confront my southern accent a few times in my life to get taken seriously. Moving from rural North Carolina to attend college in Chapel Hill, I had to "scrub the rural from my voice." When I went to graduate school in New York, I tried my best to coach myself to a "flat American accent," which carried me well through the midwest when I later moved to Ohio.

One of the small joys of my life right now is working with folks with thick accents in positions of seniority. At my previous job, we had a chief scientist who also came from NC. At one point, he told me that he'd suppressed his accent until he was promoted past the level where anyone could judge how he said things instead of what he said.

Possibly naive question but does anyone know if CUDA is supported on the new M1 macs? I think I heard on a podcast last week that eGPUs would no longer be supported, but I can't find a reference.

Yes, but as the primary text of the constitution doesn't guarantee any rights, it's sufficient to list the rights supplied by amendments to cover "constitutional rights."

The constitution on its own doesn't guarantee any freedoms, so we must look to the Bill of Rights. Does mask wearing fall under:

- Freedom of speech? No.

- Freedom of the press? No.

- Freedom of religion? No.

- Freedom of assembly? No.

- Right to petition the government? No.

- Right to bear arms? No.

- Protection against housing soldiers in civilian homes? No.

- Protection against unreasonable search and seizure? No.

- Protection against the issuing of warrants without probable cause? No.

- Protection against trial without indictment? No.

- Protection against double jeopardy? No.

- Protection against self-incrimination? No.

- Protection against property seizure? No.

- Right to a speedy trial? No.

- Right to be informed of charges? No.

- Right to be confronted by witnesses? No.

- Right to call witnesses? No.

- Right to a legal counsel? No.

- Right to trial by jury? No.

- Protection against excessive bail? No.

- Protection against excessive fines? No.

- Protection against cruel and unusual punishment? No.

I think we called it a win on "The year of desktop linux" when it was clear that Linux was mainstream enough for Microsoft to tie it up with a bow and offer in their app store.

Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, and it's not uncommon for engineers at the 8000+ not-a-software-company I work at to casually have a Linux machine instead of a Mac or PC. It's not 2010, where you had to be willing to navigate UEFI and "will my broadcom wireless work?" to weed out the casuals from the true-believers.

Something something RCS.

(It works & is genuinely quite pleasant, as long as you have friends & family who also have pixels).

The Latitude "Business laptop" has it, but not the XPS. It's good enough.

I just learned about this last night, and was really considering it. One thing that I wasn't sure about is the size-- I already love the ergodox I've been using for the last 6 years, and reddit says the moonlander is much smaller feeling.

Fascinating, never knew the biff one.