It makes me deeply happy to hear success stories like this for a project that's moving in the correctly opposite direction to that of the rest of the world.
Engildification. Of which there should be more!
My soul was also satisfied by the Sleeping At Night post which, along with the recent "Lie Still in Bed" article, makes for very simple options to attempt to fix sleep (discipline) issues.
The author recently went full time on their Marginalia search engine, AFAIK it's a team size of 1, so it's the farthest away from any enshittification risk. Au contraire, like you say: it's at these sizes where you make jewels. Where creativity, ingenuity and vision shines.
This comment is sponsored by the "quit your desk job and go work for yourself" gang.
A bootstraped company can resist enshitification indefinitely, but if it gets any investment, resisting it becomes harder and harder up to the point where a publicly traded one can't resist it at all.
It could be it’s resolved though funding them, or getting more people across it. Anything to help mitigate the risk.
Or don't, I guess the world needs its mindless drones, that discourage everybody else from taking the leap and following their dreams.
I joke, but a lot of people just want to show up and do the bare minimal until quitting time. Disturbingly, many seem employed in customer facing positions.
To be fair, if they’re paying minimum wage, the employer has the same attitude towards the employees.
- cut his resources burning in half,
- is more productive with a smaller screen than before, and
- sleeps like a log at night
(his 3 last blog posts!)
Too much processing power, too much memory and storage. Too many data centers, bandwidth. We lost all sense of traction and we're running wild trying to fill up all the extra space and burn up all the extra resources. Software is currently way more complicated than it needs to be, and it makes it overall excessively insecure as well.
I've said this before, and it's becoming official this fall. I'm getting out of the wheel. I wish I had the competence of Marginalia's author to brave this storm. But my vessel is making water fast and I need to make landfall. Next month I embark on a new stint in academia hoping to change direction for good.
There might be an argument that education has never been the primary responsibility of the academy; that it's institutional responsibility is on "learning" not "education." If your goals are primarily research oriented there's still room to do that, especially in STEM.
Or tiling window managers with virtual workspaces. When most applications I use are two keystrokes away, the need for more than one screen seriously lessens. Besides, looking at a screen on the side hurts my neck.
I've had 3 monitors at one point on my main dev box of which 2 were 32" 4K. It became tiring very fast. I went to a single one. First it was 40" 4K but it proved to be too much neck bending to look at. So I've finally settled to a single 32" 4K and am happy (I use it at 100% scaling). Smaller monitors - no thanks, not my cup of tea. I know it is possible and I used to program on tiny ones in my young days but fuck it. Do not want to go back.
In terms of size I use 28" and that works well for me, 14" on the laptop is fine too but feels a bit limited now and then. In the long term I'll probably go for something inbetween with a size ratio closer to 4:3.
I found something with an effective resolution of about 2560x1440 to be a sweet spot, where I can fit windows needed for a single task in one screen. Provided those windows don’t waste too much space with unnecessary stuff of course.
I quickly realized I absolutely hate setups with multiple monitors, when I was given one at work. I quickly gave back my second monitor, because it just made it worse for me, and additionally wasted space on my desk. If you want to improve my circumstances at work, give me a bigger monitor, not more of them.
(I've never even tried multiple monitors. I could immediately think of several reasons why they would not be an improvement for me, so made a quick decision in 1998 and moved on.)
I’ve been struggling with sleep this year and finding out what works for others is very useful. I wouldn’t have found it if not for your comment.
Link for others interested: https://www.marginalia.nu/log/86-sleep/
Having said that, I did look up 'gild' to make sure I was using a semi-obscure word at the opposite end of the scale that begins with 'shit'.
Coming up with new words is surprisingly easy when there's an existing word requiring of a foil.
Don't give me too much credit for this, I need to maintain my current level of almost total obscurity in order keep pumping out the quality ;)
> Engildification. Of which there should be more!
Great word though.