Vivek Haldar

"I’ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such profoundly better user..."

Fri, 17 May 2013 22:04:03 -0700

“I’ve always been intrigued with music interface. Musical interfaces are such profoundly better user interfaces than anything we’ve done with a digital computer. They have better acuity. They create more opportunities for virtuosity. They work with the human body more profoundly, the nervous system.”

- Jaron Lanier

Games as a hook into CS

Thu, 16 May 2013 10:00:09 -0700

From the same article I was talking about in my previous post, a fascinating look at how videogames are a hook into CS, but it’s not how much you play games, but how you play them, that affects whether it steers you towards CS:

Betsy DiSalvo (now an assistant professor at Georgia Tech) starts from an interesting observation. Many computer scientists (who are mostly white or Asian, and male) say they became interested in computing because of video games. No demographic group plays more video games than African-American and Hispanic teenagers and men. But few African-American and Hispanic males become computer scientists. Why was that?

DiSalvo explored her question with ethnographic methods. She observed African-American teen males playing video games and talked to them about how and why they played. She found they were playing video games differently than white teen males. Her participants never used “cheat codes” or modified their games in any way—they used video games like athletic competition. Manipulating the football or the field is cheating, so why would you change the video game?

The full paper is here.

What do you think computer science is?

Wed, 15 May 2013 07:00:18 -0700

Via this article in the latest CACM, I came across the work of Mike Hewner, who studies CS education, in particular the issue of what students think the field is about.

Here are some (paraphrased) points from his dissertation that I found particularly interesting:

There were three main conceptions of CS among students (with the percentage that held it):
1. Programming is central, with other subfields in supporting roles (41%)
2. Broad view: CS consists of many computing-related subfields (27%)
3. Theory: CS as the mathematical study of algorithms (8%)
As ever, there is still a deep tension between the programming and implementation-centric and algorithms and theory-centric view of CS. Theory still has a PR problem. “Many students did not understand the purpose of CS theory, and a few left it out of their description of CS entirely.”
At the high-school level, application use was conflated with CS. E.g. believing that a CS degree could be used for a Photoshop job.
Surprisingly, misconceptions about CS did not change long-term educational decisions, which were based on more immediate experiences like whether a course was enjoyable.

Future programming

Mon, 06 May 2013 18:47:20 -0700

When lambdas make it into C++, it’s fair to say that the functional languages camp has “won”. A purely functional language may not have broken into the mainstream, but a large number of features that are functional in spirit are now part of almost every mainstream language. Hard core believers will grumble about macros, or other mechanisms that let you treat code as data to be manipulated, but we have still come a very long way.

This is a battle that had been fought since the 60s, and for all practical purposes that chapter is closed now.

So I wonder, what will programming languages look like in 2050? What are the big problems we should be tackling?

I will put on my prognostication (or make-a-wish) cap, and if that makes me look like a fool down the road, so be it.

Better Systems Programming: functional constructs made it into imperative languages, but lower-level systems programming is still stuck in the 70s. In good ol’ C. Languages like Go are trying to change that. But systems programming (by that I mean stuff like operating systems and virtual machines) is still done by a priesthood with an extremely high barrier to entry and experimentation. The last and only project I ever came across that tries to lower the barrier for experimenting with operating systems was OSKIT from the University of Utah. Imagine the flowers that would bloom if programmers could try out OS ideas with the same investment of effort as writing a Python script.

The current landscape has me pessimistic, for the same reasons Rob Pike laid out in Systems Software Research is Irrelevant: that to even get to the starting line you have to support a huge mass of legacy stuff for compatibility.

One project I like is Microsoft’s Singularity, an attempt at building an OS from the ground up in a safe language.

Treating large bodies of code as raw data for machine learning: Imagine a Clippy for programming. What if your IDE went: “Looks like you’re trying to write a for loop over this array, but you have an off-by-one error. Would you like me to fix it?” Or: “Looking at the signature of this method, here are the most likely methods you will need next to get to the type of the returned value.” That’s your editor understanding the semantics of your language and code base at a deep level.

The fun starts when you combine that with the millions of lines of openly available code and bug reports, feed it to a giant machine learning system, and build up machine knowledge about bug patterns, patterns of good and bad code, idioms and best practices (“Looks like you are trying to filter values from this list. A better way to do that is…”).

