I'm mildly interested in keyboard ergonomics and efficiency, but every time I read threads like this I can't really see me spending $200+ on a keyboard when there are quite functional versions at $10 (and I know that the vast majority of the world is typing on either those or a laptop keyboard). To me it reads too much like an audiophile discussion about whether the materials of the cable affect sound, or just people "playing" (similar to cyberdecks). Not just trying to be provocative here, but those prices just seem crazy and just Silicon Valley posturing. Is there a post here that is not partially signalling "I'm rich enough to splurge in an unreasonably expensive set of keys"? Or am I being too harsh? The most grounded take seems to be easterncalculus's "https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47083354" where he mentions that the best approach is to rest and exercise a little bit instead of having led-colored chording keyboards.
Mechanical and Ergonomic keyboard prices suffer because they are niche and way lower volume. The switches are not that expensive if you use common ones, but if you want some special keycaps, prepare to fork some good money. Most of them are made in very low batches and most of the expense is in the molds you have to make.
Your $10 keyboard is probably so mass produced that literal millions have been manufactured. Versus custom-ish keyboard designs that are made for at most a thousand buyers.
There are much cheaper Microsoft ergonomic keyboards, even if the 2 keyboard halves are not separate, so you cannot adjust the distance between them or the lateral tilting.
I had been using for many years Microsoft ergonomic keyboards and it was still much more comfortable than with a classic keyboard.
A few years ago I have switched to a really split keyboard (Kinesis Freestyle), which was an improvement over Microsoft, but not a so great improvement as Microsoft was over a standard keyboard.
Unfortunately, Microsoft has first discontinued their cheapest ergonomic keyboards, which had almost the same price as standard keyboards. Then the remaining more expensive models have been sold to Incase in 2024, so they can now be found "Incase Designed by Microsoft" products, but at significantly higher prices than when they were made by Microsoft. Even so, they might be the cheapest ergonomic keyboards of decent quality. Microsoft still sells a "Microsoft Surface Ergonomic Keyboard".
Old stock cheaper Microsoft ergonomic keyboards may still be found at certain shops.
On eBay and the like a lot of old and very cheap Microsoft ergonomic keyboards can be found, but buying a "pre-owned" keyboard is risky, as you do not know how worn out it is. Moreover the wireless MS keyboards used proprietary USB dongles paired with the keyboard. If an old wireless keyboard is sold without the dongle, it cannot be used unless it also has a wired connection.
For someone who types all day, there is a great difference in comfort and fatigue between a classic keyboard and a good ergonomic keyboard. Young people typically do not care much about the quality of their keyboards, pointing devices and monitors, but after decades of using computers every day many of them regret their negligence, which could have avoided unpleasant health problems.
It's very much a hobby, like audiophiles, but also like tricking out your car. It can be expensive. It's more than the average person needs. It's fun picking out parts and being part of a community.
There's also a perspective bias that most mechanical keyboard content you see is not made by people who found a keyboard that made the wrists stop hurting and then went on with their life. The people enthusiastic enough to make content are also the people that have a bunch of tricked out keyboards.
I actually think it was quite prescient and still raises important topics to consider - irrespective of whether weights are uploaded from an actual human, if you dig just a little bit under the surface details, you still get a story about ethical concerns of a purely digital sentience. Not that modern LLMs have that, but what if future architectures enable them to grow an emerging sense of self? It's a fascinating text.
I love clojure but the points still stand, kind-of.
- There is Calva for VS Code but the community default is emacs and cider
- How many programs in apt or brew are written in clojure? I'd concede that the community is great and focused on productivity, but it's so niche that you don't see much work out there made in clojure, and there is also a vestigial lisp sentiment to prefer building your own library from scratch instead of contributing to a standard library, which spreads the efforts of a small community too much
- Third one you need to mutate it a little bit: clojure is opinionated instead of having "so many ways", but its opinions, while great, are foreign to most programmers
> There is Calva for VS Code but the community default is emacs and cider
Emacs isn’t required. You can always create a REPL plugin. Emacs just does a lot of heavy lifting for you due to comint, sexp navigation, and process management being included.
> building your own library from scratch instead of contributing to a standard library
Simple data structures lead to very generic function. You don’t have to write tower or massive spread of abstractions like in Java or TypeScript. A struct is nothing than a hashmap that can help a typechecker. Most lisp programs prefer primitives or functions instead of manipulating complex objects -never ‘buffer.name’ but ‘(get-buffer-name buffer)’-.
From a module, what you need are functions and an opaque state holder.
With such philosophy, you don’t need a lot of libraries, which are often designed to be complex, when you need a simple model.
> Third one you need to mutate it a little bit
You don’t. Clojure already does the optimization for you for the standard data structures, and they are the only things you need in most cases.
> Well you have to deal with American and European financial regulations, KYC, &c. - you have to vet merchants, you have to run the infrastructure to process transactions, refunds, direct payments from bank accounts to pay for cards, and all of those things. Those are real, genuine business activities that are non-negotiable and while they may seem simple, in practice they are not at all simple.
Those are partially or completely taken over not by the card network but by the bank that is issuing you the card, so a change in the underlying technology will be transparent.
I draft most of my blog first without any AI and later refine it for flow and clarity. These time i had used it to influence the flow and agree it changed a lot. But i liked the flow so kept it like that.
That's the same fallacy as claiming that rich people save money by donating to charity.
Simple example:
- Germany gives 100 € to other EU states
- Those states 100 € to buy made in Germany goods
- German companies have 10 € profits from those sales
- German state collects 5 € from those profits
In summary, German taxpayers paid 100 € so the state can collect 5 € taxes, and companies another 5 €. Not a very good deal.
And this calculation is crazy optimistic, because it assumes that all money that Germany gives to other countries will be used to purchase German good. In reality, they will be spent willy-nilly and German companies may not see even 1 € in return.
This calculation is flawed. German state collects much more than 5€, because there is VAT etc and, of course, employees of that company pay income tax from their share of that 100€ they just got back.
For example, decades of pegging the value of the currency down, thus facilitating exports on a massive scale and thus pushing up the performance of whole industries, without other member states that would have had their currency devaluated being able to compete on prize.
And even those will require draft from outside the insert / stove, so either you build them with an inlet from outside, you pull cold air from badly sealed doors / windows, or the chimney draft will be insufficient.
They will require breathing but much less than an open fireplace and a lot more of the heat will be kept inside and not sent through the chimney. So overall they’re way on the positive side. If you can get a cold air inlet it’s better, but it’s far from necessary.
As a kid I lived in homes with both - and a home with a barrel stove - and as an adult with a pellet stove and I don’t remember that being a problem. Net, it was fine?
Sorry, I'll go get my coffee now :)
reply