sombragris

> I never bought into the recent vinyl hype.

This. I'm 55. My teenage years were in the 1980s, where CDs started to appear but vinyl was still mainstream. I remember Dad having a significant vinyl library and I also got my own collection.

But I hated caring for that thing. The medium is finicky, prone to scratches and whatnot, and CDs had more length and also more range and better sound. So as soon as I was able to get CDs, I got rid of my vinyl collection faster than one does it with a hot potato in their hands. I used vinyl daily, hated the whole burden of caring for it; and against CDs, I really found them wanting.

Too bad the medium got degraded with idiots who used dynamic compression, but inherently CDs and lossless digital audio in general is way much better. I never understood the vinyl resurgence, until some people explained it as being something more performative and also a way to get better artwork and physical mementos of the music. Understandable, but I still feel it's weird.

To be honest, I'm not "anti-AI", that is, anti-LLM/agents, etc., at all. LLMs and their ilk are just a tool. You can use it, or not. And you can use it well, or not. That's it. The tool has its good uses and some benefits are genuine. I should know since I'm no developer, and I should be the prime target for vibe coding uses.

But I really hate with my guts how AI capabilities are shoved down our throats on every instance of consumer-facing software, and I hate how it's carelessly used, sometimes with devastating consequences. The latest case where some accounts were hacked by abusing Meta's AI is an example.

And also, as a teacher, I hate how AI has upended higher education. I'm still adjusting my workflow to work around student's AI-enabled cheating and abuse.

So, while it's just a tool, it's been a tool that has seen some very crappy uses, and companies are quite happy to empower and enhance humanity's worst tendencies with it.

My perspective is that of an user, not a developer. I use Deno since yt-dlp required a JS engine and recommended it. So while I don't use it for development, I have to build it for my system.

This software is a beast to build and package. On first compilation, it spent like ~5-6 hours just pulling Rust crates. This time thankfully was significantly reduced once the relevant packages were in cargo caché; only the changed/added ones were picked up.

But the second problem is even more annoying. Building Deno happily consumes about ~16-20 GB of precious disk space on space-constrained SSDs. This is too much.

I think we should go back to more efficient software, both in object code formats (the product) as well as in the build process. Why would a single JS runtime need 20 GB storage to be built? This is wasteful.

That's if you need to customize headings. I usually can keep using the standard ones, so that's not my case, and I suspect this also applies to a lot of people.

Not necessarily my experience. I wrote (and I am writing) several academic documents with it. There are its quirks, of course, but with good classes such as memoir, I don't feel the need to do a lot more than basic customization in the preamble. Still is a good tool for me.

RIP. He was (perhaps unknowingly) a great friend of my country. The Missouri Botanical Garden (under his leadership) helped a lot to help and increase the Paraguayan Herbarium collection at the Chair of Botany of the Faculty of Chemical Sciences, National University of Asunción back in the 1990s, and perhaps this association was sustained over the years. The botanists there looked up to the MBG as the landmark and example of how botany should be done.

(Some might wonder why a chemistry school has a botany department. Well, that school taught pharmacy since the 1930s and pharmacists use plants as medicines so yes, botany was part of the core school activities right from the beginning...)

> "Restricted" is much more honest regarding what Denovo does.

I'd suggest "encumbered" or even "infected".

I fully agree about the overall downward trend in quality and efficiency of GUI apps, but I also think there's an important factor in the rise of TUI apps:

People now have access to good terminal emulators. Back in the day, you had cmd.exe in Windows. Now you have a plethora of Linux/Unix terminal emulators, Terminal.app in MacOS, and Windows Terminal in Windows 10/11. These are quite capable applications able to render good, complex text-based interfaces.

I'm not a ghostty user (and neither a MacOS user). I use Plasma 6 and yakuake (which uses konsolepart; that is, it's based on Konsole, Plasma's default terminal emulator) is fairly economical in its battery usage.

So, my terminal, while it could perhaps improve in its battery usage, does not behave like this.

Wife just upgraded her laptop, and the newer one has Win11. Of course yours truly was tasked with setting it up, etc.

Oh my, now I get why people complain about advertising in Windows. The relentless noise of the OneDrive and Edge advertisements, riddled with dark patterns, is deafening. It's not like they are notifications, either, but as The Reg article pointed out, they are full-screen things that prevent you from doing anything else.

I have my own W11 setup on my laptop but somehow it never was this spammy. Well, if wifey complains about it when she's using it, I'll say: "There's always Linux...". Let's see if she wants to switch. So far, she has refused.

The whole use of AI agents in this context reminds me of the movie "War Games"

  > A strange game.
  > The only winning move is
  > not to play.

I wish I could have 1K upvotes for this.

The ability to pause is extremely important in games (at least single player ones).

I hate when games are into multiplayer modes even when played in single-player campaign (e.g.: Generation Zero) and thus cannot be paused.

Another thing that I hate in this regard are unpausable cutscenes. I remember when I was playing The Witcher 3, that at last there was some cutscene advancing some plot point, and right into the middle of it The Wife™ would barge in telling me something important that would require my attention... but I cannot pause that scene so I had to miss it while I listened to her. Why, oh why, devs hate pausing cutscenes so much??

I studied graduate school in a building designed by William B. Fyfe, one of Wright's Praire School first apprentices. It was beautiful and serene. The same city where my school is located has a house designed by Wright himself in a special neighborhood known as Heritage Hill, also a great example of Wright's style.

I felt grateful that I had to go to class every day in such a lovely building (which still stands, btw, albeit with some additions and modifications). Having the opportunity to be there was, and still is, one of the highlights of my life.

