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ydant

759 karma · joined May 15, 2010

Email is <username>@<username>.com
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ydant··on Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?
As a workaround, /btw will force it to answer based solely on context and isn't allowed tool calls
ydant··on If it is worth keeping, save it in Markdown
I appreciate the mention of FSNotes (and in turn textbundle). Somehow, despite trying tons of note taking apps and formats, I don't remember ever coming across mention of this format specifically.

http://textbundle.org/

My biggest beef with org mode and all of the markdown apps I've tried is the asset management problem. For me screenshots are almost as important as the text part of the note, and are usually strongly tied to a single note. I've taken to using apple notes at work just because it "solves" that well enough, but I'd really prefer to work in markdown/plain text (except for the images).

ydant··on My Life in Weeks
Interesting perspective.

Though, I'd argue it should be 18 years free by their math. They lump a subset of leisure activities into another category as if those are beyond your easy control.

Commuting, working, grooming, etc - sure, you could optimize those, but it's harder to deviate from the norm. But TV/video games? Doesn't seem like the same discussion.

ydant··on How Copyover MUD Servers Worked
This is a fun blast from the past. One of my first real programming experiences was working as a (the) programmer on a MUD and I remember learning about this technique somewhere (I think just reading about how forking worked) and then figuring out how to implement it on our MUD.

It felt absolutely magical to be able to hot deploy changes without kicking everyone off of the server - but felt even more magical to have gotten it to work.

The MUD community was a fun early introduction to open source. People (many of them probably "kids" like I was at the time) sharing various patches and features. It felt so cool to release something and have other people use it and provide feedback. Like the author says - at some point the MUD itself became a lot less interesting than the programming.

ydant··on Show HN: Daily-notes.nvim – fuzzy time journal and planning plugin
Smart Connections[0] plug-in for Obsidian is worth checking out.

It does a really good job of indexing (with local or OpenAI embeddings) and RAG allowing you to chat with various models about your notes. The chunking and context algorithms it uses seem to be well designed and find most/all relevant details for most things I try to discuss.

It's well implemented and provides useful and interesting discussions with my journal/notes.

0 - https://github.com/brianpetro/obsidian-smart-connections

ydant··on Google open-sources the Pebble OS
Redirects to Pixel watch for Android user agents.
ydant··on Magic/tragic email links: don't make them the only option
That has the problem of opening up an attack where the attacker requests the sign-in link, the person receiving the link blindly clicks it, and the attacker now has access.

People blindly click links all the time. It would have a low success rate, but would be more than 0%.

ydant··on Memos: stick private notes on your email
I can't tell yet if I'll actually end up using this in practice, but it's pretty well implemented.

The memo is stored as another email in the "Memos" folder as a reply to the message being memoed, so the data will be backed up naturally by any email backup and does show up, in a sort-of-awkward way, in other non-Fastmail mail clients.

In the Fastmail client, the memo shows up, highlighted, in the message list before the normal message snippet, and at the top of the message when you edit the message.

Seems pretty well thought-out.

ydant··on Google Pixel 9 Pro
It's just an anecdote, but from my one-time experience the 90 days restriction isn't a hard restriction with TMobile. Service worked fine for 5 months for a family member abroad (in a single country) with no issues or messaging from TMobile about an overstay - although this was on a family plan with other phones in the US for the majority of that time.
ydant··on Things I know about Git commits
I'll absolutely reference an issue number in a comment (with some context comments as well) in cases where it makes sense.

Sometimes you need to go back and read through a lot of context understanding why a block of code does what it does, and it's a lot more efficient for the rest of the time to have a quick reference to the full explanation rather than pages of comments giving that context.

ydant··on Things I know about Git commits
Thanks for the hint about `--intent-to-add` / `-N`.

There's constantly new things to learn about git. I use `git add -p` extensively, but never thought to check for an option like that.

ydant··on PySkyWiFi: Free stupid wi-fi on long-haul flights
Re: T-Mobile - On United you can just set your laptop user agent to a mobile one and sign on with your phone number. Works fine for both the short period and full flight options.
ydant··on Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road
Looks to be this rider - Eugène Christophe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8ne_Christophe

ydant··on Tour de France: How professional cycling teams eat and cook on the road
I enjoyed this show about feeding the tour riders:

Eat. Race. Win. https://www.amazon.com/Eat-Race-Win-Season-1/dp/B086HVQ5RB

Related, Unchained (https://www.netflix.com/title/81153133) has been an interesting view into the race although food isn't discussed at all.

