There was an active shooter in our area a number of years ago and they locked the building down. No one was injured, it was a domestic dispute in a neighborhood a few blocks away. The police caught the guy hiding in some bushes.
In response to the perceived need to "do something", my company put cameras in the hallway we share with other companies and gave the receptionist monitors for the cameras and a panic button that locks all the doors.
It's not a terrible thing, it's largely security theater though. Someone would have to be clearly brandishing a weapon and our receptionist would have to notice this amongst all her other duties and out of all the people in the hall. It could happen, but it seems unlikely.
Coming from the Midwest I visited Fry's for the first time in early 2020 weeks before COVID. I had always heard amazing things about the store, for years. It was on my short list of places to visit on the west coast. That place was not a healthy operation. Close to half the shelves were empty, the place was generally a mess and needed a deep clean, and worst of all the employees seemed entirely disinterested in helping me.
When news came that they had shut down I was entirely unsurprised.
COVID might have sped things up a little but that location at least was on its last legs.
For me, as a two thumb typer, I feel like if you had kept the letters generally on the same side (left/right) as Qwerty, even if nowhere near the same location, I could adapt to it much more quickly.
I go to spell something as simple as my name on this and none of the keys are anywhere near where 40 years of muscle memory expect.
Frankly, I just want to hit the letters with the same thumb.
I understand not wanting to copy, to be a purely original creation, but you could certainly help adoption by making it a little less painful.
It's interesting to me every time one of these "I just figured out I can use git without GitHub" posts comes up.
The entire design of git was intended to be decentralized. You really don't even need the centralized bare repo! You can just point your machines at each other. With Tailscale these days that's especially easy.
Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.
Eventually we tossed a bare repo up on a server in the office and switched to push instead of pull. Finish a feature? Push it up! At some point our devops guy installed Gitlab around that, but we never really used the web ui.
Winds changed, we moved to GitHub, eventually a pull request / code review workflow. Here we are now.
GitHub did an incredibly good job of capturing mindspace around git, to the extent that many users don’t realize that there is any distinction between the tool and the hosting platform.
I’m not sure if this is a large scale thing, but I know it’s definitely true for myself and some others.
My first exposure to Git and GitHub was through GitHub Pages. I was told to use the GitHub web editor, ignore all the ‘git’ stuff, and just write the HTML files there. Then I grew into using GitHub desktop and later VSCode’s git integration. At no point did I have to use ‘git’ on the command line so I didn’t really understand what the tool did or why. I think many people simply don’t see git without GitHub. Some even see GitHub without touching git eg. see the infamous ‘I am new to GitHub and I have lots to say’ post https://www.reddit.com/r/github/comments/1at9br4/i_am_new_to...
The best way to make the distinction really obvious is the phrase: "Github is to git what Pornhub is to porn".
Alas, not a phrase you can use in an educational setting though. And I haven't really found other "hub" examples which would be as instantly recognisable and demonstrative of the difference.
It's a good metaphor, and one could easily substitute "YouTube" into the explanation in really sensitive situations. In less sensitive situations, you might be able to still use "PornHub" so long as you do enough throat-clearing to make it seem like you're not speaking glowingly of it, and YouTube is helpful here, too.
PornHub didn't invent online videos, and the fact that just because someone was talking about watching a video online doesn't mean it wouldn't be really weird for someone else to assume that they meant it was something on PornHub, instead of just an ordinary video on YouTube.
> Admittedly, I'm getting old, but for the first couple years I used git professionally ~2008-2011 we just pulled from each other's machines. Directly over SSH. We worked in an office, all had each other's machines as remotes. "Hey, is that feature done? Cool, I'll pull it". It worked really well.
Haha I'm jealous.
We used Airdrop.
And then I was like "shouldn't we use git?"
"Nah, this works fine, you have the code you need now, don't you?"
I was still in my second year of my information science bachelor and he was +60 years old and had programmed for over 2 decades. I was not going to argue with someone that experienced. In retrospect, I should have. But I'd probably been shot down with being "that youngster that always wants to use new technologies" (despite git not being that new anymore).
I recall a time when github was having an outage at the same time me and a coworker were trying to fix a high priority issue.
I had pushed my changes before the outage but he couldn't pull them.
I proposed that I share my repo locally so he could pull from me,
but he looked confused
and didn't get it,
so I let it drop.
Exactly!
I was in university around that time. Our team project needed a non-public repo for us to sync to. Free/Personal Github at the time did not allow for private repos, so I just used my Dropbox folder as the "server". Worked well enough for a bunch of students to use that as a centralized repo.
My Facebook is bad, but I still see a bunch of posts by friends. Instagram on the other hand went from a stream of artsy photos my friends posted of their vacations to a literal river of AI generated garbage.
Until about a year ago I really liked Instagram because it had been the last bastion of content by friends.
Now my feed goes
- maybe one post from friends if I am lucky
- 1-2 posts from content creators or local stores I like but don't follow
- endless stream of rage bait / slop / thirst traps
I just don't feel compelled to even open instagram anymore.
Back at a job I had in ~2008 we built a library to convert an Excel spreadsheet into a fully functional web based configurator. I've talked about it here previously[1].
