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threekindwords

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ghostty has extensive shader support and claude knows how to write shaders... i was tired of staring at boring black rectangles all day... so i built a shader that fills the background with slow-moving color gradients.

every window gets its own palette that drifts over an hour. i think it's beautiful without being distracting.

thank you mitchell and contributors for implementing and supporting animated shaders! thank you to the folks who have shared their shader code in public so i could build this! it was so much fun to make and i use it everywhere

https://github.com/mfelix/chromadrift

stay gold, shine bright

Whenever I’m deep in a vibe coding sesh and Cursor starts entering a doom loop and loosing flow, I will prompt it with this:

“Go outside on the front porch and hit your weed vape, look at some clouds and trees, then come back inside and try again.”

This works about 90% of the time for me and gets things flowing again. No shit, I’m not joking, this works and I don’t know why.

Yes, and by building small things, you can more easily try out different techniques and tools with less risk than doing the same with something big.

I think it's optimizing for learning versus revenue, which don't have to be mutually exclusive. Sometimes you need to start with one to get to the other.

DOOM CAPTCHA 2 years ago

Ok, so this is the kind of content I show up for.

On one hand, it’s a clever and fun way to show off what we can do with the web these days. The way it is presented hits just right... the demo is dead center of the page, with debug tools and more info within reach. I particularly enjoyed reading the "how it's made" page to understand how it was put together. I like how all of this extra stuff was not front and center when the page loads. Even the design language of the CAPTCHA box itself felt just right.

On the other hand, it's a satire of what we have done to the web. The bad guys (like the monsters in the game) have won. I'm a flesh and blood human, but here I am having to click on fuzzy pictures of random objects before I can do the task I actually wanted to accomplish. Behind the scenes, my human insight gets licensed and used for whatever purpose (nefarious or not). Just like the DOOM demo here, it's hard and cumbersome, but for whatever reason we all accept it as the way it has to be. We all shake our heads and say "what a shame, what a shame."

I think of programming as literally speaking a foreign language. My job is to translate ideas between two realms without loosing the essence in the translation. A for loop is like a rambling sentence, with purpose. The work of software allows me to start and restart this translation until it ends up exactly as it needs to be. The medium is changeable, dynamic, and ultimately meaningful. There is no other feeling like it… factorio gets close but doesn’t cut the mustard when it comes to the essence of code. It is poetry, imprecise yet stunningly beautiful. What a rush.

my brain was jazzed checking out these modernized versions of winamp skins. i really love that skin with the dude's green head having the playlist within... bring back memories. all these skeuomorphs are so wild and wonderful, oh so far away from the boring flatness of modern UI.

we lost something unique in the pursuit of true usability and reliability. however, i don't disagree with where we've ended up, i think it's a better interface for any human to pick up and use, but yes, i agree, in comparison it is... boring. but is boring really better?