One thing that always surprises me is how much more "symbiotic" I am with my computer than most of my other dev friends are. It's to the point where my muscle memory goes fritz when I unplug my keyboard, since I wrote so many hotkeys that use the numpad

`num1 b` opens up my ebook directory, `num2 T` opens up the TLA+ IDE, `num-` switches from superscript to subscript mode, `num2 e win-d` lets me jot a new idea for an example. I have a lot of these and am steadily writing more

I know the usual argument is "but what if you have to switch computers", which I get, but the productivity and QoL benefits I get *right now* more than make up for it. There are so many useful things that are also tedious— I do them less often than I should. hotkeys fix that

I'm a better researcher because I added "open in scihub" and "open in http://archive.org " hotkeys to my computer. Before I had those, using those sites was a chore, now it's muscle memory. I see the link is dead and hit rctrl+ralt+a purely in reflex

If I'm being honest, it's a much better computing experience. Consider how useful cut and paste are as hotkeys, and then imagine writing your own hotkeys that are just as useful. I wasn't kidding when I called it "symbiotic". One step closer to what computing is supposed to be

And that's the thing I keep coming back to, right? A computer *should* make my regular tasks easier, not just the mainstream tasks that are easy to write features for, but also the complex tasks that I need personally. And computers aren't designed to make that easy

For the most part we think of "computers making things easy" as pure automation via scripts and APIs, except most of the things people want to do aren't available through APIs. Browsing the web, for example. Using apps that only have GUIs

Here's one that always pisses me off: timezones. I should not have to *go to a website* to convert between timezones. I should not have to copy it into an app. I should be able to select a date, press a button, and pop a tooltip showing the time in Central Time and UTC

(I'd have done this in AutoHotKey but AHK is absolutely godawful at datetimes and timezones, and I've been dragging my feet on writing an AHK Python bridge)

Okay, this took way longer than expected, but after learning dateutils, timezones, AHK idiosyncracies, and OBS I whipped up a quick prototype

Wow I have no idea how to record and upload videos

Fuckit just gonna upload to Youtube

Here we go

...how come it looks terrible but only when you view it on Twitter, if you go to the youtube link it looks fine