Before Eat. Race. Win. I had this entirely uninformed idea the food the riders ate would be incredibly streamlined and controlled - I was thinking something like Soylent and protein powder and supplements. To see them chowing down on "normal" food and drinking alcohol (at all) was surprising for me.

ydant··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)
Your "join" page is a little UX uncomfortable. Middle click doesn't work for the description or apply link (just loads the whole join page again), and the apply expands/embeds the greenhouse.io page (in a narrow column) instead of opening it in a new window.
ydant··on Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
Related - this might be helpful to someone.

ImageMagick can do a visual PDF compare:

    magick compare -density "$DENSITY" -background white "$1[0]" "$2[0]" "$TMP"
(density = 100, $1 and $2 are the filenames to compare, $TMP the output file)

You need to do some work to support multiple pages, so I use this script:

https://gist.github.com/mbafford/7e6f3bef20fc220f68e467589bb...

This also uses `imgcat` to show the difference directly in the terminal.

You can also use ImageMagick get a perceptual hash difference using something like:

    convert -metric phash "$1" null: "$2" -compose Difference -layers composite -format '%[fx:mean]\n' info:
I use the fact you can configure git to use custom diff tools and take advantage of this with the following in my .gitconfig:

    [diff "pdf"]
        command = ~/bin/git-diff-pdf
And in my .gitattributes I enable the above with:

    *.pdf binary diff=pdf
~/bin/git-diff-pdf does a diff of the output of `pdftotext -layout` (from poppler) and also runs pdf-compare-phash.

To use this custom diff with `git show`, you need to add an extra argument (`git show --ext-diff`), but it uses it automatically if running `git diff`.

ydant··on Diff-pdf: tool to visually compare two PDFs
I use some custom tools for PDF comparison (visual, textual, and perceptual hash) for my personal records/accounting purposes.

A number of the financial and medical institutions I deal with re-generate PDFs every time you request them, but the content is 99-100% identical. Sometimes just a date changes. So I use a perceptual hash and content comparison to automate detecting truly new documents vs. ones that are only slightly changed.

ydant··on How to prolong lithium based batteries
Bolt will cool itself, but it does so more aggressively when plugged in (even if not actively charging). I always leave our EVs plugged in when it's over about 80F and below freezing because of that.

My 2021 is complaining loudly (running the cooling system) about the heat-wave today.

ydant··on Migrating from Java 8 to Java 17: A Comprehensive Guide to New Features
If you're using AWS ElasticBeanstalk Tomcat distribution, 21 isn't supported yet. I realize this isn't a huge segment of the market, but it's probably not the only example.

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticbeanstalk/latest/platform...

21 is supported for Amazon Linux 2023 and the JavaSE ElasticBeanstalk offering, though.

ydant··on lsix: Like "ls", but for images
They don't (on iTerm2), which makes this of fairly limited utility for me, since my next operation would be to copy the filename and act on it.

I mainly use a modified version of iTerm2's imgcat script for browsing images (remotely through SSH and locally) and knowing the filename.

This lsix tool is faster than my imgcat based script, though, so it looks like I have some room for tweaking/improving.

ydant··on Multiple Displays on a Mac Sucks
Mine (with Hammerspoon) are:

- Left half / right half - full vertical

- Move to monitor 1 or 2

- Bottom half / top half - full width

- Center 2/3 wide, full vertical (for the ultra-wide screen and reading)

Also have shortcuts for launching or switching to certain key applications (Firefox, IntelliJ, Terminal).

These + normal window switching keybinds are so integral to my workflow I definitely feel out of sorts if using a machine they aren't on.

ydant··on YouTube to start blocking third-party apps that don't show ads
I wish you could turn off auto-play when watching a video from a playlist. The general auto-play option doesn't have any impact on playlists.
ydant··on Show HN: Using Google Sheets as the back end/APIs of your app
Agreed. Google Sheets is a great scrappy option for a startup / small company.

I've used it for a lot of system data that needs to be modified by a few people at most. With a little bit of careful code and caching (I like validating and syncing to S3) you can easily use it as a crud frontend for important system data.