I have always thought that it was a missed opportunity that we'd never reused it nor turned it into any sort of SaaS. It seems to me like such an obvious and easy way to let your clients define their own business logic without having to maintain it yourself.
FWIW iBook G3 is circa 2003-2006 so only 20-23 years old. Not 27.
Way to make me feel older than I already do lol.
We used these in when I was in high school, they'd wheel in a cart full of them into the classroom, and had a Wireless B Airport on the cart they'd plug in to the Ethernet on the wall.
Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.
Speaking for the group of people I know and work with, we don't want a "consistent experience" and hate TUIs that try to manhandle the color palette. Use color sparingly and with intention. Respect that different people have different settings.
First, I make third-party Vim colorschemes, not app. People install my colorschemes because they like the colors, not because I'm a monster with a gun pointed at their face. No one is harmed. No one is forced to do anything they don't want.
Outside of my text editor, where colors matter a lot to me for syntax highlighting, I'm definitely in the NO_COLORS camp (and in the NO_EMOJI camp, nowadays).
> Color usage in the terminal should be largely semantic, not stylistic.
I wholeheartedly agree but 0-15 sadly have zero inherent semantics, which is the single reason behind every terminal colors-related drama since forever: developer choses 9 to highlight an error message because it is generally a bright red by default --> user sets 9 to whatever makes sense to them --> error message is illegible.
It would be much better if application developers (and web developers, too) -only- had access to semantic color labels like TEXT, BACKGROUND, ERROR, WARNING, INFO, HIGHLIGHT, and so on, rather than red, yellow, blue, green, black.
I don’t want my applications to decide “this element must be red text on green background.” I want my applications to annotate the UI with things like “warning message” and “title.”
That could be done with a few influential terminal emulators adopting a consensus extension to ISO8613-6, like this: ESC[38:99:‹purpose›m for foreground, ESC[48:99:‹purpose›m for background.
e.g.
Foreground Background Purpose
----------- ----------- -------
ESC[38:99:0m ESC[48:99:0m normal ( same as ESC[39m and ESC[49m )
ESC[38:99:1m ESC[48:99:1m emphasise
ESC[38:99:2m ESC[48:99:2m de-emphasise
ESC[38:99:3m ESC[48:99:3m error
ESC[38:99:4m ESC[48:99:4m warning
ESC[38:99:5m ESC[48:99:5m caution
ESC[38:99:6m ESC[48:99:6m notice
Then people (themes) could easily choose foreground colour or background highlighting for particular roles. Some terminal emulators might also choose to configure other stylistic choices like bold, italic, etc.
(I believe ISO8613-6 defines sub-modes 0 through 5 (te;db), with 2 (rgb) and 5 (256-color indexed) being most widely implemented. But some terminals historically mess up : and ; in CSI sequences, and I know at least one would interpret ESC[38:6:1m as ESC[6;1m (blinking bold!), so here I pick 99 (ECMA-48 defines modes up to 65).)
After thinking about it a bit more, I think the specific details of that (i.e. inventing an extended colour mode) are not ideal.
One alternative: Assign semantics to colour indexes above 256.
Both of those have the disadvantage that they separate foreground and background colour, but a user really wants a combined semantic presentation. For instance, a user might want a warning message to be black text on a yellow background, and not have to rely on the program remembering to set both foreground and background to ‘warning’ colour.
So another possibility is just to invent new SGR numbers, e.g.
Control Purpose
------------ -------
CSI 2 0 0 m normal (undoes any CSI 1 x x m)
CSI 2 0 1 m emphasise
CSI 2 0 2 m de-emphasise
CSI 2 0 3 m error
CSI 2 0 4 m warning
CSI 2 0 5 m caution
CSI 2 0 6 m notice
⋮
Then the user can configure those as they please with any combination of foreground, background, weight, slant, etc.
I'm now thinking about writing up pros and cons of alternatives.
I like this idea, although I think that they should be only one code, which might program both the foreground and background (and font styles if applicable), rather than separate codes for foreground and for background.
My proposal would be to define a set of intents for 0-15 with sensible defaults and let terminal themes assign any color they would like to those. 0 would be background, 7 for foreground , 1 for highlight, 3 for titles, 4 for frames and from there work on backgrounds also..
I prefer my background dark so light colorschemes are not really an area I've explored seriously. Also, dark colorschemes are much easier to design than light ones due to the disproportionate amount of light a white, say, background emits compared to the amount emitted by text. It dramatically reduces the number of colors you can use.
We have many millenia of books using black text on a white background with various colors added, why are computer monitors all of a sudden so special and annoying
Good TUI's arent bad for POS terminals and the like, where speed it's king, kinda like airports where the latency it's a matter of life of death. For everything else, just look at IBM: you have the old TUI with 3270 terminals and web 'bindings' to these to accomplish the same exact task but with a GUI interface.
But OFC some airport assistant has an AS400 console on it and that's it sending commands at blitzing speeds. These interfaces have sense there; but not for a modern desktop OS shell as the main debugging environment.
Yes, and giving developers control over colors, text size, typeface and so on has also been a usability and accessibility disaster on the web, too! The user should have this control.
My initial gut reaction was "he can't even be bothered to use his shift-key while dramatically altering 4,000 people's lives?"
It's just too casual for what is happening.
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