• 95 Posts
  • 774 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

help-circle



  • Physiotherapists tend to recommend against wrist rests. When you are typing your hands should hover, when you aren’t then your hands should ideally move away from the keyboard altogether.

    If you still use one anyway, rigid ones are less likely to compress veins/nerves in your wrist/hand and are more comfortable than they sound. Make sure you only rest your palm on it (and only when not typing), it’s not actually a “wrist” rest (also you’ll find better options searching for “palm rest” IME).

    I am not a physio, this is all parroted from two physios I’ve talked to about wrist pain.





  • There were eight recommendations specific to the LGBTQIA+ community, which included:

    • Removing the exemptions that allow religious schools to legally discriminate against LGBTQIA+ students and staff
    • Eliminating legal exemptions that allow discrimination against trans, gender-diverse and intersex people
    • Delivering public education campaigns to reduce stigma and discrimination against the queer community
    • Introducing a national ban on conversion practices
    • Banning unnecessary surgeries on intersex children
    • Improving systems to allow trans and gender-diverse people to legally change their gender without intrusive requirements

  • People with computer science degrees often work as software engineers but Computer Scientists are not Software Engineers. Computer Scientists are mathematicians. Theoretically you can do pretty good computer science without ever touching a computer - it’s the mathematics of computation, which is much broader than the machines we keep on our desks. Software Engineers are not typically mathematicians.

    I say this as someone who is qualified as a software engineer. I would absolutely love to be involved in computer science, but I’m trained for engineering not mathematics.



  • Certainly for all. I was mostly thinking in terms of e.g. languages that (can) compile to LLVM, since you have the intermediate form already defined. But then languages layer quite a lot on top of LLVM in terms of abstractions and safety constraints that make it probably a bad intermediary even for that subset. Even just for one language, there must be something funuseful that can be done just by viewing the same code with different syntaxes.



  • I fundamentally disagree with the idea that “programming sucks” but there are some neat thoughts and tools in there.

    This bit in particular:

    We don’t even have to give up code! The GUI version of a program could merely be one of several human-editable representations. Just as some people love text-based interfaces to their operating systems, some people will continue to enjoy code-based interfaces to software editing. It just doesn’t have to be the default—or the only—option anymore.

    I’ve often thought about the idea that to an extent a programming syntax does not have to be married to a language. We could potentially have editors and syntaxes designed so that each developer can interact with the code in the syntax they’re most comfortable with, independent of the language. I don’t know how realisable this is, it may be underestimating how tightly coupled syntax and language is.

    I’m not a big fan of graphical programming in general, but there are times when I would like it just for a single function or class, for signal processing or control systems or state machines. I usually think of this in terms of editor plugins or external code gen tools rather than whole environments. Although every code gen tool I’ve used to date sucks.




  • It could be argued that they are a willing variant of Reverse Centaur

    Start with what a reverse centaur is. In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. You’re a human head being carried around on a tireless robot body. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete.

    And obviously, a reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.

    That’s not a slur though, it’s generally sympathetic.