maremp's comments

AdGuard works in Safari, and can block ads on youtube. I’ve been using this setup for years now and it’s been without problems. The experience is obviously not as good as the app, but it does what it’s supposed to, and I think the worse UX a plus because I do not spend as much time on the platform.

> Using a bare laptop all day will damage your health.

Do you have any references to support this? A NY Times article on posture, littered with affiliate links, is not it.

I am using only a laptop for the majority of my almost 10y career as a web developer, without any discomfort or pain, during or after. I've tried the "ergonomic setup" in many different variations and I always ended up with some pain, most often pain in wrist and lower arm, due to repeated movements between the keyboard and mouse/trackpad. Most important improvements for my setups were a good chair that allows shoulder and arm mobility (HM Embody) and a standing desk frame for precise height adjustment when sitting. And the macbook pro seems to have the perfect position of keyboard and trackpad so that I do not cause any strain on my wrists.

But our bodies are different so there is no single best way, health damage is a bold claim without supporting literature.

I would say self-help is quite unreliable already, more unreliable doesn’t make it much worse.

The authority argument is pointless. The therapist must value person’s wellbeing above their continued income for this to apply. In theory they should, but it would take a lot to convince me and I would want to know what’s the incentive behind such a recommendation. An to be clear, I’m not saying LLM can be your therapist.

First point is disingenuous, it’s not like you only have that one option. There’s plenty options at lower price points which are still decent. And there’s the second-hand market for the budget-conscious. You can get a decent pc for around 1k, and much lower with second-hand market options.

For the maintenance, it’s not like you’re buying a car. Unless you’re enthusiastic about your pc, you can get a pre-built, plug it in and use it, same as console.

Not to mention that games are cheaper and there’s more cheap indie titles available, so if one is optimising for max gaming enjoyment for the least money, pc looks like a better option. But if the plan is to play through the best titles here and there, then console is a good option as well.

What about Rtings? For tech stuff, I found the reviews to be of good quality and it does not seem like it’s biased or sponsored.

> googling "reviews of X"

DDG produces somewhat better results, or at least does not rank the seo spam, generated garbage up to the first page. Also, I do not have ads following me everywhere for the next week.

> When my cloud dependency fails, I'll use another of the 400 ways to get weather data. I've already switched weather providers several times. Don't worry about me; I'll make it through. ;)

> And I'd rather spend 10 hours automating something than 1 hour doing it. I'm not doing this to create free time, I'm doing it in my free time.

That’s exactly the point the original commenter was making. It’s a hobby, you do this because you enjoy it, and it’s not a general off-the-shelf solution that anyone can pick and plug it in. Nothing wrong with that, I enjoy the same stuff so I know where you’re coming from. But I’d be lying if I said it’s simple and robust like the mechanical timer thing.

This sounds like words of a programmer. And I agree with your point to some degree, I would never consider an iPad for my work as a developer.

But this point is unfair to other knowledge workers. For example, my SO would get much better workflow from an iPad, especially with the pencil. The workflow includes a lot of research and note taking, including annotating images, and a mouse/trackpad is just too clumsy for this. The iPad seems perfect for that. I plan to get her one, currently waiting to see if they will refresh the iPad pro lineup in March.

Mind you that a 350€ laptop PC does not come with nearly as much longevity (due to bad build quality), performance and user satisfaction as the similarly priced iPad.

I believe iPad is a great force multiplier of the good 'ol pen and paper. It takes a bit of getting used to, but I bet the kids pick it up in a heartbeat.

For the more advanced endeavors, a 350€ PC as a second device. Not that expensive for a hobby, I think this is in reach of most parents.

Most of the points make sense, but this one does not

> Impact on the body - prolonged unmoderated sitting in bad postures, eye strain due to constant staring into the screen, bad eating habits, etc.

How does WFH change how you sit and the eye strain? You’re doing the same work, what changed? IMO having a good office setup (chair, device, screen, room lighting) is a must for any WFH position, but especially if it’s full-time.

Also for me, the food is better because in the office I used to eat snacks and go out in restaurants or fast foods. Now I mostly make food at home, and with the benefit of s garden have home-grown vegetables. So I eat better and spend less, plus I cut down the crap food from couple times a week to a few times in a month.

As I see it, the argument 4) applies only with refusing to invest into a proper working environment setup and with the lack of discipline. But I hardly believe someone with the lack of discipline would eat any better in the office. And I’m taking this from my past experience.

Also, the 1st party support and integration is something that makes me go back. For example, being able to create a new note directly from the control center on iOS. And paired with faceID it’s seamless even when doing it from a locked screen.

Although it sucks that other developers do not get to offer their shortcuts.

Do you have the tool somewhere to share?

I was looking into writing a simple tool, preferably a bash script I can use cross-platform, which creates a new markdown file with named with today’s date and opens it with $EDITOR.

This way I can also hook it to other tools, such as alfred pr albert.

The changelog-nightly digest will send you a list of trending repos, if you care about that.

I used to keep up with the trends, even on the trending page, but it’s often that a big company will release something and it comes on the top. Stars are just a vanity metric, it says little about how popular is the project at the moment, how well it’s maintained, etc.

