geoelectric

I think the biggest issue was that bandwidth wasn't ready for them, and their hype came early because it was one of the first instances of people profiting from, well, the equivalent of NFTs with the real estate land rush. By the time bandwidth caught up, that was old hat and they had a rep for largely being a place for "alternative communities" to meet up.

I was a super early adopter of things like virtual communities and MMOs, myself (and a huge Neal Stephenson fan to boot, so immediately recognized that they were using the Metaverse as their inspiration) and Second Life held very little attraction to me because of the performance. I tried it a few times, but there wasn't much immersion happening at the standard 1.5Mbps DSL speed, never mind modem.

If they'd come out at a point where the asset streaming worked smoothly for most customers, and the hype came after that--and especially if they'd come out after things like Dreams or even Little Big Planet or Mario Maker had prepped people for the idea of crowdsourced assets--I think they'd have absolutely smashed the market.

They're invested enough in it to use it, is my guess.

People tend to downplay the "neat" factor in productivity tools--and they can be total attractive nuisances where you play with them instead of doing stuff. But the truth is you do sometimes need something to keep you engaged in the short term while the long-term benefits add up. Wrestling with Notepad works against that.

FWIW, when I try to use Notepad for this, I end up with 150 open Notepad notes that just end up pickling/restoring with the app. I've never thought hard about it, but I suspect that happens because you naturally keep the note open all day, and often the next to refer back, but there's no obvious time to close it.

But for whatever reason it just tends to turn into a huge mess, whereas note-taking apps tend to either optimize to the idea of "everything all at once" or they manage a daily journal scroll for you somehow.

This comes up a lot, actually, if you search "chair hacker news," maybe include Aeron or Steelcase in there to seed the engine a bit.

Think you have a couple of comments recommending the Embody. This is a copypaste of a comment I wrote a couple of years back:

I have an Embody. They are fantastic chairs. Couple of quick things you should know:

* They're heavy as hell. Probably the Aeron is too, but I was shocked just how heavy the chair was when I was bringing it up stairs.

* They aren't very adjustable--kind of. The whole thing about the Embody is that it, in theory, adjusts to you by itself. The tradeoff is you have quite a few less axes of manual adjustment than you do on most ergo chairs. In particular, there's no lumbar support setting--instead it has a back curvature knob, but I've heard from people who couldn't find a good fit. Test it before buying.

* They don't use cushions.

I can't remember if the Aeron is like this too, but the Embody seat uses [several layers of] plastic webbing as a spring layer and then a lightly padded fabric sling on top that rolls under in the front (it's extendable by essentially unrolling it). The back is the articulated skeleton and a frame with lightly padded fabric over it.

It is quite comfortable, but you will notice the webbing causing the fabric to wear a little in its pattern after a few months, particularly in the seat. You don't feel it at all, though. Just keep in mind it's very much a firm support ergo chair, not a comfy exec chair.

That said, I love being able to swing my arms backwards to stretch my shoulders and chest and absolutely adore being able to lean back and arch my back to stretch with the chair following my back curve and arching with me. It even twists with you some.

When you do get it dialed in right, it's like sitting on a super-articulated back brace with a butt hammock and wheels.

Edit: also, be careful how you buy them. If you expect the Herman Miller warranty, make sure you get it somewhere authorized. Most of the really cheap offers aren't. Your employer might help. I went through my then-employer's furniture distributor as part of a larger shipment, so I got it for about 50% retail.

Gizmodo actually did a pretty nice review with pictures of the construction I mention: http://gizmodo.com/5071571/herman-miller-embody-review-the-b...

This compilation is very useful. I've been needing to review my CLI toolkit for a bit, and this looks like it'll make it easy for me to try out some alternatives. Thank you for putting the time and energy in to create it.

Word length in characters:

Zylog Z80: 1

Intel 8086: 2

PowerPC: 4

Apple M1: 8

IBM Selectric: 5

It's interesting, because this tracks my take on code coverage metrics, speaking from a quality background.

There are only two intrinsically meaningful values: None, and less than yesterday. Former indicates no analysis, second indicates new code/branch/paths checked in without tests.

Past that, it's all relative. Major code coverage here and sparse there tells some kind of story, either about lopsided risk, lopsided difficulty, or lopsided process.

Yes, I was using a bluetooth based tracker I found on Amazon, but the slightly clunky medallion ended up leading to issues with her being able to clean her own chest, and she got tangles under it. It can be a real issue.

