Hacker News: brandonkal

New comment by brandonkal in "Vivaldi 8.0"

brandonkal — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:25:55 +0000

I was also a huge fan of Vivaldi. I’d recommend Helium or Orion (desktop only). People knock on Edge but it actually is a nice browser. When on a Windows box I don’t own I use it instead of Chrome. Edge has the best text-to-speech engine in reader mode which I reach for even on macOS on occasion. That’s the only reason I have it on macOS.

New comment by brandonkal in "Vivaldi 8.0"

brandonkal — Thu, 21 May 2026 15:13:21 +0000

Great job on the design refresh! I was a heavy Vivaldi user and especially liked the integrated tiling and tab grouping. But over time it got more and more bloated and performance suffered so now I just use vanilla Safari (didn’t expect that) for most browsing plus Helium when I need to test in Chromium.

I use Aerospace for tiling everything now but it breaks Safari scrolling performance so when that becomes annoying I force the Safari window to floating mode.

New comment by brandonkal in "The 49MB web page"

brandonkal — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 05:36:03 +0000

GDPR cookie banners, GTM Bloat, Z-index warfare, and bloated SPAs etc created the perfect storm where ChatGPT is a better interface for most internet users. If I hit a web page I shouldn’t have to click through a labyrinth of junk to read the content. Even with the LLM hallucinating it is a better experience. Text in and text out. Like the internet was originally.

We put up with the nonsense because we had to. But the irony is content creators are actively driving their audience away.

New comment by brandonkal in "I spent a week without IPv4 (2023)"

brandonkal — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 19:23:59 +0000

It does make it easier. IPv6 pinholes are simpler than port forwarding. My IPv4 is not static but my IPv6 prefix is. So I don’t need dynamic DNS. I have no IPv4 port forwards, instead I run snid on a VPS to support legacy internet clients and call it a day.

New comment by brandonkal in "Makefile.md – Possibly Use(Ful|Less) Polyglot Synthesis of Makefile and Markdown"

brandonkal — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 09:25:09 +0000

I built something like this. A quick markdown file = custom CLI for each project. https://github.com/brandonkal/inkjet