Long time i3 user, recently switched to Hyprland+Wayland. I just don’t like mice, don’t enjoy using them, and I find the snappiness and responsiveness of keyboard-centric workflows very fun and enjoyable.

I am a software developer, and I am very impatient when it comes to my tools: I like my feedback cycles and interactions to be as tight as possible. This limited study from 2015 showed that developers, on average, spend ~26% of their productive time on stuff that is not related to either code editing or comprehension, including 14% spent on UI interactions. Tiling window manager allows me to streamline most of these interactions through hotkey bindings and shell automation, >!so I prefer spending literal months polishing my dotfiles instead!<

1. Sometimes
2. Sometimes
3. Both

I have for a bit, decided to stick to MD because of its accessibility to my non-tech collaborators, it is easier for them to install Obsidian, and MD is very well-known.

Aside from that, I am planning to use Pandoc to process my sources into other deliverables: web pages, PDFs etc. I am myself still learning this ecosystem, and markdown (in my experience) just enjoys more visibility.

Truth be told, I did not have any exposure to Org Mode prior to looking it up for knowledge management, so all of the above might be my “little duck” brain speaking.

Bevy, specifically because it is an ecosystem of libraries. I tried UE3/4, Unity and Godot, and I’ve always found the complexity of tooling and amounts of options available completely overwhelming. Not to mention, that most of these tools and options funnel the developer into very specific and opinionated ways of doing things.

By contrast, Bevy is just a Rust crate, and it is modular - I can connect only those plugins and functions I really need. If I am ever confused by some function, or a type, I just press “gd” and my nvim will show the definition of this function or type - it feels refreshingly simple and seamless in comparison with the enormity and complexity of Unreal or Unity. At any point in time I am staring at my code, I only see things that are relevant to the problem, and nothing else.

I can bring my own tooling (editors, analysis tools, asset pipelines etc.), projects are easy to build and automate, - it is pure bliss.

The absence of an editor allows me to hook up whatever I want: LDTK, Trenchbroom, even Unity could be used as a scene editor. There is virtually no vendor lock-in with dependencies either. Don’t like Rapier as your physics engine - easy-peasy, you can use Avian, or something else, or something custom, or nothing at all. Don’t like Bevy UI - no worries, there is Egui, multiple integrations with other UI frameworks, you can even use Typst layouts for your menus if you so desire.

Right now I am working on a literate game with a friend: our sources are markdown files with bits of code in them. Our automation compiles markdown to Rust sources and then builds the game, potentially along with the devlogs and some other auxiliary artifacts.

My non-technical partner contributes to the repo freely, treating it as an Obsidian vault, - in our team there is no distinction between technical writing and development, our game design document and source code are literally the same thing. This approach has removed loads of roadblocks and allows us to safely and controllably accumulate knowledge, before distilling it into a working game.

It wasn’t trivial to set up, but it wasn’t overly complicated either - good luck replicating this set up with Unity or Unreal though.

Thanks, but it wasn’t so bad. I have learned exactly two things from that conversation: 1 - one can brake a dick 2 - some injuries have fascinating stories attached to them

Overall, I wouldl rate this experience 8.5/10 - very enlightening and only mildly inappropriate.

Sausage was fine.

I grew up in a family of medical doctors, it came with its own set of similar challenges. Every problem discussion always revolved exclusively around solutions or practical harm reduction. I suspect God forbade the doctors from talking just for emotional support.

Every problem I ever had (completely normal ones included) was medicalized and pathologized, neatly classified and wrapped in a set of actionable instructions: “this is how you get better, this is how you allow it to get worse”.

I still remember coming home from school and sitting down at the dining table, eating my sausages with buckweed, while my dad, mom and older sister discuss methods and techniques to install a urethral catheter in a person with a broken phallus.

It wasn’t good or bad, it was just weird I guess. Hey, at least I am not scared of blood/trauma/desease, and in a some cases I believe it allowed me to stomach helping people in need, when other people would turn away out of disgust or disturbance.

Outer Wilds, if you haven’t played already. Obligatory warning to avoid spoilers like your life depends on it, go in completely blind if possible.

My first encounter with Linux was in 2007, I installed Kubuntu Gutsy Gibbon on my dad’s computer out of curiosity - I was intrigued by a notion of free OS you can deeply customize.

I have spent countless hours fiddling with the system, mostly ricing (Compiz Fusion totally blew my mind) and checking out FOSS games.

Decades later I switched to Linux full-time. After 12 years of daily driving OS X and working as a developer, I wanted a customizable and lean OS that is easy to maintain and control. Chose Arch, then Nix, havent looked back ever since.

In a game, movie, work of literature or theater, your feeling of awe and immersion is maintained by something called the “magic circle”. It is an area of experience that is separated from normal reality by the proverbial 4th wall.

Everything inside the magic circle is filled with artistic purpose, it works (in good works) to drive meaning and communicate themes and ideas of the art work.

Whenever this magic circle is broken, you suspension of disbelief becomes overtaken by cynicism, and the immersion is gone.

Mundane life is full of this cynicism, because we are not conditioned (anymore) to find mundane reality purposeful, outside of really outstanding and dire situations. We take reality with it’s amazing graphics and narrative for granted, not noticing the magic.

I am not a professional educator, but in general I think it is worth to start with basic computer literacy: identifying parts of a PC, being able to explain their overall functions, difference between hardware and software, and what kinds of software a computer can run (firmwares, operating systems, user utilities etc.). This would also be a perfect time to develop practical skills, e.g. (assuming you are a normatively-abled person) learning to touch-type and perform basic electronics maintenance, like opening your machine up to clean it and replace old thermal compounds.

After that taking something like “Operating systems fundamentals” on Coursera would be a great way to go on.

It really depends on your goals, resources and personal traits, as well as how much time and energy you can spare, and how do you like to learn. You can sacrifice and old machine, boot Ubuntu and break it a bunch of times. You can learn how to use virtualization and try a new thing every evening. You can get into ricing and redesign your entire OS GUI to your liking. You can get a single-board computer like RaspberryPi and try out home automation.

We learn and teach inferior personal computing practice, and most people don’t realize how much they are missing.

The vast majority of people outside of enthusiast circles have absolutely no idea what a personal computer is, how it works, what is an operating system, what it does, and how it is supposed to be used. Instead of teaching about shells, sessions, environments, file systems, protocols, standards and Unix philosophy (things that actually make our digital world spin) we teach narrow systems of proprietary walled gardens.

This makes powerful personal computing seem mysterious and intimidating to regular people, so they keep opting out of open infrastructures, preferring everything to come pre-made and pre-configured for them by an exploitative corporation. This lack of education is precisely what makes us so vulnerable to tech hype cycles, software and hardware obsolescence, or just plain shitty products that would have no right to exist in a better world.

This blindness and apathy makes our computing more inaccessible and less sustainable, and it makes us crave things that don’t actually deserve our collective attention.

And the most frustrating thing is: proper personal computing is actually not that hard, and it has never been more easy to get into, but no one cares, because getting milked for data is just too convenient for most adults.