rollcat

Many popular games are physically and mentally demanding. You do need "vigorous, professional mousing" for any kind of shooter or RTS, on top of actual thinking and reacting.

Playing in teams requires you to type to coordinate with teammates. The language floats from cryptic to hectic: all sorts of acronyms, jargon, combining text with "body language", etc. Regardless, typing with both hands is still faster.

You can also buy a detachable numpad.

> This drove my high school typing teacher nuts [...]

I think that's typical for over-achievers.

Context: I've been daily driving an Ergodox since 2019.

> And I hated having to learn layers and layouts. Besides I have a real job and I use a proper IDE so I need my F keys, I like to use the Home/End/Page Up+Down keys, I learned to use the numpad efficiently, etc.

Personally, I find that a layer key is little different from a standard modifier key such as Cmd, Alt, etc. Yep, it's one more thing to learn, but IMHO it's worth learning: on macOS, you can use Cmd+arrow to move around text pretty much the same way H/E/Pu/Pd works, but with Mod+arrow, you can just transfer this muscle memory to other systems.

I agree with the lack of F-keys, this is a stupid trend that caught early on, and now no designer seems to be willing to challenge it. I have a different reason though (I prefer Cmd+R or similar to Recompile/Run/etc), and it's games. This is my StarCraft 2 layout: <https://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/8b8dcd36c0abc...>

SC2 is insanely demanding on your raw mechanics, and adding a layer is unquestionably a Bad Idea. For many commands (production, upgrades, some spells), modal input is hardcoded into the engine.

The layout I built is much more optimized than standard hotkeys, but the lack of F-keys is brutal and hindering (esp. for Zerg). Regardless, I've improved A LOT with this layout - which makes me think, how you make it work for you is more important than the shape of it.

> I'm working with comfortable 30-40 wpm and am still one of the most prolific and productive engineers at $work, typing speed is not important for many jobs.

The design goal was never to increase speed (that's mostly mechanics), but to allow a more comfortable posture.

> I would like to continue be able to use regular keyboards efficiently and with little annoyance. Too often I'm traveling and stuck with the laptop keyboard.

Again subjective, but I have zero problems switching between ortholinear and staggered.

> Use defaults.

Disagree (: most defaults suck. Best case, they're opinionated but thoughtful. A consensus is a compromise - always questionable. Worst: "we're now just stuck with it". These all suck, because they're someone else's opinion. And it's in your right to disagree.

I don't know. I live in a country with excellent healthcare, excellent public transport, overall excellent quality of life - yeah, and so much of it is funded from our taxes. Granted, the country was rich to begin with, but it seems to be perfectly sustainable.

Just my €0.03.

Telling people they're doing something annoying / dangerous / etc is surprisingly effective. Ask the person smoking next to you to move downwind. Ask the neighbor next door to turn down the TV. Ask the tourist in public transport to move their suitcase so it doesn't block the door. Works every time, most of the time.

I'm not a landowner, but (subject to the local laws of course) I imagine a safer course of action would be decent home insurance. Realistically, there's a thousand other ways things can go disastrously wrong, including nothing that could be the tenant's fault (like natural disasters).

Batteries? Picture a fondue going wrong.

> For example, with home robot vacuums, we can only hope that brands will use top quality cells, but the information what cells are used is not even available to the customer.

Hardware used to come with diagrams & schematics, for self-service and repair. This was a courtesy, but I guess manufacturers figured out it's better to make the consumer buy a new model. (AKA part of the reason why Commodore went bankrupt.)

Meanwhile we've been talking and implementing measures such as lists of ingredients and nutrients in food, SBOMs in software, privacy/tracking transparency, etc. Let's push it a little further.

This is what I have in my custom instructions:

    Stay brief. Do not use emoji.
    Check primary sources, avoid speculation.
    Do not suggest next steps.

Do I have to repeat this every time I suspect the answer will be incorrect?

The problem is, I ask it a basic question, it confidently feeds me bullshit, I correct it twice, and only then it does an actual search.

So, in short, do a lot of unrelated, complex, expert-level work, to get basic answers - all while I could just read the docs?

Where's that productivity increase everyone's been talking about?

Thank you for the article.

My own conclusions from your data:

- Under light workloads, you can get away with Postgres. 7k RPS is fine for a lot of stuff.

- Introducing Redis into the mix has to be carefully weighted against increased architectural complexity, and having a common interface allows us to change that decision down the road.

Yeah maybe that's not up to someone else's idea of a good synthetic benchmark. Do your load-testing against actual usage scenarios - spinning up an HTTP server to serve traffic is a step in the right direction. Kudos.

It's crazy how wildly inaccurate "top-of-the-list" LLMs are for straightforward yet slightly nuanced inquiries.

I've asked ChatGPT to summarize Go build constraints, especially in the context of CPU microarchitectures (e.g. mapping "amd64.v2" to GOARCH=amd64 GOAMD64=v2). It repeatedly smashed its head on GORISCV64, claiming all sorts of nonsense such as v1, v2; then G, IMAFD, Zicsr; only arriving at rva20u64 et al under hand-holding. Similar nonsense for GOARM64 and GOWASM. It was all right there in e.g. the docs for [cmd/go].

This is the future of computer engineering. Brace yourselves.

> The writing was on the wall once Linux was a thing.

Linux didn't "win" nearly as much as x86 did by becoming "good enough" - Linux just happened to be around to capitalize on that victory.

