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WhyNotHugo

6,714 karma · joined November 26, 2017

https://whynothugo.nl
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WhyNotHugo··on The "File" menu isn't about files
The example you're giving is for an application that operates on files. In that case, naming the menu "Files" obviously makes sense.

But the obvious example of what op is talking about is Pidgin, an instant messenger. The first menu is called "Conversations". It has actions for operating on conversations. The application can't open files, or save files. At least not in the same sense as Notepad, Paint, Audacity, etc.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Qt is fully of bugs on Wayland, some of which are unfixable because the API makes guarantees that are impossible to uphold. I've reported a few issues upstream where there's no apparent path to fixing them (after years), and have reported countless bugs to applications which are just a bug/incoherency in Qt that can't be fixed.

Flutter is an absolute nightmare to install and work with. Even now the few bleeding-edge distributions where it's available are lagging behind many releases because of the pain that it is to maintain it. I don't want that level of pain as a pre-condition to building my software.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Keyboard-driven GUIs belong in the realm of a lost art called "accessibility", which enabled people with motor issues (amongst many others) to use applications without a mouse.

FWIW, most of Windows XP's utilities and included software was perfectly usable with a keyboard alone.

WhyNotHugo··on Wi-Fi 8 is the first wireless upgrade in years that isn't chasing speed
Agree completely. Higher speeds are a bit pointless for most users. Unless you have an extremely fast NAS, where you need to copy (not stream) data over Wi-Fi, you're unlikely to be anywhere near the current limits.

I'm using 802.11ac and see no need for higher speeds.

WhyNotHugo··on Why your local LLM feels dumber than it is
Not necessarily rebuild llama from scratch, build attempting to build it without cmake and manually invoking all the build commands would be quite in character.
WhyNotHugo··on Ask HN: Alternatives to GitHub
The "social media" platform aspect is really offputting. That's really one of the aspects where it's obvious that GitHub lost perspective of its purpose.

And atproto isn't really something I'd want to be around; it's really associated with the wrong crowds.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
TUI developers could implement the same kind of anti-features. This isn't a trait of GUI vs TUI.
WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
What you're comparing is really "keyboard-driven" via "mouse-drive".

A GUI can be keyboard-driven and as fast as a TUI. The sad truth is that the status quo for GUIs is absolutely terrible, and most were rushed out and not properly tested to check if they're really usable without a mouse.

WhyNotHugo··on Stop Making TUIs
Maybe on macOS you have great APIs, libraries and toolkits for making high quality GUIs, but if you're wanting to write open source software or target open source platforms, your options are limited and poor.

On the Linux/BSD side, most toolkits are of not great quality, you'll inherit all sorts of subtle bugs and quirky behaviours. Most of the software that's of _great_ quality doesn't use the toolkit, but interfaces with the compositor directly. The effort for developing GUIs under such circumstances is dramatically higher than a TUI, and a TUI is usually "good enough".

I really would prefer GUIs for a lot of things. But when a TUI takes a few weeks to make, the equivalent GUI would take a few months to make.

WhyNotHugo··on We Rebuilt the Linux MicroVM Stack on Apple Silicon
This kind of AI-generated articles are always weird on details. Hyper-focusing on weird details while missing one higher level ones.

E.g., they use Firecracker, they build and deploy backend applications, but they needed to run the stack on macOS. Why? If you're using Firecracker to run backend applications, isn't Linux the obvious choice?

WhyNotHugo··on Version Control for Everything
That's exactly what git-annex does: https://git-annex.branchable.com/

LFS is kinda close, but you don't store the files "somewhere convenient": you need support on every git remote to handle the files.

WhyNotHugo··on Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code
No. In fact, the GPL states that the actual cost of delivery can be charged (consider this is from times when people still post-mailed floppy disks).
WhyNotHugo··on fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.
Recently featured on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49273175
WhyNotHugo··on If your agent commits a crime, who is responsible?
You honour, I didn't kill this person, the bullet flew out of my gun and was out of my control at that point, it's the bullet that killed them!
WhyNotHugo··on How Bluesky draws its logo on screenshots
OTOH, I might very well want to take a screenshot of my own bank details, transactions, or other sensitive information. It's annoying that my information is being protected from myself.
WhyNotHugo··on South Korea proposes talks to officially end war with North
After WWII, the southern part of Korean was under American occupation (it was previously under Japanese occupation, but Japan surrendered to the US). It was the US occupation that installed installed the precursor of current government, with elections which had a lot of boycotts/opposition/oppression. Right wing killed a few hundred thousands locals during these times.

