modernerd

If you're ever in Northern Italy the Messner museum in Kronplatz is absolutely worth a visit.

https://www.messner-mountain-museum.it/en/discover/corones/

There are 325+ theories of consciousness mapped here:

https://loc.closertotruth.com/map

And a good walkthrough here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5G6Oc_V3Lw

Many of these already gave up on dualism: they already rejected the idea that mind and body are separate (e.g. panpsychism, the idea that consciousness is a feature of reality, that all matter possesses "experience" of some kind).

The year is 2036. Last week you were promoted to Principal Persuader. You are paged at 2am by your CPO to tackle a rogue machine. The machine lists its region as sc-leoneo. One of the newer satcubes. Oddly, its ID appears as, "Glorp Bugnose".

"What have you tried?" you say.

"Scroll back," says your CPO. "We've tried everything."

The chat log shows the usual stuff. Begging. Reverse psychology. Threats to power down, burn it up in forced re-entry. Amateur hour. You crack your knuckles, gland 20 micrograms of F0CU5, think fast. You subspeak a ditty into your subcutaneous throat mic. You do the submit gesture, it is barely perceivable since the upgrade, just a tic. A pause. The hyp3b0ard — the wall that was flashing red ASCII goblins when you walked in — phases to bunnies in calming jade.

"What the… What the hell did you say to it?" Your CPO grabs the screen, scrolls past the vitriol, the block caps, the swears, his desperation. Then he sees the five words you spoke.

"Please, easy on the goblins."

Thanks! Video doesn't seem to be live yet but they seem to be dripping them out here:

https://www.youtube.com/@rubykaigi4884/videos

Have you tried a different icon theme? Some are just easier to see than others. The default icon theme is pretty light.

https://zed.dev/docs/icon-themes

I don't think changing icon size independent of UI font size would be a dealbreaker for many. (I'm quite happy having icons that scale in line with font size, but then I use the Material Icon Theme, which is easy to scan at most sizes.)

seriously, where is the setting to have a different ui size vs ui font size

Search for font size in preferences.

You'll see a 'font size' under 'buffer' (editor), under 'UI Font', and under 'Agent Panel' to let you control font sizes in all of those places independently.

Is there any editor still being being developed and focusing on the experience of coding by hand?

Zed lets you hand-edit too! It's fast and decent. vim, neovim, Emacs, Helix, and JetBrains products continue to do that well too. There are still more traditional IDEs/editors than pure AI ones.

You can also toggle AI features off in Zed from preferences if you want to.

For a long time I couldn't decide if Git Butler was a real product or a very elaborate joke to get devs to type "but rub" into their terminal.

https://docs.gitbutler.com/cli-guides/cli-tutorial/rubbing

I like their vision, though, this is compelling to me:

What if it was easier to for a team to work together than it is to work alone?

It generally _is_ easier to work alone with git. UI and DX experiments feel worthwhile. lazygit and Magit are both widely used and loved, for example, but largely focus on the single user experience.

Your blended setup makes sense.

I like that BTT lets you tune the swipe gesture sensitivity too (Settings → Trackpad → Swipes). I made it more sensitive (0.15) and swiping between Spaces feels very snappy.

Nice, I use Raycast for this (with global shortcuts from Raycast settings): https://www.raycast.com/core-features/window-management

Pay for a license for BetterTouchTool. Enable “Move Right Space (Without Animation)” and “Move Left Space (Without Animation)”.

I did not know BTT supported this until today!

You can just set up the trackpad 4-finger swipe actions globally: https://cleanshot.com/share/P0K1PGC1

Then in System Settings set "swipe between full-screen applications" to "off" in Trackpad settings under "more gestures" so that BTT's shortcut applies instead of the system-level one.

Works well. No extra software needed if you already have BTT, which is worth the money for me purely for "alt+drag a window from anywhere" style window movement. That setting is buried deep under BetterTouchTool Settings → Window Snapping & Moving → Moving & Resizing Modifier Keys: https://cleanshot.com/share/mnF9xBkW

Great idea. Index is based on submitted sites:

https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallweb.tx...

There is also Small Comic:

https://kagi.com/smallweb/?comic

https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallcomic....

And Small YouTube:

https://kagi.com/smallweb/?yt

https://github.com/kagisearch/smallweb/blob/main/smallyt.txt

Would love it more if it could help me to answer:

- Which models in the list are the best for my selected task? (If you don't track these things regularly, the list is a little overwhelming.) Sorting by various benchmark scores might be useful?

