paraknight

Love these and the nice!view, used them in every keyboard I built!

The way you nonchalantly mentioned your dad died last week caught me off guard -- my condolences!

AI is not great at browser use at the moment and it's also quite inelegant to force it to. It's one thing if it reads your nicely marked down blog, it's another for it to do my groceries order by clicking around a clunky site and repeatedly taking screenshots. Not to mention how many tokens are burnt up with what could be a simple REST call.

So to answer your first question, it's less about _reading_ and more about _doing_. The interfaces for humans are not always the best interfaces for machines and vice versa in the doing, because we're no longer dealing with text but dynamic UIs. So we can cut out the middle man.

As for coding, Karpathy said it best: there will be a split between those who love to code and those who love to build. I too enjoyed writing code as a craft, and I'll miss doing it for a living and the recognition for being really fast at it, but I can do so much more than I could before now, genuinely. We'll just have to lean more into our joy of building and hand-code on the side. People still painted even after the camera was invented.

Yes, when I said Betamax I was actually referring to Swagger/OpenAPI. It's been around for a while but it didn't catch on the way MCP did.

What I'm saying is that the AI hype is making people make that business decision, and that is ultimately a good thing because it means more human accessibility. Not just for people with disabilities, but through interoperability and fewer silos like YouTube.

I suspect people will get pretty riled up in the comments. This is fine folks. More people will make their stuff machine-accessible and that's a good thing even if MCP won't last or if it's like VHS -- yes Betamax was better, but VHS pushed home video.

I came to a similar realisation about world news a few years ago and live a much less stressful life now. Especially since most of the news was about the US, and I don't even live there and there's nothing I can do about it. If something really important happens, eventually I find out from friends or family.

Same when it comes to staying on top of tech news -- almost everything is a flash in the pan. I used to bookmark cool new products, never revisit them, and then a year later realise half of the links are now dead.

One thing I realised though is I still need to mindlessly browse an endless feed every once in a while for some downtime. One way or another I'll want to fill that time with something, so it's a question of being mindful what goes in it. So my drugs of choice are Hacker News, and carefully curated YouTube subscriptions.

I currently use Hapi (https://github.com/tiann/hapi/) for this and find it quite handy. I can easily tap into a session on my PC from my phone.

Before that I used Happy (https://happy.engineering/) which is also open source and a lot more sophisticated. It has a voice assistant that can chat with Claude Code on your behalf in the mobile app. However, it wasn't very reliable, and there are other reasons to use Hapi instead (documented in the Hapi repo).

Before that, Omnara (https://www.omnara.com/) a YC company and seemingly a proprietary Happy fork (?) but it never worked properly for me.

Long story short, there are a few of the around, and frankly I really like to use them. Unlike other commenters, I don't find that they wreck my work-life balance. Rather, I can go out and have a walk in the park, only checking in on long-running tasks every once in a while. The diff view is pretty good too. There are many tasks where I'd rather not stare at my PC all day and instead do other things, and these tools allow me to do that.

What.cd were extreme sticklers for quality! When you applied to get in, they did a live interview on IRC to test your knowledge of ripping, transcoding, and different kinds of compression, how torrents and private trackers work, and their code of conduct. I remember studying for it. They also had ways to make sure you weren't cheating like checking your screen, as well as very aggressive automated checks for VPNs and blocklisted IPs to prevent ban evasion and multiple accounts.

They also had good incentive structures for keeping the bar high -- you could get kicked out for having a bad ratio, so the easiest way to pump your upload up was to fulfil obscure requests for FLACs you could purchase online but were extremely difficult to purchase (if you're lucky it's just an unknown artist on Bandcamp). I discovered a lot of obscure music this way, some that I'm still looking for to this day after it shut down.

