There are all kinds of mechanical keyboards. Not every one is going to suit everyone's tastes.

> plus what's with the stripped down layouts?

The most common kind of 'squished down' is because it's "small like a laptop keyboard". The common sentiment seems to be: "I don't use those keys often, so I don't need them on the keyboard".

Though there's another kind of small keyboard: small keyboards with multiple thumb keys. Multiple thumb keys then allow the thumbs to do much more than a typical keyboard, & so allow bringing the full functionality of the keyboard to within reach of the hands on home row.

> All those tech guys getting the PCB Way sponsorship really don’t know business do they.

Eh.

For a hobbyist it's pretty neat. I don't expect to be extracting a lot of value from hobbyist PCB designs.

That some PCB manufacturer is willing to do a small batch of my PCB design & I don't have to pay for it, just give them a shout out & write about it, that seems pretty neat.

I read "out of box" as meaning "has sensible defaults, can be used 'out of the box' without configuration".

I've never seen it used to mean "preinstalled on most systems". Although e.g. people like vi keybindings because vi is preinstalled on most systems.

Either way, I think you can argue for workstations, it's worth configuring software to your liking, and worth installing software that helps you be productive.

Though, the only software I've seen people excuse for having 'bad defaults' have been things like vim, emacs, tmux.

My first instinct reading an article (especially one about LLMs) is to scroll down to see the structure..

Anyway.

Do people get the impression that LLMs are worse at frontend than not? I'd think it's same with other LLM uses: you benefit from having a good understanding of what you're trying to do; and it's probably decent for making a prototype quickly.

I like the quote about how different programming languages give you tools to think in different ways.

I get the impression languages like k are a good example of this. (That C code looks as dense/concise as k).

OP's post features he wants "that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to."

I could read that as: wanting to do something interesting that others would benefit from.

Though, I don't really think that's a good reason to filter out things to be enthusiastic about.

I reckon if you asked fountain pen enthusiasts whether they'd prefer to type or to use a cheap ballpoint pen, I bet they'd agree with your assessment.

> Then there's "Flakes" which I never quite understood

Flakes do 2 things:

1. Declaration of the inputs and outputs of some Nix codebase. 2. Pinning the versions of this input sources.

The dependency pinning is similar to package.json/package.lock etc. which are common in language-specific package managers.

For a single machine? Yeah, NixOS' cost surely outweighs the benefits if you're not familiar with Nix.

Using Nix for per-project development dependencies is quite good. It's nice to be able to return to a project & not have to fuss over which tools/libraries need to be installed.

> nix is superior in every single way.

My experience using NixOS on desktop is that it's 95% wonderful, 5% very painful.

If you run into friction with NixOS, you may need to have a wider/deeper understanding of what you're trying to do, compared to the more typical Linux OSs which can be beaten into shape.

With NixOS, you pay all the complexity up front.

Such a pity that the article didnt touch on running rust nightly or the sometimes statefull nature of user configs of some programs. The 5% painful part was just around the corner.

Fair point but I've stopped trying to declaratively manage stuff in nix that has its own idiosyncratic state management. That way youre just using nix to run an installer.