Simplification of my digital self. Removed most of my online accounts. Removed all my VPS's. Removed most apps from my phone except core ones. Cancelled a lot of online subscriptions.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context.
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
A friend of mine and I (we are both Aussies) had been staying at my Grandma's house in a rural village in UK and were trying to make our way back to London on Boxing Day. The fact that it was Boxing Day meant that no buses were running, so we started sticking our thumbs out to try and hitch a lift to the nearest town's train station. As you would expect, picking up two 19 year old blokes in the middle of nowhere was not an attractive proposition to your average passerby.
Eventually a guy comes along and picks us up. Tells us he hitched all the way across Europe back in the day so he empathized with us. Says he's on the way to pick up his son (our age) from work, a department store that happened to be on the way to the station.
His son gets into the car, understandably pretty bemused as to why his dad has brought two random stragglers with him!
We get to the station only to find that it's closed, because, yes, it's Boxing Day and trains weren't running either (we hadn't really thought this through). Guy says:
"Don't worry lads, all the family are around ours for Christmas dinner. My brother lives in West London so he can give you a ride there at the end of the night."
So we found ourselves, two foreign students, invited to a complete stranger's Christmas dinner party. We all had so much fun and drank so much that we completely abandoned the London idea and went back to my Grandma's at the end of the night.
And the kid who was our age that got picked up from work? He ended up being my Best Man when I got married 15 years later. True story!
Could also be a different psychological path in person and through text. I know I behave much more anxiously irl and I might act colder than my personality can be.
Arch package manager here, there is ongoing work behind the scenes to support multiple architectures (aarch64, riscv, etc), but as our volunteers (myself included) are doing this in our free time, progress is up in the air.
Adding Cloudflare to my site would actually cause more denial of service to legitimate users than it would if I never added CF. As someone using OpenBSD + Firefox with strict privacy settings and "resist fingerprinting", I am frequently blocked from sites because CF erroneously identifies my browser as suspicious (with no way for me to resolve this except use a different browser or computer). I'm not interested in blocking visitors because they use a different browser. Case in point: https://www.theregister.com/2025/03/04/cloudflare_blocking_n...
This reminds of a friend I had in college. We were assigned to the same group coding an advanced calculator in C. This guy didn't know anything about programming (he was mostly focused on his side biz of selling collector sneakers), so we assigned him to do all the testing, his job was to come up with weird equations and weird but valid way to present them to the calculator. And this dude somehow managed to crash almost all of our iterations except the few last ones. Really put the joke about a programmer, a tester, and a customer walk into a bar into perspective.
I see this as an absolute win. The state of micro dependencies of js was a nightmare that only happened because a lot of undereducated developers flooded the market to get that sweet faang money.
Now that both have dried up I hope we can close the vault door on js and have people learn how to code again.
First of all, don't do this. No one cares. Secondly obviously every Euler solution is going to appear in the training data many times over. It's no surprise at all that an LLM can regurgitate data that was given to it.
Actually, recent research suggests daily mouthwash use, especially alcohol-based and antimicrobial formulas, carries underappreciated risks (e.g., Microbiome disruption kills beneficial oral bacteria that help regulate blood pressure while promoting harmful strains linked to gum disease and certain cancers [oral, esophageal, colorectal]; Long-term alcohol-based mouthwash use is associated a with 40-60% increased risk of oral/pharyngeal cancers, with risk scaling by frequency and duration; Chlorhexidine reduces nitrate-reducing bacteria, potentially raising blood pressure and increasing prediabetes/diabetes risk even in healthy users; Some formulas actually increase acidic bacteria that lower salivary pH, promoting tooth demineralization and staining).
In other words, mouthwash offers short-term hygiene benefits but should probably not be used daily unless medically indicated. The oral microbiome matters more than we thought, and indiscriminately nuking it has downstream effects.
I want an automatic scrambling machine, not an automatic solving machine. Two cubes. While you're solving one, the other one is being scrambled. Cubers spend way more time scrambling than solving. Scrambling is the annoying part that needs automating.
> Transient UIs [...] could usually be replaced by just using a regular special-mode keymap in a custom buffer.
For people who can look at a list of key bindings once and have them memorized, maybe. Turns out most people are not like that, and appreciate an interface that accounts for that.
