Groxx

If it's within like 90% of your targets and it's a far easier development experience, but you need to optimize a small bit to fit in the budget, tools like this can be fantastically useful. Rewriting the whole thing in, like, C, complete with a coroutine stack, would be a hell of a lot more work than "avoid allocations here".

All I've ever seen that do is move "the top answer doesn't work" (usually with no reference to which top answer) to the top. I fully believe it can help, but uh. Nowhere near enough.

I mostly blame the near-complete abandonment of the product. It was quite clear even early on that it did not work very well for time-sensitive knowledge, and that having any of that cluttered the search results badly, but nothing at all was ever done to address that, despite nearly all of Stack Overflow fitting in that category.

IMO the uselessness of the answers just became more and more apparent, so fewer people contributed, so they rotted further. Good riddance, I say - it had a brief couple years where it was excellent because all information was new enough to be useful, and then it started dying like all stagnant things do.

Stack Exchanges that do not have such a bias for time-sensitive information are still going relatively well AFAICT, e.g. math exchange. The model works fine for some things, just not general tech assistance.

Linux and Windows touchpad hardware and software is significantly more widely varying, usually ranging from "good lord, did any human ever try this?" to "I hate it but it's usually functional", with only a few outliers in the "this does what I expect" realms. Touch screens on the other hand have a 1:1 mapping for everything, and very nearly all of them support 5+ fingers (not just 1 or 2), so they almost always work like you expect. (... when they work at all on Linux)

From past experience (not for quite a few years, but some at least): oh heck no. I loved simulating locally, but the deeply limited touch handling made it infeasible a lot of the time. The dev -> install -> run -> dev cycle is dramatically faster in the emulator, and you don't need to have multiple devices nearby if you're building custom UI for each size.

As a primary/only mode of use: oh hell no, it's awful. It's too far away from your hands, the ergonomics suck.

As an occasional "pinch to zoom that thing centered on my fingers, and adjust it to show what I want to someone 10 feet away" tool: it's fantastic. I could learn the key combo, but "use two fingers" is dramatically easier to remember and control.

Or to guide someone through something on screen, you can just tap it rather than having them mouse to precisely the control you meant. (yes this is often a terrible idea for teaching, but not everyone has fine motor control and sometimes there's random interruptions from other software - having them push those away can make it harder for them to learn/remember the actual goal)

Or for signing your name on a document, or anything else even slightly related to drawing.

Or if it's propped up on your chest in bed and your hands are naturally more comfortable on the screen than the keyboard (which is far too close).

Or if it's dark or you're at a low angle and can't read the keys.

It doesn't cost much, doesn't influence the display much, and is very useful occasionally. A great hardware feature to have IMO.

yeah, they've been quite logged-out hostile for a few years now. not quite as bad as instagram, but they seem to be holding that as their guiding-north-star...

Yea, or the ridiculous first-gen M1 with only two USB-C and an audio jack. One of which was of course used for charging.

Dongle hell is a real place.

Wild stuff, thank you! I've got quite a few monarch fans to send this to now...

The various privacy-maximalist cryptocurrencies also serve as a fairly effective example imo, like Monero and Zcash. E.g. it seems pretty reasonable to say "one vote" is "one fixed-value transaction", and the count per member is just "they have X transactions in their receiving account". Both of these (one optionally) hide sender and recipient (and amount) while still having verifiable account-value = number of votes.

"controlling" some kid-height character. the button-pressing seems almost frustrated with the lack of response, long holds with no (or opposite) change and sometimes mashing. are they supposed to be buttons a person pressed to direct it? or did it create those too?

>With the new 14-inch MacBook Pro, users can connect high-speed peripherals, transfer photos, work with multiple external displays, and more with its wide array of ports.

* looks inside *

4 kinds of ports. while being generous, and including the SD card slot and the headphone jack.

I don't know anyone who would consider 2-4 to be a "wide array".