i live in the largest city on the west coast of the USA and the only stores i've found where i can press keyboards is Office Depot and the like, and at least in the stores that i have visited, they have not had mechanicals.
even when Frys was around, i don't remember them having keyboards out and about.
Microcenter is probably the most consistent place. Not a huge selection, but some of the maintstream ones, to get a feel for switches on Keychron and some of the other big brands. Depending on where exactly you are, it's likely +/- 30min of an hour drive, which is only sorta "far" in US terms.
Frys predated the "mainstream" mechanical keyboard boom. If they were still around I'm sure they'd have even more (they were always larger stores).
wow, i had no idea at all there was a Microcenter in Socal! not too far, i'll be visiting, thank you. i went to a Microcenter in Dallas decades ago and was blown away.
is it just me or was the scrollbar purposefully hidden on this site? in chrome on windows, i found it very jarring and user-hostile to NOT know how far along i was in reading the article.
i make a judgement call early on: is this worth my time? my whole article calculation algo was thrown off by this.
That's why I drive with 10 pounds of paper maps in my car. I won't have any of this new fangled GPS tech atrophy my map reading skills that I've honed so much.
If you were driving on an unmarked, unbarricaded bridge that Google Maps directed you over in a dark and rainy night, are you 100% certain you'd be driving slowly, undistracted, and checking to make sure the bridge isn't collapsed?
This analogy doesn't work because you can assume that by a bridge existing, and not having traffic cones/barriers, it's probably built by humans and is fit for use (ie. isn't half built). The same doesn't exist for LLM outputs, which is wholly generated by AI. If I was in some simulation where the environment is vibecoded by AI, I'd be very careful too.
That's kind of what I was trying to say, or at least it kind of goes along with it. This meme of "somebody drove into a river just because Google Maps told them to" is a grossly distorted retelling of a fatal accident. One could twist any tragedy into a glib soundbite about how the dead stupidly trusted other people. The street could collapse under my feet as I'm crossing it and I drown in the sewer, and people on the internet would be laughing about how I dived into the sewer just because a traffic light told me to. There were some cracks in the asphalt, so obviously I should have known it wasn't safe to walk across, but I wasn't thinking for myself.
I suppose part of the reason so many people are so dangerously trustful of LLMs is because they assume that if the LLM was put out there by decently responsible humans (doubtful, but understandable), then so too should the LLM be decently responsible? The analogy does break down there.
i have been recently quite enamoured with using both the ChatGPT mobile app (specifically the Codex part) and the Github mobile app, along with Codex. with an appropriate workflow, i've been able to deploy features to some [simple] customer-facing apps while on the go. it's very liberating!
GP's setup sounds like the logical extension to what i'm doing. not just code, but sessions within servers? are sysadmins letting openclawd out and about on their boxes these days?
thank you for this reply! i've got 6x CASIO watches and have struggled to the time on them synced for over a decade. a quick [small] purchase later and every single one of my CASIOs are synced. i'm so happy. its the little things that matter. thanks again.
how sort of perversely lovely (i say it in an admiring manner), to meet in a gloriously old-fashioned manner on such a modern platform!
love it.
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