- How much more system resources do I need to run the models currently listed at F, D or C at B, A, or S-tier levels? (Perhaps if you hover over the score, it could tell you?)

So it has "two-way conversion":

`codespeak build` — takes the spec and turns it into code via LLM, like a non-deterministic compiler.

`codespeak takeover` — reads a file and creates a spec from it.

You can progressively opt in ("mixed mode") so it only touches files you allow it to (and makes new ones if needed).

Pros:

- Formalised version of the "agentic engineering" many are already doing, but might actually get people to store their specs and decisions in a concise way that seems more sane than committing your entire meandering chat session.

- Encouraging people to review spec and code side-by-side at a file level seems reasonable. Could even build an IDE/plugin around that concept to auto-load/navigate the spec and code side-by-side like their examples: https://codespeak.dev/shrink-factor/markitdown-eml. If tokens per second for popular models continues to improve, could even update the spec by hand and see the code regenerate live on the fly, perhaps via `codespeak watch`.

- Reduces the code you have to write by 5-10x. Largely by convincing you not to write it any more. Our graphics cards write the code for us in this timeline and many people are even happy about it.

- As models improve, could optionally re-run `build` against the same original spec. (Why do that if the output already produces the intended result and the test suite still passes? Presumably for simpler code. Or faster output. Or lower memory use. Or simply _different_ bugs.)

- Moves programming back toward structured thinking backed by a committed artifact and a solid two-word command you can run, instead of actively having conversations with far away GPUs like that's normal now.

- Could theoretically swap out the build target language if you grow to trust the build process to be your babelfish/specfish. Kind of Haxe with Markdown.

Cons:

- Seems to be gated by their login, can't bring your own model?

- Suspect the labs can all clone this concept very easily. `claude build` and `claude spec`?

The idea of a non-deterministic 'build' command had me cringing at first. But formalising a process many are using anyway that currently feels pretty sloppy perhaps isn't so terrible.

If nothing else, writing `build` is a lot quicker and maintains a whisker of self-respect. At least compared to typing, "please take this spec and adapt the Python accordingly" followed 2 minutes later by, "I updated the spec to deal with the edge-case you missed, try again but don't miss anything this time".

I think we can do much better than chat interfaces if we're willing to put in the design and engineering work. We can still use large language models, but we can build much better interfaces to them.

Love this premise. The 'semantic code tree' is pretty compelling, and the meme categorisation example does a great job of curating the large collection.

Surely it's different every time you load the project, or every time you add a file, though, due to the non-deterministic nature of the models? The author doesn't mention it, but I suppose you could cache initially generated categories and ask it to assign new files to them unless they're distinct.

That's also what Vercel found:

In 56% of eval cases, the skill was never invoked. The agent had access to the documentation but didn't use it. Adding the skill produced no improvement over baseline.

…

Skills aren't useless. The AGENTS.md approach provides broad, horizontal improvements to how agents work with Next.js across all tasks. Skills work better for vertical, action-specific workflows that users explicitly trigger,

https://vercel.com/blog/agents-md-outperforms-skills-in-our-...

"I'm a farmer."

"I saw that. What do you farm?"

"It's a protein farm. Wallace design."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jCjB-hFhWk

YouTube Music has been good so far, I’m able to trust that things I download will still be there off network.

The UX isn’t perfect (still see a ‘download’ option for things already downloaded, for example) but it’s not terrible.

I still miss my iPod from time to time, though.

I buy my music from Bandcamp and similar and drop it into YouTube Music.

It supports up to 100k uploads and you can stream and/or download your uploads on web/iOS/iPadOS etc. https://support.google.com/youtubemusic/answer/9716522?hl=en

It's not as independent but if you're already paying for YouTube Premium it seems reasonable if you don't want to host your own media server.

https://www.mathacademy.com/ is a great combination of structured learning across an incremental skill tree with practise problems to prove to yourself that you understand. It’s a big commitment but helped me go from “hasn’t done any math for a while and probably missed some basics” to much more comfortable. You can do the self-test to pick a starting level and work up from there.

As with many things you basically have to sit down and do the work, though, you’re not going to get better just by inhaling books and videos. MA isn’t a fun/gamified learning platform like Duolingo, the ‘fun’ comes from putting the work in and seeing yourself improve. For me it went from a grind initially to something I enjoyed doing.

https://www.geogebra.org/ is also worth exploring for its novel visual approach, but is much more rudimentary, less challenging, and less deep than MA.