But GitHub as a company is doing so much great things lately. Actions are a nice built-in way to skip setting up a CI. And the little things which improve dealing with PRs, for example, checking the file as reviewed, review suggestions, multi-line review comments, automatically changing the base if the base is merged, and the list goes on.

It might not be fun for the trend/hype seeking, but it’s a great experience to work with it as a VCS tool.

It’s not an unreasonable delay on a slow 3g hotspot. It’s problematic to have the performance tied to the network speed and suffer an overall slow performance because your network happens to be slow.

The thing is that stuff like exact versions, super outdated software (especially browsers), changing passwords every N days and making it unique is a part of being allowed to pass some kind of security audits.

If you combine paranoid-level security with non-technical and often lazy users, and add cost-cutting all around, you get something like described here.

I know that from my father working in the IT department of a large corporation.

> they don't have training, and the hospital itself has no plans in place

I have a difficult time grasping this part. It’s not like it’s something completely new. We encounter virus infections every year during flu season. The SARS outbreak was 18 years ago and MERS was 8 years ago. Did we not learn anything from it?

Sure, it was not as severe as SARS-CoV-2, but we should know how to handle it. I agree we should take precautions to stop spreading. But from seeing what is going on around here in EU, I am thinking that the panic is over-inflated and is doing more harm than good. Maybe it takes panic and fear to scare the majority of people into taking all precautions to stop the virus from spreading?

As a web developer, I just can't buy into firefox. The chrome/chromium dev tools are far superior.

I also tried using chrome as a "work" browser and firefox for the rest, but it's all a big mess. Not to mention that a lot of pages are not working well.

I am now using Brave to at least mitigate the privacy nightmare of Chrome.

What you’re saying sounds like a PC custom build enthusiast. I respect that, I like it too.

Please be mindful of the fact that consumer products are not designed for the workstation/server type of load. It’s related to why the hardware is cheaper compared to the server hardware. Also, the consumer ISP connection is most likely not as reliable as that of a data center. I’m working remotely from home and I experienced this many times, bad performance in peak times or a half of a day of downtime can happen, without any warning. And account for maintenance, everyone on the team must be able to figure out a problem or deal with getting someone else in to fix it.

I know I sound like a buzzkill. I am writing this with good intentions.

Even if this works right now, it’s not a reliable long-term solution. Maybe instead of dumping a couple of grand on consumer PCs to handle server’s work, look into building a proper server. Or you could find a datacenter provider to rent their hardware, something that is not as shiny and full of features like AWS.

Since you’ve invested time in this, did you ever try moving to a different time zone for some time, enough to truly adapt to the local day/night time. If yes, what did you observe about “when your brain wakes up”?

FWIW if buddy #1 lives in an area where 50k/year is enough, I would say it's still better off than most of the hacker-types, which also do this, but in their free time. At least he got to build a business around his hobby.

But I do understand the point you're trying to make. Obsessing over doing it yourself and perpetuating the NIH syndrome does more harm than good. There is a lot more chance that one's business will go out by their doing compared to going out because one of the services they depended on went out.

Exactly. And the major version upgrades are a pain. Unless you're willing to give your weekend away to figure out how to fix the broken configs, it's better to wait a month or so to see how other, more enthusiastic people have worked around it.

IIRC my first build was with El Capitan, and I tried to follow with all updates, but it was painful every time.

When I was building my Hackintosh, the common advice was to use nvidia GPU, so I got myself a then fresh out GTX 1070. But then soon, Apple decided not to sign the nvidia web driver, so we all are SOL with the support on newer macOS versions.

I was even considering trying to sell my current GPU to replace it with an AMD one, but instead decided to make it work with iGPU and do the GPU-heavy work on Windows.

I would never use or recommend a Hackintosh for any work where you'd expect a reliable machine, let alone using it for work.

But I would also not drop the cash on the insanely priced mac dekstop lineup. I've got a macbook and I will probably buy another one (not convinced because the keyboard fiasco which also affected my machine).

I was not expecting it, but windows 10 is much improved over the windows I knew. I now use it for gaming and some personal projects where GPU matters (game dev, computer vision, machine learning). I still need to get used to it and I sometimes miss some tools (Alfred, Preview.app, iTerm, modifier keys -> cmd > windows). But while macOS seems to have been dropping the ball recently, windows is scoring goals.

I will seriously consider switching back for my next machine, especially if apple keeps doing this stupid stuff. I was also thinking about linux, but I'm not sure if I want to spend time configuring all the little things.

Not sure what's the full story because it's behind a paywall. But I want to address the part that I got to see

> Mr Moore received a prescription for opioids to help him cope with the pain; but the pain persisted, and he found himself becoming loopy.

Opioids/pain killers is not a poor treatment, it's not even treatment. I think of using painkillers like seeing some dog poo in your living room and instead of cleaning it up and making sure the dog gets to poo outside, you just cover it with a napkin and call it a day.

In the culture of "fixing" our body's problems with painkillers, we're making it worse for ourselves in the long term. The mild pain indicates something is not good. Instead of finding the cause and fixing it before it gets worse, we just patch it until it cripples us and forces us to solve it with drastic measures (i.e. surgery).