So I've also been looking for a way to use an airtag unobtrusively. My cat isn't outdoors, but I have a big house and she's very old and likes to hide. I'm afraid someday she'll be sick or worse and I won't be able to find her, so something like this would make me feel a lot better.

That seems like an entirely reasonable expectation to me. Think this isn't the first horror story I've read on here, though, where they interlinked the services such that activity on something completely unrelated messed up someone's business, or where a glitch for one service invalidated another. They usually get reported as cleared up in an update after support finally takes notice, but brand damage is a thing and sounds like you're catching some.

What a way to kick off a weekend. Sorry to hear it.

The pseudo-fastback sedan actually wasn't nearly as popular until around the time the model S came out. Then I started seeing it in a lot more cars, especially luxury, where the rear window comes down almost to the edge of the trunk. I'd always credited the S with kicking off the trend.

If the idea was to get visibility, posting at noon on Friday may not be the best time. This does sound really frustrating.

I generally dislike getting commits to review with a bunch of unrelated formatting changes around it, so I kind of get that pushback. As a lead I've asked people to format PRs so at least they're separate commits to review. That said, even I set my editors to clip EOL whitespace and add a linefeed on save if need be for every file I touch, so I guess I can't be too rigid about it.

I do think formatters work great (much better than format linters) but only if everyone does them on landing from a shared conf. Otherwise you end up playing format tennis and a lot of expression-normalization noise if it's working from AST.

I think the point where it's rewriting braces, adding parens, etc, is the point where I'd typically want to see the reformat split out for review. I haven't seen a code review tool in a long time that didn't let you hide whitespace-only changes, though, so not sure I think pushback would be justified there if the files were being touched anyway.

That may depend on where you live, and what your electricity consumption already is. In CA, for example, with our tiered billing and PG&E's award-winning business practices, it's pretty easy for an electric car to rack up quite an energy bill. If you were already using electricity up to the top of your tier, the add for the car will be at $$$ rate.

So they also have non-tiered plans for electric car owners but those are time of use. If you use them at peak for whatever reason, $$$ again. It's a little tricky.

It won't be as expensive as liquid fuel, to be sure, but the savings over time might not be as high as you'd expect. Offsetting with solar seems to be the popular option around San Jose, where homeowners tend to be particularly affluent.

I wonder if Match would have caused it to silently re-upload your missing files then supply them back.

It's the (supposed, it's very confusing) difference between Match as a standalone service and the Apple Music streaming service when it comes to your own library--Match will serve back your own music files to you if not already on the service. OTOH, I have no idea what it does if it thinks it matched on the service when first scanned, but the track isn't there anymore.

As long as they keep the screen roughly as wide as the keyboard + side bezels, I don't see why not. It'd have to add vertical height, not take away horizontal. I suspect the market would push that one in the right direction.

I'm also not suggesting the previous aspect ratios go away entirely, since they're plainly better for some use cases. I'd just like some more choices in what I buy.

Tangential to the review, I'm glad that 3:2 displays are universally getting praise wherever they appear. After using my iPad Pro as a sidekick monitor, I've really come to appreciate how much extra vertical space you get at that ratio. It's much nicer for coding and other tasks that benefit from seeing the surrounding context.

My hope is 3:2 might become a standard for PC or at least laptop monitors, rather than most things being 16:10 (which isn't so bad) or 16:9 (which is).

I think the idea for these tends to be more like having the little cycle thing under your desk. You don't use them to exercise at full tilt or pull sprints, more like you spend an hour or two doing whatever while keeping your legs moving on something with just enough resistance to maybe matter.

I briefly used a FitDesk (which is an exercise cycle with a lap-desk-quality platform rather than handlebars) and the cycling motions really weren't an issue for typing. But they did make the monitor bounce a lot. That was way more of a problem.

yeah, I was hoping this would be basically a home video receiver with built in monitor and streaming apps, and with a nice set of hookups for real devices.

Instead it's a sub to a really janky looking gaming service, a very small handful of streaming apps, and a very expensive spot in the garage next to the FitDesk I also never use (but which would, with small mods, probably be better for this purpose than this).

I've never succesfully sustained interruption tracking. Only a few timers support it, and the ones that do are the ones that try to be a task manager too. Since I already have tasks tracked elsewhere, I've never wanted to use the very rich Pomo software packages and just chose not to track them, instead.

