For me, as a two thumb typer, I feel like if you had kept the letters generally on the same side (left/right) as Qwerty, even if nowhere near the same location, I could adapt to it much more quickly.
I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.
Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.
I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.
It's interesting to me every time one of these "I just figured out I can use git without GitHub" posts comes up.
The entire design of git was intended to be decentralized. You really don't even need the centralized bare repo! You can just point your machines at each other. With Tailscale these days that's especially easy.
Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.
Eventually we tossed a bare repo up on a server in the office and switched to push instead of pull. Finish a feature? Push it up! At some point our devops guy installed Gitlab around that, but we never really used the web ui.
Winds changed, we moved to GitHub, eventually a pull request / code review workflow. Here we are now.
GitHub did an incredibly good job of capturing mindspace around git, to the extent that many users don’t realize that there is any distinction between the tool and the hosting platform.
The best way to make the distinction really obvious is the phrase: "Github is to git what Pornhub is to porn".
Alas, not a phrase you can use in an educational setting though. And I haven't really found other "hub" examples which would be as instantly recognisable and demonstrative of the difference.
I’m not sure if this is a large scale thing, but I know it’s definitely true for myself and some others.
My first exposure to Git and GitHub was through GitHub Pages. I was told to use the GitHub web editor, ignore all the ‘git’ stuff, and just write the HTML files there. Then I grew into using GitHub desktop and later VSCode’s git integration. At no point did I have to use ‘git’ on the command line so I didn’t really understand what the tool did or why. I think many people simply don’t see git without GitHub. Some even see GitHub without touching git eg. see the infamous ‘I am new to GitHub and I have lots to say’ post https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
> Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.
Haha I'm jealous.
We used Airdrop.
And then I was like "shouldn't we use git?"
"Nah, this works fine, you have the code you need now, don't you?"
I was still in my second year of my information science bachelor and he was +60 years old and had programmed for over 2 decades. I was not going to argue with someone that experienced. In retrospect, I should have. But I'd probably been shot down with being "that youngster that always wants to use new technologies" (despite git not being that new anymore).
I recall a time when github was having an outage at the same time me and a coworker were trying to fix a high priority issue.
I had pushed my changes before the outage but he couldn't pull them.
I proposed that I share my repo locally so he could pull from me,
but he looked confused
and didn't get it,
so I let it drop.
Exactly!
I was in university around that time. Our team project needed a non-public repo for us to sync to. Free/Personal Github at the time did not allow for private repos, so I just used my Dropbox folder as the "server". Worked well enough for a bunch of students to use that as a centralized repo.
My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends. Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI generated garbage.
Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had been the last bastion of content by friends.
Now my feed goes
- maybe one post from friends if I am lucky
- 1-2 posts from content creators or local stores I like but don't follow
- endless stream of rage bait / slop / thirst traps
I just don't feel compelled to even open instagram anymore.
Back at a job I had in ~2008 we built a library to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a fully functional web based configurator. I've talked about it here previously[1].
I have always thought that it was a missed opportunity that we'd never reused it nor turned it into any sort of SaaS. It seems to me like such an obvious and easy way to let your clients define their own business logic without having to maintain it yourself.
FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27.
Way to make me feel older than I already do lol.
We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall.
Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.
Speaking for the group of people I know and work with, we don't want a "consistent experience" and hate TUIs that try to manhandle the color palette. Use color sparingly and with intention. Respect that different people have different settings.
First, I make third-party Vim colorschemes, not app. People install my colorschemes because they like the colors, not because I'm a monster with a gun pointed at their face. No one is harmed. No one is forced to do anything they don't want.
Outside of my text editor, where colors matter a lot to me for syntax highlighting, I'm definitely in the NO_COLORS camp (and in the NO_EMOJI camp, nowadays).
> Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.
I wholeheartedly agree but 0-15 sadly have zero inherent semantics, which is the single reason behind every terminal colors-related drama since forever: developer choses 9 to highlight an error message because it is generally a bright red by default --> user sets 9 to whatever makes sense to them --> error message is illegible.
It would be much better if application developers (and web developers, too) -only- had access to semantic color labels like TEXT, BACKGROUND, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, HIGHLIGHT, and so on, rather than red, yellow, blue, green, black.
I don’t want my applications to decide “this element must be red text on green background.” I want my applications to annotate the UI with things like “warning message” and “title.”
That could be done with a few influential terminal emulators adopting a consensus extension to ISO8613-6, like this: ESC[38:99:‹purpose›m for foreground, ESC[48:99:‹purpose›m for background.
e.g.
Foreground Background Purpose
----------- ----------- -------
ESC[38:99:0m ESC[48:99:0m normal ( same as ESC[39m and ESC[49m )
ESC[38:99:1m ESC[48:99:1m emphasise
ESC[38:99:2m ESC[48:99:2m de-emphasise
ESC[38:99:3m ESC[48:99:3m error
ESC[38:99:4m ESC[48:99:4m warning
ESC[38:99:5m ESC[48:99:5m caution
ESC[38:99:6m ESC[48:99:6m notice
Then people (themes) could easily choose foreground colour or background highlighting for particular roles. Some terminal emulators might also choose to configure other stylistic choices like bold, italic, etc.
(I believe ISO8613-6 defines sub-modes 0 through 5 (te;db), with 2 (rgb) and 5 (256-color indexed) being most widely implemented. But some terminals historically mess up : and ; in CSI sequences, and I know at least one would interpret ESC[38:6:1m as ESC[6;1m (blinking bold!), so here I pick 99 (ECMA-48 defines modes up to 65).)
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the specific details of that (i.e. inventing an extended colour mode) are not ideal.
One alternative: Assign semantics to colour indexes above 256.
