setopt

It’s pretty nice to ssh into a remote host and plot some data there without needing either X forwarding, or dumping to files and rsync’ing, or similar workarounds.

The problem is the asymmetry. If the choices were «yes, but we can re-evaluate later» and «no, but we can re-evaluate later» then there wouldn’t be an issue. But especially with laws implemented at the EU level and not national level, it’s extremely difficult to get out of it after it’s been implemented. The choices are in practice, «yes, for the next foreseeable decades» and «no, for the next year».

> > Just intuitively, in such a high dimensional space, two random vectors are basically orthogonal.

> What's the intuition here? Law of large numbers?

Imagine for simplicity that we consider only vectors pointing parallel/antiparallel to coordinate axes.

- In 1D, you have two possibilities: {+e_x, -e_x}. So if you pick two random vectors from this set, the probability of getting something orthogonal is 0.

- In 2D, you have four possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y}. If we pick one random vector and get e.g. +e_x, then picking another one randomly from the set has a 50% chance of getting something orthogonal (±e_y are 2/4 possibilities). Same for other choices of the first vector.

- In 3D, you have six possibilities: {±e_x, ±e_y, ±e_z}. Repeat the same experiment, and you'll find a 66.7% chance of getting something orthogonal.

- In the limit of ND, you can see that the chance of getting something orthogonal is 1 - 1/N, which tends to 100% as N becomes large.

Now, this discretization is a simplification of course, but I think it gets the intuition right.

Yup. I’ve heard several people say that Git is a product from Microsoft…

> I originally picked up Typst as yet another replacement for PowerPoint

I’ve also mainly used it for slides so far. Can recommend Slydst for that.

Resilio is also pretty good, depending on your use case. (Syncthing is great too, but Resilio seems faster and better at NAT traversal in my experience.)

There’s also the difference between the conventional EU/UK style (spaced en-dash) vs. the common US style (unspaced em-dash).

Emacs defaults to a GUI if available. The -nw toggle switches it off even when available, while -nox compiles without GUI support so it’s never available.

There are some minor differences. For example, I believe -nw can still use the X support to access the GUI clipboard, while -nox requires enabling e.g. OSC-52 support to do the same.

Yup: https://github.com/a-schaefers/systemE

I can highly recommend KKP. It works very well in Kitty, and it even lets you map super keybindings, swap modifier keys, etc. I also used it on MacOS to get a low-latency frame on big hiDPI screens where the Cocoa GUI becomes quite unusable.

It also works fine in many other terminals like iTerm2 and Ghostty. Last I tried, they don’t report Super though.

They could choose to not offer the new feature to users on old hardware, but still provide those platforms with e.g. security updates and key features like Safari upgrades.

Thanks for all the replies! I'll probably try Fedora KDE first in that case :)

Last time I used KDE as my main desktop was v3.x, I switched away once v4.0 was released (at launch it was slow, unstable, and lacked many features). But it seems KDE 6 is likely to fit my personality more than recent Gnome versions.

I used Linux for a long time (since ~2002), but for the past years I've been daily-driving a MacBook.

I'm now switching back, and will likely go with either Gnome or KDE. I've used XFCE, i3wm, etc. for years before – and briefly tried Sway too before I switched to Mac – but from what I've read it sounds like the "big" DEs make life easier post-Wayland.

Anyone want to share why you currently choose KDE over Gnome?

I still feel a bit sad about the changes that happened ~2012. Linux on the desktop really had a strong momentum going around Ubuntu and Gnome 2, where quite a few non-geeks started switching over as well. But then everything fragmented quite rapidly – Gnome Shell was quite unpopular on launch, Ubuntu went in their own direction with Unity, Mint went in a different direction with MATE and Cinnamon, Elementary forked off Pantheon, etc. Similarly, RedHat pushed for Wayland and Flatpack while Canonical pushed for Mir and Snap, and so on.

I'm not saying that Ubuntu/Gnome was everything Linux had to offer (I myself was on Arch and i3wm at the time), but that period was certainly when the largest percentage of people around me were enthusiastically adopting the Linux desktop.

Windows Subsystem for Linux Usage or something would have been clearer.

Do they check passports to validate who goes where?

Same here. I was about to order a new MacBook recently, but there’s been a lot of small issues annoying me over the past few years and Liquid Glass was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me.

