At some point everyone was talking about / showing off their mech keyboard in developer scene. I don’t think I’ve seen much in recent years.
I myself went deep into that for a while. Got a couple of keyboards and now I have two Apple Magic Keyboards. Don’t even know where I stashed my mechanicals.
The foam has disappeared, but the enthusiasts are going on. While it's not a craze, I believe mechanical keyboard is still superior for longer writing sessions (Apple's and Logitech's scissor switch keyboards are pretty good, too).
Gamers are moving to hall effect switches because of the things they enable, but from what I have seen, some people are still building their keyboards, and people still use mechanical keyboards.
I'd love to continue use mine, too, but they are bit too noisy for my office, and I don't continue computers at home as much, anymore.
Another chilling effect is caused by the tariffs, because people can't get their keyboards or parts as easily anymore. I got mine from Kickstarter directly, but it's impossible for me now.
> Another chilling effect is caused by the tariffs
Maybe that's why prices in Europe seem to have gone down significantly. It used to be very expensive to get anything over here (UK), but now we're almost spoilt for choice.
Various patents expired and now you can get excellent typing keyboards from China for $30-50. Basically everyone I know who types for a living has one.
Gamers have moved on to analog keyboards which are controversial because some of their features straddle the line into cheats. e.g. with an analog keyboards you can negate all inertia in Counter-Strike or do speed tricks in Trackmania not otherwise easily accessible to keyboard players.
Could you give examples of excellent typing keyboards from China for $30-50? Every mechanical keyboard I've owned eventually suffered from key chatter or inconsistent actuation.
Just get a hall effect or TMR keyboard and all your problems with key chatter will go away. Also, I recommend you just build it yourself. It's a fun hobby and if you don't know how to make PCBs it's a great way to learn (keyboards are one of the easiest things to make from a PCB complexity standpoint).
Ever play "connect the dots" as a kid? That's what it's like making a keyboard PCB. It's the adult version of "connect the dots".
It's not a "rabbit hole", it's a pending addiction :D
From the article I like the characteristics of hall effect better than TMR (although one of the cons under HE, "Since the sensor is reading magnet position, any wobble in the switch can change the magnet’s alignment and affect the signal", is a bit troubling). There are indeed $30-50 ones on Amazon. Any particular brand recommendations?
> Full analog functionality often depends on proprietary software support (and not all boards execute it well).
Could you elaborate how that works? I'm on Linux. I find with Keychron I can visit the web-based tool to configure the keyboard, but if it's proprietary software I'm out of luck.
I use a Wooting which is largely open source on GitHub. Also their config tool is only needed to set up your keyboard, the config is saved onto the keyboard and persists across devices, OSes, etc.
In India, many brands are now offering low-cost mechanical keyboards. They were costly earlier but one can find super amazing one with 50% less cost now.
They have become mainstream, so they are not special any more.
Even keyboards with what used to be enthusiast features, such as aluminium case, double-shot PBT keycaps, switch foam, plate foam, flex cuts, hot-swap, damping, etc. are available off-the-shelf at very reasonable prices now.
I absolutely love my UHK [1] split mech keyboard that I ordered from Hungary several years ago. It’s the only one I stuck with after trying some other popular ones.
Other than being split, the keyboard layout is standard so it’s easy to adapt to.
It probably helps me avoid RSI. I keep an apple trackpad between the two splits, so I never use a mouse. And a microphone in the middle as well, you can guess why. I clamshell my MacBook and almost always work on a monitor. Besides ergonomics, the biggest benefit is the on-board programmability; it lets me define custom layers and macros so I can trigger complex window management, app switching, and IDE navigation with simple key combos.
That's exactly how I used to work about 15 years ago, but I found that the Apple trackpad killed my wrists. These days I just have a regular mouse, and simply try to do as much as I can from the keyboard.
I agree trackpad is not RSI-proof by any means, but for me mousing is worse. With the trackpad in the middle I can use either hand to scroll or click etc. I also keep that minimal and instead rely on keyboard tools like Vimium, and scroll kb shortcuts
It's still a craze but the people who want a nice keyboard to use daily found theirs and drifted away from the novelty/modding, I think.
I've used a HHKB Pro 2 since 2010 and it's still going strong. I have a replacement ready if/when it dies, but other than a shiny space bar it looks and feels like new.
Mechanical keyboard is still a sensible choice. With the advent of cheap 3D printing and custom PCBs, there's now also a lively DIY community, especially for odd/split layouts. I don't think it's a craze. It's just a hobby.
> Is the mechanical keyboard craze still going on?
It depends on your definition of "craze".