You also completely ignore that the menus are used to set arguments to be used by the command subsequently invoked, and that the enabled/disabled arguments and their values can be remembered for future invocations.
> The fact that Transient hooks into the MVC and breaks elementary navigation such as using isearch
Not true. (Try it.) This was true for very early versions; it hasn't been true for years.
> or switching around buffers
Since you earlier said that transient menus could be replaced with regular prefix keys, it seems appropriate to point out that transient menus share this "defect" with regular prefix keys, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/17#issuecomment-46.... (Except that in the case of transient you actually can enable such buffer switching, it's just strongly discouraged because you are going to shoot yourself in the foot if you do that, but if you really want to you can, see https://github.com/magit/transient/issues/114#issuecomment-8....
> has irritated me ever since Magit adopted the new interface.
I usually do not respond to posts like this (anymore), but sometimes the urge is just too strong.
I have grown increasingly irritated by your behavior over the last few weeks. Your suggestion to add my cond-let* to Emacs had a list of things "you are doing wrong" attached. You followed that up on Mastodon with (paraphrasing) "I'm gonna stop using Magit because it's got a sick new dependency". Not satisfied with throwing out my unconventional syntax suggestion, you are now actively working on making cond-let* as bad as possible. And now you are recycling some old misconceptions about Transient, which can at best be described as half-truths.
Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true:
> Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell.
This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. You, the junior, tag along a senior. You work under a shop that is led by a senior-senior that is called a master. Apprentices become craftsmen, craftsmen become masters. AFAIK, the master does not 'offload' project guidance into non-craftsmen, it is an expected part of the craftsmen role to be project/product managers/owners.
I've said this a million times to close friends and at this point I'm only half joking. We, and I'm including myself in the 'developer' crowd although I may not deserve it, have really dropped the ball in not being a 'guild' since way back when. At least since the late 1980's; and certainly since before the Original Boom of software dev as a profession (I'm assuming it was late 90's? I know not)
(Although I suspect that if that were the case we'd have fewer developers throughout the 00s and 10s, which may have impacted the development of the field itself in unexpected, but likely negative, ways)
How do you debug it properly? Suppose you see others not have the mysterious difficulties that you have. What if they were simply pretrained - through prior exposure to that material?
How would you even know that this was the case?
I think if you're fortunate enough to really, deeply want something, then you should simply train to become good at it. Don't worry about your natural talents, since those will change.
Personal anecdote. I started learning a rigorous dance in late 20s. No fitness or movement or musical background. Programming/sit on my ass background only.
After 10 years of it, when I try something like tai chi now, the teachers pick out that I'm genuinely "gifted" or "talented". Then I tell them I'm a dancer and they'd be like "oh that explains it".
This happened even 5 years into dance training. I had absolutely no talent for it - I always struggled with mysterious problems others never had. Whether it's postural, rhythmic, musical, whatever. Had it all.
My point is, identity change happens much faster than we imagine, when you go all-in. It doesn't take 50 years. But it's also slower than we imagine. It's not 5 months. You have to understand the timelines of human change.
Of course on day 1, week 1, year 1, even year 3, everything sucks. You can't then write an essay saying "here's my lessons from learning journey". I will believe an essay when the author gave his youth to understanding the nature of talent. Not if he gave it 3 years.
This is normal, most people are like this. The idea that there’s something out there that you’re just amazing at without even trying very hard is a trap and believing it will destroy your life. You just have to pick something you want to be good at and do it until you are.
I don't want to use the word "grift", but it really seems like we're scraping the bottom of the barrel when it comes to new ideas for products a lot of the time. Go and read this month's HN "Who is hiring" thread for an example. It's all either fintech crypto crap that never seems to come to fruition for anything normal people want to use, weird microloans, and products for extremely small niches like using AI to help with gift-giving and so forth.
It's honestly hard to imagine wanting to work 12 hour days to advance some of these interests. We're seeing some of the greatest minds of our generation lost to these kinds of ephemeral, short-lived projects that flame up, consume VC, and mostly burn out uselessly, having created a bunch of IP that is shelved never to be seen again. What's the point?
Maybe we really all ought to just get drafted. At least I'd be able to explain to my kids what I do for a living.
