I’m still on i3 as it’s been convenient, but this:

this has all become very specialized over the past decade

resonates. I keep incrementally adding personal tweaks and hotkeys to my setup, and I have all my dotfiles in a repo so it’s persistent across installations.

One example was I made my headphone button pause/play videos with i3’s config:

bindsym XF86AudioPlay exec playerctl play-pause

But then I adopted a script to toggle mic mute on work Zoom meetings, so I combined it with the above - if I’m in a meeting it toggles mute, otherwise it play-pauses any current video. The script, for now:

#!/bin/bash
#
# Handler script for hitting mute on the headphone.
#

CURRENT_WINDOW=$(xdotool getwindowfocus)

# convoluted command to find the intersection of two searches
ZOOM_WINDOW=$(comm -12 \
  <(xdotool search --name  'Meeting' | sort) \
  <(xdotool search --class 'zoom'    | sort))

if [[ -n "$ZOOM_WINDOW" ]]; then
    # if zoom is active, toggle mic mute
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${ZOOM_WINDOW}
    xdotool key --clearmodifiers "alt+a"
    xdotool windowactivate --sync ${CURRENT_WINDOW}
else
    # otherwise do play/pause
    playerctl play-pause # will fail if no player found
fi

and of course I altered the i3 config to launch that script rather than playerctl directly.

[EDIT: Updated script as Zoom updated its window identities]

Yeah. Heaviest awk I’ve ever done is extracting a value to a variable from a line with one pattern and using it to populate output from later lines matching another pattern.

Great, cause we haven’t been burning enough energy jetting around the globe up to now. Glad they found a way to burn a whole lot more.

I’m not surprised Emacs users would be seeking them out

They aren’t. Someone did it, probably more than one person, but if you look hard enough you can find people who do all sorts of weird stuff. It’s not an “Emacs thing” at all.

This and the joke itself really make me wonder about bizarre Emacs (and Emacs users) that exists in people’s heads.

I see you use capital letters in your post, so you presumably used a modifier key (shift) - unless you do modal caps with CapsLock all the time. I don’t know why people find that normal and easy, but as soon as it’s Ctrl or Alt they get in a tizzy and start talking about RSI.

Funny how over the decades I’ve known many Emacs users, and many RSI sufferers, but the overlap in my Venn diagram of that is exactly one person.

It’s obviously trivial energy waste in the big picture, but it’s 100% waste if you don’t need it. Like turning on lights in empty rooms.

wasting energy to somehow stick it to the man?

Exhibit 56845 why humanity is fucking doomed.

https://www.aliexpress.us/item/3256807606899647.html is a not carefully vetted example

I was just thinking of the likes of what you get for searching for esp32 audio kit on AliExpress. About us$12. Has microphones, amplifiers, buttons etc.

Esp32 is very suitable but they jumped through a lot of hoops to recreate the ESP audio development boards you can buy for very little money with all of those parts already built in.

Not to mention an emissions decline means we’re still making things worse, but not quite so quickly.

Obviously the path to making things better would have to pass through here, but just as people thinking electric cars are a solution rather than more of the problem, the delusion that this is winning is also part of the problem.

Could you explain what he’s saying about caret (presumably cursor?) positions because I can’t make sense of it.

floppy drive, hard drive, sechs drive — we got building blocks. Crowd sourcing a joke could work.

Avoid categories where a lot of items have fake specs (storage devices, LED bulbs, anything that claims a runtime on a Li-Ion battery)

I’d say be aware rather than avoid. E.g I bought a $10 camping lantern that claimed 2.5 times its true capacity, but it still runs for hours and is a great, well designed, if flimsy, product for the price.

The sort option by “orders” is good for this. Far from infallible but still useful.

Excellent, the punchline is sorted, now we just need the rest of the joke.

That’s a much broader term.

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I’ve had buffalo wings, and American barbecue. Also I’ve been to American Thanksgiving meals with weird things like sweet potatoes with marshmallows on. So I’ve had some American ethnic food for one thing.

He does seem to, where possible, taste blind and take serious efforts to exclude confounding factors.

If it weren’t for Hoffman doing this sort of thing with grinders I’d have been intensely skeptical that there was anything more than a placebo difference between a fairly decent grinder and a very good one. At least if his videos are to be believed (and I am inclined to), he consistently distinguishes grinders even at a fairly similar price point.

Also, it will have been either a modest variation in caffeine intake, or else a variation in modest intake (e.g. adjusting intake say from 6->5, 2->1 or 1->0). These are people who’ve already stabilized their caffeine intake to not disrupt their lifestyle, and were just adjusting that sometimes to remove the first coffee of the day.