Young Me, a voracious reader, was defeated several times by the LOTR books. To this day, I doubt I could force myself to read dozens of pages of Tom Bombadil singing about trees.
Also Neil Stephenson, come to think of it. I believe that I've absorbed enough of Snow Crash and Diamond Age via nerd culture to provide summaries of both but oof, I couldn't finish either of them.
I've never been interested in contrived puzzles like Rubik's cubes or even crosswords - but an actual real puzzle like "why does this call fail 1% of the time" could keep me enthralled for days/weeks until I either found the cause or was told to stop... Sadly no longer in that kind of work.
That's a disappointing change. I had a Moto G Play a few years ago (the one where you could swap different modules on the back, like a projector and things), and its battery was really easy to replace.
We can argue about percentage points and months here and there, but we're very quickly coming to 100% and people aren't even afraid to admit it publicly anymore. The prophecy was definitely on point.
I wonder whether there's a relevant analogy between human languages and computer languages.
I've read hundreds of books. It may be thousands if you count the multiple series I devoured as a bookish child. I think my understanding of my mother tongue is probably in the top decile of native speakers.
But I haven't ever written a book. I'm not sure I would want to write a book, though I'm reasonably sure it wouldn't be the linguistic skills that would keep me from finishing one if I did.
Not having written any books doesn't keep me from knowing whether a book I'm reading was written well or poorly. I can tell that from my extensive experience reading a variety of books of different quality.
Maybe that's what's coming for computer languages. Maybe people who like reading, interacting with, and understanding computer languages will become highly skilled readers, with the ability to recognize well-written and poorly-written code. Perhaps they'll be the ones guiding the models to improve the code generation, or finding the structural changes that would improve the code for companies making truly important projects.
Or maybe we're just going to end up with incredible amounts of poorly written drivel that works well enough for some niche audience and makes a few bucks for the person who spins it up, and most software won't ever matter on any sort of large scale, just like most books aren't ever read. Maybe there will be some pockets that really care about writing very well and producing excellent things, and they'll hire the people who love bringing that about, and the rest of the people currently developing software will have fun little hobby projects that only their friends and family ever bother to use.
This doesn't seem that different from what has happened with written human language to me.
Wait have you been thinking "keep them on the home row" means any finger not actively typing a key must be in physical contact with its home row key??
This would at least help me make sense of people's wrist problems. Holy cow. Never mind how much it would slow somebody down. None of my fingers is ever stationary long enough to bring it back to a specific place typing 135 wpm.
I think a shockingly high number of people really do type Z with their little finger, X with their ring finger, and C with their middle finger. It's the only way I can explain how they end up that way in columnar layouts so often.
This is madness to me. That would wreak havoc on a wrist. Type Z with the ring finger, X with the middle finger, and C and V with the index finger, just like you type M with your right index finger.
I cannot for the life of me understand the claims by ortholinear fans that fingers travel in a straight line as they expand. Mine don't. My fingers are much farther apart when I extend them than when I pull them in, and I think I have a fairly ordinary set of hands.
I do type Z with little finger, etc, because that's how the typing software I used long, long time ago taught it. But I don't accommodate by messing up my wrists, which are still in a natural position. My fingers just adapted to the needed flexibility. My left pinky hitting the Z is trivial and less effort, IMO, than my right index finger hitting Y.
And yes, I use a conventional straight keyboard, not an ergonomic one.
The HTC One smartphone came with a programmable IR port. All you had to do was determine the TV brand (easy if you can see it), then point the top of the phone at the TV pushing the "power" button until it went off. Then you knew you had the right configuration.
I mostly used it for turning volume down in waiting rooms or at bars, but a bar was also where I figured out most of their TVs tend to be set to the same control because they had a few with their sensors in a line where I was sitting and they all went off together while I was programming it.
One of the phone features I miss most, after the 3.5mm jack. Nobody needs to hear loud daytime TV in a waiting room.
N900 had one too, along with an FM transmitter, just in case you wanted to override whatever generic radio station was playing at full volume in the coffee shop
I would be shocked if this doesn’t exist as a small dongle you could plug into your phone directly or operate wirelessly. If you’re someone who already has a few pieces of EDC, maybe it could be stashed on a keychain.
Do you remember the watches? This was a big thing on watches for a short while in the late '90s, and the cool kids were definitely the ones who could flip the wall-mounted TV on and off when the teacher wasn't looking!
Do you ever use them cross-generationally? I had a friend a dozen years my junior stop talking to me because I used a winking face when I wanted to make it clear I was kidding and he thought I was flirting with him. Never mind that we'd been friends for years and there had never, ever been a hint of interest between us. He insisted I should have known that's what it "always" means, never mind that I was using emoticons in AIM when he was in diapers.
This doesn't feel much different than words. There was a whole ordeal at Microsoft when an intern said an event was going to be "lit" and a bunch of older generation folk assumed that meant drugs.
Language changes all the time, emoji are just part of that.
This wasn't cheeky so much as self-deprecating enough that it was important to clarify I didn't actually mean it seriously. It would've sounded pretty dark otherwise.
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