> The person you described likely has a deficit in empathy
Sorry, but I have to correct this because it's a common misunderstanding. It's actually a name collision.
People on the autism spectrum struggle with theory of mind, which is also called "cognitive empathy." We can have difficulty understanding the mental states and emotions of others.
On they other hand, we're often higher than average on what's called "emotional empathy" or "affective empathy." Many autistic people get very distressed when others are unhappy or are suffering. For example, autistic folks are over-represented in the animal rights movements and other movements to reduce suffering.
Somebody who lacks empathy in the everyday use of the word is someone who does not care if others are suffering. That is not a symptom of autism, and never has been going back to the start of research on the topic.
To me, this feels like part of a cooking change we'll remember in 20 years.
We were all taught to cook dry pasta in a giant pot full of boiling salted water, the more water the better. No! Not optimal!
A trivially simple change fundamentally alters the process for the better: soak the pasta in cold water for a couple hours (as far in advance as you like, for convenience). The pasta rehydrates and takes on the texture (but not flavor) of cooked pasta.
Cook it in any hot liquid, quickly (3-4 minutes). Done.
The Ideas In Food book (which is a-m-a-z-i-n-g and nerdy) plays around with this technique in a bunch of interesting ways. But they didn't manage to turn box pasta into ramen noodles. Turns out: not so difficult if you use the modern technique.
This article gets even cooler than making ramen at home. Read it! Strong recommend! Extremely hacker-y!
The last two generations of Samsung NX cameras were built around Tizen Linux, and it was (and still is) easy to get a root shell on them. They still make great photos and you still can buy them used for a good price.
NX300/NX30/NX2000 had a read-only rootfs, but for NX500 and NX1 there was a persistent mod that extended camera functionality with a menu, and you can actually SSH into them and rsync your photos... while shooting!
I have had such bad experiences with psychiatrists and psychologists being contrarian and demanding filling in generic tests leading to no working solutions (aka you're depressed here's a prescription for an SSRI. Still depressed? We'll up the dose).
My current psychiatrist figured out my main issues after talking to me for 15 minutes. Sent me off to a psychologist back up his assumptions before prescribing anything. Recommended therapists who specialize in the area I needed support in.
The psychologist I went to was great as well (after seeing one that was a terrible). She did a lot of testing (three sittings lasting around two hours) but said the tests were really just to rule out other things. The important part were the conversations.
Let me blow your mind: Betamax was not better quality than VHS. There are many things that can explain why people believed that one was better than the other.
People confused Betamax with Betacam, Sony’s professional grade recording medium, which is absolutely better quality.
People conflated VHS’ ability to slow the tape for even longer play at the expense of quality. That of course made the recording terrible. Betamax did not initially have this capability.
People listened to Sony’s own marketing. When they couldn’t compete on features, they banked on their reputation.
Related, I used to love going to the monowall website gallery to see all the labgore. It's still there like a time capsule: https://m0n0.ch/wall/gallery.php
Okay, but this causes me about 90% of my major annoyances. Seriously. It’s almost always these stupid country restrictions.
I was in UK. I wanted to buy a movie ticket there. Fuck me, because I have an Austrian ip address, because modern mobile backends pass your traffic through your home mobile operator. So I tried to use a VPN. Fuck me, VPN endpoints are blocked also.
I wanted to buy a Belgian train ticket still from home. Cloudflare fuck me, because I’m too suspicious as a foreigner. It broke their whole API access, which was used by their site.
I wanted to order something while I was in America at my friend’s place. Fuck me of course. Not just my IP was problematic, but my phone number too. And of course my bank card… and I just wanted to order a pizza.
The most annoying is when your fucking app is restricted to your stupid country, and I should use it because your app is a public transport app. Lovely.
And of course, there was that time when I moved to an other country… pointless country restrictions everywhere… they really helped.
I remember the times when the saying was that the checkout process should be as frictionless as possible. That sentiment is long gone.
In the real world finally moved everything to USB-C. Gave all my old cables away. I have two chargers in my home and a handful of C to C cables. Everything connects to everything now.
Home is now downgraded to a dumb home. Lights work on physical toggles. No hubs or sensors anywhere. Heat and AC is with a dumb panel on the wall.
It feels freeing.