Think of it as coding with an entire datacenter behind you to help.

Hardware will eat software from the bottom: Has been a long trend, and I don’t see it stopping. Common low-level software patterns gradually make it into the chip. Network and graphics cards have long been absorbing higher and higher level functionality into silicon. The latest example that’s quite exciting is Intel’s version of transactional memory in hardware, hardware lock elision.

Patterns of use

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 16:37:22 -0700

I find a clear pattern emerging in the way I use various computing devices.

Laptops and desktops—I put them in the same category because they are heavy, power hungry, and have full size keyboards—are factory machines. They are what I use to get serious work done, the kind that gives me a paycheck. I almost never reach for them outside work situations.

On the other end of the spectrum are phones. I don’t know why we still call them phones because I never use them to make phone calls, because in general I never make phone calls. They are rude, disruptive, and synchronous. There is a single digit number of people on the planet from whom I will accept phone calls. But these “phones” are perfect for being our assistants out in the physical world, where we need maps and directions and traffic updates. And that’s mostly what I use my phone for. I almost never use it indoors. Except as a camera. Because the crappy camera you have at arms reach—and they’re getting less crappy by the day—beats the expensive one in your closet.

Which leaves the great big middle of… everything else. This is where the tablet comes in. It has become my main non-work device. I use it for reading—tons of reading. I use it for writing. Gesture typing on Android has greatly improved the speed and accuracy with which I can heave words into the device. I probably spend as much time on the N7 as my laptop/desktop combined. And I think it will only grow. If we start seeing new interesting interfaces that make it viable to actually code on tablets—and we’re beginning to—that will be another blow to laptops and desktops.

Abolish the "Save" icon

Sun, 07 Apr 2013 21:36:20 -0700

Aza Raskin on the ubiquitous “Save” icon :

It’s a floppy disk. There is only a tenuous connection between saving and a floppy disk even for those of us who know what a floppy is (and at the moment most of us remember them), but floppy disks are on their way to becoming as unknown as Charles Yerkes. Don’t know who I’m talking about? That’s my point.

Floppy disks were a stepping-stone medium — once ubiquitous, they have given way to larger, faster, and more convenient forms of storage. Soon, nobody is going to remember floppies, except for those of us re-living the good old days when we used to replace their magnetic sheets with sandpaper as a practical joke. When the new generation of users takes over, they’ll have no idea of what a floppy is, and the icon will have lost all meaning.

His larger point in the post is about using words rather than symbols for icons, but I want to come back specifically to the idea of “saving” documents.

The idea of creating a digital artifact on a computer and it being ephemeral until one remembers to “save” it to a more persistent medium has caused countless people untold misery since the dawn of the computer age. I haven’t met anyone who does not have their own personal story of loss. Inspiration strikes, you heave a thousand words into the computer, and in the heat and fluidity of the moment forget to save your precious words. And then, the computer crashes. Noooooooo….

But, progress happens.

In most web apps, the concept of saving has simply gone away. You type your stuff, and the cloud captures it for posterity. You do not have to remember to save anything. At least, Gmail and Google docs work this way. This, of course, is how it should be.

I’d go as far as to say that if an app made today has the concept of saving work, it is fundamentally broken and does not belong in the 21st century.

RIP Ebert

Fri, 05 Apr 2013 22:22:51 -0700

Well, I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters. I loved the way Bob and Charlotte didn’t solve their problems, but felt a little better anyway. I loved the moment near the end when Bob runs after Charlotte and says something in her ear, and we’re not allowed to hear it.

We shouldn’t be allowed to hear it. It’s between them, and by this point in the movie, they’ve become real enough to deserve their privacy.

That’s Roger Ebert on “Lost in Translation”, a movie that had me wandering in my head for weeks afterwards.

Often we are at a loss to understand and express why something touched us. We feel the sharp jab in our souls, but lack the words. “I loved that movie!”, is all we can say, flaccidly.

Roger Ebert filled that void. He gave words to feelings many of us didn’t know we had, that were stirred by movies. We often mistake a movie review as pure opinion, as something everyone is entitled to his own distinct view of. But Ebert touched on the underlying universal constant that is the same in all of us.

That was his power as a human who felt, and then magnified that using his words.

