hiAndrewQuinn

This sounds like the kind of thing Hannibal Lecter would write before he eats you to convince you he's actually doing it for the common good, you just can't fathom it.

Can't say enough good things about fish from a UI/UX experience. There's a reason Shell Bling Ubuntu [0] swaps out your underlying shell to fish. Unless you need a terminal up ASAP for scripting purposes or shelling out (in which case dash is still much faster than bash) it's just such a better experience.

[0]: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/shell-bling-ubuntu/

I do this all the time with Vim. To the point that it astonishes me that this isn't like the third or fourth thing people learn about Vim.

You can just record and play back your exact keystrokes like a _Super Smash Melee_ game plays back your inputs to replay matches. If you can figure out how to do any mildly complex action once you can literally replay it a thousand times. Just like AutoHotKey! To my that's the essence of citizen programming!

A lot of these tricks come down to knowing there is a better alternative program somewhere out there in the universe, and then installing it. I happen to keep a shell script handy for these situations, which automatically installs most of the options listed here:

https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

More readable presentation: https://hiandrewquinn.github.io/shell-bling-ubuntu/

Among other things, fzf gets installed with all the proper key bindings, ripgrep, fdfind... basically every papercut I could find between going from a vanilla Ubuntu or Debian box to a configured one is handled in this shell script.

Would you switch positions with King Richard II, then? That's a hypothesis we can test since you're here.

Unfortunately, you either put all the commercially interesting bits on your own server and let your customers eat the latency, or you ship it to the edge and let piracy decimate your profits. I don't think there is any technical way out of this, and probably not any reasonable legal ways.

I like TUIs, and I chose to build e.g. https://taskusanakirja.com/ as a TUI for a couple of reasons, some of which are in this article and some not. Cross platform compatibility was a big one since at the time I started building it I didn't actually have a Windows or Mac machine handy to test this out.

One thing I think which is overlooked is the raw feeling of speed a good TUI can give you. The lowest grade consumer laptop could probably download my little dictionary program and still get true search-on-keystroke performance, because there is virtually nothing slowing down that path, no animations, no nothing. Now most of that comes down to the data structures involved and making sure nothing ever has to go over a network, but I still appreciate the sheer simplicity of the approach.

It's also nice to know that I can probably recompile this same exact code 50 years from now and still get it to run exactly as intended, since GUI frameworks have waxed and wanted in popularity, but terminals truly don't seem to be going anywhere.

I don't see why we would weight those points of reference stronger than the ones where people claimed "this time is different", and it really was different.

In fact there's almost nothing similar between my day to day life and the day to day life even of my grandfather, to say nothing of the Irish peasantry I came from 500 years ago, say. The number of correct everything-is-differences per year seems to be going up, not down.

>Prior remote work success (not just experience) is the best indicator but it’s hard to evaluate, too. Some of the most difficult remote hires I’ve worked with had past remote work experience, but it’s only after being hired that you learn they struggled at those companies too.

I often tell people that I'm unusually well suited to remote work because I've had a lot of practice. Starting in high school I was out more days than I was in owing to health problems, yet I still managed to knock out 11 AP classes because I got really serious about reading the textbook and actually studying on my own time. This was even before I discovered spaced repetition systems.

By the time I actually got to college I realized these techniques were not only more effective and enjoyable for me than sitting down in lectures, but that the vast majority of students never actually had to build these muscles to begin with. They really struggle when the courses get too big to cram into a class session, but it's not because they're dumb or anything - it's literally just an endurance sport they've never played.

I feel those same muscles are the ones I've been using in remote work, which I've had the good fortune to do my entire career in at least a 60% capacity and more often a 100% capacity. Remote work likely feels deeply unnatural at first, to people who aren't used to putting in focused sweat at a desk in their own room far beyond what traditional education typically requires.

I hope my own children develop this ability too, although I'm not really sure how to get them there.

Do I have to give just one? I have a whole script to install them! https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/shell-bling-ubuntu

Looking over this list I would recommend you check out `fd`, a much faster `find` with an interface that actually fits how people tend to use the tool.

`lnav` is also an excellent local log viewer if you allow TUIs.

>They could pass this liability on to their employees, who would probably cover it through insurance, like doctors.

That seems like the ideal situation to me, yeah. In general more professions should shoulder individual risk and more insurance firms should arise to hedge those risks.

>When you see a plant where workers are cutting corners on quality, they're probably under pressure to do so.

Correct, and pressures cancel each other out. A reverse pressure of holding individual liability is a good way to push back on pushing back on quality.

Same here, thought it was Mullvad at first causing issues but I guess it's more common than that

Life insurance companies and federal agencies estimate the value of the life of an average US citizen at around 10 million USD, last I checked. If you consider that anywhere close to accurate, it's hard to imagine anything you could do with a higher ROI than having a child, at least from a public goods perspective. You'll never see the 10 million but they're out there enjoying themselves because you helped bring them into being. And if you consider it a woeful underestimate, or that it's wrong to put a price on something priceless, that argument only gets stronger.

>I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.

It's actually pretty simple to understand how I offer them grace, it's because they're terrible businesses with terrible financials. Airlines run on brutally thin margins, barely 5% in the best of years and usually closer to 1-3% in average years, and frequently wipe themselves out, as Spirit did here. They generally make less than 10 USD in profit per customer.

