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mcjiggerlog

2,524 karma · joined January 28, 2014

mail: hn at tomjwatson.com

x.com/tom_j_watson

github.com/tom-james-watson

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mcjiggerlog··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (August 2026)
Waystops (https://www.waystops.com), a map-based travel app for working out what destinations exist and which are actually worth visiting.

Google Maps is great for route planning and looking up things you already know about, but it's pretty useless for discovery. Sometimes you just want to know what places are actually worth going to as a tourist or backpacker.

It's the kind of information you'd traditionally get from guide books, but in a format that IMO makes a lot more sense - a map. Right now the scores and content are seeded by an AI, but the idea would be for these to eventually be user-derived.

It's still pretty early and I have a WIP native app which makes it a lot nicer to interact with on mobile, but it would be awesome to get people trying it out already. It's free to use, with nothing paywalled or anything like that. I'd only think about some kind of monetization if it actually gets some traction. Would love any feedback!

mcjiggerlog··on Back to Kagi
Author of said extension here. I've been getting some reports of this happening in a few countries, namely Australia and the US so far. See https://github.com/tom-james-watson/old-reddit-redirect/issu....
mcjiggerlog··on A truck driver spent 20 years making a scale model of every building in NYC
There's one of Madrid that also dates to 1830 that is insanely impressive, too:

https://www.madrid.es/UnidadesDescentralizadas/UDCMedios/not...

mcjiggerlog··on Ghostmoon.app – A Swiss Army Knife for your macOS menu bar
You don't need to do any of that to sign and notarize an app that you are distributing yourself.
mcjiggerlog··on Is it a pint?
Well, depending on the type of beer, that's intentional. It's not always the faux-pas that it would be to do this when serving cask ale in the UK.
mcjiggerlog··on Glaze by Raycast
This looks super fun, actually.

I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?

mcjiggerlog··on Obsidian Sync now has a headless client
I've been using Synology Drive to sync Obsidian between different machines and my android phone and it works great. I've never seen a need to use the official sync.
mcjiggerlog··on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data
No, fortunately in my case it's not tempting at all.

It's easy to see how many people in less advantaged positions would end up selling out, though.

mcjiggerlog··on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data
I was just having a quick search and the only email I can find that offered a price range up front was for $0.1-0.4 per user, and that was from 2023. So I assume up to a dollar per user these days?
mcjiggerlog··on Chrome extensions spying on users' browsing data
I have published an extension [1] that has 100k+ users and I've probably received hundreds of emails over the years asking me to sell out in one way or another. It's honestly relentless. For that reason I also only trust uBlock Origin, Bitwarden and my own extensions.

I'd also note that all this spam is via the public email address you're forced to add to your extension listing by Google. I don't think I've ever had a single legitimate email sent to it. So yeh, thanks Google.

[1] https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/old-reddit-redirect...

mcjiggerlog··on Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
Not that I know of, unfortunately.
mcjiggerlog··on Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
At the time there was a bit of momentum behind the idea of mutable torrents: https://torrentfreak.com/mutable-torrents-proposal-makes-bit...
mcjiggerlog··on Peerweb: Decentralized website hosting via WebTorrent
This is cool - I actually worked on something similar way back in the day: https://github.com/tom-james-watson/wtp-ext. It avoided the need to have any kind of intermediary website entirely.

The cool thing was it worked at the browser level using experimental libdweb support, though that has unfortunately since been abandoned. You could literally load URLs like wtp://tomjwatson.com/blog directly in your browser.

mcjiggerlog··on BirdyChat becomes first European chat app that is interoperable with WhatsApp
> With the new WhatsApp interface mandated by the DMA, any BirdyChat user in the EEA will be able to start a chat with any WhatsApp user in the region simply by knowing their phone number.

Unfortunately, as it's been implemented as opt-in on WhatsApp's side, this isn't really true. Honestly that decision alone means it's kinda dead in the water.

mcjiggerlog··on Show HN: Synesthesia, make noise music with a colorpicker
RIP my phone's speakers. Maybe I should have read the post first..
mcjiggerlog··on Firefox will have an option to disable all AI features
> Imagine you have an AI button. When you click it, the locally running LLM gets a copy of the web site in the context window, and you get to ask it a prompt, e.g. "summarize this".

