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I just used (and still use) org-mode to track todos & projects, as well as keep time that was spent on each task.

I tried not to over complicate my task keeping, because I've always been more worried about getting the tasks done, than trying to track progress.

Anything that was in planning/needs more info state got a WAIT instead of TODO, with a note on what was needed. And I'd review my list every morning before deciding on what I needed to work on, or if I needed to start pushing for information on other tasks.

I still do all this btw, I'm just not solo anymore.


Feature minimalism is a good thing to strive for usually.

Wrote my own dirt simple lazy loader & slider libraries, because I didn't need many of the features other libs had.

On the flip side, if I need a reasonably complex component that would take quite a while for me to implement, like say. A date picker. I just grab the lightest weight, good looking one that I can find. (That also doesn't appear to be abandoned)

Minimalism in everything, even minimalism.


> And what, may I ask, are your pea shooters going to do against the firepower of a corrupt nation state?

Kill and intimidate people. This a serious question?

Yeah, in an all out war it's not likely to work. But an all out war against your armed citizenry also isn't likely to happen.

Politicians are still people. They too, can fear being at the wrong end of a barrel.

Which no, isn't some kind of veiled threat. But more an important point that politicians, just like everyone, also tend to want to live & sleep peacefully at night. It's not in their self-interests to make such a move.

What's far more likely to happen is what's already happening/happened. The erosion of various rights, and the militarization of the police force.


This is the thing I don't get.

Who precisely is this concept even marketable to? People with high speed internet, that also can't afford a gaming console?

But can afford a device capable of handling all of the inputs & playback of the video.

So lets low ball and say a $140 chromebook.

+ the cost of the games.

How many people is this? Genuinely.


Well I bought stadia. With 3 young kids and a busy job i don't have a lot of time to game so I want something where I can just sit down and game. No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.

A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.


I don't doubt your motivation here and am not going to sit her and debunk your thought process - but I do wonder how many people match your template, which seems to be "people who want to play AAA games but not very much".

I game on PC, my kids use PC and consoles, and I can't say that "downloading/installing games" is a significant time sink - and if your network isn't good, Stadia isn't going to work either.

The other thing that I think will break the Stadia business model is that the free access costs Google money unless it recoups the spending on the games. So while we're hearing about reasonably competitive Day 1 prices for games, will we see the pattern of discounting that all other games go through? Second-hand console games?

It just feels like it's aiming at a niche while building out a huge system that's only going to be viable if it achieves mass adoption.


I think it has it can have its uses, even if it's not great for every single situation.

For example, say you want to play a particular new game but don't have the hardware for it. Stadia could be a good option to quickly get to play without having to buy new hardware.

Say I have a decent PC for most days and small games, but I'd like to try the new Forza Horizon because it looks fun. I could very well get it on Stadia. I'm not worried about losing access in 10 years, it's just to have some fun for a few months.

Actually for games with pretty high requirements such as the future Microsoft Flight Simulator, streaming could be the best option for most people.


> A second point, sometimes i play coop games with my wife. Its nice not needing 2 consoles or gaming pc's. One can play on the TV and the other on a tablet or cheap laptop.

Unless you have (particularly good) fiber, this probably won't happen. The bandwidth requirements are too high.

> No wasting time downloading/installing games. No patches. Just games ready to play.

FWIW, all of the current generation consoles (even the Switch) have a standby mode that will let them patch your games while you're not playing, meaning that in most cases when you go to play, you can immediately play. They'll even download pre-ordered games without your input.

The only time you would need to be concerned about download times is when you're purchasing a new game for the first time. That's typically a one-time event per game.


I do have gigabit fiber.

On my Xbox I often don't get around to pre-ordering games and there is limited disk space so if I want to play a old game I have to wait again.


A bigger harddrive for your xBox would cost less than the Stadia controller.


Only if you dont factor in the cost of the xbox. If buying from scratch stadia would be cheaper.


There are many simple solutions for that which cost less than the founder's edition.

And, if I'm a little bit snarky, you can't exactly play those old games on Stadia either.


Hey me too (albeit 100mbit) and I've gotten my Stadia and been playing tomb raider with it and it works great so I wouldn't worry about it.


I bought a 2TB SSD for my XBox One and I never looked back.


Microsoft thinks there is an audience here too, given Project xCloud.

Maybe there isn't enough high speed internet deployed in the world, but there certainly are a lot of devices capable of streaming given how many people already have an Android or iOS device on them at all times. Both of which support Bluetooth and most modern game controllers. Some of which have better screens than most people have at home. Some of which have better specs than, as just one interesting example, Nintendo's Switch.


