(oh awesome blogger on ms edge still hasn't fixed the issue where every post starts with a secret whitespace character no matter what.) Smaller keyboards are tricky, if you ask me. I have been trying some during wfh, getting them used here and here. One of them is a Drop ALT which isn't too bad. At least it has cursor keys. One thing that is strange to me is that there's a Backspace, a Del, and a Home key all near each other, but there's no End key. You have to hold down Fn+Home to get End. I would have instead done Fn+Backspace=Del (since I don't use Del much) and have the freed up extra key be used for End. 

(some day i will get around to programming the keyboard to do that and replacing the keycaps to look right, but i just think for me in terms of usability this is kinda obviously a better default choice. but then again what the heck do i know. maybe most people really do prefer this. i mean, i go into the store to buy groceries and when i look at the "craft" beer section the only thing i see is IPA which i do not like. or the fact that people seem to think that True Faith is somehow not clearly far and away the best ever New Order song. or that blue clicky is a good key switch to use. or that either Democrat or Republican party aren't 99.9% evil self promoters. etc. ad nauseam. and it isn't just that i am getting older every day, i've been a non-conformist in my tastes for ever i guess. having said that, there are lots of things about fashion that seem to be about age, where i can't stand the new things. i think the Honda CBR900RR around 1998 or 1999, and the Kawasaki ZX-7R around 96 or 97 are the perfect motorcycles, aesthetically speaking, vs. all the new crap that has like no tail or some "aggressive" polygonal fairing design. (with the exception of KTMs like the Duke, i feel like they started it and own it really well.))

Wow, I haven't used Chromium things in a long time, being more of a Firefox user by default. Sorta like how I am an Emacs user by default. Or an XFCE user by default. etc., get off my lawn. Thus when I set up a new Windows 10 machine from parts last night and then tried to set my home page / new tab page to just be duckduckgo and could not immediately see how to do it, I installed Brave since I had heard about that, and guess what - it is based on Chromium, I guess, so it has the exact same utterly insanely obviously brokenly over complicated hellacious wrong pure evil UI UX about this kind of stuff too! Thus I ran crying home to momma Firefox. Which - don't get me wrong - is horribly broken in all sorts of UI UX ways, too, but not nearly as much, which is horrible irony since Firefox used to be the thing I was disgusted by in terms of usability. In the computer world the Emperors haven't had any clothes for way too long. All of them. If you ask me.

I've always wanted to learn and love Blender. It is free and open source, how blessed we all are. Then every time I try to go actually use it, I end up wanting to stab myself in the face with my mouse. I'm trying out 2.91.0 and oh my gosh the UI UX is kind of an utter heck. 

Some computer technology is sorta overhyped, if you ask me. Pragmatically for basic computer and even some relatively fancy gaming needs, an older i5 from the LGA 1150 or even 1155 eras is just as good as, and a lot cheaper, than newer chips. Also the gain from DDR3 to DDR4 isn't really, I feel, all that impactful.

On the other hand, I did get a used All In One hydro liquid CPU cooler unit and hooked it up in a miniITX build, and that actually feels like a real quality-of-life improvement. I am now all about the liquid cooling and look down upon the air cooling plebes. :-)

Software is, by its very nature, trying to carve out some Happy Path(s) in an utterly mind-bendingly explosively large state space. Even if you only have S and K combinators as your programming primitives, you aren't safe from this truth if you want to make any useful software. Heck, even basic math operations are empirically impossible to always get right as you can see from more than half a century of bugs.

This means, I feel, that any software which seems to "work" is to some degree just getting lucky. That's why we have bugs that come up seemingly at random, and those bugs can be of arbitrary trouble. That's why we have security problems, why there is pretty much literally no such thing ever (and I mean ever, as in the entire life of the universe) as an actually secure (and very useful, non simplistic) computer system.

In my mind that is the truth in the Douglas Adams, '"that's just life" and we are powerless to do anything about it' sense. 

But since I use software day in day out, and even worse I have to use software to make more software, I feel like I get to be reminded every 73.2 seconds about how true this is. About how tentative and fragile and fake and broken and sorta ethically intellectually bankrumpt (I am keeping that typo and coining it) the entire venture is.

I wish I were smart and rich and influential enough to be able to advance & further the cause of tackling this problem. Of making formal methods useful. Of making property based testing easy. Of even just making our debugging story something that isn't a forehead slapping banana peel slipping keystone cops litany of hopelessly bad UX.

(Admittedly, another kicker to all this is that making requirements and specifications is also very difficult and very broken.)