Because I don't want to pay an extra 100 USD for a marginally nicer experience, and w neither does anyone else. I want the cheapest possible way to be thrown through the air across an ocean. I'm not going to fault them for acting like assholes when I pay them like an asshole.

>Isn't my poor writing style basically my signature? How do you wipe that?

Stylometry obfuscation is a surprisingly strong point in favor of using wholly LLM generated writing to rephrase your points. If someone sees a — and doesn't know you're intentionally trying to snuggle good points through blandly mellifluous prose, they'll just assume you're like every other boring dangerous professional out there. Nothing to worry about.

Much obliged. I like using footnotes to get more unhinged than the actual post, I think simonw reblogged one of my footnotes a few months back which was just a personal note and that was killer.

The natural landing point for info you'd want an agent acting on a user's behalf but don't want to drag the user themselves through is probably just an AGENTS.md file or something I would think

If it's a custom Yocto thing or it involved buildroot at any state of provisioning it gets the moniker "quasi-embedded" to me. Doubly so if it never actually connects to the internet, unlike these water controllers, apparently.

To me that speaks to a fundamentally incorrect economic structure. I bet PLC programmers could command much higher salaries - at much higher levels of risk - if they held more liability for things going wrong. That, in turn, would spur a lot of economic development around unfucking the field.

On the other hand, markets are generally smarter than I am. Much like how US citizens living in the EU are basically barred from investing in index funds due to two fundamentally incompatible regulatory regimes, there are almost certainly factors here I'm not seeing and wouldn't see without a couple weeks of research and talking to people who have tried and failed as this.

A guy can dream, though.

It's not for nothing that de facto founder of the Singaporean state Lee Kuan Yew wooed top men and women into working government jobs by ensuring the government buildings had A/C. I would far prefer an inflexible air conditioned 9 to 5 than a flexible perpetual sauna.

secret counterexample. people have been failing to learn vim for literal decades

Really, they should have merged this into some competing database for optimal marketing, like MongoDB. This is kind of like if you bought an Adidas sneaker and it said Adidas on it, like, yeah. I know.

Land value tax solves this

Here in Finland my company has a dedicated testing team that's almost at large at the actual engineering staff. We sell a combined hardware-software stack, though, and it's basically a contractual requirement in our industry. They are very helpful to be on good terms with when working on a given project, they often know ways to work with the gestalt I never would have guessed in a million years.

>The goal of refactoring an agentic code base is to spend tokens now in refactoring to make token consumption for future work lower.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Deciding to refactor should be like a discounted cash flow analysis but for tokens!

This still seems off to me. If I were a potential creditor in such a closed loop system, and I was told I absolutely could not charge interest due to these monetary supply constraints, I would either just stop lending entirely or I would demand something that isn't strictly denominated in money to make the risk I'm taking on, etc worth my capital outlay.

But then eventually, if the system were sufficiently complex, I'd probably tire of whatever complicated barter system we have already going on, and then it's likely some third party would step in offering something that's totally not money, dude, trust me, it's just like a handy clearinghouse of IOUs for people engaged in the trade of these non-monetary favors for favors...

Some people who hold or offer such IOUs might then take the bold step of calling them non-exclusive, as in I will mow the lawn of whoever happens to have my "one lawn mowed" voucher, I just happened to originally give it to this first guy, I have no idea what he did with it after that... Other people realize this "non exclusivity" deal actually makes the voucher strictly more valuable, you can do more things with it than you could otherwise... You see where I'm going with this. It's not passing my sniff test.

This isn't really surprising in a low margin industry. If you are making a 2% margin on the average perfume bottle, and then you liquidate it at -3% because it's cheaper than destroying it, you can accidentally end up anchoring customer perceptions on a price with like a -1% margin which actually will destroy the business over time.

High margin industries get more complicated to model, of course.

Prior art also has https://litestream.io/

On the other end of things, for tiny responsive web apps that don't necessarily even need their own built in database, like e.g. real time API dashboards, I've been using my PAHG template a lot lately [1]. Pico.css, Alpine.js, Htmx, Go. There's no reason one couldn't hook this up to SQLite, of course.

[1] https://github.com/hiAndrewQuinn/pahg-template

It's closer to only 10% the money to spend on such things, and that gap is closing rapidly. The poorest African countries these days still have a GDP in the low thousands per capita, and poorish central Europe trends to have low tens of thousands per capita. I could see 5 families in rural west Africa or something deciding to pool their funds to get one shared Starlink connection if they didn't have cheaper internet available some other way.

Moreover the utility of internet connection faces an extreme amount of diminishing returns - hear me out on this. You can very easily download an entire plaintext book on a subject you need to study up on in a few seconds with even a 100 Kbps connection, from any where and for any reason, and that's immensely valuable if previously you didn't have access to it before. You can't stream YouTube on it, but a YouTube instructional victory makes whatever you're doing merely easier, not possible.

WhatsApp and text messages, as well. It's very cheap to send a couple bytes back and forth to coordinate eg local market prices in fish, and so if you and a couple buddies team up to get one starlink connection you can very quickly tear the volatility of your local first market prices to shreds. I'm extrapolating from an earlier study that found just such an effect after cell phones were introduced to rural areas.

I guess my overall point is don't rule out the transformative effects that a few very reliable low bandwidth connections can have on an area. If the Romans discovered AM radio (possible given their late tech) we'd probably all still be speaking Latin, even though they couldn't play Fortnite.