+bonifartius 𒂼𒄄 @bonifartius@qoto.org

@Syberia

angst
henri le chat noir
Tuxedo cat

@cyberspook @11112011 @7 @bonifartius @helene @ins0mniak

> It’s simply more ergonomic and it makes more sense for typing.

I disagree, but there's no objective metric for ergonomics so we're not going to get anywhere. That was the point of the Dvorak rant: it's of dubious value and it's not worth evangelizing a keyboard layout.

> The reason software is designed for QWERTY is the same retarded reason why we still have outdated standards all across the industry and science. Like, look at math. Its notation and numbering system are a fucking disaster.

This was an entertaining rant but misguided. What exactly are you optimizing for? What makes you so certain your solution is optimal? We have a use-case for mathematical notation and it works well enough in the places where it's applied; it's a tool for communication. Who are you going to communicate with? We're here speaking English and it's got a number of infelicities but it gets ideas across and that's the point of language. (It might be interesting to see what would have happened if World War II had not occurred and the Polish mathematicians hadn't been executed, but it did happen and they were executed and their notes were burned and we lost a lot of math, logic, physics.)

The thing you have to optimize for being useful, and useful means a compromise with the situation on the ground. What everyone else uses gives utility to what you use. You decide to work as a cashier at a coffee shop, someone comes in and offers leaves as payment.

> a society tends to be a controlling, standardizing asshole.

You're thinking of it like it's an agent instead of a landscape. Our freeways' dimensions are the sizes they are because that's how big our cars were, which are the size they are because that's how big the roads were, which are the size they are because of the size of wagon axels, and the initial wagons were imported from Europe, and those wagons were the size they were because that's how big the roads were, and the roads were built by the Romans based on the width of their wagons' and chariots' wheels, and Rome built the roads. Nobody's controlling anything, it's not an asshole maneuver: if you're going to make a car, do you figure out the optimal distance for the wheels or do you make a car that fits the road? If you decide to make your car extra wide or extra thin, where do you plan to drive it?

So, nothing's going to

> Tiling WMs differ drastically from stacking VMs

It's really not a big difference. I mean, screen/tmux/acme/dvtm essentially act as tiling interfaces. They're just muxing a VT or a framebuffer. I use both, it makes almost no difference. Lack of sloppy focus was a dealbreaker for me since around the time I started using AfterStep. This is one of the reasons I use qwm (a tiling WM) in Inferno: sloppy focus. When I started using rio more often, the time it took to adjust was nil.

> otherwise might as well say that tablet interfaces aren’t differen’t from stacking or tiling WMs

You're telling me that an Arabian is different from a Kentucky Saddler¹ and I'm saying "Well, look, that's just horse breeds, it's all horses. Here's some weird shit, here's an ox, an octopus." The breeds are only different if you only care about horses or if you only know about horses. If we were talking about horses, that'd be one thing, but we were talking about water for housing an octopus and you come in and say "You don't need that much water if you're riding a"...let's say one of these horses doesn't need as much water². In the context of this conversation, no, not any window manager is *that* different.

I don't know, I understand that you like tiling WMs. I've used them; I still use them. I have used them for years. It's not that different.They're different UI branches of essentially the same thing. "DE" versus "No DE" is a bigger shift. (Let's say a DE is an ox or something. A donkey.⁵)

Speaking of the difference between an octopus and a horse, there is a system called "Octopus". Octopus is different from anything else I've ever heard of. It's tiling, but uses the mouse, except the mouse is used for gestures so you have the same UI on touchscreens, the layout is device-independent and gives a view of the same system to every client, and the UI can also be serialized and deserialized, so your entire system has session save/restore. Here are some of the papers, it's very interesting. Everyone's used a tiling WM: there's not a lot to consider. This is something different, it's something worth thinking about.


> And using the keyboard only in stacking WMs doesn’t count

Presumably tiling WMs that include a floating layer also don't count.


¹ If you are guessing that everything I know about horse breeds I got from RDR, then you are correct.

² I really know nothing³ about horses.⁴

³ Almost nothing.

⁴ I probably should have gone with a different metaphor but I don't want to argue about tiling WMs or Dvorak so I don't want to rewrite that paragraph.

⁵ If I can call Gnome a donkey, then I changed my mind since writing the other footnote⁴ and I like this metaphor again.
2007--ui_in_octopus.pdf
2008--using_the_octopus.pdf
2012--personal_pervasive_environments.pdf

declined a job offer that was considerably more because it wasn't WFH, not having WFH for most tech stuff is inexcusable now tbh

image.jpg

My top 2021 pictures I took.

Bullish

@james @Tutanota @BrodieOnLinux

Avoiding Gmail/Google is how we keep the net functional.

"btw i use arch" t. @yes

@bonifartius @useless_idiot @EU_Commission it should be called "make Croatia socialist republic again" plan. I mean, let's call things for what they are, shall we?

@EU_Commission

Translation: My taxes are used to bribe Kroatia into accepting and promoting harmful ideologies.

@straw @11112011 @7 @bonifartius @cyberspook @helene @ins0mniak Maybe it's a filter, but I think it's reasonable to unironically dislike Nazism. What does it matter? It's software. The guy that runs the website put some icons on the website like it's 1998 and maybe he's joining a webring.

