stochastictrebuchet

Don’t just put things down; put them away. I have to remind myself each time, but it really helps to keep clutter off the table or desk.

Another: when I sit down at my desk, I do a quick scan of everything and assess what I won’t need, or haven’t needed the past few days, and remove it. (Anything decorative is obviously exempt.) Again, I’m not perfect about it – there’s an old scribble pad with no blank pages that for some reason I can’t bring myself to throw out even though I haven’t opened it in over half a year.

Nice, new job search constraint

Gotta say, it’s kind of a bummer to be downvoted for sharing my own experience. Are those ‘disagree’ or ‘doesn’t contribute to discussion’ votes?

AdGuard does more than DNS blocking. It strips ads from the response content.

Haven’t seen a single YT ad

I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.

Wait… WHAT?!

Honestly, what an amazing person.

Thanks for teaching me something new!

So Chromium is based on Blink, which is LGPL – a less viral GPL. Hence, it can serve as a dependency in closed-source software.

As to the shared heritage of these well-established projects – I don’t know how else to interpret it other than a testament to the complexity of building a decent browser engine.

Btw, quick shout out to Orion, a rare WebKit browser by the makers of Kagi that’s apparently coming to Linux as well. I’m a monthly supporter. Even though I still mostly use Vivaldi, it’s been coming along really nicely. Proprietary software but idc. I appreciate their unspoken mission statement: pay or be the product. (No-one should be a product, obviously, but that’s capitalism.)

Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.

I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)

I sometimes wonder what I would do or who I would be if I had a fraction of these individuals’ courage.

Having regained my freedom, I would leave. Hong Kong, it seems, is a lost cause – which saddens me to no end because I spent 6 years there as a kid. It was completely different than mainland China, which I moved to after. It was a beautiful mix of western and Chinese culture. It was its own thing.

Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.

I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:

1. Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
2. Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
3. Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.

It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.

And they’ve got an entire diagnostics team working on a single patient multiple days in a row, breaking into their house, running lab tests, and doing basically every single task a hospital has an entire staff for.

Would love to see the hospital bill

To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!

Another happy Kitty user here!

I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.

Morning: fugue state. Feel as if I’ve been slingshotted into a separate plane of time where the hours of the day feel drawn by random.

Evening: alert, focused. Each minute feels precious. Backlog of ideas overflowing. Dread having to go to bed at a time that feels ‘normal’.

A term I learned just this year: chronotypes. Basically, the preferred timing of the wake-sleep cycle varies among humans. Easy to imagine how that might have been useful from an evolutionary perspective: always someone to keep watch while the rest sleeps.

Another vote for hx!

Getting a productive setup for Python work is a matter of a few extra lines of TOML. The pre-release version on master also allows for multiple LSPs per language, which means I can combine pyright with ruff.

The modal key chords are verb-object instead of object-verb. It’s not a main selling point to me. However, you get multi-cursors out of the box, which I’ve always found simpler than e.g. macros. In general, keybindings are discoverable. I learn something new every week.

All in all, despite a few rough edges, it’s a nice alternative to needing to get a PhD in neovim configuration to get anywhere remotely near the cool setups other people are rocking.