Because I cared so much about being part of that private tracker, this is what also prompted me to rent a seedbox for the first time. I paid in Bitcoin out of paranoia (I lived in Germany where the fines for piracy are HEFTY, and they actually do come after you) back when Bitcoin wasn't really worth that much, and later found that that old wallet suddenly had a couple thousand in it instead of the spare change I couldn't move!

Does this background process have any neurological backing (literally a part of your brain) or is it more of a mental mode?

FYI: octopi is not the correct plural for octopus.

I was not aware of this, but this actually supports my point, since the reasons in that study seem to be correlated physical comorbidities, so that makes the claim "autism increases mortality due social isolation" both easier to make (as you can misinterpret the stats) as well as less defensible.

The author may like https://omnara.com/ (no affiliation) instead of SSH-ing from their phone. I have a similar setup with Obsidian and a permanently-on headless Claude Code for my PKM that I can access through the phone app.

I haven't dug into all the sources, but I think there's a potential confounder here, or maybe even reverse causality. The author seems to assume causation when the studies only indicate correlation. E.g. the first link says "chronic loneliness increases mortality risk" but the actual source says "actual and perceived social isolation are both associated with increased risk for early mortality".

So for example, it's possible that if you already have chronic illness, a disability, or any other kind of health issues, you're more likely to have higher social isolation and therefore be more lonely, in addition to having a higher mortality risk. There's an outside variable (your health) that is correlated with both (loneliness and mortality), but that doesn't necessarily mean that loneliness causes mortality. If this were the case, we could defend claims like "autism increases mortality", because we already know that autism increases social isolation.

The APIs thing: it's not just Chrome, but Chromium too. I first noticed this when trying to replicate some of the screen sharing UI (buttons to share different things) from Google Meet, only to find that no non-Google domains have access to those APIs in the Chromium source code. Made a huge deal about it but nobody seemed to care.

Not sure how to DM on here, but I just checked your landing and wanted to ask in what ways you're better than clerk.dev?

This is an excellent point. We launched on PH and reached #1 of the day and #1 of the week. We barely got any new customers, but we did get a lot of inbound investor interest. I'd say that if you're fundraising, it's worth it, but otherwise you need to go to where your customers are (ours were not PH users).

different countries manage their public services and institutions.

This is the injustice. The decisions made by these institutions are not just. Sometimes they're business decisions (e.g. a university can make more money price gouging international students, when we're getting an identical education).

There can be an overlap with privilege, but at that point you're arguing semantics. For example, I'm privileged if I don't get racially profiled by the police, but it is also unjust for police to racially profile me. To say that it's down to the institutions/countries/individuals making the decisions is the same argument as "well that bakery is a private business, they can decide not to serve you because of your nationality".

Of course there are Germans and Brits that haven't had the same opportunities that I have had, and of course it wasn't handed to me on a silver platter either; I still had to work hard. But my point is that if I were Egyptian _no_ amount of hard work or luck would have gotten me where I am. It would have been quite literally impossible.

I'm not even going to begin to crack open the can of worms that is the colonial history of the same countries (in my case the real and lingering effect that the UK has had on Egypt). The way you compare the institutions "built by the UK" and the ones "provided by Egypt" makes it sound like "well maybe Egypt should just do better m" when the reality is that the prosperity of these very countries is built on centuries of injustice and blood. Call it what you want but it's injustice all the way down.

For half my life I had an Egyptian passport, and for the other a German passport. Having experienced both sides, that bit of paper is without a doubt the most valuable thing I own.

It's hard to quantify the kinds of doors it has opened for me. I was able to get a scholarship to study in the UK that covered home/EU rates (a third of international rates, while I might not have been able to get even a student loan otherwise), get government funding for a PhD that would not have been accessible to me otherwise and other grants, travel to international conferences without thinking twice about visas (unlike many colleagues) meeting people that would impact my career and skipping all sorts of and barriers along the way, and never had to worry about deportation because of the EU settlement scheme, easily become a founder (no visa sponsorship needed), and so much more! Even travelling/business in the the middle East, being German rather than Egyptian is an entirely different life, one that my cousins cannot even begin to imagine.

