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This is amazing, I just ran it and it works perfectly for my needs!

For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse!

Thank you to the author!

I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.


Mentioned this in another comment, but there are pretty good implementations of tiling window managers as kwin scripts inside kwin. I've been using Karousel and it's been great, coming straight from Hyprland.

I use a plasma widget called "Command Output" to replicate most of what I needed from waybar, and set up Breeze to not have title bars, and added a plugin to get rounded window corners, and I don't miss hyprland at all anymore.


I have a config on github to replace plasma's core window manager with i3wm.

https://github.com/comalice/dotfiles if you're interested.

I like kde's batteries included stuff, but none of the tiling functionality matched i3.


I'm not OP, but I've been interested in something like this, but from the perspective of memory systems within oral cultures. I'd love to talk more!

I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system).

From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code:

> The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users.

I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.


I read her whole retrospective last summer and it was the story that made me feel like I not only had a place as a trans woman in science, but could be ambitious as well! Retrospective: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

It also so charming to see other trans people here on hacker news celebrating Lynn Conway. I didn't know there were so many of us here!


Small joke:

- Q: What do you call a group of trans people

- A: The IT team

:)

Yes there are many of us


There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable

It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.


The trouble is that it ignores the very thing that debate is trying to teach: the ability to sympathize with, understand, and argue for a position even if you don’t agree with it. It is meant to encourage a greater understanding of the world through different perspectives.


People do exactly this with Ks in policy debate - the same person presenting a K in one round will be defending against it in another round. Nationally competitive debaters don't (in my experience) choose Ks because they believe in them, but because they're tactically effective.


it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate

Sure. But not in the debate itself.

That's classic bad faith participation and means the argument you are representing is being ill-served to the point of dishonesty.


That's absolutely untrue, at least in policy debate, which I participated in during high school.

There are 5 of what are called "stock issues" that are the basis for judging a round, and the affirmative side must win all of them to take the round. The negative side need only win one.

One of those stock issues is "topicality." The affirmative wins topicality as an issue by affirming the resolution. The negative is not so bound. This leads to an absolutely classical negative strategy called the "counter-plan." Essentially, what this is is a strategy where, rather than the negative simply saying "nuh uh" to the affirmative's points, they put forth their own plan and argue that it is better than the affirmative's plan.

There is some thought that the negative counterplan must explicitly be non-topical, i.e. not advocate for the resolution. So, for instance, the the resolution might be something like "Resolved: That the United States government should reduce worldwide pollution through its trade and/or aid policies," which was actually the 1992-1993 high school policy debate resolution. The negative could argue that the US should reduce worldwide pollution by means other than trade and/or aid policy, or that the US should do something completely unrelated to pollution reduction, because that action would create bigger benefits than the affirmative plan.

For this strategy to work, it's best if the counterplan and the affirmative plan are mutually exclusive, so it's a common strategy to simply hijack the affirmative plan's funding plank to make it all work.

Absolutely none of this is any sort of bad faith tactic. An affirmative team must always be prepared to argue a comparative advantage case. As I said, this is completely bog-standard, classical policy debate strategy, and in no way constitutes bad faith. But, yet, because the negative has no duty to be topical (and, indeed, could possibly be more convincing if they are explicitly non-topical), they might spend half their time talking about something not mentioned at all in the resolution.


In the context of the article here, the tactics are used to derail the agreed proposition - not to contribute to understanding the values or otherwise of it, which is the purpose of any good faith approach.


If the resolution is about reducing worldwide pollution, and I put forth a counterplan that essentially says "No way. We should take all that funding you want to use for your plan and use it to support animal welfare instead," is that not "derail[ing] the agreed proposition" in your terms? Yet, again, this is a classical and accepted tactic.


I haven't participated in this kind of program, but it seems extremely bad faith to basically expect the opponent to argue that their position is necessary condition to something nothing short of absolute utopia.

As a college admissions officer or employer, if this is what the endeavor had degenerated to, I would place no stock in it as a skill builder or source of any reputable credential.


In what way? Like it or not, we exist in a world of finite resources. It's wholly appropriate to argue that "No, we should not use our limited resources on X when there is the problem Y out there that we could apply them to instead, and derive a much larger comparative advantage from." These are the types of questions faced in the real world by decision makers every day. If anything, your position is the utopian one.


