HN user

twoquestions

1,820 karma
Posts16
Comments485
View on HN
Steam Machine 1 month ago

Prebuilt machines have a terrible reputation, I could see people wanting this for a PC that you don't need hardware expertise to boot up. If you're reading this you could probably pick out your own parts and assemble them for cheaper, but for people who want a console-style plug-and-play type experience I could see the market for it.

Pricey, but so is any other sort of electronic entertainment hardware these days.

Trip report: FFXIV does great, but both Hades and Hollow Knight have atrocious lag. I don't know why different games are different for Bluetooth lag performance, when they're all great on my Windows machine.

I hope the Bluetooth audio latency issue I've been having is fixed. I have two Bluetooth pairs of headphones, one open-ear and one noise-cancelling, and they both have either a half-second or one-second latency between what happens on screen and the audio feedback.

Luckily wired headsets work perfectly fine.

Stalin's Russia didn't have a cult of machismo quite like Germany or Italy did, they measured themselves by industrial and intellectual might, rather than how manly they were. Yes there are quite a few similarities I'll grant you, but they didn't have that particular weakness.

Migrating to the EU 4 months ago

For the longest time it was an economic axiom that regulations drive off businesses, and here stronger laws are directly attracting business!

This, I've been using SpecKit for a while for my side project and it's been working beautifully. I generally spend more than half my time working on the specs, until implementation is an afterthought, Claude already knows what to write and where. The /speckit.analyze and /speckit.clarify tools are extremely useful for me.

It's extremely refreshing to see the editor's memory and processor usage be smaller than the webapp tab I'm working on.

I'm really liking it thus far!

Vibe engineering 10 months ago

People keep comparing LLMs to automated looms, but I find them more comparable to cruise control than autopilot.

I've been working on a character sheet application for a while, and decided to vibe-code it with Spec-kit to help me write up a specification, and for things I know it's been great. I tried using Claude to make it into a PWA (something I don't know very well) as an experiment, and I've found the nanosecond the model strays out of my experience and knowledge everything goes straight to Hell. It wraps my codebase around a tree as if I'm not paying attention while driving.

It's a tool you'll have to learn to use, but I can say with absolute confidence it's no replacement for actual skills, if anything it highlights the gulf between people who know what they're doing and people who don't, for better and worse. It sacrifices some of the 'code under your fingers' feeling for management tasks, which I personally really like, as I've always wanted to document/test/code review/spec things out better, and I now understand the pain of people who'd rather not do that sort of thing.

https://github.com/github/spec-kit

Probably the same thing I'm trying to do as a side gig now, building software to help solo/small company artisans keep track of customers/payments/taxes.

Essentially, make tools for others in my position that are going to try selling pottery or soap until they can hopefully turn it into a full time thing.

Hardest possible concur with everything OP said.

Knitting and other fiber arts are the grandmother of computer programming, and I'd go so far as to say your CS education is incomplete without at least passing knowledge of fabric weaving and especially weaving machine history.

Ignorance is not your fault, unfortunately they can't teach you everything in college, and people tend to downplay the importance and history of "women's work", much to all our detriment.

https://www.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/objects-and-stor...

Planetfall 1 year ago

You owe it to yourself to give this a shot if you have the time. I find it less of a Civilization game, more a sci-fi horror novel presented with Civilization mechanics rather than paper, if that makes any sense at all.

Play on Civilian and comp-stomp the AI, that way you get to see all the Special Project videos which are really excellent. I really wish they let you see them if someone else gets there first.

It's one of the best science fiction stories I've experienced, along with The Last Question (very short) and Outer Wilds (which is some of the most profound 20 hours of solitude I've had).

POTUS fired two Dem members of the FTC, and the remainder voted to delay enforcement.

Some people like this, where companies get to effectively scam people by deliberately not enforcing rules preventing it. I don't know why people like this. I speculated that it was due to some dumb new bigotry of some sort, as a wild guess as to why people like it when the gov't harms people for no reason.

Why do regular people like this? For real, is it all "Those People Have it Worse", or do they just like the government making things worse for it's own sake?

There's people who like this who will never benefit at all, does anyone know why?

I don't get it. Then again I don't get the appeal of tearing the wings off of flies either.

I find that Copilot's suggestions are not quite what I want in most cases, so I have to edit what they give me anyway.

I know Primagen had a similar experience that you had, he found it useful to keep the AI chat out of his direct editor, and that's how I've been using it too.

I got those and I love them, but that same thing happens to me if my sideburns get in the way of the speakers. It's a good signal to me to get my hair cut.

Mostly, I use them to listen to stuff in the house and still be able to carry on a conversation without having to doff my headphones, just pause whatever I'm listening to! A friend also uses them in a wood shop that doesn't allow headphones, but he listens to podcasts to help get through the day.

I'm sorry they don't fit your use case, and I'll have to keep that in mind as I get back on a bike next year.

You just described Numenera, if you've never read/played it I'd highly recommend giving it a shot!

It takes place billions of years in the future in what it calls the "9th World", when some mysterious beings just went away.

What are you going to be using it for? Gaming? AI model training? Wordpress dev? Writing?

Your answer will change radically depending on these things. Personally, an out-of-support Macbook Pro from 2016 with Fedora on it has worked really well for me.

I'm genuinely sorry you have assholes for neighbors.

If it's any consolation, not every rural area is like that, at least around here people just want to be left alone.

Personally I'd buy one of these in an instant, I like being able to enjoy the peace and quiet!