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ahaferburgon Fuck it, make it anyway

I disagree with the "nobody cares about my tools anymore because they could order it themselves." They didn't, they wouldn't, and they won't. It's not about how the work got produced, it's about having an idea, getting over the initial hump, and seeing it through. It's pretty much the same as before, except that the hump got a little easier.

A couple months ago I made a task tracker. Actually I didn't make it, I started making it. It's far from done, not only because it still has bugs, but because I still don't know exactly what I want it to be. I'm still discovering its shape.

I would never have started that without the AI assistance, and never would have grown it so quickly to what it is now.

If your moat is just one prompt, that may be an issue. Most of the time it's less about how to get somewhere and more about what is interesting or tasteful or useful or fun.

ahaferburgon Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

Saving lives is not the priority.

Transportation efficiency is not the priority.

Follow the money, and you'll find out the priorities.

ahaferburgon Casey Muratori – The Root of the Root of All Evil – BSC 2026 [video]

At some point I stopped caring about Handmade Hero because he just never got out of the global illumination rabbit hole. He should have followed that as a side quest, behind a feature flag. Maybe one week for progress on the game, one week for rendering experiments. He didn't seem to make much progress, and it just fizzled out as he ran out of steam. Finishing should have been a bit higher on the priority list. It was just not setting a good example from a project or self management perspective.

ahaferburgon Hilariously fast volume computation with the divergence theorem (2018)

The emphasis here is on the mesh being simple and closed. Make sure to validate these preconditions before relying on the output.

Similar formulas exist for moments, to compute the inertia matrix for a rigid body.

ahaferburgon Show HN: FnScribe – Open-source, offline dictation for macOS

Are you aware of https://handy.computer/?

ahaferburgon Claude: System Prompts

You forgot to mention the global dairy and meet industry, which is by far the biggest percentage of the global water usage.

ahaferburgon Prioritize mental health, and why communication is so important

Link timed out for me.

Mirror: https://archive.ph/LlX04

ahaferburgon How to convert between wealth and income tax

Except that billionaires don't hold cash but assets. And they did not necessarily pay taxes on the value of those assets. The idea that billionaires have vaults of cash in mountains is not a sensible basis for any argument.

ahaferburgon How to convert between wealth and income tax

The point of a tax is to steer society, not to compute some sort of equivalence. Billionaire wealth has increased by way more than the 5 % mentioned over the last couple of years. This oxfam article [1] says 81 percent in 6 years. Wealth for the middle class means safety and stability. Wealth for the richest of the rich means power, and that threatens any democracy. The goal should be to prevent extreme inequality. It's supposed to be one person=one vote, not one dollar=one vote.

The example mentioning $100 is just tasteless. Wealth taxes are relevant only to people for which $100 means absolutely nothing whatsoever.

The article carefully avoids clear words. What's your conclusion here, dear Paul? Why are you intentionally staying vague? Nobody asked how to convert between wealth and income tax. So exactly why are you educating the public about this topic?

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-wealth-j...

ahaferburgon Key, in sight – A guide, of sorts, to keyboard customization

Will check out keyd and wtype, thank you for the pointers! If you don't mind, could you go into a little more detail on your journey? What do you use it for? What roadblocks did you encounter that made you try out different tools?

On Windows I was a happy Autohotkey user. For the same functionality I'm using kmonad+bash+ydotool+systemd now. I use it to make CapsLock a modifier key. Mostly for navigation, e. g. Caps+HJKL for arrow keys, Caps+E/R for Ctrl+🡰/🡲, i. e. jump to the next/prev word. Also moved some special keys closer to the home row, e. g. Caps+F=Backspace, Caps+D=Delete, Caps+V=Enter.

I do not like kmonad at all. The configuration language seems poorly designed, and OS integration is non-existent. Last week I spent about 90 minutes with Copilot trying to get the kmonad script to autostart. And it still doesn't work properly. I have a macro that types the current date, and I just couldn't get it to work when running as a systemd service. Umlauts also don't seem to be working anymore.

ahaferburgon Grand Theft Oil Futures: Insider traders keep making a killing at our expense

Yes. It's a conditional probability.