"I’ve certainly experienced my share of cognitive dissonance when it comes to determining the social..."

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:04:38 -0700

“I’ve certainly experienced my share of cognitive dissonance when it comes to determining the social value of my career. But, like most people in their twenties, I find it very hard not to derive a lot of my self-worth from that career. For any recent graduate taking their first steps onto the ladder, a job is the culmination of fifteen years of education and all of the hard work, money and striving that comes with them. It seems like the most important thing in the world because it’s what finally qualifies us as grown-ups. In career terms, being in your twenties is a time to be selfish, to take what you can and claw your way to the top. The consideration as to whether or not this career, this badge that we wear so proudly, is actually of any significance to the universe can wait until later. Right?”

- Don’t Worry That Your Job is Pointless, James Shakespeare.

Spring in California. It’s under your feet.

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 21:51:33 -0700

Spring in California. It’s under your feet.

Start here

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 16:38:56 -0700

I started writing here in 2008. And now when I look back, it pleasantly surprises me to see a body of work. But the reverse-chronological presentation of a blog is particularly hostile to new readers, or even regular readers looking for an overview.

So here they are, all the long-form posts from this blog, categorized as best as I can. Start here.

We are all Mad Men

Sat, 23 Mar 2013 17:10:15 -0700

For the longest time I couldn’t put my finger on what I loved about Mad Men. It wasn’t the acting or period accuracy or cinematography. There are plenty of shows that have those, but that never pull me in. Only after processing a run of five seasons in the lull until the sixth did I realize the true reason the show attracted me.

Mad Men is an honest portrayal of the themes of modern work in all its glory and pain.

I once described the show to someone who hadn’t seen it as a long, detailed and deliberate character study of one person: Don Draper. Now I realize it is more than that.

The lens through which that character study is done is his work. The main stage of the show is the office, with home filling in the interstices. The primary way in which characters relate to each other is through their work.

Along the way, Mad Men starkly reveals truth after truth about the nature of modern work. They are part of our daily life, but still so hard to see. We’re blind to them, just like a fish would be at a loss if asked about the nature of water.

From building the physical to creating the imaginary

Look at your hands – they’re as soft as a woman’s…What do you do? What do you make? You grow bullshit. — Don’s father, to Don.

Modern work deals largely with imaginary, sometimes ephemeral artifacts. Even where the final output is a physical object (a chip, a phone, or a car), the physical object is but the last link in a long chain of platonic objects. Often, that last link is not even thought of as “work”, but as “assembly”, ideally handled by robots.

3D printers now make it so that we can think of that last step as “compiling”. Just like you compile source code to get an executable, you compile your 3D design to manifest it into the world of atoms. The compiler is just another piece of automation.

Roy: Perpetuating the lie. How do you sleep at night?
Don Draper: On a bed made of money.

We use our hands not to move and arrange physical objects, but to command the manipulation of bits. At the beginning of this transformation, it was understandable for the real makers, the movers and arrangers of physical things, to look down upon people pushing around paper in an office and wonder, just like Don’s father did, ”What do you do? What do you make?” Don is condescended to even by the “true creatives”, the starving bourgeois artists.

Some might still wonder, but the derision is gone (or at least, veiled), after the complete shift of power and wealth and attention from the old physical makers to the new bit-wranglers.

The War for Talent

Don Draper: It’s your job. I give you money, you give me ideas.
Peggy Olson: And you never say thank you.
Don: That’s what the money is for!

Each factory worker was more or less like every other factory worker. But a star creative director or copywriter or programmer is irreplaceable, and hence, valuable. If you lose them, you might, after much effort, get another great one to fill their position, but they will not be the same. They will have a different creative signature. Like a uniquely shaped diamond, each demands their own custom-made setting.

Don picked Peggy from the ranks of the secretaries and made her a copywriter. He challenged her, and forced her to grow. He was mean to her. He was tender and protective towards her. In the entire cast of characters, she is the one who understands (or comes closest to) what makes Don Draper tick. But while Don was a great grower of talent, he was not a great retainer of talent. Don eventually loses Peggy to a rival ad agency.