There's a parallel universe where I'm stuck making ends meet in Cairo where I was born, dreaming of a brighter future, feeling all my potential fade away. I know because my immediate family is that version of me - no less talented or worthy of the opportunities I got because of my nationality!

I see the kind of freedom that I have because of that passport as one of the biggest modern injustices.

Yes

I had no hope during mine and completely changed research area in my final year. All my publications became irrelevant and I did a complete rewrite of my already mostly written thesis. My thinking was that I have nothing to lose since I'm going to fail anyway. That freedom allowed me to put together something good that I actually care about in a short time and pass my viva very easily, despite none of my new work being published.

I wrote about this here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/ My number one bit of advice would be to stop listening to your advisors and do what you think is right. They're the ones that led you to the point of no hope despite your efforts.

If I could go back in time, I would go straight to founding instead of wasting some of my sharpest years on a PhD, but I would never have known that had I not done it.

I use one of these https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07YF95RNR, some bluetooth peripherals, and a little phone tripod. I have it set so that when a monitor is plugged in, DeX starts automatically, so when I'm at my desk and plug my phone in, in 2 seconds I'm ready to roll. I also use DeX with my AR glasses (Nreal Air) when traveling, which basically behaves like a full-HD monitor on your face.

My termux session runs permanently in the background out of laziness (though this does noticeably shorten your battery life, but it's been mostly manageable) so all I need to do is start AVNC.

There are a lot of little configurations and quality of life things that I tweaked over the past year or so of doing this; happy to write all those up somewhere if you're interested.

My daily driver is Android + Samsung DeX, and I've tried doing this a couple different ways. In the end, the only thing that didn't make me pull me hair out in the long run was proper VSCode (arm64 build) inside termux/Ubuntu (installed via Andronix). Crucially, the only VNC client that works well with this (and I've tried all the paid ones too) is AVNC from FDroid.

I had too many issues with code-server and vscodium and such when it came to proprietary extensions unfortunately, and my actual dev machine is in the cloud so I rely on the Remote Dev extension. Has to be real VSCode.

I like that you can create a PWA from a standard code-server deployment too, and that works quite nice on DeX (proper immersive-mode full screen), but for me that has been too limiting because I cannot remap my brain away from my vim keybindings, and some stuff just doesn't work in a browser context. The browser will take over certain things (like ESC for getting out of full screen or alt+tab for navigating across browser tabs rather than VSCode tabs, etc).

As a rule of thumb now, any software that's complicated enough to require tabs, I try to run native arm64 builds for (VSCode, Obsidian, browser) and everything else I can get away with kiosk-mode browser windows masquerading as apps (email, calendar, feed reader, chat).

Yup. And I'm my area, you'd have wanted to keep the dust out too. At certain times of the year when it was windy and the power went out and the ceiling fans went with it, you'd have to open the windows to cool down, but live in darkness because your candles would blow out.

I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?

I highly recommend using Andronix + AVNC

While we're discussing alternatives, does anyone know any for specifically Stripe Connect? E.g. for a marketplace app.

I think the original was Falling Sand Game, then I remember a lot of very interesting clones. https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Falling-sand_game

Not realistic (for me) the way the advisor relationship is portrayed, and not enough academic politics. I wrote about my own experiences here https://yousefamar.com/memo/notes/my/views/phds/

https://yousefamar.com/memo/log/ a mix of small projects, AI experiments, and my (rather unsuccessful) horticulture

There are dozens of us! I use the phone as trackpad when I need to. Small BT keyboard, but thinking of learning the Charachorder. Nreal Air + S22 Ultra DeX + AVNC + proot Ubuntu (via Andronix) + VSCode with the Remote Development extension has been my daily driver for almost 6 months now I think. I even play games on this via GeForce Now and a Switch Pro controller, even voice chat on Discord at the same time and it doesn't break a sweat.