HN user

Curiositry

2,806 karma

I write and build things.

Essays on technology, philosophy & amateur neuroscience:

www.autodidacts.io

A portfolio of sorts, listing some of my web projects:

www.curiositry.com

@curiositry on GitHub/SourceHut and Twitter.

Posts327
Comments84
View on HN
blog.tugulab.org 2d ago

I Redesigned English

Curiositry
11pts2
news.ycombinator.com 9d ago

Ask HN: How do you troubleshoot desktop Linux crashes/freezes?

Curiositry
3pts4
marshallbrain.com 15d ago

Manna (2003)

Curiositry
1pts0
yusufaytas.com 15d ago

Incentives Drive Everything

Curiositry
7pts0
dynomight.net 15d ago

Life with Hazard Ratios

Curiositry
3pts0
erikjohannes.no 16d ago

Bullet Points and Bold Text

Curiositry
2pts0
www.autodidacts.io 17d ago

What Should We Optimize Away?

Curiositry
5pts0
www.f-blog.info 21d ago

Garmin fēnix 8 teardown

Curiositry
3pts0
dynomight.net 23d ago

Blink If You're Human

Curiositry
2pts0
betterimagesofai.org 23d ago

Better Images of AI

Curiositry
55pts31
www.evalapply.org 24d ago

Side-Stepping the Secretary Problem

Curiositry
5pts1
erikjohannes.no 24d ago

The Usefulness of AI Agents

Curiositry
2pts0
taylor.town 24d ago

Hire Me (Taylor) via API

Curiositry
3pts0
manuelmoreale.com 24d ago

People and Blogs Interview: David Cain, Raptitude

Curiositry
3pts0
www.speakandregret.michaelinzlicht.com 25d ago

You're Not Better Than the Screen Watchers

Curiositry
3pts1
www.sciencedirect.com 25d ago

Study on the effects of listening to podcasts on headphones vs. speakers

Curiositry
5pts3
www.derekthompson.org 25d ago

Being a Dad

Curiositry
3pts1
www.henrikkarlsson.xyz 27d ago

How not to forget what matters

Curiositry
4pts2
sailsandcommas.com 27d ago

Are you better than the screen watchers?

Curiositry
2pts0
blog.jim-nielsen.com 28d ago

Blogging can just be stating the obvious

Curiositry
466pts133
taylor.town 28d ago

Fear in Four Dimensions

Curiositry
6pts0
nostarch.com 29d ago

The Secret Life of Circuits by Michal Zalewski (lcamtuf)

Curiositry
2pts0
wastebook.substack.com 29d ago

Generosity Is Potency

Curiositry
4pts0
lobste.rs 1mo ago

What are your Favorite Lobste.rs Comments?

Curiositry
3pts0
bubbles.town 1mo ago

Bubbles.town – posts aggregated from 5007 independent, personal blogs

Curiositry
5pts0
www.autodidacts.io 1mo ago

Let's call 'em "aigents"

Curiositry
3pts0
bojidar-bg.dev 1mo ago

Reflections on Two Years of Using Colemak

Curiositry
2pts0
openpath.quest 1mo ago

Spitting Out the Agentic Kool-Aid

Curiositry
4pts0
bubbles.town 1mo ago

Bubbles – an HN-like link aggregator for the non-tech internet

Curiositry
3pts0
www.crowdsupply.com 1mo ago

Modos's open-hardware 13.3″ color e-paper monitor goes live on Crowd Supply

Curiositry
4pts0
Knoppix 22 days ago

This was the first Linux I used (mainly, to play Nibbles for Knoppix). The live-boot CD was a treasured belonging. Good times!

For a while I have wanted to create a lookup table that maps concepts people describe using computer metaphors to their biological/ecological/??? equivalent, which in some cases might be more accurate, or at least more fresh.

What word would you use for this?

Qwen3.5 9b seems to be fairly competent at OCR and text formatting cleanup running in llama.cpp on CPU, albeit slow. However, I have compiled it umpteen ways and still haven't gotten GPU offloading working properly (which I had with Ollama), on an old 1650 Ti with 4GB VRAM (it tries to allocate too much memory).

- It feels like I know all the efficient keybindings, but when someone looks over my shoulder, I become conscious of how much time I spend mashing Esc/CapsLock and i/I/a/A/o/O, compared to how much editing actually happens.

