I quickly got used to mine. It’s not exactly at a 90 degree angle to the desk, the finger pushes about as much down as to the side, and since it’s a natural pinching gesture the thumb on the other side stops any remaining horizontal force. Just find a mouse that has a good design, I’ve seen some I could never use.
This made me remember of a benchmark that I saw a few months ago about LLMs being unexpectedly _very good_ with Perl when compared to any other language. I couldn't find it right now. If someone knows what I'm talking about, please post it here :)
Some kind of planning / speccing out is becoming inevitable. No personal experience with openspec but I do rely on generating plans, and then a set of tasks from the plan. And keeping a close eye on what's going as the tasks are churned through (although I wonder if simply saying Yes to the diffs has been adding much value /shrug).
Matt Pocock talks about specs and Openspec after 23:00 minute mark and again after 33:00 minute mark here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-QFHIoCo-Ko. He doesn't believe in simply translating specs-to-code. He emphasizes tracer bullets, TDD, setting up quick feedback loops.
The problem is the signal/noise ratio in these articles. If the AI has written the article, then this same info could have been generated by my own AI, but tailored to my needs. So what, exactly, is the new info that this article is generating that I can use to consult with my AI? That's what I want to get out of this interaction.
Maybe my point is something on the lines of "Just send me the prompt"[0]
prompt + all other bits of information the context has been seeded with before the output was created (documents, web searches, other sources) in which case it might be more efficient to just consume the final deliverable (yourself or via LLM).
On a side note, _in the context of workstations_, I wonder if a hypothetical OS that reimplements the Windows APIs (like ReactOS, but with perfect modern hardware support) would be better for end users than a Linux distro with a modern DE.
In the past, this hypothetical OS would be a revolution. But I feel that, in recent years, this gap is not as big anymore and Linux supports way more apps than in the past. Such an OS might even not be relevant anymore, even if it exists.
Do I have a blind spot on this? Is there value in having a "working ReactOS" as of 2026 _for workstations_?
> Is there value in having a "working ReactOS" as of 2026 _for workstations_?
The ideas behind the NT kernels are much deeper than what many Linux fans think of it. Just to give some examples:
- the NT kernel is build around supporting multiple subsystems, even though currently only "1.5" are in active use: the Windows subsystem and WSL1 (the latter has for many purposes been replaced by WSL2)
- the NT kernel is not built around "everything is a file" (a very leaky and very incompletely implemented abstraction that is used in GNU/Linux); instead the central concept is the handle
- the I/O in NT kernel is built around the idea that the API is "completion-oriented" instead of being "readiness-oriented" as in Linux.
This manifests in concepts like I/O Completion Ports (IOCPs), Overlapped I/O, ...
Since this is a deeply technical topic, I refer to https://speakerdeck.com/trent/parallelism-and-concurrency-wi... (the most important information is in the backup slides (slides 43-54)).
And you can also argue that that's overengineered (the original NT design docs were posted on here a while ago), that the UNIX model (while much more primitive and simplified) has proven more successful in the real world, and that the original "clean, overengineered" NT design has been buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
> the original "clean, overengineered" NT design has been buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
The original UNIX model has (considering the current state of GNU/Linux) similarly buried under a progressively bigger truckload of crap year upon year and is no longer as clean as it once was.
A central difference is: the NT kernel stayed rather clean (the crapload rather happened in the Windows subsystem).
Once you've taken most all of the other subsystems out of NT (which they pretty much have), all you're left with is is the crapload in the Windows subsystem.
I should have mentioned that I am speaking from a Plan 9 point of view where some of the common mechanisms are provided via the kernel file servers such as /proc.
IMHO with a couple of fixes which allow Linux+Wine to better simulate some specific lowlevel Windows behaviours (like this one recently in the news: https://www.xda-developers.com/wine-11-rewrites-linux-runs-w...)... a Linux distro with a 'Windows personality' (e.g. running Windows Explorer as desktop) should be pretty much indistinguishable from native Windows.
In the end it's all about driver diversity and quality though...
Wouldn't that just be Linux with Wine? It would be less effort to implement further APIs/fix incompatibilities on Wine rather than reimplement a new OS from scratch.
In my opinion, Civ1 was fundamentally simpler than any other Civ game. It is like the difference between playing DOOM and Halo. Civ 1 has very few units, very few civ types, very few anything really. That means that it is easy to keep the whole game in your head at once. For me, its a totally different experience.
It's simple (both in terms of gameplay and graphics) and it's the fastest Civ game to complete a full playthrough. Later releases made the game slower and more complex.
I played a lot of Civ1, Colonization and Civ 2. First time I tried Civ 3 I lost some city due to some culture or religious influence and ragequit (I was also working my first job at that point so didn't have as much time to spare).
Played a bit of Civ 4 and 5(or 6?) but never was really as hooked on them.
Honestly it feels to me that Civ1 - Civ2 is the most direct upgrade in the series. Civ 2 was mostly just a better civ 1. From civ4 onwards, the series was a lot more willing to shake things up in its gameplay.
Civ 2 was without doubt a much uglier civ 1, though. Isometric graphics in win 3.11 wasn't a good bet.
Civ 1 had good pixel art (look at those mountains! Not to mention the intro), good colors (and more of them!) and clean iconography. For me the look was part of the magic, so I never got into Civ 2.
I don't have a stake on AI, but more and more I see the following patterns:
- people that give in to AI do so because the technical merits suddenly became too big to ignore (even for seasoned developers that were previously against it)
- people who avoid AI center their arguments on principles and personal discomfort
Just from that, you can kind of see where this is going.
Most arguments against it are built on some moral principle and not on objective reality of usefulness.
Crypto used to be the thing to hate but that made sense as the objective usefulness of crypto was meek. AI models were always crazy useful but prohibitively expensive. Youd need an entire team to build your models. Now you dont.
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