swdunlop

For me, it is:

1. Yes, the size. I don't spend a lot of time thinking about "do I really want to bother with this in my pocket, I'm just going to the store."

2. The ecosystem. There's a lot of different firmware forks, people tinker and optimize. Which is important, because that helps with..

3. The UI. There's only a few buttons, no touch screen, so the power on experience sends you straight into the last page you were reading, and there's not a lot of farkles trying to drive engagement.

4. No touch screen. The buttons aren't very soft, and there's no touch screen, so you can just toss it back in your pocket, without turning it off, and pick it back up.

5. It's cheap, and it is not linked to my accounts. I'm not terribly worried about theft or someone accidentally knocking it out of my hand.

All that comes down to just.. no ceremony. No unlock the screen, push past the notifications, find the app, wait for Kindle to pass some advertising back and forth with Amazon. Nothing. Pick up the book, read the next page while you are waiting for coffee to steep.

That said, there's some suck to be had:

6. No frontlight. You can't read in the dark without a separate light.

7. No, the font rendering is not perfect, the DPI is pretty low. This is not the most beautiful screen. But it's pretty readable. I got over it.

8. It's a pretty small screen. If you have awful eyesight, you're going to go through a lot of page turns. But if you are prone to skipping ahead and scanning, you might actually read more of the book this way.

9. It is not fast. The firmwares I have used all do some indexing at the start of each chapter, and it can take a few seconds.

10. The vendor either doesn't quite understand its customers (it seems like xteink got lucky sometimes) or is scrabbling through parts bins and unable to communicate with its customers. The X4 Pro really confused its fans.

I think it really just comes down to "this thing is too simple to become more fucking adtech pretending to be useful."

I was thinking the same thing. There are OLED USB-C monitors on Amazon for dirt cheap that are light if a little fragile.

Add the following to your settings.json:

  "assistant": {
    "version": "2",
    "default_model": {
      "provider": "anthropic",
      "model": "claude-3-5-sonnet-20240620"
    }
  }
  

Once this is done, you should be able to use Anthropic if you have an API key. (This was available before today's announcement and still works today as of Zed 0.149.3)

And that is where the drama is frequently found in the Culture series — when Fluffy the Pet Human meets Spot the Feral Human and disaster ensues.

When Iain (M.) Banks published science fiction (or essays about science fiction), he used “Iain M. Banks.” Other works he used “Iain Banks.”

You can sometimes separate the fans and the topic by how they refer to him.

It's hard for me to read the Culture novels and not hear Porno for Pyros' "Pets" on loop in my head.

It is amusing that this essay starts with "Government" and does not get down to the intelligences until halfway through -- in my mind, it's all just the intelligences watching the funny monkeys play at still having meaningful role in the Culture and the surprising things they do at the edges of its influence.

I was expecting electron in there somewhere.

I think of contexts as being Go's answer to dynamic variables in earlier languages, like Lisp, and less like thread local storage (like Pthreads). Much like how Go works with errors, explicit is favored over implicit -- being able to see the context pass through, and whether a function expects a context, tells you a lot about the function you are about to call.

If a function does not take a context, you know it probably cannot be interrupted, just like when a function does not return an error, you know it should not fail. In my work projects, this is also a cue that the function does not do any logging since we always carry a zerolog.Logger in our contexts enriched with trace information about the request and handler.

This also makes life easier for me as a reviewer -- I can see the context passing, I can spot when there is a bad pattern, like retaining a context, or failing to handle an error. It does not require me to maintain a detailed mental map of which functions employ dynamic variables or can throw exceptions.

You can bypass a Nushell command by prepending "^". To use MacOS open, this would be "^open cat.gif"

This tic drives me nuts when I hop between fish (which I use for two features, better tab completion and background jobs) and nu. With 0.86, it might just be for background jobs, which is something Nushell has avoided dealing with entirely. CTRL-Z and "bg" is just muscle memory for me, much like "open."

Good microsd cards are cheap as dirt and easy to use with a Steam Deck. I do not regret getting the lowest storage model and just using a card.