Similarly, I don't tend to feed back the actual duration info into my system. I could--my task tracker has an estimate field I don't use since I estimate in numbers of pomodoros, so I could put real times there. But I doubt I'd look at them so I haven't bothered. So I don't necessarily get the benefits Pomodoro outlines re: making estimates better. I do think that having to break stuff down into sub 2 hour (and preferably sub 25m) chunks has helped me there, but it's an indirect benefit.

But the timer itself is invaluable.

I have ADHD and anxiety issues, and big tasks get intimidating enough that I have problems starting them. I was already using an "I'll put N minutes on the egg timer, then I can decide to bail if I want" technique to cut intimidation and get started. It's a very well-known way to get over that first hump.

Pomodoro just formalized that a little more for me: now I make that call at the end of each 25m Pomodoro. I invariably end up stringing a few together before I bail, so it works for me.

Think Alfred may be more efficient here, since I've never noticed that issue at all.

They bleed off energy, to the benefit of both.

I personally use it just to display the currently playing track on Music--which actually solved a huge gap.

It was amazing to me that I couldn't find anything else to do just a basic "track playing" I could always see, without an always-on-top window blocking real estate. It seemed so obvious but nobody was offering that without adding a ton of other crap on top or making an intrusive windowed UI.

Then this little script executor with a per-menu output schema worked great. I was able to customize a basic "current track" script that either came with or was around as a plugin/sample and get it working to my exact spec within an hour.

What was especially awesome was when I moved to Catalina and the AppleScript targets changed from iTunes to Apple Music and broke automation, I was able to fix it in 30s by editing the script file for the new target name and it just worked. It was great to not have to wait on anyone else.

I'll definitely be trying the reboot.

IIRC my issue with MacPorts was that it insisted on recompiling the world from its ecosystem as dependencies because it kept everything super-stable, whereas brew would attempt to use system ones if they were viable. It was more or less FreeBSD Ports vs. Debian apt-get as the model at that point, and MacPorts was (predictably) FreeBSD-like.

Over time I'm not sure brew is any better now, though. I have unlinked versions of gcc, python, etc., etc. under /usr/local that are there just to handle brew packages that listed them as pinned dependencies. It's nice that brew doesn't expose them to CLI unless I want it to do so, but it's not less complex.

Assuming MacPorts has a good "bottle" type concept of precompiled packages now too (haven't looked for years) it's probably about the same as brew now, just more stable. If they still compile from source every time a la BSD, that would be my main sticking point.

brew might have a discoverability challenge. I've been installing an rmtree helper to do this for years and didn't even know it was an option to autoremove them.

I think /bin/sh is required to be a POSIX shell, at least when invoked with that name, and fish wouldn’t qualify.

I used fish shell for a lot of years.

Ultimately, I got tired of having to translate snippets for my use and went back to zsh for the bash compatibility. Zsh becoming the Mac default also gave me an incentive, because I prefer to use system native if it's anywhere near up to date.

But a lot of what I have to cobble together in zsh via antigen and omz was batteries-included or fisherman-easy in fish. It's very powerful right out of the box. I miss it all the time, and it may get me back before it's done.

It's been controversial from the start. It's essentially using a browser engine in the same way as Java uses the JVM runtime, so all the performance arguments against that apply to Electron too--probably even more so given that the JVM is specifically optimized to be used that way whereas Blink/V8 is not.

Personally, I think the idea of a cross-platform application runtime with GUI capabilities is a good one, browser-based or otherwise. The only real problem is every app needing its own, rather than using some sort of shared (but partitioned) app subsystem based around a central browser engine. I think the Chrome apps were supposed to be essentially that, but didn't work out. That said, Chrome basically treats every tab as a separate browser instance, so Electron really isn't as bad as all that compared to a browser-based app.

The problem is everyone compares it to native, not acknowledging the dev's choice was probably Electron vs. no support off the dev's main OS (usually Windows), rather than Electron vs. native support for Mac or Linux. I still remember when you had to have Windows to run most of the interesting productivity and development apps, so I'm pretty OK with extra overhead in exchange for the expanded support.

It also auto-calibrates to the typical granularity of your tasks, assume you decompose with similar concerns across the board.

I just call it “work block” or “deliverables.” Like yours, simple and to the point goes a long way towards making it acceptable.

I’m seeing the nut sundae on iOS mobile so I wouldn’t get too happy yet...

100% agreed. I love the agile manifesto, but the core principles got lost when most of the companies twisted it into a status and sprint scheme only.