Both of those have the disadvantage that they separate foreground and background colour, but a user really wants a combined semantic presentation. For instance, a user might want a warning message to be black text on a yellow background, and not have to rely on the program remembering to set both foreground and background to ‘warning’ colour.
So another possibility is just to invent new SGR numbers, e.g.
Control Purpose
------------ -------
CSI 2 0 0 m normal (undoes any CSI 1 x x m)
CSI 2 0 1 m emphasise
CSI 2 0 2 m de-emphasise
CSI 2 0 3 m error
CSI 2 0 4 m warning
CSI 2 0 5 m caution
CSI 2 0 6 m notice
⋮
Then the user can configure those as they please with any combination of foreground, background, weight, slant, etc.
I'm now thinking about writing up pros and cons of alternatives.
I like this idea, although I think that they should be only one code, which might program both the foreground and background (and font styles if applicable), rather than separate codes for foreground and for background.
My proposal would be to define a set of intents for 0-15 with sensible defaults and let terminal themes assign any color they would like to those. 0 would be background, 7 for foreground , 1 for highlight, 3 for titles, 4 for frames and from there work on backgrounds also..
I prefer my background dark so light colorschemes are not really an area I've explored seriously. Also, dark colorschemes are much easier to design than light ones due to the disproportionate amount of light a white, say, background emits compared to the amount emitted by text. It dramatically reduces the number of colors you can use.
We have many millenia of books using black text on a white background with various colors added, why are computer monitors all of a sudden so special and annoying
Good TUI's arent bad for POS terminals and the like, where speed it's king, kinda like airports where the latency it's a matter of life of death. For everything else, just look at IBM: you have the old TUI with 3270 terminals and web 'bindings' to these to accomplish the same exact task but with a GUI interface.
But OFC some airport assistant has an AS400 console on it and that's it sending commands at blitzing speeds. These interfaces have sense there; but not for a modern desktop OS shell as the main debugging environment.
Yes, and giving developers control over colors, text size, typeface and so on has also been a usability and accessibility disaster on the web, too! The user should have this control.
I genuinely enjoyed it and do recommend. As another commenter mentioned, Lee Pace's performance is stand out.
My only real critique is that it has the same problem as Mr. Robot.
The writers and script are clearly very tech-literate, but the spoken lines are stilted and awkwardly delivered with odd intonation because the actors clearly have no understanding of what the words they're saying mean.
I've worked in the software industry for just over twenty years now. In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display.
I worked with an older gentleman for the last decade until recent layoffs who had worked on Oregon Trail for MECC. Single most productive person I've known in my life. I aspire for half the career he's had. His desk was absolute chaos. He had multiple computers on his desk across an unmatched mix of monitors, all as described above, controlled with Synergy.
The least productive people I've known have clean aesthetic desks, no icons on their desktop, and inbox zero.
Don't get me wrong, there are absolutely people that are a mess that aren't productive at all. I have worked with them too. Frankly, in their case, cleanup like this suggests probably would actually help. I've just never seen the opposite.
I just know that the most productive people I've known have been insanely good at managing chaos, and lean into it.
I maintain it’s because productive people know how to focus on what matters, to cut through the noise, and it’s not just by carefully thinking things through (though that’s an important skill too). It’s partly because they “just don’t see” the noise - if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!
I’ve frequently been:
1. Complimented on my productivity
2. Told I need a less messy workspace/environment.
One of these is true, the other is a road to depression - wasting time and energy tidying up and then feeling like I got no actual work done because, well, I didn’t!
There’s obviously a limit - continual small bits of sorting and organising ensure I can still sit at my desk and find stuff on my computer, but it doesn’t need to be the extreme clear-desk policy that proponents of Clean Work seem to be pushing. There’s a huge zone in between the two extremes.
> if you like, they’re not distracted by it, they can tune it out - or rather, they don’t need to spend any energy tuning it out because they don’t ‘see’ or hear it in the first place!
The human body is not made of regular lines.You can see it in ergonomics accessories. They are not what we would call beautiful. While I love to tidy every once in a while (mostly for cleaning), everything will eventually fallback into some organic arrangement where I don't need to think about what I need and what I don't will eventually get removed. I think about task planning, then I offload the result in the environment. Starting fresh every day will just gobble up my time in order to reconstruct the environment again.
I don’t tidy up very often, but when I do, it doesn’t take much time or energy. I just dump everything that isn’t version controlled into a junk folder, and it feels great.
>In my experience basically without question the most productive people I have known have had the messiest most chaotic setups online and offline. Hundreds of windows open, more icons on their desktop than it can display.
Man, I wish this would also work in reverse, like being messy would automatically make me a good programmer.
Agreed to an extent. I think there are different axes at play here though.
Their desk and computer setup is chaotic, but their "task system" is probably very minimalist. Either it's nonexistent - everything's in their head. Or it's a scribble pad with the next few things they need to do which they cross off and then write new things. Or it's a .txt. At most it's a .md but even that's already stretching it.
What it's not is an immaculately structured maximalist Notion workspace - which is what the "clean desk" people you're talking about often prefer.
Likely because the high-productive people have already transcended basic hurdles like getting overwhelmed or distracted through sustained long-term practice, to the extent that they no longer feel having an uncluttered environment necessary to have an uncluttered mind at work.
It is unlikely this will work for those less experienced.
I know and have known plenty intelligent coworkers that spend more time organizing and creating structures and planning than actually doing anything useful. I had a colleague who spent so much time setting up his coding environment and whatnot - that when we finished the project he hadn't done anything. at all.
I have known several highly productive people who were also neat.
I one had a roommate who, when they get stuck on a technical problem, start cleaning. The change of pace would often give them sparks of inspirations -- sort of like shower-thoughts without the shower.
I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.
Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.
I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.
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