The writing on the wall was the decreasing prices and increasing capability of consumer-grade hardware. Then real game-changer followed: horizontal scalability.

As a bystander watching the world burn, I find it hilarious that you're both opposing and arguing against the other's chosen planet-incinerator.

I'd argue the crown was already well-established from day 0 of Apple Watch, but you're right.

Followed by "Enterprise".

If you want a simpler and less invasive "improved cd", you can do this in ZSH:

    chpwd() {
        ls
    }

It does what it says: after changing the cwd, list its contents. You can try other things, e.g. "[ -d .git ] && git status".

They have straps, not hinges.

>> introduced

> MacBooks

Laptops have been a thing since the 80s.

Apple is kinda famous for scaling processes that are not supposed to be viable at scale.

They may be just buying out all of the worldwide (China-wide) available capacity. Perks of sitting on an impossibly large pile of cash I guess. Still, impressive.

The last time Apple introduced a product with a moving part was the Airpods line. I think we'll see a foldable iPhone about the same time we see a touchscreen Mac.

> "zero-cost abstractions"

I believe that in modern times, this term refers to stuff like: transparent conversion to a low-level representation (e.g. a bit-packed integer) from a high-level, statically checked datatype - e.g. a tagged union with exhaustive pattern matching, aka ADT. This is also something C++ etc lack.

"Legal" vs "ethical" summarizes everything that is wrong about the current state of copyright.

> You're answering rhetorical questions which, incidentally, are not about terminology, but about legal and social mechanics.

Yes, that's what I've tried to imply. You name things, so you can discuss them in more abstract terms, so you can form a social & legal framework around those concepts.

> My whole point is that not having to define such relationships and their expectations is a reason to forbid them culturally.

>> [...] not having to define [...] is a reason to forbid [...].

Suppress the concept. "We don't talk about that."

> How did that work before most people knew how to write?

How did people enter agreements?

> Personally, I'm more of the opinion that cultural features are memetic, and that memes are not uniformly successfully propagated.

Agree. It's also how dictatorships rise. Another form of oppression that concentrates power and fires back at the group who have initially supported it. Another lose-lose.

Societies often overoptimize for a local maximum.

Thanks for debunking, I'll stop spreading lies now ^^;

None of this is the point of this discussion.

The point is: commodity hardware is powerful, and it's interesting to explore its capabilities outside of its original purpose. Apple or not.

> In a community with such liberal sexual practices, STDs spread more easily, especially in earlier centuries.

You can use a condom. TIL, rubber condoms are a mid-19th century invention; a significant upgrade over sheep gut.

The alternative is called polyfidelity.

> [...] what are Alice and David to each other?

They're called Metamours.

> Anything? Nothing? Is the entire married community a distinct entity?

It's called a polycule.

> Relatedly, how is inheritance handled if such complex spousal organizations are going to be legally allowed?

You write a will.

By the way, inheritance laws are messy already as they are. Try figuring out how to reject inheritance (e.g. of debt) in your jurisdiction.

> There are reasons to allow only one of the sexes to have multiple sexual partners/spouses.

Yes, the reason is to reinforce division and oppression. One "side" is underprivileged, the other has to fight each other for supremacy. The stronger few win, everyone else loses. History is littered with examples.

Don't get me wrong, these are all very good questions. But we've figured all of these things out quite a while ago. People do live like that, and form lasting, loving communities. I'd wager that an entire society built on top of that would have no lesser chance at thriving than the one we've been born into.

> Which is common in industry.

It was *not* common in mid-90s. x86 was commodity hardware - home PCs, early NT workstations. PHP was still written in Perl. Linux was a few years old - industry veterans (e.g. Greenspun) were throwing rocks at it.

Yes, the x86 platform was documented - through reverse-engineering efforts. Compaq was the first to produce PC clones, to IBM's great disdain.

Don't get me wrong - you're probably better off running Ampere. Just don't dismiss commodity hardware.

Doesn't help that all of the major decentralized protocols have been very effectively undermined and pushed aside.

GTalk first de-federated (weakening XMPP as a whole), then killed XMPP support completely. Reader effectively killed RSS for casual users. Email has been swallowed whole by the oligopoly of GMail+Yahoo+Outlook+iCloud+etc; spam is a real problem, so if you're self-hosting your email, you kinda expect to be blocked by default by the large networks.

Existing, corporate-backed efforts are "open-washing" their services.

Signal is supposed to be using an open protocol, but IIRC won't even let you join their network if you use an alt client.

Following Twitter's demise, Bluesky popped up, and promised federation. I didn't check in a while - did it happen yet?

Actually open networks? Mastodon took off like crazy, but everyone tried to register on the "main", biggest instance - we got bamboozled so hard, we can't even comprehend what "decentralized" is actually supposed to mean.

ActivityPub as a protocol? Ted Unangst decided to build his own client from the spec, and was constantly running into Mastodonisms. <https://flak.tedunangst.com/search?q=activitypub>

Matrix? It has effectively one client (Element) that isn't a security disaster. <https://soatok.blog/2024/08/14/security-issues-in-matrixs-ol...>

Anything left, worth of anyone's attention?

You're absolutely right! Social media like Reddit are overrun with bots, sycophants, and trolls trying to provoke reactions by engaging in controversial topics. This forms echo chambers, which is a sub-par source for training data, and reflects those biases in LLM responses.