Mechanical keyboards are more popular than ever, and became mainstream to the point where nowadays they are just considered keyboards. Even Logitech sells whole product lines of mechanical keyboards, and even has specialized lines of mechanical keyboards.
Also, multiple companies sell ergonomic keyboards that fall within the "craze" classification. Even if they don't ship with noisy switches, they are still in line with what mechanical keyboards were known for.
Nowadays even the pure mechanical keyboards have non-mechanical switches. Optical, magnetic, hall effect, etc. they ship in the standard cherry MX form factor. But aren't mechanical.
A few years ago you had blue switches, red switches, brown switches... You could count the types of switches with your fingers. Nowadays the offer is so vast that you can't keep track. Some companies even sell sample kits with an array of different types of switches for customers to try out. That's a relatively new development.
And do I need to mention the massive inflow of mechanical keyboards on offer from cheap Chinese manufacturers? We're not looking at 400€ mechanical keyboards, but 20€ mechanical keyboards.
The truth of the matter is that in the past you barely had any choice in keyboards. You could choose brand and color, but it was always the same keyboard. Anyone who wanted something beyond this pattern was drawn to mechanical keyboarss. Not today.
Utilitarian device to type on became an object of obsessive consumption, collection, customization, showing off, fashion (RGB lighting, forced mechanical over scissor distinction even though many people prefer the latter, etc). Yeah of course it's a craze, without scare quotes.
The same gear obsession happened to the gaming mice world, but it was much tamer by comparison.
> Yeah of course it's a craze, without scare quotes.
This is a simplistic opinion to hold. You'd be better complaining that some people enjoy things. Form factor is important, also tactile response and sound. Features like embedding USB hubs or touchpads are essentially a given in laptops. Not being forced to throw a keyboard to the trashbin just because a key failed.
Is this a craze?
Ask yourself this: why are there people paying good money for gaming keyboards? Or Apple's magic keyboard. Is it a craze?
Or are you just complaining that other people enjoy things?
Yeah but just look at what happened within the last 2 years. I was not convinced about the AI revolution but I bet in another 2 years, we won't be looking at the output..
Not so sure, there are indiosyncracies now within the various models, I suspect all this is the result of RLHF, and they cause side.effects. I'm not sure that more attention-is-all-you-need is necessarily going to give us another step change, maybe more general intelligence, but not more focus. Possibly also we soon end up with grokked AI's on all side: pushing their agenda whatever you asked... Gemini: "no this won't work with Cloudflare, I created your GCP account, there you go" OpenAI: "I am certain you really wanted me to do all these other tasks and I have done them, you should upgrade your tokens plan" etc (you know how to fill in for DeepSeek and Grok already, right)
It is not opus. It is good, works really fast and suprisingly through about its decisions. However I've seen it hallucinate things.
Just today I asked for a code review and it flagged a method that can be `static`. The problem is it was already static. That kind of stuff never happens with Opus 4.5 as far as I can tell.
Also, in an opencode Plan mode (read only). It generated a plan and instead of presenting it and stopping, decided to implement it. Could not use the edit and write tools because the harness was in read only mode. But it had bash and started using bash to edit stuff. Wouldn't just fucking stop even though the error messages it received from opencode stated why. Its plan and the resulting code was ok so I let it go crazy though...
I've been using it with opencode. You can either use your kimi code subscription (flat fee), moonshot.ai api key (per token) or openrouter to access it. OpenCode works beautifully with the model.
Edit: as a side note, I only installed opencode to try this model and I gotta say it is pretty good. Did not think it'd be as good as claude code but its just fine. Been using it with codex too.
I tried to use opencode for kimi k2.5 too but recently they changed their pricing from 200 tool requests/5 hour to token based pricing.
I can only speak from the tool request based but for some reason anecdotally opencode took like 10 requests in like 3-4 minutes where Kimi cli took 2-3
So I personally like/stick with the kimi cli for kimi coding. I haven't tested it out again with OpenAI with teh new token based pricing but I do think that opencode might add more token issue.
Kimi Cli's pretty good too imo. You should check it out!
I was using it for multi-hour tasks scripted via an self-written orchestrator on a small VM and ended up switching away from it because it would run slower and slower over time.
I've heard people granting access to their production servers to this thing. Apparently you can ask it to check logs to find solutions to some errors or whatever. Gotta be a complete moron to do that.
I've only installed it on a fresh VM and the first impression was underwhelming. Maybe there is some magic I can't see.
In the second report, Daniel greeted the slopper very kindly and tried to start a conversation with them. But the slopper calls him by the completely wrong name. And this was December 2023. It must have been extremely tiring.
