Add Xe's interview and portrait

posts/xe.iaso.markdown

@@ -0,0 +1,47 @@
+---
+title: Xe Iaso
+summary: Streamer, developer, technophilosopher
+date: 2024-02-01
+categories:
+- developer
+- linux
+- mac
+- streamer
+- windows
+---
+
+### Who are you, and what do you do?
+
+I'm Xe Iaso, I'm a technical educator, [Twitch][] streamer, vtuber, and philosopher that focuses on ways to help make technology easier to understand and do cursed things in the process. I live in Ottawa with my husband and I do developer relations professionally. I am an avid writer for [my blog](https://xeiaso.net/ "Xe's website."), where I have over 400 articles. I regularly experiment with new technologies and find ways to mash them up with old technologies for my own amusement.
+
+### What hardware do you use?
+
+For hardware, I use a [MacBook Pro][] (M2 Max), an [iPad Pro][ipad-pro] with a keyboard, a gaming desktop with a [Ryzen 5950X processor][ryzen-9-5950x] and a [4080][geforce-rtx-4080], two [ZSA Moonlander keyboards][moonlander] and some pretty professional audio equipment. I am an avid VR enthusiast and play a lot of video games.
+
+### And what software?
+
+I somewhat jokingly call my microphones my 0% keyboards, because I use a piece of software called [Talon][] in order to do enhanced dictation with them. One of the best ways to understand Talon, is that it lets you control a computer with your voice. This includes things like programming. When you combine this with other tools like [Cursorless][] in [VS Code][visual-studio-code]. This means that you're able to do everything that you can with your hands faster with your voice.
+
+I used to be a fairly big [Emacs][] user, but VS Code is my main weapon of choice right now. In terms of editors, it is okay really. It doesn't have a lot of stuff that sets it apart from other things. Except for Cursorless, which lets you do AST-level editing with your voice. This is insane fuckshit magic from the future. Normally when you use your keyboard and deal with text, you are dealing with individual characters or even words at a time. Cursorless lets you operate on the language syntax in the nodes that the compiler for that language uses internally. There is such a huge gap between normal text editing and using Cursorless that it is difficult to explain unless you actually use it.
+
+I run all big three operating systems across my devices. My laptops are MacBooks. I play games on Windows. I have a home theater PC running [NixOS][], but also all of my servers in my basement run NixOS too. It ruins you. Really bad.
+
+### What would be your dream setup?
+
+My dream setup would be some kind of AR experience where I have goggles that show me a screen and I use voice for the input as much as possible. I have done some experimentation using my [Steam Deck][steam-deck] for this, but I think I would need something a bit more beefy in order to run all of the language models on device. If only Nvidia believed in giving people reasonable amounts of VRAM.
+
+It would be nice if I could use eye tracking in order to act as a mouse, but I would be fine with just voice input for everything. Needless to say though, I am very happy with the setup that I have right now. I think that it could be a lot better with just some minor adjustments that I've been working on making; but a lot of it is going to be building finesse in my tools rather than adopting new tools or building new tools entirely.
+
+Computer science is a weird profession.
+
+[cursorless]: https://www.cursorless.org/ "A VS Code extension for working with Talon to write code with your voice."
+[emacs]: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/ "A free open-source text editor."
+[geforce-rtx-4080]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/graphics-cards/40-series/rtx-4080-family/ "A GPU."
+[ipad-pro]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPad_Pro "An iOS tablet."
+[moonlander]: https://www.zsa.io/moonlander/ "An ergonomic mechanical keyboard."
+[nixos]: https://nixos.org/ "A Linux distribution."
+[ryzen-9-5950x]: https://www.amd.com/en/products/cpu/amd-ryzen-9-5950x "A CPU."
+[steam-deck]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Deck "A portable gaming machine."
+[talon]: https://talonvoice.com/ "Voice-control input software."
+[twitch]: http://web.archive.org/web/20230525093711/https://www.twitch.tv/ "A video broadcasting service."
+[visual-studio-code]: https://code.visualstudio.com/ "A development IDE."