Hacker News: flkiwi

New comment by flkiwi in "Take better notes, by hand"

flkiwi — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:21:48 +0000

Same principle applies to, e.g., Leica cameras. Yes, they're pricey (absurdly so), but the lack of features, the slow speed, and the lack of configuration contributes to me improving my photography. It doesn't make me a better photographer, but it gives me the time and space to focus on being one, rather than just firehosing my camera at whatever is in front of me. It makes my photography intentional rather than reactive.

New comment by flkiwi in "CodingFont: A game to help you pick a coding font"

flkiwi — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 20:00:06 +0000

It's ... weirdly validating that what I ended up with is what I actually use (Source Code Pro).

New comment by flkiwi in "Why I love NixOS"

flkiwi — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 23:58:04 +0000

I literally just fixed a couple of nagging config issues that I couldn't be bothered to find in my (admittedly complex) set of NixOS and HM config files by asking Claude to find and fix them.

I had Claude do the grunt work of shifting parts of my config to a new structure I started but didn't have time to fully implement.

Based on examples I provided, I had Claude use specialisations to set up a couple of different WM and DE test environments.

And the thing is that, now that I have everything set up the way I want, I don't really have to DO anything to keep the system running, other than occasionally update (I'm on unstable, so I do that manually).

Could I turn Claude loose on my .config directory, give it access to apt or dnf (etc.), and let it set up a non-NixOS environment for me? Probably, and it would probably work reasonably well, but I wouldn't trust it the way I trust NixOS.

New comment by flkiwi in "MacBook Neo"

flkiwi — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 14:34:55 +0000

First guess: making things small (and durable) is more expensive than making things big.

New comment by flkiwi in "DialUp95 – A 90s inspired nostalgia hit"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:46:28 +0000

Me, before clicking: Man, I remember I had this USR modem that did this weird BONG sound during handshake. I wonder if anyone else in the comments remembers that.

Comments: YUP.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 19:04:28 +0000

Exactly right. The individual in question produces excellent deliverables within their space. They, the coworker, are very good at receiving inputs, but not very good at outputs (other than their deliverables). In a way, it's like having an offshore worker who speaks almost none of your language but can understand it and produce good work.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 17:02:14 +0000

Exactly right. He’s good at what he does, except communicating, and people are beginning to associate him with AI slop they don’t have time to read rather than the excellent work he does for them.

New comment by flkiwi in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:34:01 +0000

Remote, multi location workforces, supervisors and workers thousands of miles apart.

New comment by flkiwi in "I verified my LinkedIn identity. Here's what I handed over"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 15:23:38 +0000

This is only going to become more common. Companies are implementing checks using similar services (a) to prevent employment scams (where the person who interviews is not the person who works; usually the latter is a low-paid offshore individual) and (b) basic security authentication. It won’t be long before this sort of biometric validation starts showing up to authenticate users on regular websites and similar services, if it hasn’t already. I think the last one I had to do was to authenticate when activating a bank card.

New comment by flkiwi in "AI uBlock Blacklist"

flkiwi — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 14:22:09 +0000

One of my coworkers is EXTREMELY capable but functionally almost illiterate. He’s recently discovered that he can put an idea in Copilot and have it generate an email. So now instead of brief, correct, but difficult to parse emails we receive 20-paragraph, bulleted, formatted OpenAI slop. It’s been a very strange thing to see, like someone getting extraordinarily bad cosmetic surgery.

New comment by flkiwi in "Fix the iOS keyboard before the timer hits zero or I'm switching back to Android"

flkiwi — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:55:24 +0000

I read things like this, which I absolutely agree is happening, but then compare it to my ongoing, multi-day failures to create a child account on a Samsung device (which also involves a child account on Google, which is where the workflow is failing) and I wonder if the entire technology industry has simply given up. Every mobile experience is awful lately, nothing seems to work, errors pile up, and people just quit.

New comment by flkiwi in "British drivers over 70 to face eye tests every three years"

flkiwi — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 16:09:19 +0000

Well the obvious solution is take away the vote for over-65s!

/s … maybe

New comment by flkiwi in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

flkiwi — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 18:46:15 +0000

I actually tried Ground News for a while because, you know, why not? I appreciate what they're trying to do, but the signal to noise ratio was so, so unfavorable between the UI clutter, the curious lack of certain categories, and the oddly slow update rate.

New comment by flkiwi in "I now assume that all ads on Apple news are scams"

flkiwi — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:28:55 +0000

My "favorite", and likely related, part of Apple News is that if I have blocked a source because it is unreliable, heavily biased, etc., and a story from that source appears in the main timeline, Apple News shows a greyed out version of the story--headline and image visible--with "You have blocked this publication" (or similar). You can still clearly see the story, so it's not blocked at all.

I assume this comes down to some sort of distribution agreement, but, as bad as the ads are, this single behavior is the reason I stopped using Apple News and continue searching for a successor.

New comment by flkiwi in "Hypergrowth isn’t always easy"

flkiwi — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 18:04:04 +0000

Interesting post. I appreciate their candor and self-criticism, but, as a customer, I'm consistently surprised by how robust Tailscale ends up being, and how rarely I've experienced an issue that actually broke my tailnet. The sort of downtime that might keep me from accessing the admin tool or something else like that is rare enough, but my nodes have almost (?) never failed to talk to each other. Pretty great.

Caveat: I have a very small tailnet (<100 nodes). Anyone running with thousands of nodes may have a very different experience where inconvenience might be existential.

New comment by flkiwi in "Claude Code's new hidden feature: Swarms"

flkiwi — Sat, 24 Jan 2026 18:09:28 +0000

I accidentally gave my wife a prompt the other day. Everything was hellishly busy and I said something along the lines of “I need to ask you a question. Please answer the question. Please don’t answer any other issues just yet.” She looked at me and asked “Did you just PROMPT me?” We laughed. (The question was the sort that might spawn talking about something else and was completely harmless. In the abstract, my intent was fine but my method was hilariously tainted.)

New comment by flkiwi in "Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi"

flkiwi — Wed, 21 Jan 2026 19:23:32 +0000

I've gotten more value out of it than just about any ongoing subscription I have. It's clean, fast, deeply customizable (i.e., excluding "answers" websites or any other domain you never want to see again), and, for what it is, inexpensive. Honestly if Google (or Bing) worked like Kagi does, I'd trade some of the privacy for the utility.

New comment by flkiwi in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

flkiwi — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 15:00:31 +0000

The approval of the people is irrelevant if Putin cites Zelenskyy’s democratic illegitimacy as a reason to remove him (which, arguably, they have) or Trump as a reason to withhold support.

New comment by flkiwi in "Trump says Venezuela’s Maduro captured after strikes"

flkiwi — Sat, 03 Jan 2026 14:12:24 +0000

So we can justify, say, deposing the king of Saudi Arabia? Or Zelenskyy on the pretext that he hasn’t held a timely election? Or the president of Taiwan on the basis of illegitimacy of the election? Regardless of Maduro’s sins, this is a massively destabilizing action and I expect we will see unpleasant downstream effects even if, in a vacuum, the action was justifiable and legal.

New comment by flkiwi in "Honey's Dieselgate: Detecting and tricking testers"

flkiwi — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 02:36:06 +0000

Thank you. I was confused about why this was suddenly bubbling up again. And ... paints Honey in a pretty bad light? LOL, they already looked like a fraudster scam to begin with! (But, again, thank you.)