I've seen things you people wouldn't believe... Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.
Pipewire is a layer above most of the really important stuff.
Pedalboard is also not a realtime audio environment (as was clarified by one of its developers here on the HN thread last week). In that sense it is extremely different from Bespoke (and nearly everything else).
So after trialing a few of the "audio-centric" distro-flavours I couldn't find any that were particularly compelling (most, Ubuntu Studio included, were installing huge quantities of tools that I was never likely to explore).
I've ended up using Manjaro, with Jack, Reaper, Renoise, Airwindows plugins, a real-time kernel and very little else. It's pretty good.
For all the work that gets done in offices there's a corresponding lack of self-awareness related to the impact that it has. As an Information Worker it seems to me that there isn't nearly enough diversity in approach.
The Typewriter Revolution article is a real beauty. It covers a nice history lesson as well as making some good points.
One thing I take offense to is this statement:
> Opening multiple windows on a computer screen doesn't work for back-and-forth cross-referencing of other material during authoring work, both because of slow visual navigation and because of the limited space on the computer screen.
That's a problem that's easily solved with a half decent window manager.
Yeah, I recently changed my main dev environment to be a 27" 2560x1440 monitor (Asus PB278, if anyone's curious) attached to a Mac Mini. There's enough space to happily keep a browser, evernote, and a terminal side-by-side (three vertical pillars); this has had very noticeable impacts on, if not my efficiency, at least my feeling of "not having to context switch". Everything's just right there and I just need to shift my eyes left and right.
I'm rocking a 46" 4K tv at 4096x2160, using xmonad in split-screen mode so I have two viewable displays and 9 virtual displays. The hardest part was finding a 4K videocard with HDMI 2.0 output. I got the video card and TV for under $1k total and I'm very happy with it.
it works fine for software dev. there's some tearing when playing videos, not sure if it's the card (most likely) but it doesn't bother me at all. I dont do gaming, but I've heard the lag can get bad with tv's.
As am I. I found some expensive hardware solutions that do eye tracking but can't justify the expense to see if they work. Other systems include mounting a dot in the middle of your forehead and moving your head around...impractical for most cases.
I've always found focus-follows-mouse to be a detriment rather than a boon. If I'm going to mouse over a window, it's trivial for me to just click the window, but using your mouse cursor to change window focus seems vastly less efficient than using the keyboard.
What time savings do you find that you can't key with keyboard shortcuts?
The awesome thing about focus-follows-mouse is that it doesn't raise the window that gets the focus (which clicking in it usually does). So I can type into a partially hidden window, while keeping another window on top.
For example because the window on top is a web browser and I'm referencing some API, or the window on top is another emacs window with another module I'm working on that I'm using, etc...
So I can tell the window manager where I want to type, decoupled from what windows I want to be stacked on top of each other in what order...
And, for example, right now, I have 6 emacs windows open for the project I'm working on, plus a few terminals to run the code, plus firefox. I don't see an efficient way to quickly shift focus to what I want, without tab-ing through all the windows looking for the one I need, potentially messing up the order I have the windows in...
Also, for me personally, using the mouse to tell the computer what I'm looking at, while the keyboard tells the computer what to do there is almost instinctive...
The result of more hours spent playing FPS games and the like than I care to think about. At one point, sitting down at a computer, without thinking about it, my left hand would automatically land on wasd and my right on the mouse XD
The behavior I like is more mouse-wheel-follows-mouse so you can move the mouse over to a web browser and scroll. Especially with a touch pad. Windows still treats the mouse wheel as part of the keyboard.
Cmd+backtick only works if you're switching between windows of the same application; if you are, it works well. However, I find more often the case is that you're not. (In my case, it's usually between the terminal, the browser, and the editor, or some subset thereof.)
Cmd+Tab switches only between different apps, and brings to the foreground all windows of that app, even if only one is required, sometimes obscuring way more of the now-backgrounded window than desired.
I really miss having a key to switch to the next window in the Z-stack, ala Alt+Tab on Windows/Linux.
Unfortunately kwm cannot do real focus-follows-mouse, it can only raise windows to the top. That works okay if you're using tiling mode exclusively, but with floating windows it's unusable.
Coming from i3, I tried Amethyst for a while when I had to use a Mac at my previous job. It seems like the best solution within the constraints of OS X, but it always seemed like enough of a hack that I ended up battling both it and the real window manager, so I ended up disabling it after a few months. The focus-follows-mouse never came close to working as expected for me.
Fighting with window size, positioning, and focus is such a productivity killer. Now I'm glad to be back in a real tiling window manager.
Your average office worker does not get decent screens. Even if the Windows default settings for the desktop have been kind of acceptable for many years, it does you little good if you are looking at it through a 9"-by-5" rectangle.
Multiple monitors are beyond any discussion for most, even if we programmers have gotten used to those and find'em indispensable.
Accountants often have 3 screens. Perfect for doing tax work - the form your working on, the customer's documents, and any relevant instructions/legal presidents for whatever they are doing.
That one's covered in the article, wastes too much energy. I submitted this article yesterday and it went by with no upvotes because people probably thought it suggest we return to typewriters and paper piles, which it doesn't (I could've editorialised the title but guidelines say not to). It basically describes how energy inefficient today's offices are and how we can fix them.
Edit: Driving just one mile further to work is significantly more energy than a huge monitor and nobody thinks a 11 mile commute is vastly worse than a 10 mile one.