> I haven't participated in this kind of program

So you have no idea what you're talking about.


So, you can't counterargue a lay perception? That speaks for itself.

Better yet: "this is atypical in-group power play: the misuse of authority in the absence of substance is de facto perpetuation of the institutional dysfunction laid clear by outsiders."

Which "k" is that?


A "lay" perception is not actually an argument.

Your arguments is basically a mediocre elitism K,


The distinction between derailing and "understanding the values and otherwise" is contestable and in fact routinely contested by debaters - and there is of course no de jure or de facto rule that the person who goes further in trying to critique assumptions and structures wins.

The style of "critique is inherently bad" argument made by this article is also perfectly possible to make within debate. But it's not common, less because of biased judges (who certainly exist, in all directions) than because it doesn't stand up to scrutiny very well in context. Policy debate isn't a great truth-finding endeavor, but it is ruthlessly competitive and as a result pretty effective at weeding out arguments that, like the article's, rely on a low-context audience who have heard a lot about out of control woke college students but haven't just watched a bunch of rounds of vigorous dispute over everything from hypothetical policy details to the boundaries of the year's topic to, yes, critical theory, with practiced advocates on every side.


Nothing is solved by high school debate. Nothing. Ever. The only point it has is teaching kids how to debate, which is negated by giving the kids instant-win buttons in the form of Correct Opinions they can spout to adoring judges.


Good thing nobody gets an instant-win button! (That would actually kill the activity which is why even this rather poorly-argued article doesn't claim it's happening.)


It doesn't? It says judges openly advertise things like "I will no longer evaluate and thus never vote for rightest capitalist-imperialist" along with many other positions. It also says they routinely award wins simply because they happen to like a particular "K", all this sounds a lot like a collection of instant win buttons.


The article says a lot of things, some of which are even true. Debate judges are volunteers and there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people who've done it. I don't doubt there are judges who make bad decisions, but that ideological quote, if it's real, is definitely not representative of how debate is actually judged in most or prestigious tournaments.

(Also, even that isn't an instant-win button! Any decent debater can spin an actually-you're-the-imperialist argument in almost any circumstances, and sadly paying attention to judge biases is also routine. And FWIW at something like a state championship tournament there are a lot more normie judges who won't vote for a K, no matter how well argued, than there are Maoists.)


I don't know, as a neuroscientist this is very confusing. Blue light generally is linked to arousal, as in this study for instance: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973462/

I wonder if there is some paradoxical effect if you put in a lot of blue light you get a decrease in arousal? Perhaps it could also be something like repetition suppression, where there is a lot of activity and arousal initially, but this causes a backlash and you get a relaxing effect?

Or maybe it's all just placebo.


16 candlepower just doesn't seem like a powerful light. That's around 1800 lumens if unfocused.

Sometimes I can distract myself with a computer screen and I don't notice chronic pains but I don't think it's the blue light doing it.


This would explain why so many people were dazed and confused by the PC tower blue LED craze of the early 2000s.


I wouldn't claim dazed or confused for myself, but I _could_ read easily by them on my machines[1]. So I had make sure two were asleep, and the third…well, it thought it should blink a steady 1 Hz while in sleep. That one was also the brightest. There was no setting for the blink, so I had to unplug the LED to sleep.

[1] Not that everybody would agree. I've joked that I have Low-Light Vision.


Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2730/


Plot twist: biological evolution works like that too.


I've had a rather similar experience with NicOS a few years ago. I did get comfortable with the language and even contributed a small package! I did like having a reproducible config file for my whole OS setup.

However, everything was just a hassle to get working. Any program that's not in the package repos takes a day or two of fiddling to install. I just lost patience with it and have been on Ubuntu for the past few years.


The common advice is just using the steam-run wrapper. It will run the binary in an ubuntu-esque fhs environment, which is what must binaries you get expect. Worked every time for me.

Granted, it's not ideal that this kind of hint is needed for such an important workflow. Oh well. All the rest still makes it easily worth it for me.


Ahh that's right, I remember using the steam-run wrapper a lot.

If I remember correctly, it would work in 80% of cases and fail on the last 20% (usually if some library is missing or if it has some strange binary installation procedure).

The 20% made it not worth it for me to use as a desktop environment. I still see the value in it for server configurations, though.