They basically already have this feature: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/use-link-previews-firef...

mcjiggerlog··on Codex Is Live in Zed
I tried it out this morning and it felt really rough, unfortunately.

It was super slow (thought I think that applies to CLI Codex too), it wasn't outputting any text explaining what it was trying to achieve, and it started off down a path that made no sense. Claude Code in Zed has some rough edges but it's at least usable.

In terms of GUI agents, Cursor is still a lot nicer experience, IMO. Though I do still prefer just using Claude Code cli, personally.

mcjiggerlog··on NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
I also received the same phishing email and I only have packages with a few thousand downloads per week.
mcjiggerlog··on NPM debug and chalk packages compromised
I actually also received this phishing email, also read it while half-asleep after a 6 week break and clicked on it. Luckily I was saved by exactly this - no password suggestion made me double check the domain.
mcjiggerlog··on UK government states that 'safety' act is about influence over public discourse
There oddly seems to be a concerted effort online to paint the UK as some kind of failing police state recently. This narrative seems to have really taken off with some Americans, who now seem completely convinced that the UK government is some kind of totalitarian oppressor who are snatching people off the streets.

Meanwhile, Brits just look on at this narrative wondering what the hell they're talking about. Look, I'm against this legislation too, but if you actually live in the UK or even just consume mainstream British media, you'd soon realise that this narrative that's being pushed is a distortion that doesn't match day to day reality.

mcjiggerlog··on What Is HDR, Anyway?
For me this crashed in android webview, android chrome, and android firefox. Impressive.
mcjiggerlog··on Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
I actually did the same video on desktop and the same answers worked fine! Screenshots of it failing in an android webview, but passing on desktop firefox: https://imgur.com/a/vALlFdH.
mcjiggerlog··on Show HN: Duolingo-style exercises but with real-world content like the news
Really cool idea! I tried a few Spanish ones (I speak Spanish) and unfortunately it was marking things as incorrectly wrong on 2/5 videos I did!
mcjiggerlog··on Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed
I did the same too, but by ingesting Wikipedia's current event portal. The result is a decent balance of world events, but without the sensationalism.

https://detoxed.news/

https://github.com/tom-james-watson/detoxed.news/

mcjiggerlog··on The company behind Arc is now building a second, much simpler browser
I'm glad I stuck with Firefox. At least you know it's not going to be abandoned.
mcjiggerlog··on Signal: Will leave the EU market rather than undermine our privacy guarantees
I can't find specific policy positions for Volt on encryption, but they're very positive about open source [1], so you'd imagine they'd have a pretty reasonable approach to encryption too.

[1] https://volteuropa.org/policies/european-democracy-act/open-...

mcjiggerlog··on Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
> Nobody is chopping down old growth forest to burn in electrical plants.

I wouldn't be so sure.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63089348

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/03/26/biomass-ca...

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/estonia-h...

mcjiggerlog··on Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
There's nothing green about chopping down forests for energy - biomass being called carbon neutral is one of the greenwashing scams of the century.

Whether burned forests are ever regenerated at all is something that I'm incredible sceptical about - there's very little oversight into companies' claims. Even if they are being replanted, you are tearing down potentially primary forest and important habitat and replacing it with tree farms.

Finally, burning wood is incredibly polluting and awful for anyone in the region of said power plants.

mcjiggerlog··on Portugal just ran on 100% renewables for six days in a row
Who do you think is using renewable power that is not connected to a grid? Poor off-grid communities are pretty much exclusively burning fossil fuels or biomass for primary energy, which are most certainly not carbon-neutral or good for the environment.
mcjiggerlog··on Slack: Our biggest redesign yet came to be
Not just you - if you never leave Home then basically works exactly the same as it ever has. I don't mind it at all, and can understand how for massive companies it makes things a little more manageable.
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