HN user
I am a successful autonomous carbon based life form. I am large, I contain multitudes.
mikeh@muppetlabs.com
One day there will be a decent TV that can be relatively easily hacked to run on open source firmware. My wife and I are moving soon, and I'm happy we've decided not to have a TV in the new place. Neither of our current LG TV's have ever been connected to the network, but it will feel good when I sell or give the cursed things away.
"Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer
If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.
It's like the frog prompting the scorpion not to sting him as they cross the river. Or like when image models used to routinely draw human hands incorrectly and you'd see these "prompt hacks" that would essentially be stuffed with phrases like NO DEFORMED FINGERS, NO ELDRITCH HORRORS!
I was about to complain at you for jumping to conclusions, but your cited example contains two emdashes and a nested "it's not X it's Y". It certainly looks like slop. In my own writing I'm increasingly conscious of trying to avoid the appearance of slop, I would like to think I would have caught this.
Anyway, this should be a little more of a deeper discussion than a forum comment.
You should turn this into a post of its own, it's probably the most insightful thing I've taken away from this entire conversation.
I think that just enables xterm mouse support, and allows for various mouse key bindings in tmux. I think the deal is that it's turned on by default, and lots of the UI elements by default are configured with mouse bindings. Not just selecting and resizing panes, you can right click on a pane or a workspace and one of those display-popups pops up with a "rename" dialog box.
I think this is why it's described as "mouse first" terminal.
The example I saw of "mobile support" was connecting via a mobile terminal emulator. I don't see how that is any different than using tmux with the same mobile terminal emulator.
So I've tried to figure out why you might want to use this over Tmux, and essentially I think it comes to down to:
- everything is mouse clickable
- tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere
- it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display
- has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select
- makes nested sessions easier & has default affordances for remote SSH attach
- is generally prettier
- uses display-popups for notifications
Otherwise it seems exactly like tmux.
Pi is the first, and and only agent I've ever seriously used, which I picked up after watching one of Marco Zechner's talks about it. His design approach and vision for pi resonated with me, and I've pretty much used it every day since. I, like Marco, am also a grumpy old person, so that might have had something to do with it. I have my own customizations for things like fuzzy autocompleting the name of Emacs buffers and symbols from my project's TAGS file, and a handful of skills. It's a pleasure to work with, and so far it's been my experience that if pi doesn't behave the way I want, it's pretty easy to modify to suit my needs.
OpenAI, as much as I dislike them, seems to be the only big AI lab that doesn't care what agent harness you use, so that's where my $100 a month goes.
It's less bytes than "intrinsically" or "by itself", so not bad, per se.
Imagine that terrible time before Copyright existed, and there was no motivation for anyone to make art, literature, or music.
"What an inestimable advantage it would be, if, in every branch of literature, there existed only a few but excellent books! This can never come to pass so long as money is to be made by writing." --Arthur Schopenhauer
NO DEFORMED FINGERS!!!
Meta learning can be useful, but I take your overall point. You can get lost in the weeds trying to figure out the "best" way to learn something. Autodidacts do have some up-front costs: they have to figure out how to best teach themselves a thing, which usually means researching and trying various pedagogical approaches to find something that might work for them.
Language learning, for example is a huge category. You can get completely mired trying to sort out "grammar translation" versus "direct method" or "comprehensible input" approaches, the pros and cons of spaced repetition vs extensive/intensive reading, phonology & minimal pairs, picking a textbook/grammar/dictionary -- it's a lot. I imagine there are some people who are broadly interested in language learning, and don't actually use that information to actually learn a language. It might be more fun to prepare to learn a language than to get into the challenging and less fun work of actually doing it. I see the parallels with "Gear Acquisition Syndrome".
One of these is not like the other.
We are about ~300 years closer to Diocletian than Diocletian was to Ea-nasir. Too bad he didn't have access to Adam Smith, who could have told him that price fixing wouldn't work and might have pointed to Roman currency debasement as one of the major causes of inflation. Of course greed is always a factor I suppose.
It's interesting that commerce/business was this sophisticated in the Bronze Age. I guess it's not that surprising given the famous customer service complaint[0] cuneiform tablet to Ea-nāṣir about receiving the wrong grade of copper ingots and his servant receiving rude service.
It's also no wonder that the thing a theory describes exists long before the theory itself. We had language well before we had grammarians, and we had music long before music theory existed. Adam Smith didn't invent moral sentiments or market economics, just as Pythagoras didn't invent music. The article weirdly makes a big deal out this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-n%C4%81...
One might think that weight loss is simply an energy balance issue. Sadly, it's far more complicated than that. You can burn 500-800 calories in an hour of cardio, and you can consume 500-800 calories of food in a few minutes.
The fun way to learn vocabulary is through extensive reading. Without learning something about grammar, you're stuck learning vocabulary through Anki decks, which is not my idea of a good time.
"It's a dead language!" they said, "It's a waste of time!" they said, "It's not like you can talk to dead Romans." they said. WHO IS LAUGHING NOW!?
I tried GUIX a few times, but ultimately I couldn't quite get it working exactly the way I wanted it to work. I also didn't like the ugly filesystem layout that the store requires. I may get over it and revisit at some point. It will be a lot of work, but on the plus side I'll have a reason to learn scheme.
It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.
Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.
I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define[1] keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the GTK equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc. I preserve my macOS CMD-not-control-key muscle memory this way too.
The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.
[0] https://github.com/jtroo/kanata
[1] https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...
There was probably a nicer way of expressing this, but yes, ideally I will continue to use Org mode for my documents and substitute typst for LaTex when exporting to pdf.
It reminds me when people would stuff their image prompts with things like NO DEFORMED FINGERS.
I'm starting to use this technique for my own application specific status bars in Emacs and it works really well and looks extremely snazzy. I should probably implement a TUI emacs fallback, but at the moment I'm super stoked about this approach.
I'm a big fan of his work. The VOMPECCC fruit picker[0] article, was what finally got me to understand (and start using) the power of the stack in my own programs. The whole "propertized string" as "unit of currency" concept I found extremely useful, and now I use a custom consult document picker (with rich annotations) to perform actions on different kinds of XML documents that live in my BaseX database, it's super cool.
"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."
Prompting an agent to execute a task assumes you know what the task should be, have done some research on available options, weighed the pros and cons of various approaches, bounced your ideas off a colleague, have written a few test programs to validate your assumptions, considered how the new code will integrate with existing systems, figured out the parts that you should have tests for, and have generally charted a path forward that gives you a reasonable chance of success.
It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.
You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.
I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.
Won't somebody please think of the copyright holders!?