> Other than taking breaks, stretching, and not getting in the habit of working at night, can anyone give some practical advice that helped them?
> Do I need to stretch more?
No. In fact, I'd say almost certainly not, and you'll see why below.
> Strengthen?
Probably not. That would require more repetitive stress.
> Change my diet?
Don't see how that would help, unless you could use losing weight or improving your blood pressure, in which case yes, definitely.
Here's what's worked for me:
1) have my keyboard at my lap height or slightly above (think keyboard tray, or just put the keyboard on the lap),
2) monitor / laptop up high, so I don't have to look down (my neck also thanks me, not just my hands),
3) enable the accessibility feature known as "sticky keys", which I learned to use long ago,
4) never EVER rest my wrists while typing -- not ever, nor my forearms either.
The thing you have to understand is that the tendons that drive your fingers are anchored at your elbows and are quite long, and they move in tiny sheathes full of lubricant. If you press on the tendons moving through those sheathes, then that's going to cause serious harm. A related thing is that the nerves needed to drive your fingers also move, and some motions place great stress on them. For example, that motion you do to reach a key with your pinky, where you bend your wrist outward is called "ulnar deviation", and it can easily screw up the ulnar nerve that drives the pinky.
(4) helps me deal with all those deviations that hurt the nerves. Instead of turning/twisting my wrist to reach a key I let my hand float over the keyboard, moving the hand to enable the fingers to reach the desired keys with minimal tugging and pressure on the nerves. You don't need sticky keys for this if you learned to type correctly, which means pressing modifier keys with one hand and modified keys with the other, but I didn't learn that way back when, so I had to re-teach myself to type, and sticky keys helped with that.
Oh, and:
5) don't use emacs or anything that requires lots of modifier keys at once. Once again sticky keys helps with this, and to be honest I've never been an emacs user, so this is just me dunking on emacs. The point though is that emacs can really hurt you if you don't know how to type correctly.
Back to stretching: if stretching means putting your nerves through even more stretching and pressure, then it can only hurt you. Your problems aren't muscular, so stretching the muscles won't help. Your problems are with your nerves or your tendons, or both.
Oh, also, if you have anything like neuropathy you need to find a way to not have it. Idk how -- I'm not a medical doctor of any kind, and IIUC neuropathy is not a solved problem anyways.
And remember, IANAD, so take everything I say with salt. I had to figure out what to do about my hands mostly on my own, and I was inspired by a talk I saw where the speaker did pretty much that. The speaker's solutions did not work for me, but the speaker gave me the clues I needed, like the bit about ulnar deviation, and he gave me the impetus I needed: here was proof that one person could fix his hand pain problems, so maybe so could I. The above are roughly my solutions, but above all being conscious of these issues, these motions, and what they do to me -- that was the real solution. Same with posture problems and many other problems: being conscious of your problems, your bad habits, and so on, in real time is 90% of the battle, because then you can learn to correct the problems in real time, and soon it's all muscle memory and you no longer have to be constantly conscious of these details but you still become conscious of them as needed.
This is good advice. I’d stress that having the screen up high is usually overlooked. People think of different heights when they hear this because it’s very rare to see examples of anyone having their screen actually near eye line, and most monitor arms / laptop trays won’t even go high enough.
I’d also add that having a more extreme tilt, beyond what “tenting” can provide (so, needing mounting), can also make a big difference in relieving nerve friction from twisting. Check for example how the Glove80 has a mounting kit.
And I personally found having anything actually on my lap required constant stress to balance it during use including from my hands themselves while typing and counterbalancing… mounting the keyboard halves to my chair arms or using sturdy tripods from the floor with a lounge chair etc helped me tremendously.
> And I personally found having anything actually on my lap required constant stress to balance it during use including from my hands themselves while typing and counterbalancing…
Your anatomy and the height of the chair that is comfortable for you may be conspiring against you being able to put a keyboard on your lap, yeah.
> mounting the keyboard halves to my chair arms or using sturdy tripods from the floor with a lounge chair etc helped me tremendously.
I no longer use a chair. I either use a kneeling chair or a big exercise ball. But when I used chairs I always removed the arm rests because invariably I would rest either my elbows or forearms on the arm rests, and in ways that pressed on the tendons.
The government is allowed and required to say things about the current state of the law (i.e., they must publish the law, and they may educate the public about it, and they must enforce it). The government is not required and perhaps should not be allowed to say anything promoting specific political opinions or promoting specific Acts that have not passed yet. By "say" you [I think, and therefore] I mean as in publish with taxpayer money, because naturally elected officials and even appointees should be able to speak with anyone, even interviewers, and publish on their own dime as long as they don't do anything to prevent the opposition also speaking in that way, but publish? as in print or broadcasting? OP here thinks not, and OP has a very good point.
And the current government is so impartial with their news reporting that only right wing outlets get added to the press pool which becomes the de facto voice of the government since anybody else gets sued or defunded
"We are all [...] obligated by law to not steal or commit other crimes" is NOT equivalent to being "obligated by law to support media [one does not] agree with". Not even remotely. Negative obligations != positive obligations.
> While I sympathize with the feeling, it’s a stretch to say “obligated by law”. You pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend.
Without limit? If Trump and the Congressional GOP force a bunch of tax-funded in-your-face right-wing propaganda that would be ok with you because "[y]ou pay taxes, which your legally-elected representatives decide how to spend"?
Well they're already doing this and much worse, so no need to appeal to something fake. There's plenty of actual awful things our elected officials are doing which you can point to.
But, the idea is, that we're not out here proposing that we stop paying taxes. We're not the ones committing a Jan 6th, are we?
The solution to Trump isn't assassinating him or whatever, it's legally impeaching him or not voting for him. That's how a democracy works.
The institutions that are not being dismantled are the ones required by the constitution. The ones being dismantled, being statutory in nature, are fair game, and if anything this shows that the constitutional institutions are in fact able to rule over the statutory ones, thus the constitutional institutions come out of this stronger, not weaker. The constitutional institutions are:
- Congress
- the Executive
- the Judiciary
- the States and their constitutional
institutions
- the jury
CPB and the like are statutory institutions. Those can come and they can go. Sometimes they go. They can come back you know. The next time the Democrats are in power they can bring all those institutions back and then some, and they can tear down any institutions that Trump creates or takes over. The critical thing is that it be possible for the Democrats to win again in the future, and then that Republicans be able to win again in the future, and so on.
Bitfields have other problems. Say you have two bitfields each of `uint8_t` type and totaling 16 bits: well, you might think that's _two_ fields, but the compiler is allowed to treat them as _one_ whenever it wants to, and _that_ can be a problem if you're accessing one with atomics and the other without because the other can yield unsynchronized accesses to the one that needs synchronization.
Bitfields in C leave way too much behavior to the compiler or undefined. It's really intolerable.
In such languages that's the equivalent of a newtype in Haskell.
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