Mixing R-L and L-R scripts (as has been discussed here on many occasions) is a ripe arena for mysterious behavior. Given that even monolingual texts in R-L scripts will often include L-R characters, it can get hairy quickly. A desire to try to avoid having visible markers in text around the transitions is partly why the Unicode spec around bidi text is so complicated.
What I’m impressed by of late is that a lot of contemporary horror films (thinking of Weapons, Backrooms, Obsession) rely much more on a creepy mood than on gore to do their thing (which is not to say that they lack gore, but they don’t rely on it to the extent that horror films of the ’80s through '10s did (the Saw films probably being the apex of the splattercore aesthetic).
The Linux on the desktop one was the biggest “hell, yeah” moment for me. 99% of the desktop preference is familiarity. Since my personal computing has been on a Mac exclusively for the last 24 years and I’ve not used Windows for work more recently than 2018 (and it was sporadically the case in the decade before that), when I do use Windows, it feels like I’m typing in molasses. A Linux desktop feels like I’m typing in molasses with casts on both hands. That the desktop varies depending on the distro and whoever decided on the defaults makes it that much worse.
Meanwhile, I largely use a vanilla setup in MacOS. The only changes in the UI I make beyond the default are installing rectangle and flycut, switching the default keyboard to ABC-Extended and turning off caps lock. Everything else runs with default settings and I’m happier for it, especially when I need to do something on someone else’s machine. Losing those minor customizations doesn’t make the machine unusable or introduce too much friction.
“memorizing obtuse key commands which you never use on a regular basis” is exactly why I prefer Emacs over vi(m). The default configuration on Emacs works like most other contexts—I can just use the arrow keys to position a cursor and type.
And then, at least on the Mac, some of the basic commands in Emacs carry over not just to the terminal, but to things like text input windows in Safari and other Mac-assed apps so I can almost always use ctrl-a to go the beginning of a line, ctrl-e to go to the end, ctrl-k to delete to the end of the line and sometimes also I get esc-del to delete the previous line although that works in terminal, but not a Safari input window (and escape gets captured in IntelliJ’s terminal which kind of stinks).
I do feel that common config across a team is always a good thing. I’ve been the only IntelliJ guy on an Eclipse team and the only Eclipse guy on an IntelliJ team and both cases were worse than conforming to the convention.
I was looking at the controller support and apparently there are game controllers designed to follow the layout of a train operations controller with the same two levers that you can see in game.
Or taking a walk. There’s an intersection two blocks from me where a pedestrian was killed in a hit and run accident shortly after I moved to town. The roadside memorial remained in place for nearly two years (I remember thinking that the people who lived in the house at the corner where the memorial was would probably like to remove it, but didn’t want to appear callous).
The worst part is that even though the intersection has been a 4-way stop for over a decade (the additional stop signs added after the hit and run), I’ve twice nearly been struck by drivers blowing the stop sign after I’ve entered the intersection as a pedestrian.
Back in the 90s, I went to see an IMAX film about climbing Everest and at the beginning, I was thinking, “I could do this,” but as it continued my view turned into, “I will never do this. This is insane.”
What’s really scary now is that it’s turned into something where people have to literally stand in line to reach the summit.
When I first started using CarPlay, the screen that has the music and map showing simultaneously was not obvious and it wasn’t until well into my third long trip with CarPlay that I finally discovered it. I had thought the only display options were app full screen and app list. I think there was a change sometime in the last 3 years that made that the default starting display (or maybe I’m just a little less dumb now).
Same with Toyota (fun fact—I discovered earlier this year, over three years that I bought my Prius, that there were whole displays in the dashboard I didn’t know existed while trying to adjust the volume from the steering wheel while I was backing out of my garage, but because the wheel was rotated 180°, I hit the wrong button. Turns out the navigation between different info displays is 2-dimensional and the ↑/↓ gives additional views into some of the information that I had no idea existed, as well as revealing some functionality I didn’t know was there for the HVAC).
I think some of it is just aligning with more modern computing technologies combined with the people who write the materials have lived rapid evolution of computing technology and decided it was best to use a generic abstraction that better reflects contemporary technology. I’d note that Knuth, in The Art of Computer Programming moved his abstract machine from MIX to MMIX, the latter being a RISC instruction set, the former being more aligned with 60s style machine instructions.
I’m likely moving to Mexico next year, so I’ve switched the temperature reading on my watch to Celsius in preparation. The problem is that bands of ten degrees in Fahrenheit translate nicely to comfort levels,¹ which is not really true for Celsius, or at least I’m still adapting to get a sense of what those numbers mean in practice.
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1. For the record:
below 0: Stay inside, drink warm cocoa
0–10: Only go out if you have to
10–20: Cold, but doable
20–30: Nice winter-sports temperature
30–40: Cold, but you could run out to the garage without a coat if you had to
40–50: Cold, but you don’t need a scarf or gloves
50–60: Cool. wear a jacket
60–70: Cool, wear a light jacket
70–80: Perfect
80–90: Warm, but not too bad. Go to the pool.
90–100: Ugh, hot. Tell your parents that you’ll pay their electric bill if necessary but they need to turn on the air conditioning.
My book on LaTeX: https://preppylion.com
Writing fiction (and occasionally poetry): https://dahosek.com