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ideasman42

188 karma · joined March 17, 2016

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ideasman42··on I don't like passkeys
They're great when you don't own a phone - when you can't use random 2FA "Apps".

As many USB-security keys can be used passkeys.

ideasman42··on GPU World
I couldn't believe it when the "real" news headline was reported - destructively scanning books.

I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)

ideasman42··on Hello, me. It's been a while
It's always seemed strange to me that it's so common for people to feel the need to have continuous ... radio/podcasts/tv.

It turns out there is a fair amount of research done on this, look into:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_partial_attention

ideasman42··on ST-RS: A suckless-like ST terminal in Rust
Since moving to Wayland, I missed ST. While there are many terminals available, most seemed too bloated.

This has enough font support to be useful, but doesn't provide scrolling, tabs etc... similar in scope to ST.

ideasman42··on Zed 1.0
This was reported for Blender/Wayland, they might be able to use a fix like this: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/commit/eaf63a35...
ideasman42··on A Textual widget for beautiful diffs in the terminal
What benefits does this have over https://github.com/dandavison/delta ?
ideasman42··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)
My own modal editing system for emacs:

After using evil-mode and meow, this is a system I've come up with that addresses issues I ran into with both.

https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/emacs-meep

ideasman42··on Meow: Yet another modal editing on Emacs
Had a similar experience, tried to switch to Meow twice, it's really nice in most ways. But I found lack of vim-style repeat and accidental "dropping" the selection to be so unwieldy that I couldn't stick to using it.

Ended up writing an alternative to Meow which addresses the issues I had.

It's currently in review for Melpa, see:

- https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/emacs-meep

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJqX8Z64k0c

ideasman42··on I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens
This has also been going in in Libraries in Australia. Go to the library - toddlers Rush to play on the computer.

I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.

ideasman42··on The future of large files in Git is Git
Something they missed out with the GitLFS cons is authentication, if you don't use SSH-agent, pushing involves authenticating multiple times, sometimes more than 2-3 times in my experience.
ideasman42··on Blender 4.3
I remember downloading it from my library on a floppy disk (hoping the librarian wouldn't hear it the floppy drive working - since it wasn't allowed). :)

It's in fact still quite small if additional 3rd party libraries are disabled.

It's possible to make a much smaller download that removes OpenCollada, FFMPEG, OpenEXR, OpenImageDenoise, OpenVDB ... etc. However it's a hassle to distribute a second version at a time when the current size is manageable for most users.

ideasman42··on How to find your perfect keyboard?
You need to consider

* How much time you are willing to invest in learning something "different/cusotm".

* How much time are you interested to spend setting up your custom layout.

* How much do you care about muscle memory with other keyboards you're likely to come across.

For example, why not use something like https://svalboard.com (seealso https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataHand)

Or, do you prefer regular keys - split/ortholinear ... etc. (ergodox, dactyl... etc).

ideasman42··on Ask HN: What are you working on (September 2024)?
https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/font-topaz-ng

Re-creating a vectorized version of Amiga's system font.

Since I've always found font's online to be unreasonably opaque, the glyphs are stored in a TOML file, edited in Blender and exported using FontForge.

ideasman42··on I prefer rST to Markdown
ORG's tightly integrated into emacs & it's ecosystem. It's fine but I don't think there is an equivalent to Sphinx for large cross referenced documents, with different outputs formats & support for translations (different languages).

Perhaps some of these things exist - I may be wrong, if they do I doubt the system is as mature or well supported as Sphinx's.

ideasman42··on I prefer rST to Markdown
Strange that everyone seems to think it's simpler, it seems might be a web-developer bias here.

I'm not a web developer and I don't find markdown especially easy/pretty/simple... I find it annoying when the same markdown can't be used in different places based on the rendering engine and there aren't standard ways to extend it.

Also, having trailing whitespace as part of the spec.. tsk!

ideasman42··on I prefer rST to Markdown
Right, this is the one fairly clear down-side of RST, in practice I've found it's never been an issue - but it does seem like a strange constraint.

If you really want you can define bold italic text using some styling magic, but that's quite awkward.

ideasman42··on I prefer rST to Markdown
Keep in mind you might not _only_ be exporting HTML.
ideasman42··on I prefer rST to Markdown
I've written a few Sphinx extensions ... it seemed OK to me, a bit awkward but long term - this is the kind of thing you do rarely & use often, so how nice it is to write extensions is barely an issue.
ideasman42··on Zed, a collaborative code editor, is now open source
I've been using emacs as my main editor for years now and don't find the startup speed to be an issue - to the point I've never bothered with emacsclient:

It starts up with ~77 packages in half a second.

This is my config.

https://gitlab.com/ideasman42/dotfiles/-/tree/main/.config/e...

ideasman42··on StyleTTS2 – open-source Eleven-Labs-quality Text To Speech
Once this is working, is there a simple way to switch voices with the default downloaded models? Or does this require downloading other models or generating them?
ideasman42··on StyleTTS2 – open-source Eleven-Labs-quality Text To Speech
When trying to input a larger amount of text I get the error:

The expanded size of the tensor (4293) must match the existing size (512)

Any way to fix this from the IPython notebook examples?

ideasman42··on Show HN: I automated half of my typing
The down side of this is you have to remember them, for some time now I've been writing with n-gram auto-completion based on a large body of text (including code-comments for projects I work on), see https://codeberg.org/ideasman42/emacs-mono-complete

I have it configured to be enabled when typing in code-comments or commit logs & it often gives helpful suggestions.

ideasman42··on Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
In fact no, Python 3.10 is OK new enough.

There is still the lag though, Python 3.10 was out for quite a while before PyPy supported 3.10.

ideasman42··on Ask HN: Is anyone using PyPy for real work?
If it was relatively up to date with Python3 I'd use it, but as it lags behind considerably I avoid it, even for personal work.
ideasman42··on fe: A tiny, embeddable language implemented in ANSI C
Are there any projects using this?
ideasman42··on Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
This article misses that there are pragmatists are not the kind of technology-disinterested "normal" people.

An individual may have the same values as an early adopter, while having to make the decision to used tried and true systems for various reasons out of their control - one of which might be that you depend heavily on the continued development & support of surrounding ecosystems. Or that large code-bases can't simply switch to a new technology without it being a massive multi-year undertaking which is difficult to justify.

So while the article makes some reasonable points, I think it doesn't fully take into account that pragmatists often use what they use for better reasons than "following the herd".

ideasman42··on I unschool my 5 kids. This is how much it costs
There are active home-schooling communities where kids socialize frequently, go on camps at least once a year. And catch up informally. Also socialize with other non-home-schoolers.

An issue with most criticisms of home-schooling is they are (sometimes) true, and it depends a lot on the parents.

However, parents home-schooling are often well aware of these pit-falls and compensate, do after-school sports for e.g. So common characterizations of home-schooling often highlight all the possible down-sides and overlook many of the possible up-sides.

While not being wrong exactly, it's an incomplete picture - people talking about something they have not experienced.

ideasman42··on Flux Keyboard
At what point would the magnets lose their strength?
ideasman42··on Blender: Wayland Support on Linux
The UI works the same way it did back in the day, with updates to abstract away OpenGL spesific logic (preparing for Vulkan).
ideasman42··on Zsh 5.9
I switched to ZSH and was quite happy with it, now using FISH - mainly because of it's excellent auto-completion that displays as you type. Otherwise both ZSH and FISH are good options IMHO.

Although for typical "shell-scripting" I still use BASH for the most-part where scripting languages like Python aren't as suitable, so my scripts can be used on other peoples systems.

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