I have switched between left and right mouse every few years when I was younger, just to see what works best for me. I could adapt to both, even though I can only write and draw with my left hand. I have settled with left-hand mouse because I feel like I can be a bit more precise for graphical works and shooters.
With the trackpad on my Laptop, I switch quite frequently and haven’t yet noticed any difference in precision. The movement is very different than mouse or pen control though and comes more from individual/multiple fingers instead of the whole hand or arm, so I guess that explains it.
Same, I always misread the title like this when it comes up and it amuses me for a while, since it sounds like it could be a book written by Franz Kafka.
Years ago, someone demonstrated an improved mobile text editing system called "Eloquent" [1] and I wish this would be the default today.
However, my biggest issue with mobile text selection is accidental scrolling or scrolling too fast/far while dragging on the screen to select longer text parts. This is especially annoying in landscape mode when there is just a tiny gap between the visible text and the touch keyboard. I don’t know how to solve this, but it just makes the text editing process feel incredibly insecure/slippy and annoying for me.
Don’t know if it was added after your comment, but there actually is one separate page for each character, just click the arrow in the top-right corner of each box. For more "giant" character previews I can recommend https://decodeunicode.org/en (which is more focussed on writing systems though).
There is also a "Copied x" toast (is this the correct term? idk) at the bottom of the viewport when you click a character box, maybe it was also added later on.
Maybe the structure and operation in LLMs is a somewhat accurate model of the structure and operation of our brains and maybe the actual representation of “thought” is different between the human brain and LLMs. Then it might be the case that what makes the LLM “feel human” depends not so much on the actual thinking stuff but how that stuff is related and how this process of thought unfolds.
I personally believe that our thinking is fundamentally grounded/embodied in abstract/generalized representations of our actions and experiences. These representations are diagrammatic in nature, because only diagrams allow us to act on general objects in (almost) the same way to how we act on real-world objects. With “diagrams” I mean not necessarily visual or static artefacts, they can be much more elusive, kinaesthetic and dynamic. Sometimes I am conscious of them when I think, sometimes they are more “hidden” underneath a symbolic/language layer.
In the past few years I have seen some serious efforts from the Clojure community to make Clojure more attractive for data science. Check out the Scicloj[1] group and their data science stack/toolkit Noj[2] (still in beta) as well as the high-performance tabular data processing library tech.ml.dataset (TMD)[3].
You might have forgotten the language but I bet it must have had some influence on how you think or write programs today. I don’t think the value of learning Prolog is necessarily that you can then write programs in Prolog, but that it shifts your perspective and adds another dimension to how you approach problems. At least this is what it has done for me and I find that still valuable today.
It is unfortunate, but I can absolutely understand it. Keeping up such open-ended, time-consuming projects year after year while the person doing it changes inevitably – their personal life, habits, job, interests, etc. – must feel like a burden at some point, even if it is out of love and passion (I know that from personal experience with my voluntary work, from which I had to take a break after 10+ years).
I am truly thankful for all of Eric Wastls work on Advent of Code, no matter how much time he can invest and how much puzzles we get. I already look forward to the challenge at the start of autumn and consider what programming language I will choose (this year it’ll be Uiua :)). I am very slow at these puzzles, so I mostly quit at around puzzle 12 anyway, but I learn so much from them and they are a lot of fun.
I actually understood Git much better as soon as I switched from a graphical interface (which was Git Tower at the time) to just using the Git CLI. I feel like the graphical interface/overhead obscured what was really going on and made me not so much learn Git, but the tool on top of it.
Git Tower is actually a great tool, but I believe Gits core concepts cannot be understood well without lots of experiments with the bare Git CLI (what helped me most was making toy repos → testing my hypotheses on how things work → observing/inspecting results).
I don’t think that great work and financial success are necessarily related; in fact, in many historical cases they were not. For me personally, I always have special and long-term projects on the side (that may or may not lead to “great work”), while doing more boring work in my bread-and-butter job. I guess I need some sort of independence from financial or social pressure when I want to do what I am passionate about, even if it means that I am not able to go “all in”. Otherwise it would only stress me out and in the worst case, I would lose interest or drift away from my original intentions to satisfy a customer or whoever might give me money.
So many very valuable or important things are just not profitable, but that doesn’t mean they should not be pursued.
I believe webrings could still be great discoverability and serendipity tools for smaller communities today. They could provide a curative answer to the failure of qualitative selection in search engines and a (small but significant) counterbalance to the corporate attention-sinks that dominate the modern web.
Of course this depends on trustworthy people who are willing to take on the effort to become a “ringmaster” of their community and approve new entries. There could even be webrings that connect great related webrings, forming a decentralized network of rings – a web of value and meaning rather than commerce and data aggregation.
But I guess our browsing habits have changed too much and it has become rare that we discover great websites outside of the realm of anonymous content-machines. Most people wouldn’t even see any of those rings or would ignore them and instead google for similar websites, even if they find only a bunch of crap between ads.
With the trackpad on my Laptop, I switch quite frequently and haven’t yet noticed any difference in precision. The movement is very different than mouse or pen control though and comes more from individual/multiple fingers instead of the whole hand or arm, so I guess that explains it.