pmontra

When they tell you that Linux has issues with suspend, reply that Windows has issues with paste /s

The sort of things that a human developer can do better than an AI is telling a founder that it is a bad idea to use country flags to select UI languages because languages have names and don't have flags and somebody will be pissed off by having to select the flag of some other country, maybe one they don't like much. I've been doing this today for the nth time probably because crappy sites spoiled a lot of people. I provided plenty of examples (check the EU web site locale selector) but it's not settled yet. An AI won't put much of a fight and will soon comply. I will too, I advise, customers put money on the table. Their privilege.

The issue of critical software is not much different. The people with the money eventually decide how to spend them and what to prioritize.

The Wizard of Yendor.

The point is that it is hard to prove that that 5 days code will never break. In the eyes of a customer a feature ready in one morning and in production before evening is a truly great thing and they know that even before AIs developers were shipping a lot of bugs. Some of them were evident only weeks, months or even years after the commit that added them. A customer of mine got a few hours of downtime a few Saturdays ago because some code from 2021 did some potentially long operation in the threads serving requests instead of doing them in a background job.

So what can one do when they expect that you use an AI to speed up development and they manually check features before they are deployed? You develop with an AI, check that it works, deploy to preprod, let the customer do its tests, business as usual.

Sometimes it is handy when doing something like ASCII art or drawing ASCII diagrams. Imagine editing a much more complex variant of this

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  | AB |
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Finally, Shift-INS pastes from clipboard on Linux. A keypress saved compared to Control Shift V in a terminal. However they don't paste from the same clipboard: one is the primary selection (middle click) the other is the actual clipboard. However when I Shift INS into this textarea on HN I paste something else so I don't really know the rule and I stop here.

I always use middle click, which is a hardware button below my touchpad and it is one more saved keypress.

I agree that "privacy is not the currency Google deals with."

However when I run an adblocker and Blockada on Android, when I use alternatives to the YouTube app (and Google is technologically fighting them) when I don't log into Google, then those exchanges happen with very little of the currency Google is interested in.

I thought it was enough to add please and thank you to every prompt.

It's two totally different matters.

I won't be first, second or third in the AI race. I'm not even participating in that race. I don't care who wins. However my private data are mine and I do care about them.

It's Google and those other companies that may not care about my privacy, because the AI race is more important to them.

If AI is going to cost too much, I will use a cheaper one (Ferrari or FIAT?) or if every AI will cost too much, no AI all and there will be billions of people like me.

I'm willing to pay time or money to avoid ads, not to be spied and harassed by companies making me offers to buy something that almost certainly I don't want to buy. Those companies should pay me a percent of what I make them save by not buying ads to serve me.

And eventually when I want to buy something I research it and buy it and nobody had to pay anything to Google.

Emacs does it. I don't remember which package I'm using and my laptop is out of reach now, but it leverages LSP. However my point is that I never used that functionality in the last months. I discovered today that M-. doesn't work anymore. It's the key combination to jump to the definition of something. Of course I used to hit it all the times. Maybe I broke it weeks ago with some configuration change. To give you some context, I'm a web developer, frontend and backend, currently Ruby, Python, Vue. I've been doing this job for more than 30 years.

Claude in a terminal is becoming more and more my IDE. I use emacs to do some edits or to look at some files, but orders of magnitude less than when I wrote all the code.

Syntax highlighting? Yes, for readability. Completion? I noticed today that maybe I broke the language server for Ruby but I didn't bother to investigate. Maybe next week, or next month.

Git log, blame, diff, yes, as usual.

I don't see a bright future for IDEs. Vi or emacs from the 90s could be all we need.

Non developers using AIs to vibe code their projects maybe won't need any editor at all, nor an IDE.

Can you clone or sync hardware keys? Maybe they don't fail as much as computers do but they can be lost or stolen like the keys that we use to open (dumb) doors.

My non hardware key is a keypass file that I update only on my laptop and I sync to my other devices. I have plenty of backups. It does also the TOTP required to login into some customers servers.

What if the old Mac is dead, stolen, lost? Those are the scenarios in which one recovers on a new machine from a backup.

Maybe a browser extension could inject JS in a tab to redefine all the WebGPU API into a noop.

Yeah, but what is a medium? Every material is basically empty space with an atom here and there. So there is not a hard boundary for a particle to instantaneously slow down from speed of light in the air to speed of light in water. Some of them will travel a bit deep before hitting their first H or O or electron, or some salt ion. Anyway, it won't travel faster than c.

Yes, I kind of discovered that in a dream, in which I extinguished a fire by teleporting away oxygen. It worked, until I stopped teleporting. The oxygen came back and the fire started again. When I eventually woke up I thought about it and I told to myself that I should have chilled the place, not that it matters in real life. I was also proud of my subconscious' understanding of physics.

Thanks

The back button works at its best when it closes an app and it restores the one that opened the previous one. There could be no in app back button to do that. However the back button used to be an always available hardware button or a touch one on the bottom bezel. It's optionally visible now (I'm on an old Android phone so I'm not up to date with the latest OS) or a gesture, right? So app designers must design as if it does not exist.

Too bad that it does not seem to work on mobile. I did not find any way to move around (add arrow buttons? Are we supposed to move around?) and if I double tap I change the direction in which I am looking but not very predictably. Maybe my phone is too slow.

Not really. That keyboard adds up size and weight and it will be used very little. Furthermore I would be tapping on it with two fingers now instead of sliding my thumb on my screen, which is faster.

What I miss is a compact and light phone. Less than 5 inches screen, 120 grams. We had them, we could make them with no bezel now, so even smaller.

This company https://nexphone.com/ has been doing something like that since 2016 but of course in a different way, by attaching the phone to a laptop shell or more simply to a USB hub.

I did that a few times with a 10 inches Samsung tablet and a Bluetooth keyboard, using the DeX UI. It had Linux on DeX with some Ubuntu version. 16.04?

I can't think about a good way to do it with a phone screen, unless you know that you can find a TV set to connect to. But hotel rooms usually place their TV sets very inconveniently and if you stay at a friend's home, their TV sets will be not so well placed too to be used as a monitor. So maybe a costly large foldable as your next phone?

I also want a small phone. I was happy with a Sony Xperia X Compact which is one inch shorter than my current Samsung A40, which is shorter and lighter than almost everything else.

What if this is true mid or long term but by not participating to the AI race one gets poor or killed in the short term? The only way out would be that all parties agree to stop. There are previous examples (e.g. nuclear proliferation treaties) but it gets hard to do it with hundreds or thousands of parties.

That did not work well enough for Kim Dotcom.

Same thing in Firefox on Android but I used uBO element picker to select the header and nuke it. There is a link to the home page on the HTML below it and links in the footer. There is little to gain from that sticky header and much to lose.

I confirm that. Then I opened the page in Chrome on Android and it scrolls nicely there too. So maybe they broke only desktop browsers.

I noticed

> The modes are the load-bearing piece:

Why do people write like LLMs? Maybe they delegate all the work to a LLM and don't have the time or the will to edit the copy. How about telling another LLMs to replace at least the most common LLM patterns with something human looking?

By the way that is exactly what humans do when playing with white in high stone handicap games. They place their stones all around the board, start little fights everywhere and wait for the weaker player to misread or misevaluate something. Suddenly two or three fights merge in a one sided larger one and part of the handicap is gone.

We were hand writing PostScript code that drew pelicans at job interviews in the 90s, then they sent it to a printer a stored the page in a file drawer /s