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dickiedyce

166 karma · joined November 10, 2016

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dickiedyce··on Show HN: The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude
Someone would have done it soon anyway...

https://github.com/dickiedyce/mrso

The naming is from Mrs Overall, and her inability to keep from slopping tea out of of a cup.

dickiedyce··on Ask HN: What's your daily driver keyboard?
Daily driver is a Svalboard. Before that, there was a Rolio, Corne-ish Zen, Moonlander, Ergodox EZ. All were great. I tried to make the MoErgo Glove 80 and a Characorder Master Forge work, but without sufficient success. For 'thinking not typing' Svalboard takes the biscuit. I use tap-dance, with 1 extra momentary layer for macros. Layout-wise, I went with Workman. Makes Helix interesting, but it's muscle-memory now. What is unplayable now... minecraft lol.
dickiedyce··on How does IKEA come up with names for its products?
Nope. Real Scots history. See also ‘piece’
dickiedyce··on OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining
I’ve always thought of both as the departmental equivalent of “cleanup crew to aisle nine“
dickiedyce··on Nyctography: A substituton cypher by Lewis Carroll
An excellent excuse to pull out the 3-D printer.
dickiedyce··on Show HN: Wyrm – Solve algebra by touch, built on an open-source soundness engine
I thought the difference of two squares example was odd. Maybe I just didn’t get how to factorise into brackets rather than out of them.
dickiedyce··on Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming
Although, didn’t it appear in a popular culture reference? I seem to remember an episode of “elementary“ that mentioned it.
dickiedyce··on Idler Magazine
Cracking magazine, and the frequent Idler online interviews generally thought provoking. Excellent cast of occasional contributors too.
dickiedyce··on The AI backlash is only getting started
"...and no one would feel the difference" does speak to the inadequcy of bureaucracy and government execution. Maybe we wouldn't notice the difference with our interactions with bureaucracy and government, but fairly certain we'd notice the jobs market being flooded with Golgafrincham's cast-offs.
dickiedyce··on Free SQL→ER diagram tool, runs in the browser, nothing uploaded
Small? Yes, but perfectly formed!

(Only minor tweak one could suggest would be multiple table selection for dragging... but to quote Frasier: "Think about it, Niles. What's the one thing better than an exquisite meal? An exquisite meal, with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night." Niles, raising a glass: "Ah, of course, to impossible standards.")

dickiedyce··on Am I German or Autistic?
My dearest childhood friend is half Italian, allegedly.

However, his woeful time-keeping is so poor that we began to suspect that he was indeed simply from another planet... with a longer day.

dickiedyce··on 4D Doom
Hmmm... Agreed that they're mostly 2D sensors, but apart from near-field the post-processing brain can use depth-cues to for us 'see' in 3D. Also, you don't see in 3D unless your head/eyes/target is moving, right?
dickiedyce··on Arno's Engram Keyboard Layouts
Some explanation of the design principles would be welcomed. The workman (https://workmanlayout.org/#introduction ) website is really interesting in this regard, even if you disagree with the end product. [As an aside, the Svaalboard has been my saviour, that and a ludicrous amount of QMK customisation with tap-dance functionality.]
dickiedyce··on Have a fucking website
I daren’t ask “What have Millennials ever done for us?” because I have a suspicion that it would be a surprisingly unfunny answer.
dickiedyce··on Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw
... or disastrous comedy?
dickiedyce··on Show HN: DenchClaw – Local CRM on Top of OpenClaw
I'm in.
dickiedyce··on Substack confirms data breach affects users’ email addresses and phone numbers
Ooopsie... possibly a problem for some folks: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
dickiedyce··on US Gen-X is definitely feeling the pressure
Interesting framing of the data.
dickiedyce··on Impeccable Style
I'm glad it's not just me. One would hope that `BEFORE` and `AFTER` would imply `WORSE` and `BETTER`, but from their examples they somehow they managed to shoehorn `MEH` in there.

And if they need to explain it... ;-)

Tufte it isn't.

dickiedyce··on Show HN: WalletWallet – create Apple passes from anything
Code39 would be really useful ;-)
dickiedyce··on Show HN: HN Wrapped 2025 - an LLM reviews your year on HN
Actually on the nail. Mine actually made me laugh out loud. https://hn-wrapped.kadoa.com/dickiedyce
dickiedyce··on Proximity to coworkers increases long-run development, lowers short-term output (2023)
1 company? 2 buildings? Over < 5 years? Any evidence for "dampening short-run pay raises but boosting them in the long run" must be pretty sketchy.
dickiedyce··on Orion 1.0
I'm a keen Orion user, and general Kagi user - early adopter since June 2022 (So kool-aid? ;-) ) That said, I have Chrome installed for mandated office work (profile managed by IT ;-( ), Brave for LinkedIn & YouTube... but for everything else I use Orion. Recent versions have been rock solid, and it does exactly what it says on the tin.

My only gripe is that the favourites bar isn't right-click editable like Chrome or Brave - assume this is down to Webkit. Apart from that, joy to use and develop against.

dickiedyce··on GPT-5.1: A smarter, more conversational ChatGPT
Warmer = US centric? I always think that the proliferation of J.A.R.V.I.S.-type projects in the wild is down to the writing in Iron Man, and Paul Bettany's dry delivery. We want dryer, not warmer. More sarcasm, less smarm.
dickiedyce··on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
LOL. Yes, Scottish Water was never privatised, and that's been a great story of success... even if it's only because it's not any of the failed English water companies.
dickiedyce··on Britain's railway privatization was an abject failure
As a Scot who travels on Scottish, English, and Welsh railways, and on Swiss and German railways... Scotrail (now in Public ownership) is pretty good. And I say that as someone in the Highlands, which has had the worst of it in the last 30 years. There's been recent investment, and even the re-opening of closed lines and finally new stations where they've been desperately needed (Inverness Airport, Kintore, Laurencekirk). But still plenty more to do. I visit the south semi-regularly, and worked in London in the 90's. Rail around London seems to have really improved over the last few years. Swiss Rail (SBB) is still the poster child for a decent rail system. Clean, on time, reasonably priced (compared to UK rail), and easy to use. What was eye-opening for me was recent travel in Germany (München to Basel in CH)... DB was dreadful and the stations were in an awful state of repair.
dickiedyce··on Why effort scales superlinearly with the perceived quality of creative work
Also - the speed and quality improvements when having to redo homework lost to an undiscerning canine companion is also a corollary of this. Perhaps the time it takes to 'redo' is a better measure than last mile - it's the entire effort, minus the initial solution-space exploration?
dickiedyce··on Show HN: I've build a platform for writing technical/scientific documents
No, this is an argument against any new online-only software for students where your work is being stored in a cloud, and not in an open format locally on hard drives.
dickiedyce··on Monodraw
It's a really cracking little app, and great for inline docs.
dickiedyce··on Material 3 Expressive
From the blurb: "Expressive design makes you feel something. It inspires emotion..." Yep, sea-sickness, quesyness, nausea, and a growing desire park the DeLorean back in 2010 or skip to 2035. The whole 'emotion' thing = funky palettes is irritating beyond measure: the next 2 years of websites will be like working inside a TV advert for Jaguar.
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