b-kf

Even more macabre (I should not admit to this publically...): I can't help but find this one (from your first link) quite... hilarious https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Reichelt.ogv

Elaborate contraption, jumps, falls like a stone, is dead. The end.

Imaginary person: "But he had balls and believed in his own theories."

Me: "Ehm but... how difficult would it have been to throw a wooden puppet instead... or run scaled down experiments first,... than to just immediately jump..."

And Edit: He did run dummy experiments and they clearly showed he shouldn't have jumped https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Reichelt#Experiments

Edit 2: That article is very interesting, regarding the jump: "Initial reports speculated on Reichelt's state of mind: none assumed he had been suicidal, but many called him discombobulated in the brain. [...] interview with one of his friends, who claimed that the tailor had felt pressured into giving a dramatic demonstration to attract sponsors, without whom he could not expect to make a profit before any patent expired." (So human nature at play. Financial pressure, wanting to will something to work, guts in the wrong places. An heroic last ditch stunt, combined with a not quite sane state of mind)

I vaguely remember amounts of lead exposure and IQ (as in lower) could be linked quite well and there was a map showing that for the US.

Trying to find it I stumbled upon this https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2118631119 -> "The average lead-linked loss in cognitive ability was 2.6 IQ points per person as of 2015." Quite insane to think about. Obviously that's more than merely leaded gasoline though.

Regarding the map, not what I was looking for, but https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/... from https://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-025-02735-x is interesting.

Still an ongoing issue, interesting article, some insane metrics in that image though. Lower image is showing `relative IQ cost` for children 0-9 years of age as of 2019,... as in `estimated loss of earning due to less IQ`, boy oh boy, let that sink in: Starting with incomplete exposure data, estimating the resulting IQ loss, then translating that into lifetime earnings (projected somehow into the future economy)...

`Discussed at the time` and here I expected a link to a HN thread from the 1920s!

But yes, `(of the article)`, guess my reaction was anticipated :)

Obviously it's not a shell script, it's still C. It's fun though and being able to freely specify an interpreter/execution path using a shebang has led me to write some useful little command line utilities in unlikely programming languages over the years. That said, not sure why changing the working directory would be the litmus test. A C program can change its own working directory just as easily as an ordinarily executed bash script?

  $ cat bscript.sh && echo "---" && ./bscript.sh 
  #!/usr/bin/bash
  cd testdir/
  ls
  ---
  dummyfile

  $ cat cscript && echo "---" && ./cscript 
  #!/usr/bin/tcc -run
    
  #include <stdio.h>
  #include <stdlib.h>
  #include <unistd.h>
    
  int main(void)
  {
      if (chdir("testdir") == -1) {
          perror("chdir");
          return EXIT_FAILURE;
      }
    
      execlp("ls", "ls", (char *)NULL);
      perror("execlp");
      return EXIT_FAILURE;
  }
  ---
  dummyfile

If you meant somehow changing the parent shell's directory an ordinary bash script doesn't do that either

Exactly

  #!/usr/bin/tcc -run
  
  #include <stdio.h>
  
  int main(int argc, char **argv)
  {
      printf("Hello from C!\n");
  
      for (int i = 1; i < argc; ++i)
          printf("argument %d: %s\n", i, argv[i]);
  
      return 0;
  }

  $ chmod u+x cscript && ./cscript hello world
  Hello from C!
  argument 1: hello
  argument 2: world

"The year of the Linux desktop still isn’t upon us (in 2026), and part of the reason why it has taken so long to get to that point is fundamental: a lot of the people who use Linux love fiddling with configuration files to reshape their system"

"part of the reason", yes, besides people's familiarity with Windows, it being pre-installed, Linux's splintered ecosystem in general, games, drivers for hardware, and so much more...

But what I want to contribute: LLMs like codex can be brilliant for custom setups, maybe not for the layman, but for the now lazy but previously-into-tuning your setup person with an itch remaining. For years I've not been wanting to tune my system, I have actual work to do. A few hours spent configuring a tool for small marginal gains is hours I could spend more productively.

Hence, Default Ubuntu with Gnome, good enough, let's do actual work. But I as I get to work more away from my desk setup (hence away from a docking station and external monitors) and more on my Laptop alone, I recently started to long for my i3 setup from years ago...

A few hours of prompting codex and I have sway set up w/ vim like keybindings, all the information I want in a task bar (I couldn't even tell you which, swaybar I think), a good launcher for applications that I like (it's graphically fancier than the simple default launchers for tiling wms), have kitty as terminal with awesome shortcuts for tab navigation, have bash aliases for saving and loading terminal sessions, no shortcuts (sway versus vim vs kitty) are in conflict, all overlap beautifully and make sense (different modifier keys, but same vim motion like fundamentals). I can simply pull the plug on my docking station or re-attach and everything keeps being fine.

So I have a custom setup, custom to me, that especially on a single screen makes me far more productive, setting it up is 10% the time it used to be, making changes in the future will be 10% it used to be, and I still a) leveraged the capabilities for customization and b) it being simple text based configs I can still leverage that going forward and c) have still the insight if needed (looking at the configs).

Codex on Linux in general feels like a super power. Due to the heavy text-based workflow Linux allows for, the Composability of terminal tools etc, I doubt working together with an LLM on setting up a system could work so well on any other system.

thanks for the pointer, as I said I wasn't sure, good to know

bit meta but can I just applaud the article?

Descriptive title, immediately comes to the point, no elaborate fluff, factual... what a nice change of pace. 95% of other users finding this would have done much worse. This is not clickbait, not calling for a social media campaign, has no embedded tweets of interaction with Google engineers trying to shame them, no singling out of individuals, ...

Not sure if a user posting own material should declare so with `show hn` or so, that might be the only possible avenue of criticism (but I don't know the netiquette around that well enough).

All games by Zachtronics can be highly recommended to this crowd here, obviously why his games have come up here https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Zachtronics

  - SpaceChem

  - Shenzhen I/O

  - ...

  - the funniest concept is probably a game about assembly programming (TIS-100) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TIS-100

also can recommend the soundtracks! I often listen to computer game soundtracks while programming, my favorites are Deus Ex (original) and Zachtronics OSTs (it tracks, good puzzle game OSTs are naturally suited for fading into the background while concentrating): https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=zachtronics+ost

Not sure about the motivation behind the comment, but small donations help too and provide you with a good feeling. Almost anyone here can probably part with the equivalent sum of money of a mobile phone plan in their country and split it across their most valued open source projects. I've honestly come to the conclusion that if you rely on open source software you simply should.

Many of us have probably been poor at some point (e.g. as a student, young adult), but most of us spend a significant amount of time in their life having means to contribute, even if only small.

Appreciate Odin, especially the batteries included approach (simple to use structure of arrays, matrices, array programming, the context system for custom allocators, ...). To be fair though: the heavy lifting in JangaFX is likely done by a ton of C++ code, it being high performance real time graphics programming.

I assume C++ outweighs Odin in their code base by a significant margin (accounting for all dependencies).

Was my intention to specifically link to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ise_Shrine#Rebuilding_the_Shri... but the link automatically was converted to point to the main article instead