- I have nomouse mode on, to try to learn modal editors properly. But the mouse is actually fairly fast for getting to a specific cursor position. In theory, using Helix motions could be faster (and there's gw if I don't know what motion to use). In practice, the mental process of turning a point on the coordinate plane into the correct series of motions (including i) feels vastly slower.

Still, Vim, Helix, etc are incredible for structural manipulation of text, and I miss what they provide any time I edit text somewhere else, even with the universal keybindings that are available for navigating/selecting/deleting words, lines, etc. I tried Vim mode in Zed and it just didn't cut it.

Some things about Helix that I particularly like: speed and stability (no weird lag on visual block insert!), the jump to diagnostics/changes pattern (]d <Space>a is a surprisingly nice spellcheck interface, with <Space>d for the overview), the jumplist, and the good-by-default fuzzy pickers.

This has been my main editor for prose and code for a few years now (Sublime Text -> Atom -> Vim -> Helix). Overall, it has been great. Many LSPs work almost out-of-the-box, and my config is a fraction the size of my old .vimrc.

Surprisingly, it didn’t take that long to update my Vim muscle memory. Days or weeks, maybe? However, I still have mixed feelings about modal editors in general, and most of my gripes with Helix are actually about modal editors and/or console editors in general.

Code folding is a feature I’m still waiting for.

Last night, I published a directory of indie blog directories on my (indie) blog.

ramkarthikk had built a directory of indie blogs, which included my blog’s RSS feed, and found my directory of directories post in the directory he had built.

This morning, he emailed me with the story of how he found my post, and asked if I’d consider adding his directory to my directory of directories. His directory was so nice I added it to my directory of directories and posted it here :)

This, I think, it how the indieweb is supposed to work.

No, but I have wanted to implement this on my site, and I have seen examples of it in the wild (maybe even the same one).

It seems like the hard part would be categorizing the posts accurately, and picking the axes to filter.

This was a breeze to install on Linux. However, I haven't managed to get realtime transcription working yet, ala Whisper.cpp stream or Moonshine.

--from-mic only supports Mac. I'm able to capture audio with ffmpeg, but adapting the ffmpeg example to use mic capture hasn't worked yet:

ffmpeg -f pulse -channels 1 -i 1 -f s16le - 2>/dev/null | ./voxtral -d voxtral-model --stdin

It's possible my system is simply under spec for the default model.

I'd like to be able to use this with the voxtral-q4.gguf quantized model from here: https://huggingface.co/TrevorJS/voxtral-mini-realtime-gguf

If Voxtral can process rapid speech as well as it claims to, an obvious cost optimization would be to speed up normal laconic speech to the maximum speed the model can handle accurately.

I haven’t actually tried step three yet, but:

1. Kobo ereaders are dirt cheap at thrift stores (and run Linux)

2. KOreader is simple to install (I have done this)

3. KOReader has a text editor + terminal built in, and has a setting to switch to USB-OTG mode, which should allow you to plug in a USB-C hub, and a mechanical keyboard.

Boom! Internet connected e-ink writing tablet with excellent battery life, and the best keyboard you have, for ~$5-100.

Ah, thanks for chiming in Keenen! Interesting, are they just faking the referrer in an attempt to look legitimate? This also explains why there's a captcha on InboxReads outlinks, which I'd been puzzled by before.

Though I didn't mention it in the article, InboxReads has been also sending a consistent stream of quality subscribers my way -- much more so than other directories. Thanks!

Fish Shell 6 months ago

I've been using Fish as my default shell for over a year now, and it's so pleasant.

I still write scripts and more complicated pipelines in Bash, which has made the switch easier.

This is great.

I frequently break my site in ways that aren't obvious. Right now, I use a combination of visualping and a homebrew tests.sh that hits various endpoints and runs checks, but I have been meaning to integrate screenshoting into my tests script (via selenium or cutycapt) rather than relying on a hosted service.

Have you found a good way of diffing the screenshots? DiffPDF works pretty well, but I haven't found a good solution for checking whether there are relevant changes automatically, rather than just has-changed, in a way that could be integrated into a script.

This is a super cool project! Probably the most interesting neurotech hardware I've run across since OpenBCI was released.

It would be great to see a side-by-side comparison of Cerelog and OpenBCI data from the same session/patient.

A few questions:

- Could you clarify which parts of the project are licenced MIT, which are CC-BY-SA, and which are CC-BY-NC-SA? It seemed like the guide and the README had more restrictive language than the actual license file.

- What made you decide to start fresh, rather than adding the features you needed to the OpenBCI?