freenode/#stumpwm - IRC Chatlog
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8:16:33
Demosthenex
adlai: well, i'm interesting in scrolling, and while it's ok that middle button + mouse up/down scrolls, i worry about accidental pasting. i'd rather use a hotkey + mouse up/down
8:19:18
adlai
I recommend that you have a visual indication of the hotkey's status, if you are worried accidents
8:19:58
Demosthenex
i was unaware it's able to do the scroll, that's what i wanted, but not while conflicting with pasting.
8:21:32
Demosthenex
i have a meta key setup as my stumpwm hotkey, if i could hold that and mouse up/down it'd be ideal
8:22:41
adlai
there are several different options in https://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/How_to_configure_the_TrackPoint
8:23:54
adlai
my guess is that hardly anything in that page is specific to thinkpads, other than perhaps the exact magic numbers used for detecting and simulating the mouse actions
8:25:14
adlai
by "stumpwm hotkey", I suppose you mean the key that takes you from top-map to root-map ?
8:25:45
adlai
it is almost certain to experience quite a bit of mechanical wear, due to being one of your most commonly used keys
8:26:31
adlai
if you do a lot of scrolling, and want to have the scrolling hotkey held down during the scrolling, then I suggest having that mechanical wear be on a different key than the main hotkey.
8:29:28
adlai
maybe it is best to have a 'nice' idle process that always flushes the X clipboard into /dev/random etc, so that ygwyd
8:30:52
adlai
someday I might want to regain the scroll granularity offered by an actual mice peripheral
8:31:08
adlai
ACTION spent about a decade without mice, then encountered them again in computer labs at the university
8:31:51
adlai
they are ridiculously awesome, once you consider them from a fresh mind that has gotten used to working only with a keyboard
8:32:24
Demosthenex
no, if i have to remove my hands from kbd to switch to mouse, you've already lost me =]
8:32:41
Demosthenex
also i can type with my eyes closed, mice are useless because you have to watch them.
8:33:36
adlai
e.g., both hands on keyboard for typing a paragraph of report; then, one hand on keyboard, one hand on mouse, for searching for some specific bit in a 1000-page pdf file
8:35:29
adlai
during my first semesters, the first thing I always did at a terminal was to enable control of the mouse pointer by the number pad (MS windows often has such a mode, although it is never default)
8:37:05
adlai
ACTION has occasionally wondered what sort of "mousekeys" mode could be superior, for keyboards that have no separate number pad
8:38:13
adlai
the trivial approach is to mimic vi: some mode-switch key turns the home keys of one hand into cardinal steppers for the pointer
8:39:24
adlai
maybe a decade from now I'll have the free time and fuxtogive for exploring that rabbithole.
8:40:10
adlai
so in that approach, various keys relocate the pointer in geometric steps from various fixed anchor points?
8:41:57
MichaelRaskin
Default-ish mode is you get a rectangle covering your entire screen; you can replace the rectangle with the bottom/top/left/right half (vi bindings) and you can click in the center
8:42:43
adlai
ok, that seems like an optimal approach for the generic "click at a specific, randomly-selected point"
8:43:46
adlai
where you don't want the interface to have any dependence on quirks of screen content, e.g. jumping to confirmation/cancel buttons, which is a 'helpful' default that is often infuriating
8:44:32
MichaelRaskin
Yes, there are extra things like «click where my pointer is already», adjust rectangle to current window, get me a rectangle for neighbourhood of mouse pointer,
8:45:07
adlai
there are probably better division hierarchies than a quadtree, although which one is intuitive is probably an orthogonal question
8:49:01
MichaelRaskin
I am not sure ratclick works reliably, though, might need just to shell out to xdotool
8:51:05
adlai
orthogonality is rather important for these things. it might be unwise to have too many moving parts managed within the same lisp image.
9:12:38
MichaelRaskin
It's another question that if you can set comfortable bindings for keynav, using keynav is probably the least work
11:08:57
Demosthenex
adlai: i think it's a major feature that 90% of my laptop can be used mouse free. stumpwm plays a big role in that
11:09:13
Demosthenex
wish my severely adhd son would convert to linux, windows is plagued with popups and distractions
11:10:03
adlai
lol, if there's more than one lispm looking at me with incomprehension, then perhaps they can go crosseyed and comprehend orthogonality.
11:12:11
adlai
Demosthenex: if you have the time, consider mentoring your son in how to turn the digital junkyard's interrupt requests into opportunities for improving his own skills and power over the junkyard
11:12:53
adlai
unsupervised learning typically ends up just producing another floating barge, in the little puddle in the middle of the giant junkyard.
11:14:07
adlai
and incidentally, there is almost nothing redeemable, in and of itself, in using linux.
11:15:07
adlai
open-source operating systems don't magically cure the fact that the advertising industry will DDoS the operator's brain with interrupt requests, regardless of incidental details such as whether you say "GNU plus" or "GNU slash"
11:37:05
Demosthenex
adlai: if only. between the adhd and autism, i'm afraid my recommendation has been "pen and paper only". everything which has a screen is a jet engine, and he's a pidgeon.
11:42:17
MichaelRaskin
Well, GNU/Linux (although not Android/Linux) is quite usable just from a framebuffer console.
11:42:53
Demosthenex
oh i agree completely. i setup a debian laptop for him, he refuses to touch it. there comes a point after 20 years the onus is now on him.
12:01:23
adlai
at the risk of going completely off-topic... both of those diagnoses are rooted in neuroscience that characterizes according to deviations from neurotypicality; and that approach is not terribly constructive to discovering what someone's strengths are.
12:02:41
adlai
for example, someone could stupidly conclude, "savants who also suffer from attention deficit disorder should be considered allergic to smartphones", and although they might not be strictly speaking incorrect, they haven't exactly contributed much to improving the lot of such a savant.
