I used to have everything in a git repo, but nowadays I use Nix with Home Manager, and I don’t want to look back.

Just curious, but what would be a good choice, or where would one look for it?

Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don’t like mice, don’t enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<

In a game, movie, work of literature or theater, your feeling of awe and immersion is maintained by something called the “magic circle”. It is an area of experience that is separated from normal reality by the proverbial 4th wall.

Everything inside the magic circle is filled with artistic purpose, it works (in good works) to drive meaning and communicate themes and ideas of the art work.

Whenever this magic circle is broken, you suspension of disbelief becomes overtaken by cynicism, and the immersion is gone.

Mundane life is full of this cynicism, because we are not conditioned (anymore) to find mundane reality purposeful, outside of really outstanding and dire situations. We take reality with it’s amazing graphics and narrative for granted, not noticing the magic.

I don’t know of any solution that would allow to scan entire pages, but here is a local tool to get LaTeX math from images via OCR https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

The future’s wasteland will be covered by bodies of web stalkers who were naive enough to get tricked by mid-2010s shitposts.

“Turns out they never used this to make their metal cutlery darker - who would have thought the ancients were so casually cruel?”

“After months of research we have concluded, that despite all their technical achievements, the ancients never figured out, what does the fox say”

“Today prof. Drobyshevsky is going to tell us about their newest work in XXI cent. anthropology - what is ‘streamer dent’ and why do we have such long heads 2300 years later?”

“Ass, coochie and the rich - dietary practices of homo sapiens in the age of over-production”

Get a habit of tracking your habits. When you know everything you do while “on autopilot” and why, - you can outsource a lot of chores and work to your “autopilot” self by setting up your routines and habits correctly.

This skill is best learned as soon as possible, and it’s a shame it’s not taught in schools. 20s is a good time - all the momentum you gain within next 20 years can carry you the rest of the way.

Also, don’t be hard on yourself for failing. You’ll see tons of good advice - a lot of it will seem essential (like being financially responsible), for good reasons. Just know that failing at all these things does not necessarily make you a failure or a bad person. Who knows what struggles you might/will face - as long as you survive and take care of your loved ones, you should be ok. Ultimately that is all we can do.

Also, try to engage with physical things more: people IRL next to you, touch grass, craft something with your hands. Of it’s not physical, it exists in your head, - and your head might not always be the best place to spend most your time.

Please elaborate, I’ve been interested in this for awhile - what do you use/recommend for someone who’s new?

Back in 2011 I already felt that there should be some sort of easy-to-follow hygiene to maintain around mass media, especially internet. You know, like we hide our coughs and sneezes, maintain healthy distance around people, wash our hands, use slippers in communal pools. I should probably look up if someone smarter has already done the work.

Handwriting has been proven to enhance learning in humans, so you are doing great by keeping the habit!

I don’t have much to recommend, but so far this little tool was very useful for me and my math studies: https://github.com/lukas-blecher/LaTeX-OCR

I am not a student, but I learn like a student all the time. I also enjoy handwriting (got an e-ink tablet for that) and knowledge management. I am often dreaming of a “perfect setup” where all I write gets pushed automatically through OCR into my knowledge vault (Obsidian, Logseq or whatever I/my peers happen to use). Even came up with a plan. I hope this new year will leave me enough energy to execute something useful.

Would you like to collaborate on that perhaps?

As someone who has built a career in building and maintaining digital services, a lot of what Carmen talks about rings very true to me, especially this part:

“The platforms make money based on the time we spend on them, and they don’t hesitate to use unethical, addictive resources, so how are you going to ask a 10-year-old or a 13-year-old to stop, if it’s even hard for us adults?”

I’ve struggled with social media and technology addiction myself, so in my mind, allowing a child a smartphone is akin to teaching them how to smoke - that is how toxic and generally “bad-for-your-health” modern internet is, I think.

At the same time, I am not (yet) a parent, so I really don’t know how am I going to be making such a decision when the time comes.

I am in the process of learning about/choosing shells for my new setup. Can you please elaborate on gpl-vs-mit style - what do you mean? Is it just about licences?

I might have phrased my thought too bluntly: I never intended to frame the problem as any sort of moral failure on the end users’ part. I view this as a failure of our educational institutions.

In my mind, preferring to spend time on (e.g.) MS Office in class, instead of teaching proper computer literacy, is like trying to teach meal-prep with Philips air fryers instead of teaching how to cook.

I hear you, and I too feel like it might be just my aspi-nerdiness speaking, but the same argument could be said about any subject that is considered fundamental to highschool ed. We don’t skip on philosophy, sciences, languages and arts just because they seem less applicable than math or econ, or because “it’s impossible to learn everything”.

Our civ made progress, having invented a fundamentally new tech that is accessible to everyone and now underpins everything. Allowing people to acquire the basic literacy needed to interface with this tech sustainably is the bare minimum we should be doing. I am not talking about turning kids into cyber wizards - just getting their computing up to a level that allows them to make relevant informed choices.

We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don’t realize how much they are missing.

The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.

This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.

This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don’t actually deserve our collective attention.

And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.

Humor can be read in various ways, the author’s public statements and policy paints a cringey picture, unfortunately. I am not a trans person myself, so the tastefulness of this humor is hard for me to judge. Still, this particular episode has left a bad taste, even if the show as a whole cracks me up. Doesn’t help that I am growing into a huge Matt Berry fan

I used to love this show until that one transphobic episode. After watching that I looked up the main show writer and learned that he is huge piece. Such disappointment.

Fascinating, as a developer, where can I read more/contribute?

It’s it possible even to buy a decent EV that doesn’t have connectivity and data-harvesting tech built in?

Was just about to comment the same thing. Unix philosophy should be taught in schools. Every high schooler that doesn’t experience education-induced gag reflex when they see Windows is failed by the system.

I’ve been toying with the same idea. Having Logseq running in server mode + creating an LSP adapter should be doable.