Insisting on ideological purity from the developers of software is the worst thing someone can do. Mastodon sucks because it sucks, not because it's run by a bunch of...I don't even know what. Soapbox sucks because it sucks, not because Gleason is a male-feminist vegan that wants to go full- on trans people. Akkoma doesn't get any magical fairy dust for being STUNNING AND BRAVE, it's just the dev branch for Pleroma with some bad ideas merged in. Pleroma is wonderful software and this, as far as I can tell, has nothing to do with feature bounties having been paid by a cam site, despite Gleason's retarded "BALORMO TRAFFICS CHILDREN" rant, and despote all the allegations of the trans people hacking on Pleroma being secretly transphobic Nazis. The FSF wants to kick out and that's a travesty, because it doesn't matter what Stallman's personal opinions on are. Linus getting strong-armed into adding a Code of Conduct. All of it. It's cancer. Good software is good software, bad software is bad software, and none of the rest of it matters.

I boot up this software and I enjoy what happens. 9front is not the only version of Plan 9 available; I use ANTS. 9legacy is good too. At no point has anything political happened to me when running this software (except occasionally if I execute fortune(1) or something). That is exactly what I want when I run software. I do not have much interest in the political leanings of anyone involved in the project: code is code. I barely have interest in anyone's political leanings. I just don't care: politics is the most boring possible topic on earth. Political philosophy is interesting, geopolitics is interesting, regular philosophy is interesting; I'm not even doing those on here until I am posting from Revolver, though, and after last week (fiasco week) and this week (hell week) I am fresh out of fucks to give about anyone being worried that someone else might be or .

I've gotten this question about a million times and my answer from now on is that if it's important to you, go run an OS written by people that agree with you. If it is not important to you, it is good software, try it out. If you don't want to try it out, that's fine. If you don't want to try it out because you don't like the website made by someone in charge of making the website for this fork of this OS, I'll make fun of you, but I won't care. I'm not especially trying to evangelize it: the perpetual drive for YOLD killed Linux. You can build something that a small number of people love, or that a large number of people kinda like. Plan 9 is something a small number of people really love. I really love it; I would like to share it with people that I think would also love it. Consider spicy food: you can make something that's extremely spicy, burns people up, and a handful of people will enjoy it and the rest will have a painful experience. If you make something that's fairly spicy, it'll appeal to more people; if you make something that's completely bland, it'll be edible for everyone but the people that want really spicy food are going to be unhappy with it. So it is a comfortable OS for hacking, I recommend it to hackers, I talk about it a lot because I like it, but I don't mind if it doesn't get popular: to become popular, it would have to dilute the things that make it interesting. This disincentivizes me from caring if some superficial thing puts somebody off, like if they don't like some icons on a website and they're more worried about that than the code.

@cyberspook @bonifartius @11112011 @7 @helene @ins0mniak

> And the issue with using the keyboard is that the keybinds are often shit.

I'm telling you, I started using vi (which you keep calling "vim") in the 90s. The thing you are describing (vi, tiling WM, only ever push keyboard buttons), I was right there. I still use ratpoison on laptops (but I nowadays mostly use it for full-screen Inferno windows and drawterm sessions), basically the evilwm (which I also used to use) of tiling WMs. When I say it's better here than there, it's not because I was never there or that I've never heard of tiling WMs; I suspect people in this thread are more or less the same.

> Switch to Dvorak

Not the Dvorak stuff. I haven't been there. I am horrified that you are telling actual humans that Dvorak will make their life better in any way. Dvorak's home-row fixation is an RSI vehicle designed to be the "well ACTUALLY" of keyboard layouts. Dvorak is a Crossfit vegan Reddit atheist that just came back from a summer abroad in Europe. I will die on this hill, this and every hill. You do not get raw typing speed by using Dvorak, raw typing speed does not matter unless you take dictation for a living, a keyboard supposedly optimized for prose will not be likewise optimized for the sorts of thing a programmer or sysadmin types (which are, themselves, usually optimized to be convenient for qwerty users), and the hard part of programming isn't the typing anyway. Thinking is the hard part and you read more than you type, so if you really want to bump productivity, you should switch to a sensible bitmap font with shapes that you can turn into words even half-asleep and half-drunk, and switch out your transparent terminal background and excessive colors (everyone evangelizing Dvorak uses either grey-on-purple, eye-searing green-on-black, or transparent anime girl wallpaper background, 99% of the time on some pleb terminal like Gnome's, whatever they call it). Keyboard layout doesn't matter.

:globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated: Keyboard layout doesn't matter. :alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons: Keyboard layout doesn't matter. :globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated: Keyboard layout doesn't matter. :alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons::globalistlocated::alexjonesdemons:

> It’s a completely different paradigm

This is like saying that Pepsi is a different paradigm from Coke. Plan 9 is a different paradigm; the zooming interfaces and the Canon Cat are a different paradigm. Keyboard-only is just an interface tweak.

@cyberspook @bonifartius @11112011 @7 @helene @ins0mniak

> Why use a mouse even? Vim keys.

The mouse is a fine input device.

You have been abused by evil GUIs that use the mouse wrong. I was once like you. I thought the height of HCI had been reached with vim+screen+ctags+urxvt. I spent years and years being abused by the terminal emulator that pretended to be a DEC vt100, which was itself pretending to be an ASR-33 teletype, because it hurt me less often than a desktop environment. But what if the mouse could be good?

Somebody snapped a pic the last rime Fauci practiced medicine