P(W | You're a sucker) = 0.5

ahaferburgon OurCar: What I learned making an app for my family

Fun project. The article is a bit light on details. I find it astonishing that a project like this runs into performance issues. I would have liked to learn more about what these resource-constrained widgets looked like, what they did, and what caused the performance issues.

ahaferburgon GameStop makes $55.5B takeover offer for eBay

There is no valuable information in that comment.

ahaferburgon A desktop made for one

I think some of these obstacles are documented here. https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode

I found the asm skill file quite interesting. Gives a glimpse into a world I didn't know still existed. Very cool! https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/skills/x86_64-...

Thank you for sharing!

ahaferburgon Before GitHub

A uni prof of mine insisted on hosting the work group's SourceSafe repo on his laptop. You could not commit changes when he was out of the building.

ahaferburgon Before GitHub

For the name: Use something with amber in the name.

ahaferburgon It's OK to abandon your side-project (2024)

Maybe you could try to find somebody to take over or help you maintain it?

ahaferburgon If America's so rich, how'd it get so sad?

Can be explained with one word: Inequality. America being rich is a smokescreen. Some Americans are very rich. Most are not. The very rich Americans are not sad, actually.

ahaferburgon Arguing with Agents

I'm not a native English speaker, so I don't really have much of an opinion about LLM writing. It probably doesn't stand out to me that much. Your reply made me curious though, so I asked a bunch of "is this AI writing" websites about this article, and they landed on about 7-8 % AI writing, so pretty unlikely.

On the article itself, I found the title quite relatable. When coding agents became a thing, I kept arguing with LLMs before realizing how pointless it is. I really liked the turn the article took, relating the communication breakdown to neurodivergence, and the inherent bias that current models bring.

It reminds me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-sides_model

According to this communication model, there's four aspects to communication between humans. Apart from the factual and the appeal layers, it highlights other aspects, which it calls self-revealing and relationship layers. It is somewhat surprising, and definitely remarkable, that these also matter when communicating with an LLM.

Thank you for posting the article!

ahaferburgon Want to write a compiler? Just read these two papers (2008)

I liked this series of lectures on Youtube.

Compilers - Alex Aiken | Stanford

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEAYkSg4uSQ3yc_zf_f1G...

Mentioned in another comment, but with a different link.

ahaferburgon Arguing with Agents

> Autistic person writes article describing a mismatch between communication styles of autistic people with non-autistic people.

> HN commenters express their anger about the writing style and how it was probably generated by AI.

Peak HN.

In all seriousness, I really liked the article. For me, it was well written.

ahaferburgon The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces

Totally missed that. Thank you!

ahaferburgon The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces

What happened to Andreas Kling?

ahaferburgon The Case for Apolitical Tech Spaces

Why?

ahaferburgon Parakeet.cpp – Parakeet ASR inference in pure C++ with Metal GPU acceleration

Agree about the latency requirement.

There's https://kyutai.org/stt, which is very low latency. But it seems not as hackable.

ahaferburgon US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land

It's not AI, it's AI companies, at the behest of their stewards and owners.

People with money have been competing with you for your assets for a long time. And they will keep outcompeting you.

ahaferburgon Audio is the one area small labs are winning

Yes, but, you see, guns are merely tools. If you give these guns to the right people, they will actually create more work for the doctors, and everybody wins.

ahaferburgon Nonograms: a practical guide with interactive examples

A couple years ago I wanted to design a custom Nonogram as a birthday present. We had a photo of the giftee and pixelated it. But how do you make sure the Nonogram is uniquely solvable, without any guessing? Of course I wrote a solver in Python.

But now I needed to test the solver. I had a couple of magazines with Nonograms. Transfer those manually into the computer? No way! So I wrote a utility that uses OpenCV to parse these low resolution pixel grids from photos, from the solutions page of the magazine. This was way harder than I imagined. A huge waste of time, but quite a fun project on its own.

For the solver I added one technique after the other. In the beginning it would not be able to solve all puzzles. Then it gradually became more capable, until it would no longer get stuck on the test inputs. A list of techniques like this would have been very helpful!

The solver was still quite slow, but it was really fun to watch it fill in the solution pixel by pixel. It took about 10-20 s to solve the larger puzzles.

ahaferburgon CachyOS: Fast and Customizable Linux Distribution

I know what you mean, but there is bitrot. I'm currently trying dwm. Zero out of the three patches I downloaded from the website applied successfully. I'd call that bitrot.

Not sure how much I like "hand-write your own code from snippets" as a way to configure software.

ahaferburgon I don't care how well your "AI" works

  The AImish