Modern monitors are very low energy usage. The lights above you likely use more power than two 27" LED monitors, especially as overhead lights are often on more than your ~25-50w monitors are. Note, monitor brightness does impact usage.
My main monitor at work is a 34" ultrawide, marginal increase in power consumption, but with Spectacles for OSX I'm able to use it as 2 monitors (I have secondary monitors but I hardly need to use them
Nuclear is ~20% of our electricity gen, so 1/4th of that is 1/20th or 5% of US electricity aka not really that big a deal. Energy wise getting to an office is generally far more expensive.
Further they talk about BTU for heating ignoring heat pumps generally being over 100% efficient and running on electricity.
Because efficiency is measured by how much heat you get compared to the electricity you put in, and heat pumps cheat by moving heat in from outside. So you get more heat than you could from the energy input.
200 words per minute is kind of average, but for this kind of content it's easy to beat. I would practice a little as hitting 350-400+ as a fairly comfortable pace. It should be easy for most people and it really does add up.
As to actual content I kind of skipped over 2/3rds of it as it's really repetitive.
IBM did a study on work spaces and how they affect productivity. It would be nice if universities did the same as a joint project of the Architecture and Computer Science departments but everyone seems to be interested in coding to get a job rather than studying these issues that are faced daily by millions of devs.
Let's not forget the security kernel in Guttman's cryptlib. It's like a lightweight variant of formal verification that justs makes sure things interface correctly.
Which is interating here since F* can extract to OCaml. I wonder how hard it would be to wire up a test harness to compare the two with randomized tests.
OCaml has more runtime requirements. Can someone comment on how invasive those requirements are, and whether that would limit adoption of the OCaml version compared with C or rust?
I'd be interested to know a good place to start with this kind of thing.
Do you have some examples of software engineers contributing their skills to charities, open source projects aimed at assisting in these situations or just some boards or communities that can assist in finding a starting point?
I'm searching for an efficient (read: not waste my time and affect my means of living) way to do this myself. The easiest way to start is to look for non profits operating in your area - or close to you - ask them to go have coffee with you (use LinkedIn). Do a virtual chat if necessary / pressed for time or distance. Discuss their work, and I guarantee you that ideas will come rushing out, this is what makes us tick. Then, just start. Do something for someone, talk about it.
Okay; I can empathise with that (not an empty statement).
In that case, I can suggest that your happiness (and 'effortless' productivity) can stem from wanting to dig yourself out of that hole and "set your family up for life" - because looks like you've committed to that direction.
This is easily construable as a presumptuous statement, these things are so much easier said than done. I have no right to play "guru" out here. I just care that a fellow peer in this same struggle is unhappy and talking to you as I would talk to myself and self-counsel.
Whatever you do, good luck, because you don't seem like one of the "bad people". Cheers.
I don't know if my goals are anything so lofty as setting my family up "for life", but certainly, part of the issues are economic and, to some extent, money can cure them.
I'm not a low-income individual--certainly not by non-SV US standards. But I started this business with $200 to my name and a high personal expense base, and ground my financial history and financial position to powder as a result. I also lost big on an upside down property in the housing crisis, a still ongoing matter. The volatility and sliding-backwards stress of self-employment in a non-scalable niche is a big part of my stress, with cash flow being the dominant stressor; a highly volatile $200k income can be effectively discounted to like $65k. I'm often envious of people who get paid a good salary to just code and not have to think about anything else.
However, I'm capable of conceptually and emotionally disentangling all that from the question of whether I fundamentally like programming per se. I'm still burned out on it in the best of circumstances. If money were no object, I'd do it a few hours a week to meet some functional need, but I doubt I'd be writing new software.
" Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being."
I'm a software engineer. I work on a contract basis, contracts last 3 months to a year. I've recently made CI pipelines, Win 8.1 apps, IOS apps but mostly web-apps. The pay is good and the people I work with are cool.
I don't love it though. It's OK. It'd be better to code 20% of the time and observe, talk, think the other 80%. I think that this might make me more efficient and more productive.
My best job was my first. A guy had a profitable web-site and no technical knowledge, there was no notion of best-practice, and he hired me to do everything/anything. The environment was smokey, the equipment shoddy and the business practices disordered. I was straight out of uni and free to make any decisions I saw fit, any mistakes were on my head.
[edit] Thinking about it, it was the shear honesty of the place. I don't think anyone even tried to dress up what they were doing in jargon or exaggerations. Words like 'passion' were never applied out of place.
Have also experienced this. More of a "blue collar" feel of "it's just a job", rather than all this loaded mission/passion/vision BS that seems to accompany many white-collar jobs. I also find it refreshing.
Anecdotally, I've found this "honesty" more frequently in owner-operated companies, family businesses, etc. than in "white collar" "professional" settings. I like when people have the honesty to say, "we're doing it this way because I want to" rather than having to dress it up in some quasi-rational, quasi-scientific "we've evaluated the costs and benefits, and concluded that this way is superior" when the decision was 100% emotion/preference/it's my friend's company/we did it this way before/other silly reason.
Yes. I feel tired too but I don't live where you live or have your exact lifestyle.
I think I'm tired of fitting myself into a system of work that emerged and wasn't designed to be fulfilling emotionally.
I think most people need to tell lies of some sort to convince others, and even themselves, that everything is good and that we're fine with it, we're doing great.
Lying is really tiering. My plan is to try and be a bit brave, try being honest and follow the ideas that appeal to me, ask the questions that I want to ask etc...