I'm not sure if this is a big enough market, but system exclusive games would be a reasonable cause.

For example, a gamer playing on PC and/or XBox might want to play Horizon Zero Dawn for some time, but not buy a PS4 just for one game. Or some Nintendo exclusive game.

Most people don't have all gaming consoles available, and exclusives are (IMHO sadly) a thing, and this might be a reasonable workaround to provide compatibility.


How would a Sony or Nintendo exclusive be on Stadia?


part of the problem with that market is that there are very few true console exclusives left and that trend seems to only be going one way. sony made sure to have their mark all over death stranding and it's still gonna be on pc in a few months.


It's not entirely about cost. I don't want a gaming console or a gaming PC because they take up space and require maintenance. But I'd still like to play modern AAA games occasionally. If I can do that from my MacBook, I'm interested.


Well, as a desktop Mac user, I'd be very interested.

Of course its not available for Mac (yet).


Yes it is, you just need a Chrome browser!


Even as an emacs user, the answer is generally "No, I don't really use the function keys".

I mean, you're right that I use them to change brightness or change volume. But the touch bar can still do that, so... Meh.

It would probably be awkward to use for about a week, and then I'd get used to it. So it's kind of a whatever.

I do agree it's a dumb gimmick though, and is unlikely to offer anything more than the meme of running Doom on the touchbar.


I had one for two months and could not get used to it, I don't even use the functions keys that much. But I also can't stand a back lit keyboard, it's just so distracting.


> Even as an emacs user, the answer is generally "No, I don't really use the function keys".

Of course not, you're too busy holding 3 modifier keys instead.


Nah, I just spam M-x butterfly for 8 hours and then go home.

No need to hold 3 modifier keys.


>I mean, you're right that I use them to change brightness or change volume. But the touch bar can still do that, so... Meh.

I can't use the touch bar without looking at it, in contrast to Fn keys. It's hit or miss


Yeah, I basically only use F3 and F4, and if they were missing I guess I’d just learn the alternatives.


> I append words like "wiki" or "reddit" to get results that aren't SEO'd

I'm not sure what you expect. I mean, yeah. I have to put OSRS in any search for "murder mystery" to get the result I wanted. But that's not a huge deal.

Who searches for generic "computer" that isn't a 70 year old lady probably looking for a new computer. Google in that scenario is just serving up what they're most likely looking for.

And heck, it's not like the wikipedia link was that far down. It was under a couple of store links and then bam. Wiki for computers.


> I personally doubt users would prefer Skeuomorphic buttons.

I personally doubt users would know the word Skeuomorphic, let alone care what the button looks like.

> and I honestly do not want any of my products to perpetuate this emotion.

Why would you not want nostalgia? There are entire product brands built on taking advantage of nostalgia.

And nostalgia doesn't even imply "Hah, this is old and inferior".


> Why would you not want nostalgia? There are entire product brands built on taking advantage of nostalgia.

Surely that's not appropriate for every brand, though? Especially if you're trying to look cutting-edge.


I think it genuinely depends on what your users are nostalgic over.

You can look cutting edge while taking advantage of nostalgia.

To be entirely honest, the "flat design" doesn't look "cutting-edge". It looks basic, which is because, well. It is. Intentionally so. If users don't care what your buttons look like, why spend tons of time making them look a specific style. That's just more time spent.

I'd argue that the reason it's become so prevalent, is exactly that. Less time spent designing, more time spent on features.


> just like PulseAudio does.

I think part of it actually stems from people that had problems early on with PulseAudio, and have developed a vendetta against Poettering. Whether that vendetta is justified or not, I don't know.

Personally systemd hasn't been a pain point. It's been far less of a headache than everyone at the office thought it would be.


Interestingly; Pulseaudio was a shit show until the distro maintainers got a good hold of it, now it mostly just works without much fiddling (or, any, in basic cases).

SystemD is much the same way, I'm coloured by my impressions from Fedora21-22, where it.. didn't work great.

The issue is with poetterware, it's _incredibly_ difficult to discover /why/ it's not working properly, which is dangerous for an init system (or, an "everything between your application and kernel"-system), a failure rate of 0.0001% is still an unfathomably enormous number of systems; and due to how it works it lends itself to an incredible host of threading issues.


I’ve found it to be an improvement. Writing pre-systemd init scripts was never at all enjoyable. Systemd units aren’t exactly works of art, but they’re much, much better.


Poettering used alloca() as a poor man's garbage collector. Proper manual memory management is just "too hard". Other lingering code quality issues surely remain when the primary author is taking these sort of shortcuts and not considering how to write robust C.


