stochastictrebuchet

I give it a spin every month or so to see how it’s getting on. I’m on macOS.

Every time I walk away unimpressed, despite its maker’s very deserved esteemed reputation.

I’m probably not seeing something. What I do see, however, is that I can’t search my scrollback history, nor can I select text without a mouse.

Also, pressing cmd+, on macOS opens the config inside TextEditor (yes, a separate GUI app) rather than in $EDITOR. It’s a small thing but I couldn’t figure out how to change it. Coming from Kitty, this drove me mad.

I’m not sure who Ghostty is for. My feeling is it’s aiming to be an excellent, polished experience for casual terminal users. But I didn’t see anything that Kitty or just tmux anywhere can’t do.

Literally me yesterday trying to decipher Baidu’s PaddleOCR docs. Have half a mind to aim Claude Code at the URL and just be like ‘plz help’

Been following Synergy for a while, hoping they’ll announce gamepad/steam deck support. The art style looks amazing!

Broke: file names have a max character length.

Woke: split b64-encoded data into numbered parts and add .part-1…n suffix to each file name.

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