For the past couple years, I've been using this hacked version of xf86-input-evdev (by Teika Kazura), which allows the use of a space bar for the space and as a "control" modifier if held: https://github.com/lambdaloop/at-home-modifier-evdev

I made a small modification so that if the space key is pressed shortly after a regular character, it just inserts a space immediately. This makes typing feel more natural, with spaces inserted as usual.

I like this better than using the comma as a modifier, as the space bar is nicely positioned on the keyboard to take advantage of your thumbs already.

Day to day, it's such a natural extension that I forget that I have this on. However, this is the first thing I install when I set up a new computer, as otherwise a lot of shortcuts are much more strenuous.

Edit: I just realized that, while editing this, I've been pressing space-backspace (aka ctrl-backspace with this module) to delete whole words. I guess it's fully ingrained now!


It's funny, I was just thinking about this article this morning. When I first read it over 10 years ago, this quote really struck with me:

> Another personality defect is ego assertion and I'll speak in this case of my own experience. I came from Los Alamos and in the early days I was using a machine in New York at 590 Madison Avenue where we merely rented time. I was still dressing in western clothes, big slash pockets, a bolo and all those things. I vaguely noticed that I was not getting as good service as other people. So I set out to measure. You came in and you waited for your turn; I felt I was not getting a fair deal. I said to myself, ``Why? No Vice President at IBM said, `Give Hamming a bad time'. It is the secretaries at the bottom who are doing this. When a slot appears, they'll rush to find someone to slip in, but they go out and find somebody else. Now, why? I haven't mistreated them.'' Answer, I wasn't dressing the way they felt somebody in that situation should. It came down to just that - I wasn't dressing properly. I had to make the decision - was I going to assert my ego and dress the way I wanted to and have it steadily drain my effort from my professional life, or was I going to appear to conform better? I decided I would make an effort to appear to conform properly. The moment I did, I got much better service. And now, as an old colorful character, I get better service than other people.

> Many a second-rate fellow gets caught up in some little twitting of the system, and carries it through to warfare. He expends his energy in a foolish project. Now you are going to tell me that somebody has to change the system. I agree; somebody's has to. Which do you want to be? The person who changes the system or the person who does first-class science? Which person is it that you want to be? Be clear, when you fight the system and struggle with it, what you are doing, how far to go out of amusement, and how much to waste your effort fighting the system. My advice is to let somebody else do it and you get on with becoming a first-class scientist. Very few of you have the ability to both reform the system and become a first-class scientist.

I tried to live that way for a couple years. Frankly, I think this way of living is unnecessarily restrictive. So what if you get slightly worse service? The clothes you wear and your expressions highlight your history and your culture. By self-censoring yourself, you end up just perpetuating the censorship of other views in the workplace. This goes double for scientists, as we are rather public facing and have room for wearing nontraditional clothes within our jobs.


Google drive is great for storing research data.

I work it in a fly neuroscience lab and we use it to store all our electrophysiology and video data. Each person in the lab is storing on average 5TB of data, and the lab as a whole stores 100TB.

The graphical user interface combined with unlimited storage for Google Workspaces is essentially an unbeatable deal. Researchers can upload their data easily through the interface. Any custom solution based on S3 or equivalent would take some time to teach and more time to maintain. Also, we're paying about $200 / month total to store 100TB of data in the cloud, which is hard to beat with other services.

I tried setting up a single account for the whole lab once, but we ran into the above 5M file limit, so we just have individual accounts per researcher and it's mostly fine for now.


> Also, we're paying about $200 / month total to store 100TB of data in the cloud, which is hard to beat with other services.

You should expect this to go away soon. I support science researchers and our unlimited storage option is going away in the coming months. Options for purchasing space are limited, and not cheap.



This is with a regular Google Workspace plan, independent of the university-wide research plan. The research plan unlimited storage is indeed going away for us as well ( https://itconnect.uw.edu/tools-services-support/software-com... ), which is why we migrated to our own private Google Workspace.

I haven't heard about the google workspace enterprise unlimited storage going away anytime soon, although perhaps you know something I don't?


How expensive are we talking? Looking at the workspace pricing page the enterprise plan gets you a pooled 5TB per user with the option to add more by talking to them, does that mean you have to pay more for the extra storage?


Do y'all back this up? If so, how?


Everyone has their own machine with a hard drive containing their data. Google drive is the secondary cloud backup.


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