The Midwest in particular is extremely homogeneous and flat, mostly plains and farmland for hundreds of miles. The West cost has more in 15 miles than the Midwest has in 100, on average. There are pockets here and there, but not enough to warrant the several hour drive it will take to get there.
Honestly, most of the US is like this. It's huge and very, very sparse.
"extremely homogenous and flat" is a common sentiment, but.. it's just not true.
Flat for example. The southern portion of the Midwest can be quite hilly (the northern portion not as much, due to glaciers).
But even there, the definition of "flat" gets confused with "not mountainous". If the topography varies a lot, but there aren't mountains, is it flat? (Max/min vs variance)
The driftless area certainly has some truly beautiful parts, but my statement is less about the homogeneity across the entire region and more about the distance between any notable landmarks. Hills alone aren't really that interesting either and I stand by my statement that most of the Midwest is boring and flat.
I've hiked in the mountains and I've swam in the ocean, and I'm perfectly content to live amongst the hills and streams of the Midwest. I suppose it's relative. I live on the east end of the state, and I find the west end pretty flat and boring. :)
Yeah that makes sense, that's too bad. The coasts are the most interesting places for local travel, but the elites living there don't seem to have the time of day for it. More for me I guess.
That violates the worse is better principle which has held true since the inception of software.
Switching costs are real. It's not that hard to make an improvement, but it's very hard to make an improvement that justifies the cost in both money and time.
I switched to FireFox like 8 years ago, but to be completely honest there are maybe 2-3 very important sites that straight up do not work for me at all with FireFox. Like, completely unusable, not just weird graphical issues.
YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling.
Unsure if its a Firefox bug, Google pushing nonsense or uBlock Origin but constantly the YouTube UI Lags, video playback buffers, freeze, etc. Some days its near unuseable on Firefox, but I push through.
> YouTube is an example of a site that Firefox has trouble handling
That's fully on Google. I use plenty of other streaming sites where Firefox handles full-screen video just fine. Coming from the web search company that penalizes the rest of the Internet for slow-loading pages, Youtube is basically an embarrassment and I'm convinced this is completely intentional.
It's gotten so bad that I don't even try to watch Youtube in-browser any more; when someone posts a link that I think might be worth the effort, it goes straight into youtube-dl and I'll watch it offline or not at all.
I mostly agree with GP on stateful controls, but emacs has never clicked for me like vim did. Perhaps it's because switching between modes feels more natural than a simple toggle.
Whereas I cut my teeth on emacs in the early 90's, so modal is what felt awkward. I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.
I really like the composable shorthand of vim's command set though, even if the only one I have in muscle memory is <esc>:wq
> I wouldn't dislike vim's modes so much if it just had one combination insert/append mode that worked like every other editor out there (including a couple other modal editors I've used), but even after adding various hacks to my vimrc to help unify the two modes, I still stumble over the behavior differences in other places.
To be fair, for most values of "every other editor out there," they came after vi (if not after vim), so it's not like vi was discarding existing wisdom.
Actually, there are a number of full-screen editors that pre-dated vi. They were for mainframe operating systems, or were confined to some university or other, or were commercial products for something like CP/M made by some tiny company somewhere, and are largely forgotten; with the last magtapes or floppy discs that had copies of them long since thrown away. Unix and vi, and what escaped UCB, got remembered. But there was other stuff around.
Certainly! I was intentionally hedging my bets with 'most' in "for most values of 'every other editor out there.'" I'd still argue that, for very large values of 'most,' most editors in widespread use today came after vi.
For sure, I'm saying that vi stuck with its design rather than follow the trend of other modal editors that converged on one insert mode, and so did its follow-ups like vim.
I just tried out helix and I'm really liking the features like its single insert mode. Still taking some getting used to, since it's selection-first, not command-first, so `dd` just deletes two chars and not the line. And shift-V doesn't select lines... grr.
Honestly, there are more "modern" editors with even more intuitive flows. Helix being one. I think the ideal editor for me would be something like a mix of Helix's shortcuts with structural regexp like in vis.
I tried Helix for a few weeks and found it to be less efficient overall. Now granted it's hardly fair to compare 3 weeks to 20 years, so maybe with more time I might change my mind. I really missed vim's . key to repeat the last command for example. I think the learning curve for Helix is probably better than Vim, so if you haven't learned vim, it might be worth it. The other challenge though is the ubiquitous nature of vim and vim emulation.
I have my instance set up to enable/disable evil via a keybinding. That way, the edge cases can be handled smoothly. There is also a way to configure evil so that emacs keybindings work while in Insert mode, but not in Normal or Visual mode, if that matters at all.
I don't recall there being regular, industry-wide layoffs effecting software engineers for basically the entirety of my career up until the last couple of years. I'm sure my memory is bad and there's data to refute that, but this doesn't feel like "normal" at all.
To non-Americans, "global financial crisis" is the standard name we use for it. Inside the US (at least from my experience, when I lived there a few years ago) it was just financial crisis (without "global"), or the housing crash. Draw from that what conclusions you will about how Americans see their place in the world ;)
I worked straight through the dotcom, ‘08 financial crisis, and covid craziness. But recently haven’t worked in over two years, with nothing on the horizon. Definitely not normal over here.
The GFC wasn't good? It wasn't good for the general economy, sure, but given the specific industry we are talking about that was one of the best times ever. Money was being printed hand over fist building software that did nothing more than emit a fart sound. The opportunities for us with the 'picks and shovels' were endless with everyone trying to strike gold at the App Store gold mine.
It is unclear what you mean. It is true that most software jobs were not writing iPhone apps, if that is what you are trying to say, but those were good jobs. Those who didn't have good jobs for a moment were quickly scooped up by investors trying to create the next big app. It was a feeding frenzy out there for tech workers, despite much of the rest of the economy faltering (agriculture also did very well during the GFC, to be fair).
Maybe you are trying to say that there was some grey beard Atari programmer out there who refused to start writing iPhone apps and couldn't find their dream job banging bits on the old 2600? That is likely, but it is equally likely that they never found that job since either.
In theory, sure, but there's no way Hare is going to ever officially support Windows. Even if the compiled backend supports the target, the language still needs to abstract over the OS interfaces and implement syscalls.
I'm not familiar with the language but if it targets libc, it might be easily able to work with MINGW. There are mingw/native versions of most popular libraries.
The whole point of Hare is to be a part of a modern computing environment that offers most of the creature comforts of modern computing, yet is small enough to be understood by one person.
The Linux kernel ABI, while stable, is not simpler than libc and not portable at all. You can build the modern computing environment on mingw.
However, if they chose to target Linux–only to show how low–level Hare is, that's understandable as well —no shade.
To take it to its logical conclusion, they're saying libc will be a package you install on your Hare/Linux system for compatibility with obsolete systems, which to me implies willingness to work on ports to other platforms —you're not going to replace libc otherwise.
It's a scripting language, so it's not going to compete with anything compiled or JITed, but it has a pretty efficient threaded bytecode interpreter (that is almost more interesting than the language itself!). It's certainly good enough for most situations where you would reach for a scripting language.
In my tests, it's 5-10x Python for long running things (about 30% slower than Fennel on LuaJit) but for small things, because you can easily shift work to compile time, it beats normal Go: https://codeberg.org/veqq/verse-reader#performance
Honestly, most of the US is like this. It's huge and very, very sparse.
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