Back to Linux for me. Ended up ordering a Thinkpad X1 Carbon instead, and am planning to throw Fedora on it.

> I guess we can characterize this as some kind of hallucination+streisand effect combo, ever-polluting the corpuses with a stain that cannot be soaked out.

Or just a machine equivalent of the Mandela effect?

I don’t doubt that a conventional laptop or desktop will be far less common in a decade.

But both iPads and Android tablets have keyboard cases. Even many phones can these days be plugged into USB-C docking stations that enable the use of a big screen and keyboard when needed. I agree that most non-programmers will probably end up using phones or tablets with an external keyboard, and even for programming it is kinda usable.

Those schools will probably just switch to Android netbooks or Android tablets with keyboard cases.

Still, I think that’s very different from AI technologies killing the PC form factor. The hardware and software might change, but I personally think the «screen and keyboard» form factor will remain the default for «work» for the next decade.

Personally: Yes, I do. Likely, voice assistants and other AI tools will have a bigger market share in a decade, sure. But I doubt an interface like Alexa can replace a PC-like setup for most of the «real work». Instead, I imagine we’ll just continue the trend of laptops and tablets with AI assistants integrated in better ways, and perhaps a wider adoption of AR/VR in some sectors. Tre The tech that could replace today’s PC setup is a neural interface, but I doubt that NeuraLink et al will be anywhere near mainstream in a decade.

It’s easy to implement on a computer, but I think they want it built into a kindle.

Sounds a bit similar to ChatGPT Pulse.

My main complaint about them is no first-party support for type checking, you need external packages like beartype decorators.

> Why do people want to share information someplace that gets lost to the sands of time?

I mean, it’s the same reasons people used IRC for decades, and some people were unhappy if channels saved and published the IRC logs.

Informal asynchronous communication arguably has its place, and many people are more willing to speak plainly and without overthinking if what they say is not expected to be publically readable for decades.

Even if, of course, in public chat rooms someone could always record and share what is said without your consent, and if most people don’t say confidential things in public chatrooms about technical topics, there’s still something about a mailing list or forum that makes me personally speak less plainly compared to ephemeral channels.

If I recall correctly, the side windows on cars let through more UVA, while the front windows block both efficiently.

There are other benefits as well. For example, some eye exposure to violet or ultraviolet light have been shown to reduce myopia, which might be one reason why glasses usage has increased a lot. (Screen usage is a big myopia factor as well, but it’s not the whole story.)

There are also studies suggesting that low-level UV exposure lowers risk of death by more than what can be explained by serum vitamin D levels alone, suggesting other unknown mechanisms at play.

I got my first MacBook at Catalina, and still miss it. For a while, I downgraded my Intel Mac to Catalina again; I love the aesthetic compared to the newer releases, and it’s fast and snappy.

But the situation now is: No recent apps work on Catalina since it’s considered obsolete (except open-source apps you compile yourself). But Big Sur and higher are ridiculously slow on Intel hardware, to the point where it’s unusable. I now have an otherwise perfectly good 2019 Intel MacBook that has been gathering dust for the past years.

I don’t know if this would work for you, but I’m personally using 1Password on my laptop to generate 2FA codes. It worked even on Microsoft services, after clicking through lots of alternative settings, although some employers might disable that if they insist on push 2FA not just TOTP.

It’s tricky to find an objective optimum. Personally I’ve been happy with up to 100 chars per line (aim for 80 but some lines are just more readable without wrapping).

But someone will always have to either scroll horizontally or wrap the text. I’m speaking as someone who often views code on my phone, with a ~40 characters wide screen.

In typography, it’s well accepted that an average of ~66 chars per line increases readability of bulk text, with the theory being that short lines require you to mentally «jump» to the beginning of the next line frequently which interrupts flow, but long lines make it harder to mentally keep track of where you are in each line. There is however a difference between newspapers and books, since shorter ~40-char columns allows rapid skimming by moving your eyes down a column instead of zigzagging through the text.

But I don’t think these numbers translate directly to code, which is usually written with most lines indented (on the left) and most lines shorter than the maximum (few statements are so long). Depending on language, I could easily imagine a line length of 100 leading to an average of ~66 chars per line.