I can never reliably cut/copy and paste what I want in Vim. I'm always either picking up or leaving behind stray characters at the edges of my visual selection, because I find the end cursor so counterintuitive.

Especially true when newlines are involved, it's always a mystery how many newlines I'll paste into my document when I hit p to put.

This is not Vim's fault, it's just skill issue.

Oh, and it's also a mystery whether the system clipboard will work properly with Vim out of the box or not. There's some voodoo setting you have to tweak if it doesn't.

I like VIM as a casual user.

I barely know any of the fancy shortcuts, never successfully used a macro in my life, can't remember how to open more than one edit buffer and have to look it up every single time, and I still constantly wrongfoot copy and paste regularly to the point where I consider it a waste of my time to try and I just type things out the long way. I totally get why people feel very defeated by this editor.

But I do feel very slick darting around with hjkl, occasionally throwing in a gg or a G or a $ to leap around. Yeah, there are faster ways to get where I want if I'd only learn them, and I may some day, but this gets me around. If you can build up just the basic movements, that's enough to at least begin to appreciate the editor.

Not having to touch my mouse to edit text is a massive game changer that is worth it on its own. Not that vim is the only one that offers this benefit, of course. But what it does well that I haven't experienced in editors I've tried is how beautifully it flows if you happen to already know how to touch-type. Y'know, hands on the homerow, certain fingers hit certain keys, building up the muscle memory so you don't have to look at the keyboard to type, all that. It's why vim uses hjkl to move the cursor--it's where the right hand rests in a touch-typist position.

If you don't use keyboards this way, vim will probably ruin you. I know a lot of people who are proficient typists who never learned standard touch typing, instead home-rolling their own cursed setup that works for them, and god bless them, but they would be hard-pressed to negotiate vim. If this is you, vim may not be the editor for you.

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Man, I haven't seen a pony in the wild in ages.

Private contractors also prefer building single family homes because they get paid way more to do 50 individual houses than put up an apartment that houses 50.

We aren't here because people are stupid. We are here because this is where all the incentives align.

In theory, not voting is a protest strategy where you tie up a wealth of votes behind some set of issues, and thus incentivize politicians to platform those issues to court those votes.

In reality, next to none of the suits in power want anything to do with your issues, and they are tickled pink that they've managed to convince you to voluntarily self-select out of the process.

I don't understand why anyone would ever get onto a new commercial social media platform again now the Fediverse exists.

Lots of reasons:

• It's bigger and less fragmented. More content, more diversity, more activity, and it's all in one easy place.
• No extra conceptual hurdles to overcome like "what is an instance" or "which instance do I join".
• Network effect. See point 1. Unless you are some kind of FOSS enthusiast or a refugee of every other social media platform due to your vulgar, sexual, illegal, and/or politically extreme interests, your friends, followed creators, and other people of interest have a far higher chance of being on BlueSky than the Fediverse.
• An actual algorithm. Many people who jump to the Fediverse hate it, but a silent majority of casual users actively want it. Meticulously curating your own feed is not a boon to them, it is a chore.

A lot of the crap that the Fediverse did not inherit from its commercial counterparts is precisely what a lot of users are there for. And a lot of the expanded tooling and control the Fediverse alternatives offer are pearls before swine with most of these folks. Overall it just makes the Fediverse appear flakey, underbaked, and devoid of content.

Thus gen alpha, who haven't been around long enough to develop an identity resulting in a catchier nickname.

"iPad babies" seems to be the closest thing we have at the moment. Only time will tell if that sticks.

step 2 of this process involves making a backup. whether they understand how they did so or not.

I have lived in a home with a ceiling fan for nearly 30 years and I cannot confidently answer this question off the top of my head.

Maybe that's just tremendous skill issue on my part, but recognizing that all ceiling fans are standardized to spin only one way and knowing which way that is seems like a weird thing to ask of someone who also needs a mnemonic for which way to tighten screws.

Not to mention a rapidly growing segment of the population is unable to read analog 12 hour clocks, so the analogy is not that helpful.

Those are some really theoretical ways to observe a clock face.

How about we just start saying, "torque in, torque out"? When the torque vector points in, the screw goes in (tightening). When it points out, the screw comes out (loosening). As long as you are standing on the side of the screw you can actually work with while working with it (and why wouldn't you be?) this is never ambiguous.

Of course, now we're kicking the can down the road and relying on people wrapping their heads around the right hand rule... Hmm...