This common misunderstanding of the purpose of life is addressed by Alan Watts in this short animation illustrated by Trey Parker and Matt Stone of South Park fame.

Yeah, the one type of keyboard I haven't tried yet is a dactyl-style curved one. The Glove80 has definitely caught my attention.

I'm on a journey to find the "one true keyboard" for me, as you can read about in parts 1 and 2 of my story I've linked above. One think that I really want is to be able to switch back to a normal keyboard when needed without difficulty. This means not only sticking with QWERTY, but having modifier keys in the usual places, to be mainly operated by my pinkie and ring fingers.

If the Ergodox is like the Moonlander (my current ride) in terms of column stagger, yeah, it's about half of what it should be (for me anyway). IMHO the top of the "A" key should almost line up with the bottom of the "D" key (speaking QWERTY here).

From the pictures I've seen the stagger looks right on the Dygma Defy; but they use Kaleidoscope, the same firmware as the Model 100, and I want to keep the geeky stuff I've done in QMK, which I found hard to port.

I'm planning to sell it "one of these days" ... If you want it (with my 3d printed stand included), we'd just have to agree on a fair price. It is too tall to be comfortable with that stand, though -- unless maybe you're on a standing desk you can have a bit lower to compensate.

Roszak's notes also said that because users got hooked on Google's search engine, Google was able to "mostly ignore the demand side" of "fundamental laws of economics" and "only focus on the supply side of advertisers, ad formats, and sales."

This is textbook phase one of what Cory Doctorow calls "enshittification". Users don't have much of a choice, so make it as shitty as you are able without them leaving? Check. Phase two (which Google is no doubt also doing) is to do give the same treatment to the advertisers.

The pressure to maximize profits ensures that all private entities performing this sort of connection role on the internet will eventually become enshittified. There's no escape (under capitalism).

There is a site called Keebswap which aims to be a used mechanical keyboard market to replace the subreddit r/mechmarket on Reddit (a formerly popular topic-based discussion platform that ... probably still exists but I'm not sure). Note, I haven't used either of these; I just know they exist.

If you're typing in alt codes, it sounds like you would definitely benefit from a keyboard where you could program those to keys, whether or not it was ergonomic. I wrote about customizing qmk with programming to meet my needs, but I'm a programmer-- there are also GUI configuration tools that might suit you better. Most (all?) qmk keyboards can be configured with a GUI tool called VIA.

The Model 100 is my next installment. Spoiler alert: I didn't like it.

The biggest problem with getting the second part out is that I'll have to clean my desk to get a good picture of the keyboard. Ugh.

Taken without credit from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows by John Koenig. This is a book, but more interesting is the collection of video essays on the YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/@obscuresorrows .

I've seen the rebranded site written as "Xitter". Note that in the modern system for transliterating Chinese, the letter x makes the "sh" sound (e.g. the Chinese word for thank you is rendered "xie xie"). I think these two facts go together nicely.

My mapping is encoder: scroll wheel ctrl+encoder: horizontal scroll layer shift+encoder: switch desktops

Yeah, yeah, it's Chinese government propaganda, but isn't all advertisement basically propaganda? "Everything is rosy in Xinjiang" is a harmful lie, but so is "if you buy a big-ass truck you'll be a manly man" and frankly I think the latter is causing a lot more damage because it's one that people act on.

I've been really happy with Ayu Owl

Wow, you're right. We really need to bring back something like USENET, where newsgroups (their "communities") weren't tied to a specific server. We could almost just resurrect NNTP, although the handling of images (and binary data more generally) probably needs some tweaking.

I have accounts on both, and I like the look of kbin better, so I've tried to use it more. However, the functionality you mention has been undiscoverable to me: I have no idea how to get a list of non-local magazines, and I've looked around for that quite a bit. On lemmy, it's as easy as clicking "All" when searching communities.

Is there any document that would help me find those features on kbin? Or, for that matter, a similar sort of documentation for lemmy?

This is similar to a "Minecraft layer" I added to my last split ergo keyboard. I got all the keys I needed on to the left half. I did it by making a second row of numbers across the top and moving the other rows down. Seeing the number pad on the right here makes me wonder if I should try that design instead.