Are you sure? You used the the Fancy HTML Viewer plugin, which uses WebkitGTK2? I never had any problems with HTML Mail rendering in Claws. Your experience must be clearly peculiar to yourself.

> However, on more practical level, what are other options? Outlook, the desktop application works really well with local copies, is pretty low bandwidth and very familiar to end users.

Claws-mail (https://claws-mail.org) has a good working Windows version. Native desktop app, lightweight, extremely fast, able to handle multigigabyte inboxes for breakfast. The only drawback for some would be that it does not compose (although it can display them just fine) HTML mail, only text-only mail. This is an architectural decision.

When I saw the Monaspace family linked in a HN frontpage some time ago, I installed the whole family, and now my terminal font is Monaspace Neon. I also type my LaTeX code in Monaspace Argon. They won me over Iosevka.

Easy solution: Ditch WSL, ditch Windows altogether, and use a good Linux distro with Plasma 6.6. Problem solved.

Regardless of license status, I'd be very hesitant to trust a vibe-coded filesystem implementation with my data.

Well, a lot of people here would have loved to have 10-year old Xeons in their motherboards; while power hungry, I guess they would make good CPUs since they have good cache sizes. But no, there's no Xeons in our offers here. What people get here now are Intel Pentium and Celeron-branded CPUs, or N-class CPUs, with the onboard GPU only, 4GB RAM and 1 TB HDD running unlicensed Windows with understandable results. But when you are a digitally illiterate parent seeking to purchase a first PC for your children of school age, this looks attractive enough at a good price point.

I remember fondly the AMD K6/2 architecture. It was the CPU of a ultra-budget priced Compaq Presario laptop that got me through graduate school back in the day.

Some years later, back in my home country (Paraguay) I met a lady who had a side business being a VAR builder of desktop PCs. In my country, due to a lot of constraints, there was (and is) quite a money crunch and people tried to cheap out the most when purchasing computers. This gave rise to a lot of unscrupulous VAR resellers who built ultra-low quality, underpowered PCs with almost unusable specs at an attractive price while making a pretty profit. You could still get much better deals in both price and specs, but you had to have an idea about where to look.

Well, back to this lady. She said that during the early 2000s she was on the same line of business, selling beige box desktop PCs at the lowest possible prices. But she said that she loved the AMD K6 and K6/2 architectures because they provided considerable bang for the buck. The cost was affordable, and yet performance was good. Add some reasonable amounts of RAM and storage and you could have a well-performing PC at a good price. The downside, as she said, was that the processors tended to generate lots of heat and thus the fans had to be good. This was especially important in a very hot country like Paraguay. But the bottom line was that AMD K6 line enabled her to offer customers a good deal.

This made me appreciate what AMD did with K6. They really helped to bring good computers to the masses.

Yeah... yes. There are systems which are continuously maintained but don't break all the time. Yes, stuff will break but this is way less common in Linux.

Claws-mail has all my email for over 15 years. My inbox is several gigabytes in size, which claws handles flawlessly. And the software is continuously maintained. I'm using version 4.4.0 now, which was released 16 days ago on March 9.

So... yes.

> the issue is not that you can't do it, the issue is that you have to spend extra work at every corner to get things running, because unlike Windows Linux doesn't take your hand and hide all the nasty bits from you, while it tries to juggle a million cases in the background.

You may have to spend extra work to get things running; but once it's done, it runs forever without a hitch.

I know, I use Slackware. It's regarded as a very technical distribution and some manual configuration is expected but once it's done, it's done. I have configs from > 20 years ago that I still use without a hiccup.

For a terminal music player I like termusic, which is somewhat similar to mp3blaster, which I sorely miss.

https://github.com/tramhao/termusic

The not so good parts are 1) it is written in Rust and therefore packaging is awful with a lot of dependencies; 2) it repeats playlists by default with no option (so far) to turn that off. But there's an issue open on it and it looks like this is going to be fixed.

I read the title and thought it was odd that the MAUI project "is coming to Linux", because I had it in mind the KDE project with that name, https://mauikit.org/. Looks like what is announced in the article is something different.

The Bruderhof movement also comes from a Hutterist heritage and has several communities in the US and the world, including a historically significant community in Asunción, Paraguay (Villa Primavera)

Their website: https://www.bruderhof.com

I think a factor in Optane's demise was dishonesty on the part of low-end laptop manufacturers.

You were a poor student looking for an entry-level cheap laptop and saw a lot of models with 4GB [RAM] "memory" and suddenly there was this one model with "20 GB memory" for the same price. Seemed attractive to the regular guy, but this in fact was 4GB RAM + 16 GB Optane non-volatile storage (and maybe a paltry 32 GB SSD for the rest). Optane would be treated as a drive for storing the Windows OS.

That conflation of Optane storage as "memory", hinting that this was equal to RAM, turned many people against it once they fell victims to that bait-and-switch.

RIP. He was a giant among philosophers.

I'm firmly in favor of copyleft. But I get what chardet's maintainer has done: reimplement a piece of software. This has been done a lot of times. Musl reimplementing glibc, llvm reimplementing gcc, etc., all of them with non-copyleft licenses.

However, the purported reimplementations did not usurp the names of the reimplemented product. Reimplement chardet using AI and insisting in calling the product the same as old chardet with a new version number and a new license is, I think, not exactly honest. At least he should have used something like "chardet-ng", "chardet-fresh", or whatever, and a completely different source tree.

Not GP, but for me two of the most exciting things are the UTF-8 ready engines such as LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX, on one hand; and on the other, the fontspec package and similar ones, allowing LaTeX to seamlessly use system fonts.

On the scholarly front, the use of BibLaTeX is a significant step forward re: BibTeX.