As long as the allocation size is bounded (due to alloca/VLAs lacking any mechanism to signal allocation failure), what's the problem with that?


The problem is that 1) you can't assume what the available stack space is and 2) you don't let tainted user input determine allocation sizes which is what Systemd did in the CVE disclosed earlier this year.


Nobody can write robust C. The correct answer is Poettering should've switched to Rust. With few exceptions, any code base that has not yet done so should be considered brittle and bug-prone.


The problem is the Java generaton that never learned how to do it.


Somehow members of the JavaScript and Ruby generations pick up Rust rather easily, while those who pride themselves on having learned to write robust C (or C++) are flummoxed by it.

Hypothesis: C is so pathologically bad that it breaks brains.


I think C requires more of people. Granted I am no C expert but having worked in the industry a couple decades I have made conclusions based on observations.

As a sysadmin I wrote a small kernel module to trigger a panic on a certain condition hoping to capture some info in a dump several years ago.

Today I cant find sysadmins who can use a CLI properly.

The goalposts have moved inwards IMO

Not sure its bad thing either but it makes for interesting comparisons


It's kind of like back in the day Emacs was considered a programmer's tool. Yet secretaries not only used it, they learned how to configure it to their liking in Lisp! (If you tell a normie they are "customizing" the editor rather than "programming" it, they won't even realize it's hard!)

These days, people calling themselves professional developers with years of experience won't even touch Emacs.


Plenty of people still use Emacs.

I picked it up several months ago after using Jetbrains IDE's for quite a long time, and honestly haven't felt the need for any of what Jetbrains brought to the table.

Mostly thanks to LSP.

If you're not a Java developer, Emacs is perfectly fine as a configurable extensible editor. With the additional caveat that its lack of multithreading can get in the way sometimes.


I use Emacs, but at my last few jobs I was just about the only one.


Hypothesis: Rust is a religion. The only times I've seen this amount of proselytization have been Rust and church.


Java or any other garbage collected language is memory safe by design.


So how, precisely, is anyone supposed to get experience if it's unacceptable to hire them fresh out of "boot camp".

Even if you go "INTERNSHIP". Well what, is everyone supposed to stick the unpaid intern on toy apps that don't give them any actual real world experience writing actual production software?

Cause then the next argument will just be "Do you also go to a doctor that came out of an internship? Is you house built by a constructor that came out of an internship?".

Elitism at its finest.


>Elitism at its finest.

Do you think doctors in training get to do open heart surgeries by themselves fresh out of university? Do you think we train aviators that can only fly using the autopilot? Because that's the way we treat software developers. This has nothing to do with elitism and everything with professionalism. Our industry has built training wheels in form of various VMs and high level languages because it missed the opportunity to properly train its workforce.


Again, just more insane elitism.

You keep going to the "OH MY GOD, PEOPLE WOULD DIE" examples to try and make a fairly weak point.

No one is going to die, because some noob made a crappy little site out of the millions of crappy little sites, and it's not performing like a demi-god.

VMs and high level languages aren't "training wheels". Especially not VMs, that's just complete and utter non-sense. Unless you think literally every website on the web should have a 100% dedicated server box.

VMs are good for a great many of things, both noob-friendly and not.

As for high level languages, they were meant for one particular thing. To get a task done quickly. Which is largely the real reason why so much software out in the wild performs like crap.

Anyone can sit down and spend years making a highly performant piece of software. But when things have to move fast, corners get cut & there's not enough time dedicated to researching to get said product to be as highly performant.


Just to be clear: VM means a language VM like the JVM. I don’t have a problem with high level languages in general, but the gains in developer efficiency tend to be paid for by the CPU.

No I don’t think people die (although I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the case). I just don’t want to have to buy a 3000$ PC so I can run a fucking chat app, an editor and a browser somewhat decently. The opportunity cost of bad software is paid by billions of users every day.


Yet all that performance optimization gets thrown away when running on virtualized containers alongside sanitizers.

By the way, my language VM is your language runtime.


Yes runtime is the better word and the JVM was a bad example anyway. There are much worse offenders when it comes to throwing away CPU power.


I concur. Manjaro solves a lot of the problems of the Linux desktop, and brings with it the great Arch community.

And for keybindings, you're probably better off figuring out how xmodmap works.

It's not pretty. But honestly, if you want pretty when it comes to keybinding, nothing beats a good keyboard. Like the UHKB, Ergo Dox, anything supported by QMK basically.


Look into "kmonad", it is designed to bring the features of the QMK fireware to any keyboard on a Linux system. It is better than xmodmap IMHO.


Is there good documentation/tutorials on setting up xmodmap? It seems like that's a road I'll need to go down at least a bit.


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