This (manual?) addition in the second report [1] likely gives an idea as to the reporter's mastery of English and ability to proofread before spamming out slop:
> Sorry that I'm replying to other triager of other program, so it's mistake went in flow
I think it would be really interesting if someone at HackerOne did a dive into the demographic of many of the banned posters.
December 2023... that was early AI era. Had to double-check the dates actually, because I misremembered the release date of GPT-4 as being in 2024; turns out it was in 2023, and that was when LLMs first became remotely useful for even this kind of slop.
I looked at two reports, and I can’t tell if the reports are directly from an ai or some very junior student not really understanding security. LLms to me sound generally more convincing.
Yeah, that one is pretty clearly written with the help of AI. This could well be the work of a larger group, say a state actor, trying to overwhelm reviewers and crowd out real reports. And if not yet, then for sure going forward ...
They're very clearly AI when you're told that it's a list of AI. But when you're given a mixed list of AI and genuine reports, I bet it's not so simple and very time consuming
Let's say I want to create a small 2D game. I'm no game dev so nothing fancy, just a PoC. I'm willing to take a code first approach and I love C#. What is my best best?
- Unity seems promising but they have a weird version of mono running things and not so recent C# features available. Might be a non issue.
- Godot seems more promising for my use case but I feel like they want you to use GDScript. I don't want to use GDScript while there is a perfectly capable C# engine there. Is .NET second class in Godot?
- MonoGame was basically abandoned for a long time. I wonder if it got any better. That might be a little too much "code first" though.
Stride.. I just heard it the first time ever. Its a shame. And apparently it is a proven engine especially in VR space. Jumped on it, unfortunately no macOS support available so can't dig in right now.
Recent versions of Unity are actually using Roslyn ¹) but they are admittedly running a bit behind on C# language version. The currently supported version is at 9 while 14 came out last month. It's not really a huge issue in practice, though.
With Godot 4, the big difference between Godot and Godot .NET is that the version with NET support does not build to web and mobile support is 'experimental' ²). Also, they are two completely separate downloads and editor binaries, which makes switching languages decidedly non-trivial.
For a 2D game, if you can live without building to web, I'd pick Godot. Otherwise, I'd pick Unity.
Godot has full C# support and it is a first class citizen. GDScript has a few advantages, the main being game package size, but they are extras from the fact it's a custom language. The C# development experience is smooth.
I have released commercially successful (for a single dev) games with Godot and C#. GDScript is just the default because most newer Godot users prefer the Python-like syntax, and being a custom language it has some extra features and integration in the editor.
I would strongly suggest that for quick code-first prototypes. The boiler-plate of "load a texture and render to screen" is quite minimal - you could perhaps make a small library for yourself?
It also has no opinions about how you structure your game data. This means you can represent things like a Flappy Bird clone as just a `Vector2`, rather than having to bash a graph of entities in the shape you want.
The thing with MonoGame is that it was designed to be an opensource version of XNA, thus it doesn't have an evolution path.
FNA has done some experiments going beyond XNA 4 API design, however for the type of 2D games XNA was designed for, there is little else to add anyway.
Unity is easily your best option if you've got any sensitivity to platform targeting issues. They are working on a CoreCLR conversion but no telling if it will actually see the light of day.
The lack of modern c# features and hijacking of things like null coalescing operators are annoying but it's not something that ruins the overall experience for me. The code is like 20% of the puzzle. How it all comes together in the scene is way more important.
As for advocacy, Microsoft's "Game development with .NET" page points first and foremost to Unity and their outdated, proprietary .NET toolchain; only by digging you get MonoGame/Godot/Stride listed. And if you dig for bindings, they'll first point you to a couple of open source DirectX bindings unmaintained for over 7 years.
I'd say they stopped caring about .NET specifically for game dev as soon as they abandoned XNA. Now they're doing the bare minimum that nets them Visual Studio licenses, which I'm not sure they care much about anymore after Copilot.
> During the past year (2020), Ignacio Etcheverry worked on significantly improving C# support and its integration in Godot, adding support for Android, HTML5 and iOS, as well as popular third party IDEs. This was financed thanks to a generous donation from Microsoft.
Nice find, thanks! Turns out Godot reached to Miguel de Icaza for a few grants from Microsoft for C# integration around 2017-2020. Coincidentally, I can't find any mention of Microsoft grants for Godot after de Icaza left MS. I guess we found who used to care for Godot at MS. Still, cool that they did it.
Raylib is a very good option for 2D games. For me it was the easiest way to translate my toy Doom renderer from javascript that used html canvas to C#.
At some point everyone was talking about / showing off their mech keyboard in developer scene. I don’t think I’ve seen much in recent years.
I myself went deep into that for a while. Got a couple of keyboards and now I have two Apple Magic Keyboards. Don’t even know where I stashed my mechanicals.
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