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figbert

332 karma · joined November 24, 2019

https://figbert.com
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figbert··on Apple's Dimensional Drawings
All of their mechanical CAD? No- some of that is handled in Shapr (https://www.shapr3d.com/). Given the state of the industry and the discussion in many sibling comments, it wouldn’t surprise me if this share is growing. A little birdie tells me they work closely with the Shapr team on certain feature developments in the app, and from my own personal experience I can tell you that I much prefer the Mac-native modeling experience than any of its gargantuan antiquated peers.
figbert··on Exit the Cave
You must have skin in the game. The real shame shall be cast upon those without the courage to try, not those who fail.

Or, put another way:

> I don't see how you can hate from outside of the club. You can't even get in!

figbert··on The creator of Jujutsu has joined ERSC
Nick is great! Met him at the Recurse Center. Brilliant designer.
figbert··on A U.S. Strategy to Prevent the Creation of Mirror Life
Extremely relevant: https://www.hoover.org/research/biosecurity-really-strategy-...
figbert··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
Base Power is, at present, installing nearly 100 40kWh batteries on homes per day throughout Texas and the Chicago area. It is doubling total deployed capacity approximately every six months (currently at a bit over 0.6GWh total, to hit 1GWh by EoY). Read: at scale.
figbert··on Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election
Well he's clearly getting funding from somewhere. Look at how his bin has improved over the years!
figbert··on In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices
Installing on people’s houses isn’t just about install costs (the numbers for which above I highly doubt). There’s a huge additional benefit, and cost reducing factor, that comes from installing storage where grid connection already exists. Instead of building out battery farms in the desert and piping the power into urban centers over cables like a power plant, you can install capacity and run it essentially p2p. This is a big deal.

I’ll add that we’re not DIYing this. Professionals are manufacturing and installing these at scale. Also, though I’m not sure how it works outside the US, the government doesn’t build the grid. Energy providers and utilities are also companies.

figbert··on Exapunks (2018)
Reminds me of one of my favorite games: Hacknet (https://hacknet-os.com - https://store.steampowered.com/app/365450/Hacknet/). Likely contributed in a meaningful way to me becoming a programmer. I think I have Zachtronic's SHENZHEN I/O on my wishlist—will have to check out his whole catalog.
figbert··on Show HN: TownSquare, a tiny presence layer for websites
Matt Webb made a version of this (and wrote about it) a while back—Cursor Party: https://interconnected.org/home/2024/09/05/cursor-party

I contemplated implementing it on my site for a while but decided I didn’t want to add the JavaScript. Still find it a really cute concept.

figbert··on London Mayor Blocks Palantir
My understanding of Palantir's actual, technical offering is profoundly boring: a hosted platform that connects to existing diverse sources of data and organizes them according to well-defined (by Palantir's FDEs) useful schemas. I have developed this impression through actually building a product on the Foundry as well as several rounds of interviews. Frankly that is profoundly boring. The anti-Palantir propaganda, portraying them as this all-powerful Skynet software, is as much a part of their marketing as anything else.

On the other hand, their effectiveness appears to be less in question: the article above claims that Scotland Yard found hundreds of police officers to have been abusing their posts in various ways through use of the Palantir system. I am not a fan of corrupt cops, so I think this is good. Similar stories exist elsewhere, like a 68% reduction in 48-hour mortality at a Tampa hospital through deployment of Palantir's anti-sepsis monitoring tech.

Thus I arrive at the conclusion that this decision is ultimately a loss. Khan's legal standing appears to rely on them not investigating other potential suppliers—I'm not sure that there are any, and "develop these simple data systems in-house" is a bad option because if they could have they would. I suppose ultimately I don't think that Palantir's "bad vibes" among constituents should impact governments' desire to be effective in the programs they purport implement.

figbert··on Radicle: Sovereign {code forge} built on Git
It's not a technical issue but a UX one. It would be a pain to set up pushing via SSH to a knot container on my server because I am use SSH for the host already. And specifying a port is ugly. Doing this over the internet negates all these.
figbert··on Radicle: Sovereign {code forge} built on Git
Well said, in particular the last sentence: IIRC at the time I was seeking to delete a repo that I had made accidentally so as to clean up my profile.
figbert··on Radicle: Sovereign {code forge} built on Git
I discovered Radicle back in 2020 (when their website looked incredible: https://web.archive.org/web/20201201030505/https://radicle.x...). I bounced off of it, in part due to being unable to effectively delete repositories. They used to have an FAQ about that—looks like it's gone now, though the public-private repository area is much more fleshed out (you can make a repo private, in which case no new updates will be publicized but the history will still exist). In truth, it's just profoundly difficult to effectively "delete" things in a decentralized system (see: Matrix, BitTorrent, et. al.). But definitely something to consider; people accidentally upload secrets, and want to have some recourse when that happens.