The overt reason is that she got a much better financial offer. But that is not the true reason. It’s not (only) about the money. It’s about what the money signals. Peggy doesn’t live a lavish life. She’s only in her apartment to sleep. She doesn’t have plans to spend all that money. But she does want to be perceived as valuable. She wants to be wooed. And Don did not give her that. The head of the other agency, a long-time rival of Don, spent time and effort trying to win her over. It was that treatment she fell for.

The Primacy of Work

I know what I’m supposed to want, but it just never feels right, or as important as anything in that office. — Peggy Olson

All the characters in the show derive their self-worth through their work. All of them. There is not a single character that has any significant source of meaning outside their work. Those that have families are cast as providers and protectors rather than lovers and nurturers.

Peggy goes through a string of half-hearted relationships, each of them sacrificed to work. But the sacrifice is a willing one, not forced. There is a brief twinge of… what? Remorse? Regret?… before diving eagerly head-first back into work, into the comfortable rhythm and embrace of it.

Work is exciting. The office is a dynamic place. It is a place where you can reinvent yourself. New projects. New titles. New responsibilities. It is a place that always looks towards the future. It is sterile enough to be a place where you can regularly be born again. Home, on the other hand, is an anchor, a place where you are tied to your past, where you can never run away from the old you.

This is why Don’s relationship with Megan is an outlier, the curveball of the entire show. He does truly love her, more than any other woman in his life. More importantly, he respects her. While he didn’t think twice before cheating on his first wife, he actively shuns overtures from other women to remain faithful to Megan. Megan might be approaching, or even surpassing, the meaning and fulfilment he gets from work. And he has no compass to deal with that. It is uncharted territory for him. Which is why flashpoints with Megan leave Don (and the viewer) confused, but always end up reinforcing how much she means to him.

But at the end of it all, it is not enough. Whatever satisfaction and sense of worth work gives them leaves them searching for something else. They are anchorless, tumbling through dark waters, guided by faint and distant lighthouses. Whether they see a light or not, we will eagerly follow, if only to get clues for ourselves.

Meetings are mutexes

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 15:03:58 -0700

A meeting is a big honkin’ mutex. Treat it like one.

explain why it’s needed
minimize the resources it locks
hold it for as short a time as possible

And then go about your work.

STEM jobs

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 01:51:55 -0700

Via Daniel Lemire’s blog, I came across this three-part series of posts by John F. McGowan that uses job posting data to analyze the STEM job market.

The key results of this brief survey of the Craig’s List San Francisco Bay Area job board are: very few entry-level or junior STEM jobs are posted. Most STEM job posts claim to require 2-7 years, often 3-5 years, of work experience in specific skills such as programming languages such as MATLAB or C++ and toolkits such as OpenCV or OpenGL. Very few jobs requesting more than 10 years of experience are posted. There is little or no interest indicated in a range of mathematical skills taught in high school and college math including algebra and especially calculus.

STEM job posts with a high mathematical content are dominated by statistics and data analysis, primarily business data and some medical/healthcare data. Most machine learning, “big data”, and data scientist posts fall into the category of statistics and data analysis. There are remarkably few STEM jobs posts seeking to solve “big problems” such as alternative, cheaper energy sources, curing major diseases such as cancer, and the like. The few companies that arguably post “big problem” jobs are often backed by the government (e.g. Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors and SpaceX) or may have special relationships with the government (e.g. Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace).

Many of these results contradict common claims and themes in general news media articles, think tank reports, and other sources about STEM education, STEM employment, and alleged shortages of STEM workers (scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians).

The counterpoint is made by this Senate Committee Report:

…the demand for STEM-skilled workers is expected to continue to increase in the future, as both the number and proportion of STEM jobs are projected to grow. New Bureau of Labor Statistics data show that employment in STEM occupations is expected to expand faster than employment in non-STEM occupations from 2010 to 2020 (by 17 versus 14 percent). In addition to government projections of employment growth in STEM fields, business organizations and other groups have issued numerous reports and surveys that suggest that there is a heightening need for qualified STEM workers – both those with highly specialized skills as well as those with a more general knowledge of STEM concepts. For example, even at the height of the recession, a survey of manufacturers found that over one-third were experiencing shortages of engineers and scientists – and most of them anticipated greater shortages in the future. In addition, an earlier survey found that over half of manufacturers believe that the public education system insufficiently prepares students with the math and science skills necessary to succeed in the workplace. Furthermore, concerns regarding shortages of skilled workers are compounded by the pending retirements of many baby boomers, an issue cited by both private industry and government officials.

