I was thinking the photolithography process might be almost as important as the transistor itself. Without the ability to miniaturize transistors and create integrated circuits, we wouldn’t have anywhere near the level of technology we can build now. A computer made of discrete transistors would be way more efficient, reliable, and cheaper than one made with vacuum tubes, but would still be very limited. There are things you fundamentally couldn’t do with even thousands of discrete transistors that became possible once we were able to scale to millions and now billions.

One of the big problems with JIRA is it’s extremely configurable, so your experience depends entirely on how your admins have set it up. If your company is the type to micromanage, JIRA gives them a lot of tools to do that, which I think is why it gets so much hate from devs. I find it tolerable in my current job but it’s definitely designed for managers and not for developers.

Carbon Black. As a software developer, running unknown/untrusted binaries is kind of a big part of my job. We also had a MITM SSL-intercepting proxy which made my life miserable, especially when dealing with Docker containers. I actually ended up patching Docker to automatically inject the certificates and proxy environment variables.

On the plus side I learned a lot about certificate errors which has made me the go-to guy for any SSL issues in my current job.

+1 to this! I bought the same chair from them a couple years ago, and as a remote worker it’s been worth every cent. Oddly enough I had the Leap v1 as a previous job and hated it, but the v2 has been great for me. I found the armrests a bit uncomfortable but some cheap memory foam covers solved that.

Someone found a way to crash the kernel, which may or may not lead to an exploit, which would be just the first step in a long process of developing a jailbreak. I wouldn’t get too excited yet. Even if one does get released, Apple can just patch the exploit, and it could easily be years before a new jailbreakable exploit is found.

No, I just printed the case files from the GitHub repo.

Not sure about swipe typing specifically, but there’s been some pretty interesting and weird attempts to invent better touchscreen input methods since at least the Palm Pilot era, probably on the Newton too even before that. There’s also some crazy stuff from the world of wearable computing that’s even more niche.

There are some similar boards with 3x6 layouts - ffkb and vulpes majora, both by fingerpunch, support 3x6 with a center trackball. I do miss the extra keys a bit with 3x5 layouts - when I eventually design my own board I think I’m going to do a 40 key layout.

There’s less finger movement needed (for any alternative layout) compared to QWERTY so in theory it could be faster. In reality it seems to not make that much difference - typing speed records are still mostly set with QWERTY, and personally I think I’m about the same speed as I was with QWERTY, or a bit slower.

It’s noticeably more comfortable though. I’m not sure there’s any actual ergonomic benefit, but it just feels really nice to type on. I don’t regret learning it but I don’t exactly recommend it either - it was a lot of effort for a small benefit.

If you’re deep enough into the ergo keyboard hobby that learning an alternate layout sounds fun to you though, then I say go for it, it’s an interesting challenge.

I’ve only been using it for a day so I’m still figuring that out. Something about it feels a bit ‘off’ compared to my Elecom Deft Pro but I’m not sure if that’s a hardware or software issue - could just be a smaller ball is harder to get the same accuracy, could be the cheap BTUs I’m using. I’ll probably try printing a different trackball holder that uses static bearings to see if I prefer that.

Colemak-DH? I switched using the Tarmak series of layouts, which change a few keys at a time from QWERTY until you eventually get to Colemak(-DH). Took about 5 weeks to do the gradual switch, then a couple months before I got speed back up to around where I was with QWERTY. But with that method I stayed at a good enough WPM the whole time to not lose any productivity at work.