stochastictrebuchet

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

    As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.





  • Word to the wise: stay away from productivity bro YouTube. You’ll learn a hundred systems for optimizing your obsidian-logseq-roam-notion hybrid gsd-kanban workflow with bidirectional zettl references and interstitial notes organized into a beautiful para system with more systems on systems and queryable data views and more fancy shit than you could ever dream of, and when everything is done and set up the way you think will work for you (which it won’t)…

    … you’ll realize you haven’t actually accomplished what you were meant to.

    (Source: myself, who’s fallen into the rabbit hole once or twice before)



  • So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.

    At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).

    What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.

    The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.

    Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?


  • To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

    I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

    But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

    I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

    Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!




  • Another happy Kitty user here!

    I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

    Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

    Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

    I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.


  • Eh, I get it. There’s an overwhelming abundance of choice that’s growing faster than the average time it takes to form a connection with any one game. Why deal with the FOMO and misbuys if you know what works for you.

    That doesn’t stop me from purchasing way too many (non-refundable) indie titles on the Switch, though. And I’m glad to say some of those feel like they’ll keep me hooked for a good while.

    Still, nothing can ever top my love for one classic game in particular: AOE 1 (definitive edition). Why? (It’s unfair to the rest.) Years ago I used to play against my dad over LAN. It’s some of the most fun we had together. Standing outside while he took a smoke break mid-game, I’d explain how I was about to wipe his whole civilization off the map in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine. Sometimes when I miss him, firing up AOE lets me feel closer to him again.

    All this to say, nostalgia is a tough bar for any new game to beat.