So which is it? A bit of both, I think.

Job listings are largely fantasies. Just because someone wants a domain expert with 10 years of experience doesn’t mean they’ll get one. Often, employers truly care about a small but important subset of the long list of “requirements” in a job listing.

There being little demand for workers to tackle “big problems” does not imply that there isn’t a shortage of STEM workers. That might simply be a reflection of the fact that it takes huge teams to tackle large problems, and there are rarely listings for “come cure cancer” or “come build the next-gen vehicle.” Open positions will likely focus on small niche sub-problems, which don’t seem as big and challenging.

Strong opinions, weakly held

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 10:00:11 -0700

It’s a lazy Sunday.

	Strongly held	Weakly held
Strong opinions	Bigot	Wisdom
Weak opinions	Lemming	Spineless

"Fighting for continued existence is the biggest battle for a computer science teacher every year...."

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 00:24:21 -0700

“

Fighting for continued existence is the biggest battle for a computer science teacher every year. “The number of secondary schools offering introductory computer science courses dropped 17 percent from 2005 to 2009 and the number offering Advanced Placement (AP) computer science courses dropped 35 percent in that time period.”

Teachers were only mentioned once in the 84 initial statements of support for code.org.

”

- About High School Computer Science Teachers, by Selena Decklemann.

Zero Knowledge

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 16:15:00 -0700

Shafi Goldwasser and Silvio Micali will receive the 2012 ACM Turing Award for their work in cryptography.

I encountered Goldwasser’s work during a graduate course in cryptography. I came across the idea of zero knowledge proofs, which is a technique for Alice to prove possession of a secret to Bob without actually giving away the secret. At the end of their interaction, Bob will be convinced that Alice possesses the secret, but will have no idea what it actually is. At first, this sounds completely paradoxical. How is that even possible? But it is.

Things like this still make me feel like crypto is the quantum mechanics of computer science, full of counter-intuitive and mind-bending results.

Here’s a talk I gave to the class back then. Deepest apologies for the chintzy PowerPoint theme. I blame it on youth.

Turbo Pascal was da bomb. I still have fond memories of it.

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 22:00:28 -0700

Turbo Pascal was da bomb. I still have fond memories of it.

Addicted to work

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:04:12 -0700

Erin Callan, the former CFO of Lehman Brothers, writes about her all-consuming workaholism in the New York Times:

I didn’t start out with the goal of devoting all of myself to my job. It crept in over time. Each year that went by, slight modifications became the new normal. First I spent a half-hour on Sunday organizing my e-mail, to-do list and calendar to make Monday morning easier. Then I was working a few hours on Sunday, then all day. My boundaries slipped away until work was all that was left.

Workaholism is the perfect term for this, because, like alcoholism, it connotes addiction. Nobody starts out wanting to become an alcoholic, or a workaholic. But you start down a path, and one fine day you wake up with a dry mouth and a splitting headache with no memory of the night before, or realize that you haven’t seen family or friends in days or weeks. You think you are in control of it, but eventually it is in control of you.

It happens through a series of small choices, each one seemingly inconsequential. And it is a choice, because I’ve rarely seen a workaholic creative professional doing 80-hour weeks because their boss was tightening the screws on them. They did it to themselves.

But why did they choose this? Not for the money. Workaholics are usually already well-paid, and hardly ever enjoy that money anyway.

What is the hook? Where is the high? It is the need for cognition, a trait that compels one to “understand and make reasonable the experiential world”. Every problem solved, every little checkbox marked off, every little question answered, every gap covered—these are all highs. And when the pile of work is infinite, and usually self-created, you can string together a series of such highs into a sixteen hour workday.

But just like addiction, workaholism is an easy way out. An easy way to ignore the work and time and compromise required for cultivating relationships. An easy way to pretend that there’s simply no time to step back and distinguish the urgent from the important. An easy way to distrust colleagues and do it all yourself. An easy way to deal with the stream of work as it arises, flowing in it, rather than putting in the time and deep thought required to prioritize and tackle items with potentially high impact.

What I work on...

