As somebody potentially in the market for an EV, I can say that for me, Musk is most definitely a factor.
Not the only factor, to be sure, but the off-putting icing on an otherwise average cake.
If Tesla were the only decent EV in town, I might hold my nose through Musk’s behaviour and buy one. They aren’t, though, so I don’t have to.
The other major factors in my decision are the very public QA issues, safety issues, and questionable design decisions (eg. all-touchscreen controls, dangerous “full self-driving” fallacy) that, combined, leave me thinking “yeah, maybe I’d rather buy from a somewhat more boring company with a longer history of _making safely-working cars_”
I don’t kid myself that the heads of most car companies are necessarily decent human beings who align with me ethically or politically, but all other things being increasingly equal, why would I opt for the one run by a childish unstable egomaniac who stands in loud, public opposition to most of what I believe in?
Love taskwarrior. As someone with ADHD/executive function issues, who struggles to prioritise, I find the "urgency" calculation invaluable. Even when it doesn't quite match reality, it's handy to have a starting point I can disagree with.
The extensibility is fantastic. I have little cron scripts to pull my work tasks from Asana, requests for code review from Github, and enter a task automatically when someone on my team requests leave for me to review.
- The terminal UI is pretty usable. More so with the aid of a few custom shell aliases/functions to speed things eg. `wt` for `task add +work $argv` to make it faster to add work tasks.
- It's so extensible that I've found it easy enough to, for example, build my own little Übersicht widget to display my 5 most urgent tasks along the top of my screen all the time.
In a world where we are (or should be) in a desperate race to decarbonise the essential industries that make 1st world standards of living possible (steel, concrete, travel, electricity), you're merrily burning a road-trip's worth of energy every time you want to trade a digital beanie baby.
> This number is very difficult to estimate, but seems to be on the order of 10kwh, or as much as driving your tesla ~30 miles, or running your dishwasher 5 times, or running your air conditioner for 5 hours, or doing any of a number of other things which people happily do every day without thinking twice. It would be nice if energy consumption was even lower, and multiple chains are working toward lowering it, but popular articles all seem to believe your NFT could power Berlin for a day if only you weren't being so selfish.
Those are all astonishingly energy consumptive tasks for something that, I agree with the article author, is pretty much bereft of any value.
By contrast, you could make... what, five hundred thousand credit card transactions with that same energy? That's f**king insane.
Yeah. This is a cool factoid, but for this kind of thing I usually just hop over to whatever browser tab is open and hit F12. If it really needs to be in the terminal, I'd reach for Node, or Deno, or JQ if it's anything to do with manipulating or interrogating JSON.
When I went back to school to get my CS degree, I developed a pretty strict habit of only taking my lecture notes by hand, usually by printing out the lecture slides in advance and then annotating them with a bright turquoise fountain pen ink. Nowadays, for work, I use Org mode. Apart from the convenience of always having it to hand in my editor, being able to insert hyperlinks in my notes to specific lines in our source code is a game changer.
The short answer: very extensive systems of phonetic shorthand, a special keyboard with very few keys designed for chorded input (multiple keys pressed simultaneously), and specialised software dictionaries to translate the shorthand back into English. Professional stenographers can type upward of 300wpm as standard.
The downside is that it takes years to become proficient. http://www.openstenoproject.org/ is an interesting resource if you're curious.
> TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE
This has always stuck with me. I’m not well enough read to know if he borrowed it from somewhere, but I’m not sure Terry Pratchett ever wrote finer words than those. Beautifully concise and apt summary of the human condition.
I think a certain amount of it is just a fascination with minimalism for the sake of it and clever firmware tricks, but one argument for it is ergonomics.
Simply: fewer keys means less travel for your wrists and fingers, albeit (as someone mentioned) at the cost of a steeper learning curve in order to master the layer-switching and dual-use keys that you need to make such a small keyboard work. Germ, designer of the Gergo split-ergo keyboard that I currently use at home, has a good post on it here: https://blog.gboards.ca/2019/11/on-gergoplex-and-updates-let...