raajg

> not losing momentum in a nerd snipe like this is CRITICAL

This line got me laughing! My nerd brain has tried so many times to convince me to splurge money with this exact line!

Have you noticed that in the last few months, Github goes down every Tuesday?

Dear Google, you've burned me so many times after I've fallen in love with your products. I have experienced the cold sting of disappointment far too many times. When you abruptly discontinue services like Google Buzz and Google Reader, you leave me stranded with no reasonable alternatives. This pattern of abandonment has plagued our relationship, instilling in me a sense of apprehension each time you introduce a new product.

I've tried so many different stacks over the years but I always ended up in the same cycle:

- Spend a lot of time finalizing the stack

- Spend a lot of time styling the new blog

- Migrate some of the posts from the old stack to the new stack

- Write a 1-2 new posts in the new blog

- Stop writing

- After a few months, I come back to writing a post and realize there are dependencies to upgrade, scripts to run, and what not. I give up for at least a year.

After 10 years of having gone into this cycle over and over again, I'm currently using the following setup:

- IA Writer -> Gitlab -> Cloudflare pages

To write a new post, I just have to create a new file in IA Writer and save it. That's all.

A bare bones shell script blog.sh converts markdown into HTML (locally on my mac), invokes git push to Gitlab. And there's a 'Pages' project in Cloudflare which listens to changes to my Gitlab repo, and just statically publishes whatever's in the 'site' directory.

I've written more posts in this new stack than ever before. And I think the best part is that I just need to 'create new file' and 'save'.

Came across the magazine for the first time and really liking the presentation, typeface and feature like saving highlights. Clean interface too!

Coincidentally started reading Solaris 2 weeks ago. About 60% in and really enjoying it. Love stories with novel sci-fi ideas and this one tackles a pretty interesting one. Would appreciate recommendations by the same author or other stories.

Other stories that I really liked because I had not thought about those ideas before are: Diaspora (Greg Egan), Permutation City (Greg Egan), Dark Universe (daniel galouye), Three Body Problem series (Cixin Liu)

ChatGPT is really good with ‘text’. So I’ve been trying to experiment with different file formats. Some notable ones:

- copy paste (emails for reservations) or type an event or multiple events and ask to convert it into ‘ical’ format. Copy output and save into file, import into you calendar

- convert natural language into json , yaml or other structured text with custom fields

Been using the RC build over Godot 3 and have been pleasantly surprised. There are several quality of life improvements - the biggest one being that you can set default font and just change font sizes without having to create a new theme for reach node - this is probably my most used new feature!!

Wonderful job Godot team, and huge congrats on the 4.0 release

Well, developers can ski of course. but I think the search engine is focussed on software dev

Example of a search query with good followup questions:

https://phind.com/search?q=why+is+funcref+not+working+in+God...

The hints for followup questions is an interesting feature and something that could become a USP for this search engine. The followup questions were at times exactly what I wanted to ask next and sometimes thought-provoking and I was compelled to click and ask them.

The performance could be improved. I've having to wait several seconds before the summary is created.

I asked ChatGPT to write a poem based on this post. Here's what it wrote:

---

Two hearts, two minds, working side by side

In pursuit of a mission to make AI safe and wide

Microsoft’s investment allows us to stay true

To our capped-profit company, our mission, and you

From cloud computing to real-world use

We collaborate to ensure our systems are not abused

OpenAI API, Azure’s OpenAI Service, and Designer too

We’re working side by side to make our visions come true

Together we review, together we synthesize

Together we build, together we realize

The potential of advanced AI that’s powerful and safe

Ensuring its benefits can be shared far and wide

If such unreasonably good music can be created based on information encoded in an image, I'm wondering what there things we can do with this flow:

1) Write text to describe the problem 2) Generate an image Y that encodes that information 3) Parse that image Y to do X

Example: Y = blueprint, X = Constructing a building with that blueprint

The conclusion is in line with Tim Ferris's 'Slow Carb Diet'

Similar to https://pocketbase.io ?

For non-tech folks, I have been at loss to figure out how to convince them to use a password manager! Easy passwords repeated over and over again, and saved in plain text on one of the apps which itself has a simple password is the workflow that I'm seeing all the time. And tried many different ways to convince using a password manager and then forgetting about passwords but to no success. There's always this reluctance to change the workflow that they've been using for a decade or more

No chair ($0)

Been using a standing-only desk for about a decade now and the only thing I'd recommend.

The housing market in Toronto is a hot mess at the moment. When I told my friends in US that even for renting a condo, I had to put an offer that was more than the asked monthly rent they were surprised and wouldn't believe me!

The excessive imbalance in demand Vs supply also means that the owners have > 10 offers for each house and the prospective buyers/renters are just putting blind offers in the hope that their offer is more than most of the other offers.

I have the Steam game too, but I'm somehow enjoying the browser version much more. Perhaps because of (seemingly) light-weight nature

Wow, the entire town is URL encoded!! Example: http://oskarstalberg.com/Townscaper/#IzpjOEQ0ejP2X9w-b--c-X-...

Dispora is my all time favorite. Highly recommended. I've read it cover to cover twice, and plan to do again soon. Reading diaspora, especially towards the end, feels like expanding my mind to think at a scale that I have really never tried to understand before.

The most ridiculous thing I've heard about all week

Followed the links and came across https://small-tech.org/ which is pretty interesting. An example of how technologist can make a dent in how technology has been progressing thanks to an ad-driven internet.

I use instapaper solely for its 'highlight' feature. Strange that other read-it-later apps don't provide it (at least in their free versions).

Love the cloning feature! Haven't seen it in other tools.

Really cool project - and thanks for open-sourcing it. For a couple of years I had used Emacs and the one tool that I really miss is 'org mode'. After switching back to VIM I have tried different plugins but none get even a little closer to what you can do in org-mode.

This project looks promising and I'm giving it a try

Yeah, I stumbled upon Greg Egan too in one of the HN posts - I think it was about 'Best Science Fiction Books' or something.

I've never read anything like Greg Egan. While reading 'Diaspora' I could feel my skull expanding - he pushes you to think at a magnitude we're not used to. The last few chapters of Diaspora are something I often read myself to bed.

Great work. Issue #1 was really good. Very excited to hear about the release of Issue #2

Another Amazon Echo. Not at all interested.

I wish there was a text box:

Please never send me the latest updates about Google Home.