12:03:35
adlai
ACTION is neither a psychiatrist, neurologist, nor even a licensed schoolteacher, so unsolicited opinions end right here.
12:10:40
adlai
ehh, it is an angst-inducing issue; I simply concluded, about half a decade ago, that it is not an issue that I can personally influence without being able to talk down at people from atop a stack of qualifications.
12:11:14
adlai
ACTION has spent quite a bit of time in 'special' education, both as a student, and as a private tutor
12:13:26
adlai
ACTION stopped tutoring a few years ago, due primarily to realizing that accepting a tutor's salary -- and it was a good one! -- for a sort of charlatanism, was not exactly honest.
12:14:36
MichaelRaskin
Were you allowed to teach in a way that was both comfortable to your pupils and allowed them to learn the expected program (and more if they wished)?
12:14:49
adlai
maybe one day I'll have a better pricing algorithm, and continue tutoring; it would definitely be a better use of my time, than building a Babylon's Tower of hollow certifications.
12:15:53
adlai
the only situations where I've ever taught classes were when I was an instructor during military service, and the context there is quite different.
12:17:13
adlai
it is quite easy to answer your question about that context: the brief time during the service when I had a teaching role, was fortunately during a time when a new system was being rolled out
12:18:12
adlai
so although there was a curriculum, my commanding officer essentially expected us [ four of us; I was senior ] to build the curriculum ourselves
12:20:09
adlai
my private tutoring experience splits mostly along the lines of situations where people wanted tutoring for themselves, as opposed to situations where one person hires a tutor for someone else
12:22:19
adlai
somewhere around half a dozen, if I only include people who were actually my students, as opposed to one student informally asking another student a question
12:24:06
adlai
the most relevant example, for the current conversation, is a case where I was hired by the student's mother, without any guidance whatsoever of what material was expected
12:25:03
MichaelRaskin
That might indeed be painful for everyone involved. Typically except that mother,but thereareoptions, too!
12:25:54
adlai
the impression I received, eventually, was that she needed to pay someone else to be the "bad cop", because neither she nor her husband had the inner badness necessary to set limits to their child's exploration of computer games.
12:27:26
adlai
the unwritten contract was somewhere along the lines of "programming tutor", so I taught the kid various bits of lisp, python, javascript, and spent lots of time talking about how awesome minecraft and ... whaever FPS he was playing, were
12:27:31
MichaelRaskin
Well, it is not _purely_ bad cop thing, if you look at pair programming advocates, there are people and situations where having someone nearby does make boring work more comfortable! Bonus points if that someone actually can tell you whether you are doing the homework incorrectly
12:28:12
MichaelRaskin
Ah OK, if there was neither cirriculum nor external source of cirriculum that might be even more chaotic
12:28:42
adlai
it was pure chaos, especially considering that I myself am not the most vanilla neurotypical schoolmaster person
12:29:24
adlai
so instead of "blind leading the blind", this was some sorta "autistic tutoring the savant", without even starting to discuss hyperactivity, attention, etc
12:31:24
MichaelRaskin
I mean, if the goal is to make sure the child knows that computers can process information, not just draw monsters to shoot, then autistic might not be that much of a problem. But yeah, programming definitely benefits from having a goal to achieve, and here…
12:32:14
MichaelRaskin
I wonder if teaching the child programming Lua for Minetest plugins would be considered a bug or a feature. Both by the child and by the parents!
12:33:27
MichaelRaskin
That might have elevated chances of the child actually ending up writing a large enough piece of code and caring if it worked. Would not do any good for reducing video game fixation, though.
12:33:55
adlai
I don't think that reducing video game fixation is a necessary goal, although some parents might treat it as one.
12:34:55
adlai
videogames are often drivers of the cutting edge in technology, along with the other charming hobbies: algorithmic gambling and the weapons industry.
12:35:40
MichaelRaskin
Yeah, although video games often end up squeezed out of this role by the true thing the internet is for.
12:36:18
MichaelRaskin
Not sure automated gambling actually ended up contributing to any actually useful technology
12:36:41
MichaelRaskin
Their nice radio-relay lines are kind of too narrowly specced and too expensive to actually use
12:36:46
adlai
high-frequency trading does have its own specific set of pressures on hardware and software
12:37:33
adlai
merely algorithmic gambling (e.g., once per day, run a function, and if the return value is outside of the uncertainty range, act upon it) does not push any cutting edge, correct.
12:39:16
adlai
the pressures of which I'm thinking probably coincide with the demands of industrial controllers
12:40:23
adlai
there is almost nothing different between a sufficiently optimized HFT system, and the controller that sits between the dashboard seen by a technician, and some machinery on the other side.
12:40:26
MichaelRaskin
wIn industrial controllers you know what you are doing, and there is no race to zero delay, there are physically conditioned deadlines that stay
12:41:09
adlai
anyone who takes a sufficiently complete view understands that zero delay is impossible.
12:42:03
MichaelRaskin
Well, there is the technological race of getting as close to 0K as possible. Of course the scale is not linear
12:42:31
MichaelRaskin
And of course for any approach there is some inavoidable limit you cannot beat this way
12:43:10
adlai
the "race to 0K" is not competitive, within a single apparatus; however, the financial markets are competitive even within a single apparatus.
12:43:55
adlai
so you can use this physical metaphor... except there are three research teams, and an ethics committee, all crowded around the same pile of magnetic salts, and they're competing over who can suck the most heat out of the apparatus
12:45:12
MichaelRaskin
The race is who manages to reach the temperature threshold first and submit the measurement article to Nature
12:45:43
MichaelRaskin
Market tech competition is also more in terms of getting advantage in the next month