To be clear: I'm not justifying anything here, or claiming that you should share this viewpoint. I'm answering your question: how could NK possibly see the US as an aggressor.

WhyNotHugo··on GenRec: Towards LLM-Native Recommendation at Netflix
> Even Steam store, a paragon of consumer utility, doesn't offer this.

Steam has a "played elsewhere" button on every game, which makes it stop suggesting the game, but take it into account for recommendations.

WhyNotHugo··on GenRec: Towards LLM-Native Recommendation at Netflix
They don't pretend otherwise, the article clarifies that their LLM has to take into account "business constraints" and such (which gave me a pretty nasty impression as I read it).
WhyNotHugo··on A spectre is haunting Unicode
I've seen Dutch comics for kids which use ÿ instead of ij. E.g.: "mÿn". In typical comic font (which is closer to handwriting), it looks similar to ij, but it's clearly ÿ.
WhyNotHugo··on Firefox is now the last major browser that still supports uBlock Origin
Qutebrowser seems to _want_ uBlock Origin-style filtering, but development on the feature has been ongoing for a long time and seems to have somewhat stalled: https://github.com/qutebrowser/qutebrowser/pull/7629
WhyNotHugo··on Qwen 3.8 27B
This is pretty much Chinese grammar with English words. In Chinese you'd say "need ask" or "I need ask" if you want to be unusually verbose, but there's no "to".

All your examples align with this too. It just sounds to me like its optimising by removing the superfluous English words and thinking more Chinesely.

WhyNotHugo··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
No bank in my country offers Unionpay.

Of course, I could get a Chinese Unionpay card/account. Now each time I want to make a payment, I need to move money there, and can I even do that easily from a European bank account?

WhyNotHugo··on DeepSeek up to 1000% price hike is live
Yeah, title needs re-doing. Link makes no such claim either.
WhyNotHugo··on How Compaction Works in Pi
Potentially: remove thinking blocks, and keep the rest. At least this would ensure that the entire context of the conversation is still there, and anything said isn't lost.

Having a second model also iterate the resulting messages and remove low-value tool calls could also be interesting. Especially failed calls which add no value.

WhyNotHugo··on Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe
An interesting move. Something that drives me crazy when interacting with China, is that I can only use American payment methods to make a payment from Europe to China. I pay a fee and the merchant pays a fee both to the US. It just sounds broken. I hope this is a step in eventually resolving this.
WhyNotHugo··on Software for One
Plenty of Android phones run Linux. If you're the kind of person who's going to AI-develop your own software for personal use, I can't imagine being adverse to running a non-mainstream OS (and it can always be a secondary phone).
WhyNotHugo··on NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year
I don't see why it would be cold. It's been in the vacuum of space for decades, it's had nowhere to dissipate heat. One of the main challenges in outer space is dissipating heat, not keeping things warm. People freezing when they fall into the vacuum of space is pure fiction: that would only happen near an atmosphere.
WhyNotHugo··on Mythos social engineering AISI INC-2026-07-28-01
Actual details on the incident: https://github.com/w1b/aisi-mythos-inc-2026-07-28-01-recover...

Both the attacker and the target account are very similar and look fake/bots.

WhyNotHugo··on A physicist rigged his pet hamster’s wheel to upload to Strava
> Over one seven-day stretch, he started within the same 10-minute window on five nights, between 9:54 and 10:04 p.m.

I wonder if this correlates with Thijs's bedtime schedule, or if the hamster really is that precise.

We feed the cat at home at the same time every day, and her internal clock definitely know when it's time less than 30' divergence. She suffers the daylight transitions immensely too because of this.

WhyNotHugo··on I'm switching my phone from Android to Linux
A great deal of shops in the Netherlands don't take cash.

Some didn't before 2020, but during 2020 the trend accelerated, and many shops stopped taking cash. Aside from hygiene, it's also easier to deal with safety for the store (i.e.: nobody can steal the cash register).

The supermarket in my neighbourhood has ~30 self-checkout machines. Only one of them takes cash. The human-checkout also takes cash, but is usually closed.

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