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jamie_ca

916 karma · joined January 22, 2009

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jamie_ca··on Jellyfin 12.0
Yeah PlexAmp is amazing. Feels like it's the only music client around these days that has a functional "shuffle by album" option, instead of treating my library as only a collection of individual songs.
jamie_ca··on Canada will match US tariffs 'dollar for dollar' as trade talks break down
Canada typically elects 5 parties, though the Greens, NDP, and Bloc are typically sub-50 in a 338 seat house.
jamie_ca··on A Sick People
>> That your kids' school is going to get shot up.

> its really not that likely. A kid in the US is far more likely to die on the way to school than get shot at school, but the former is a fear people have adjusted to.

True, it's just _so much_ more likely compared to other countries, to the point of it's not really on the radar day-to-day.

Child/teen cause of death stats https://www.kff.org/mental-health/child-and-teen-firearm-mor... call out Canada as #2 for firearm mortality in general. We've had 29 school shootings (including universities, and including "a gun was discharged in a stairwell") since 2000, with 31 fatalities.

USA is 327 with 197 dead since 2020. And yes, that's with almost 9x the population, but per capita it's still a wild outlier of a stat.

jamie_ca··on Starlink 2X Price Increase
Yeah, up 50% over 5 days, back down to the starting line over the next 30 isn't a great outlook to my eye.
jamie_ca··on How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Sure it is.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/surface#dictionar...

> : to come into public view : show up

> letters that have recently surfaced

jamie_ca··on Herdr: One terminal to rule them all
I'm sure they're roughly equivalent. Parent is probably actually asking: is there native support for managing multiple checkouts/branches for parallel work (and I would add: with lifecycle hooks for create/teardown so I can have dedicated test databases etc).
jamie_ca··on Tacky men with ridiculous glasses want you to wear them too
Ignoring the fashion context (to which, no comment), totally agree.

I have an Apple Watch SE that I got the battery refurbed after 5 years, 95% of my use is a quick check on my next calendar, setting timers, managing the morning alarm, and tracking medication and exercise. Oh, and constantly putting it into power save mode after I take it off the charger.

It's not a cellular model, so the other 5% is basically letting me know my phone has something to tell me. I have in the past tried to put games on it, but purely as a novelty.

jamie_ca··on Bitburner, programming-based incremental game
For anyone coming back, the 3.0 release this month changed some APIs (so you'll need to update your scripts) but also added a new Darknet mechanic.
jamie_ca··on Canada to order military plane fleet from Sweden in shift from US suppliers
You're rounding both ways to exaggerate your point. 2024 numbers, Stats Canada (via Wikipedia) has Alberta at 11.9% population, and 15.25% GDP.

They (and Sask too) do swing on the higher end in GDP per capita, but it's not a 2:1 by any stretch.

jamie_ca··on Declining America
My understanding is (1) yes. (2) maybe, maybe no, depends on if they're looking up people tagging you in threads? If there's signs you're scrubbing yourself out of politically controversial threads that might become problematic. (4) yes, yes, yes. (5) yes.

Assuming they do ask in the first place.

jamie_ca··on Parallel agents in Zed
Oh, yeah 100% I'm putting up scripts for them, the conductor hook is "run the one script" for setup/teardown.

The difference is removing friction, having a UI that shows me what's set up, that I don't need to hit the filesystem or git status to check in, that gives me _direct_ access to a shell/etc in that worktree path.

jamie_ca··on Parallel agents in Zed
The worktree create hook is documented https://zed.dev/docs/tasks?highlight=hook#hooks

And then I guess setting up tasks for the cleanup part, but it'd be great to see that get automated too so I don't need to remember it.

jamie_ca··on Parallel agents in Zed
I'm buying into this workflow more the more I use it, but the real gamechanger is (a) parallel threads in worktrees, with (b) enough lifecycle hooks to treat them similarly to spinning up a VM.

Specifically for me that means that after I create a worktree I get some local config files copied over and Postgres duplicating my local dev and test databases so I can test in isolation, and then when I close out a worktree it deletes those databases.

The best at that that I've found is Conductor, but I can't use it at work because we only have Copilot and they're locked to a Claude/Codex backend. Arbor is close, but it's not under as active development and has a lot of rough edges. Opencode GUI has create hooks but not teardown.

If Zed can hook that up _and_ also keep its great editor roots, that'll definitely be a game changer.

jamie_ca··on Europe has "maybe 6 weeks of jet fuel left"
"Shortages within 3 weeks" and "out of fuel in 6 weeks" feel like they can both be true at once.
jamie_ca··on Backblaze has stopped backing up OneDrive and Dropbox folders and maybe others
I've been extremely happy with Arq https://www.arqbackup.com/ for several years as a quiet backup solution, bring your own storage. I've done a few small restores and it's been just fine, and it automatically thins your backups to constrain storage costs.

Managing exclusions is something to keep vaguely on top of (I've accidentally had a few VM disk images get backed up when I don't need/want them) but the default exclusions are all very reasonable.

jamie_ca··on 1D Chess
Maybe I should've worded differently for clarity, the game doesn't go forever:

The player first revealing Checkmate ends the game. They win if their opponent's currently-chosen card is also a Checkmate, otherwise the opponent wins.

jamie_ca··on 1D Chess
Give two players cards, "Check" and "Checkmate".