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:24:53 -0700

… is deep infrastructure backend stuff. It is one of Google’s secret sauces, and when someone asked me, I usually just said “cluster management”, which sounds as inspiring as a damp towel.

Now Cade Metz over at Wired has saved me (and a bunch of others, I’m sure) by managing to go a bit deeper into what that means, adding some color to The System That Shall Not Be Named.

This software system is called Borg, and it’s one of the best-kept secrets of Google’s rapid evolution into the most dominant force on the web. Wilkes won’t even call it Borg. “I prefer to call it the system that will not be named,” he says. But he will tell us that Google has been using the system for a good nine or 10 years and that he and his team are now building a new version of the tool, codenamed Omega. Borg is a way of efficiently parceling work across Google’s vast fleet of computer servers, and according to Wilkes, the system is so effective, it has probably saved Google the cost of building an extra data center.

Moving to Chrome OS

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 23:06:12 -0800

I knew I was ready for jump to ChromeOS because I was already spending most of my time on any computer in Chrome. Yes, it could even do things like ssh, which was all the escape from the browser I ever needed. I used my laptop as a 21st century dumb terminal. For heavy duty work coding, I had a heavy duty machine that I sat under my desk and was used remotely. For the rare occasion that I needed the full desktop experience of that remote machine, I used the Chrome Remote Desktop extension.

What pushed me over the edge was the Pixel.

I will not review the Pixel here. Plenty of folks have done that in depth already. I will just say that the hardware is delicious. Particularly the screen. I’m a bit of a typography nut, and seeing type on a screen of that resolution makes you realize what a waste it was looking at and picking out fonts for low-resolution screens. I now hate to connect to a large external monitor because it just looks so crappy.

(By the way, I’m biased. See my “About” page. Take all this for what it’s worth.)

Here I want to talk about how some of my workflows and habits have changed (or will need to change). I’ve had the Pixel as my full-time sole machine for a glorious four days now, so a lot of this might change as I find my way.

Whether ChromeOS is right for you depends entirely on whether you live on the web full time, or are still shackled to native apps. Even if you do live on the web full time or most of the time, like I do, when you are on a “regular” machine you fall into habits that reinforce the use of the local machine as a crutch.

There are two major factors that might tie someone to a “regular” machine. The first is native apps. In the spirit of aiming for where the puck is headed, I feel confident that those who are absolutely tied to native apps will continue to dwindle and be confined to highly specialized niches. High-end image editing, graphics, 3D rendering and video editing is the most obvious one.

The other major reason is the use of local disk. That gargantuan terabyte (or fraction thereof) of space attached to your machine—but only your machine. Local disk ties you to specific machines. Local disk makes you worry about backups. Local disk fills up. Local disk is 20th century. On my previous main machine (a 13-inch MacBook Air), I used local disk like a messy floor. The things I cared about would always find a place online, usually on Google Drive or PicasaWeb, and those that I was unsure about or were temporary in nature would get tossed on the floor, usually never to be looked at after the first time.

Even though the Pixel hardware is not cheap, there is a certain peace of mind that comes from knowing that a ChromeBook is disposable in the sense that I don’t have to worry about “all that stuff that was on that machine.”

That said, I plead guilty to being addicted to local disk. A lot of crucial things in my setup depend on local disk. Thankfully, they don’t have to. It’s a legacy workflow that will take me awhile to properly untangle. The first step is to use “Save to Google Drive” when “downloading” something from the web.

So how have my workflows changed? The big news is that they haven’t, for the most part. I used to spent 90% of my time in the browser before, and now I spend 100%.

The biggest thing I thought I would miss was dictation software. I used Dragon Dictate on the Mac. But the spanking new WebSpeech API looks like it will at least start to cover some of that ground. Check out this demo of speech to text in the browser.

There are still some odds and ends I miss. I got used to a bunch of trackpad gestures in MacOS X that don’t work on ChromeOS. Two and three-finger swipes, mostly. I’d also developed a deep habit of using sticky modifier keys (that’s when you can press and release “Ctrl” and then press “A” to emit the “Ctrl-A” key combo, rather than having to hold down “Ctrl” and then pressing “A” while “Ctrl” is held down). I still miss that.

But so far, living full time in the cloud has been great. It’s the future. Might as well start now.