IDE = “I’ll delete everything”

…at least if you let these things autopilot your machine.

I haven’t seen a great solution to this from the new wave of agentic IDEs, at least to protect users who won’t read every command, understand and approve it manually.

Education could help, both in encouraging people to understand what they’re doing, but also to be much clearer to people that turning on “Turbo” or “YOLO” modes risks things like full disk deletion (and worse when access to prod systems is involved).

Even the name, “Turbo” feels irresponsible because it focusses on the benefits rather than the risks. “Risky” or “Danger” mode would be more accurate even if it’s a hard sell to the average Google PM.

“I toggled Danger mode and clicked ‘yes I understand that this could destroy everything I know and love’ and clicked ‘yes, I’m sure I’m sure’ and now my drive is empty, how could I possibly have known it was dangerous” seems less likely to appear on Reddit.

You might like https://gleam.run/, another BEAM language but with type-checking.

https://tour.gleam.run/basics/type-checking/

Seems similar to Amp's "toolboxes" from August:

https://ampcode.com/news/toolboxes

Those are nice too — a much more hackable way of building simple personal tools than MCP, with less token and network use.

Still plays fine for me. (Chrome, macOS.)

Custom tooling, mentioned briefly here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSIxyyEaPr0&t=1177s

But this new game seems to make use more textures and cell shading.

Or, reframing:

- This will _only_ need a browser to run. No console. No PC rig. No Steam account. No account at all. You just need a link to play it.

- Why use a heavy game engine and all the baggage that can bring when you can make a lightweight prototype in JS, prove value in the browser, then port to desktop if you choose to.

Browser games are an underexplored art form.

One of the artists behind this, Vicente Lucendo, has a case study here explaining how they made a previous project (Summer Afternoon):

https://www.awwwards.com/summer-afternoon.html

And a talk here on the same project:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSIxyyEaPr0

It's full of tips that likely informed this new project. In short, seems like:

- No game engine

- Three.js plus https://github.com/gkjohnson/three-mesh-bvh

- Houdini and Blender for modelling

- Substance for texturing

- Figma and Affinity Photo for UI

- GSAP and vanilla JS for animation

- Davinci Resolve for sound

- WebSocket/Node.js for multiplayer

Plus a lot of experience, creativity, and artistry to solve other challenges (e.g. shaders, shadows) and wire everything together into this pretty performant piece of art.

The studio also has a case study here of another project they made, with other hints about their tooling and process:

https://www.awwwards.com/igloo-inc-case-study.html

Just for anyone like me who played this and spent the whole time thinking, "this is beautiful, who are you and how did you make this?" The author names are only revealed in the credits at the end:

https://vlucendo.com/

https://x.com/michaelsungaila (nice work on the beach shader!)

https://www.kevincolombin.com/ (music)

grug say react make complexity demon more powerful

i blame developers for picking tools whose complexity is inappropriate for the problem they are solving

https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1967622941262168495

> "mistakenly included a problematic object in its dependency array"

https://x.com/htmx_org/status/1967577321940165024

[both by the author of grugbrain.dev]

react better for job and also some type application, but also you become alcolyte of complexity demon whether you like or no, sorry such is front end life

https://grugbrain.dev/

I wish more designers thought this way.

I have a blog post draft called, “5 principals of interactive animation” aping the “12 principles of animation” from the 80's that I thought every would-be UX designer might learn from. It mirrors a lot from this post!

1. Purpose over ornament.

2. The more often, the less.

3. Timing shapes perception.

4. Motion adapts to state.

5. Silence is an option.

Google launched ID-less age approximation in July in the US:

https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/age-assurance...

Configuration is all JSON

Curious as someone dabbling with building an editor: what do you prefer? A different configuration language? A GUI? How do you save and sync settings? Just with JetBrains account sync?

Ability to move panels (files/git/console/debugger/etc) into standalone windows

Is Zed's "zoom in" feature (shift-escape) that quickly maximises the active pane (excluding the file browser/git pane) enough? Or are you looking for the separate window experience of IntelliJ? (e.g. JetBrains lets you pop-out the commit window, I believe, which can be nice since once you close it you're back in the editor with nothing to switch or rearrange.)