Both players choose a card. Players then in turns reveal their card, and if Check, make another choice. The player first revealing Checkmate wins if their opponent's currently-chosen card is also a Checkmate.

jamie_ca··on If you don't opt out by Apr 24 GitHub will train on your private repos
https://github.com/settings/copilot/features, it's near the bottom "Allow GitHub to use my data for AI model training"
jamie_ca··on BYD is seeing a flood of new EV buyers
Call it a midrange Model 3 (RWD), ~275mi range from full, drive 250mi, 25 mins to 220mi range again?

OK that roughly lines up - the Model Y doesn't quite get there (on expected range) and it's apparently 40% of the market, but it's also pretty close.

jamie_ca··on BYD is seeing a flood of new EV buyers
> with most EVs, you can drive 500 miles with one 30 minute charge

I'm just gonna call bullshit on that one. https://ev-database.org/cheatsheet/range-electric-car looks like it's got a bunch of recent vehicles, and pegs average range at 390km or 242mi. The _highest_ range there is 720km or 450mi, and a 300KW charge runs it 10-80% (+500km range, not miles) in a half hour.

If you _don't_ have the absolute best range + infrastructure to support the charge at that rate: I've got a 2020 Kia Soul w/ 64kWh battery and lines up with the 390km range rating. Did a road trip last year. My charger caps out at 73kW or so on a DC charge, and a charge at that rate (40%-80%) gave me ~150km in a half hour. 10-80% is ~220-250km and takes an hour.

Now, I did the road trip with two kids and a dog, so an hour's potty/walk break every 2-2.5h driving worked out for us, but I don't think that's entirely generalizable. I do also agree that unless we're road-tripping, it's a nonissue. We put a level 2 charger in the garage, and plug in overnight once or twice a week and no range stress at all.

jamie_ca··on It's time to move your docs in the repo
I see this as not just internal API/architecture/code documentation, but product documentation too. We maintain internal docs about how our product is used for our support, implementation, and sales teams to reference.

Right now it's hosted externally (in our "blessed" knowledge base) but if it could be pulled into the repo, and we set an AI reviewer on every pull request to sanity check that if the changes we're doing have a material impact on the feature as described in those docs that it should be flagged (or changes proposed) that'd be a nice win for keeping them up-to-date, and it's easy enough to publish markdown as html or even script an update to the canonical site when we merge to main.

jamie_ca··on British Columbia is permanently adopting daylight time
The US decided (and Canada followed) that daylight time was more correct for the larger portion of the year, presumably it's easier to transition the remaining 4mo to daylight than it is to move 8mo to standard.

But also, all the opinion polling (business and individual) was like over 90% in favour of year-round daylight time, so here we are.

jamie_ca··on Self hosting my media library with Jellyfin and Wireguard on Hetzner
The difference is how they're consumed you don't sit down on Netflix and say "put some scifi on shuffle for 8h", you sit down and choose a show.

If you're the kind of person who would manually queue up 100% of your songs for the day then Spotify Generic songs aren't an issue. If you just hit a "2020s R&B" playlist and go that's where it feels more sketchy.

jamie_ca··on Valve reveals it’s the architect behind a push to bring Windows games to Arm
Are you looking for Crossover? It's a bit annoying to not run Steam natively (no cmd+H to hide, etc) but it's got a lot of support. Performance is decent on my M2 mini, and even cross-platform stuff like Baldurs Gate 3 is comparable performance to native.

Especially anything that Mac Steam natively calls out lack of 32bit support has good support.

jamie_ca··on Making a Small RPG
I can counter-recommend Kenney's game assets, it's got sprites, buildings, terrain, backgrounds, top-down, side-on, isometric... Lots of variety for different genres and settings, too.

https://kenney.itch.io/kenney-game-assets

jamie_ca··on Google Antigravity
Back when Cursor was new (before literally everything was AI hype) they explicitly called out that they wanted to do more in-depth integration with the editor than was possible with just the extension APIs.

Presumably that hasn't changed much. If you want to do any large-scale edits of the UI you need to spin up a fork.

jamie_ca··on Show HN: I built a self-hosted error tracker in Rails
I want to vaguely recall that they had like 4 products in planning stages for ONCE, released Campfire, then released Writebook for free, and then made Campfire free.

Lately on the podcast I only hear about Fizzy and one other unannounced SAAS that they're putting dev energy behind, nothing about other ONCE products.

I suspect that without a critical mass of usage driving word of mouth the long tail of sales was basically nil, and long-term even fairly small products weren't looking to recoup dev costs any time soon.

jamie_ca··on Rockstar employee shares account of the company's union-busting efforts
It's more fiddly in that you need to swap to desktop mode to do the installs, but you can get it set up so that your "external" games from Epic or Itch or emulators or whatever show up in the standard Steam UI.
jamie_ca··on Show HN: In a single HTML file, an app to encourage my children to invest
Curious about your opinions on WealthSimple, if you can share. I got introduced to them when they bought out SimpleTax, and so far they've been pretty reasonable for investments.
jamie_ca··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
I got the Learn Lockpicking bundle a few years back, it's a solid customizable lock - six slots, a few different pin styles, and the springs to make it work. I got practiced enough to get a 3-pin opened, but I'm definitely out of practice now.
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