Still, time has passed and I have become more interested in GitHub alternatives (https://figbert.com/posts/ideating-tragit/). Will likely end up moving to Tangled. But first I need to add support over there for pushing over HTTPS...

figbert··on Ask HN: Who wants to be hired? (February 2026)

  Location: Palo Alto, CA, USA
  Remote: Much prefer in-person but if compelling I can be flexible
  Willing to relocate: Yes, anywhere in the world
  Technologies: Software (Go, Swift, Gleam, Ruby, Python, WebDev, Deployment), Hardware (CAD, rapid prototyping, DfM, drafting, mechanical engineering), Systems Thinking
  Résumé/CV: https://figbert.com/files/cv.pdf
  Email: figbert [at] figbert [dot] com
I'm an industrial design junior at Stanford University looking for summer work at the intersection of software and hardware. Want to have a tangible impact on the creation of meaningful products. Love working on diverse problems, diving in on areas where progress has stalled and getting things going again. Feel free to reach out.
figbert··on Ask HN: Share your personal website
https://figbert.com

coolest damn site on the net

figbert··on Rio de Janeiro's talipot palm trees bloom for the first and only time
Invest in an ad blocker.
figbert··on My first impressions of Gleam
I was tricked into trying Gleam earlier this summer, and really liked it! I anticipate that I will at least use it for all future web projects (one example: https://github.com/FIGBERT/bdab) due to my serious JavaScript allergy.

I will note something that might be of use for the work in this particular article: https://hexdocs.pm/gleam_stdlib/gleam/dynamic/decode.html

Gleam Decoders are something I haven’t fully wrapped my head around, but are supposedly very powerful and do exactly what this article is focused on (parsing input data into Gleam types) in a more(?) idiomatic way.

figbert··on Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer
Made something similar that is probably my proudest work: https://figbert.com/projects/roll-call/

I increasingly have come to believe that it is the screen itself that lies at the root of the ills of technology. It brings so much benefit—and so much convenience, from its flexibility—but it is in its fundamental glow-y rectangular nature that sucks us in, crushing our attention, posture, and so much else. Was incredibly fun to experiment with something radically different.

Excited to see where things go from here.

figbert··on ASCII Silhouettify
Coolest page on the site: https://meatfighter.com/ascii-silhouettify/color-gallery.htm...
figbert··on GPUs Go Brrr
Appreciate the recommendation, will check out the course!
figbert··on Orange Site Hit
my personal favorite hacker news tui: https://github.com/bensadeh/circumflex
figbert··on Johnny Cash Has Been Everywhere (Man)
Is there a link to a version of this that's still live? Would love to check it out.
figbert··on Show HN: Invoice Dragon – An open source app to create PDF invoices
I live in the terminal and recently found https://github.com/maaslalani/invoice, which looks really cool. Still will likely stick with my own solution (a little ruby and some tectonic latex [https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/en-US/]), which lets me create PDFs more in-line with my aesthetic.
figbert··on Passwords Are Fine
The argument that passwords are acceptable as long as everyone practices good "hygiene" strikes me as having many parallels with the argument that C code is memory safe as long as it is written properly.

I'd rather just have memory safety built in to the language I'm using—I'm not sure exactly what the equivalent is for passwords, but I don't think I would oppose it.

figbert··on Show HN: Readwise Reader, an all-in-one reading app
I would second the idea of custom storage backends, but also warn that Google Drive and Dropbox aren't really under your control either.
figbert··on Use `Python -m Pip`
If I'm understanding correctly, this basically just kicks the ball a little further down the road...

You shouldn't use pip directly because you don't know which version is the one in your path. Ok: the same applies to the python command?

Calling pip is version ambiguous, but so is calling python.

figbert··on Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
It is! Highly recommend.
figbert··on Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
Thank you! Unfortunately, we don't yet support v2. The upstream library we use (see: sibling comments) hasn't implemented support.
figbert··on Show HN: Mabel – a fancy BitTorrent client for the terminal
The font isn't strictly required – Mabel functions just fine without it, you will just have one or two characters that don't render properly.

I suppose we could make Nerd Fonts opt-in via the config, but I don't think it's that unusual an ask. See: https://starship.rs

The images in the README have been updated.

figbert··on Adblocking people and non-adblocking people experience a different web
> You know, like how it used to be with RSS.

That, my friend, would be because it is RSS!

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