It also can make great adhoc dashboards - plug into APIs (even private ones if you add in custom Google Scripts code) or push data updates to the sheets. I've had rather large reports auto updated on a schedule with multiple views of the data (pivot tables, queries, lookups, etc). Fully focused customized views into the data needed to solve specific internal problems with really quick delivery times.

Sure, a custom developed option should be substantially better than Google Sheets, but you won't develop it quicker. By the time you actually need something bigger/better, you should be at a place where your needs are better defined and you can afford the resources to develop something better.

ydant··on Show HN: tu – Convert natural language date/time to UTC
Not knocking the tool, just an alternative for people who might not be aware.

GNU date almost does the same as their examples:

    date -Is -ud 'today'    --> 2024-04-12T14:04:08+00:00
    date -Is -ud 'tomorrow' --> 2024-04-13T14:04:08+00:00
    date -Is -ud '2 day'    --> 2024-04-14T14:04:08+00:00
    date -Is -ud '9 week'   --> 2024-06-14T14:04:08+00:00
    date -Is -ud '1 month'  --> 2024-05-12T14:04:08+00:00

    date -Is -ud '2024-04-10T13:31:46+04:00'     --> 2024-04-10T09:31:46+00:00
    date -Is -ud 'Wed, 14 Feb 2024 23:16:09 GMT' --> 2024-02-14T23:16:09+00:00
And if you want Z format, you can use a custom format string:

    date -ud '1 month' +'%FT%TTZ' --> 2024-05-12T14:13:22TZ
So it would be easy enough to add an alias/function to your shell configurations and just use built-in date rather than installing a new program. Assuming GNU date relative date parsing meets your needs - I don't think it's quite as flexible as some libraries, e.g. in Python.
ydant··on Amazon virtually kills efforts to develop Alexa Skills
By "atom boxes", are you referring to the ATOM Echo or something else?

https://www.home-assistant.io/voice_control/thirteen-usd-voi...

https://shop.m5stack.com/products/atom-echo-smart-speaker-de...

ydant··on ElephantSQL Is Shutting Down
SimpleDB still works for my company's AWS account. There's been no announcement of a shutdown that I've seen (and I check occasionally since it's almost entirely disappeared from most of AWS's documentation).
ydant··on How Hertz’s bet on Teslas went sideways
I rented in 2015 and it was an experience.

I had to turn down the first car due to non-functioning wipers and a broken door handle.

Ended up with a Subaru Forester that had definitely seen a lot of miles and had its share of minor issues, but was a beast in the surprise blizzard.

Shame if they pivoted but their office was a pain to deal with and last thing you want after a red-eye is to be worried about the car maybe not actually working properly. Decided next time we'd just rent from a more established brand.

From their FAQ:

> However, we decided to use the name to make it more memorable as our cars used to be older in the beginning but it's been many years since we stopped using old cars and now all our cars are new, or one or two years old

ydant··on Receive push notifications from your rice cooker
My understanding is the Bacillus cereus spores aren't guaranteed to be entirely killed off in typical rice cooking times (also, 30-45 minutes boiling seems long for cooking even 4 cups of rice in my rice cooker). If not killed, the remaining spores become a problem.

The contamination (spores) come in the rice you buy.

ydant··on Receive push notifications from your rice cooker
Convenience.

In our house plain rice is a staple eaten with almost every meal and often associated with non-time-intensive meal prep (like reheating leftovers or eaten with eggs and some other toppings). So we like being able to start the rice and walk away.

Using our rice cooker makes "making rice" a 1 minute labor effort with absolutely no monitoring needed. You can't burn it. You're welcome to forget about it. You can barely mess it up.

In our case the rice maker is a 25 year old simple magnet kind. Not one of the expensive pressure cookers. This style of rice maker can be bought for as little as ~$30 and is super-convenient if you eat a lot of rice. Just don't get the non-stick pots if you buy one - they aren't needed and they don't last for more than a couple of years.

ydant··on NotepadNext – a cross-platform reimplementation of Notepad++
I like the new UI as well. There's always a learning curve, but after using it for months I haven't found any reason to switch back.

ctrl+ctrl is "run anything" (I tend to use ctrl+alt+r for the different but similar run menu instead).

I think what you want is "Actions" - which is default to "shift shift" and then click on a tab, or (ctrl/cmd)+shift+a to jump directly to that tab.

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