Hacker News: fnordlord

New comment by fnordlord in "Introduction to Obsidian"

fnordlord — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 20:36:12 +0000

The Raycast Obsidian plugin makes vaults pretty easy for me. Cmd+Space > "Open Vault" and then pick which one you want. You'll still have a window per vault but it makes it really fast to get to where you want.

New comment by fnordlord in "Fear and denial in Silicon Valley over social media addiction trial"

fnordlord — Sat, 28 Mar 2026 02:59:10 +0000

Having lived through the exact same hysteria, this is a totally different argument being made. This isn't about the morality of a genre of violent YouTube videos or some other tawdry content. It's not the satanic panic or about explicit lyrical content. This is about the safety of designing systems that are psychologically manipulative for the purpose of extracting as much advertising budget possible from clients. If Mortal Kombat was free to play and learned to reprogram itself to keep the child playing for as possible with no ethical bounds. Even if it had to resort to calling the child names or making them feel like playing was only way they'd find some self worth... then we'd be talking about the same thing.

From my perspective, this will sound crazy in a decade or two but more like how harmful smoking is and how ridiculous it is we didn't see it soon.

New comment by fnordlord in "Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent"

fnordlord — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 22:42:03 +0000

I always thought that was just a Plex alternative. I’ll have to give it a second look.

New comment by fnordlord in "Netflix raises prices for every subscription tier by up to 12.5 percent"

fnordlord — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 19:45:19 +0000

I would love for a service to automate cycling through services. Some small fee to automate getting a month or two of service from a selection of providers and just rotate. I don't need year round Netflix, Hulu and Disney but I think I'd be in trouble if I cancelled all of them. Anyone wanna startup?

New comment by fnordlord in "Overcoming the friendship recession"

fnordlord — Tue, 24 Mar 2026 14:16:38 +0000

If it helps, I've found hosting a pizza night to be a really easy way to have some good hang time with friends. I make the pizza and it's good enough to be free dinner for them. The kids get to participate by customizing their pies. We all catch up for an hour or two in the kitchen, watching me scramble and make a mess. If somebody brings over a bottle of wine, even better.

New comment by fnordlord in "Helix: A post-modern text editor"

fnordlord — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 15:44:55 +0000

I'm in a similar boat. It's become my primary editor but I still open VSCode everytime I need search-and-replace or an easy git-blame.

For unselect, if I'm understanding correctly, ; will unselect with your cursor at the end of the selection, Alt-; will unselect and move your cursor back to the beginning.

New comment by fnordlord in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

fnordlord — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 02:49:43 +0000

This is where these questions take me. Since the experience is the only thing I can be certain of, I'm less drawn to "everything is physical" answers and more drawn to ideas from phenomenology and Bishop George Berkeley. And since I'm not super religious, I'm not really comfortable with those "answers" either.

New comment by fnordlord in "Are the Mysteries of Quantum Mechanics Beginning to Dissolve?"

fnordlord — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 00:55:54 +0000

It's embarrassingly silly to say but I've frequently just boiled down the hard question to the question of "where is the experience of the color blue stored in the universe?" Even as a non-dualist, I still haven't found much of an answer that I like. I'm all ears if you've got a book recommendation.

New comment by fnordlord in "Richard Carrington's first portrait has been found"

fnordlord — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 18:34:12 +0000

After reading this a few months ago, I hope it's a long while off. https://www.noemamag.com/the-unseen-fury-of-solar-storms/

New comment by fnordlord in "OpenClaw – Moltbot Renamed Again"

fnordlord — Fri, 30 Jan 2026 16:05:40 +0000

Can you get meaningful work done with CC at $20 at a time? I load $20 at a time onto the API for general chatting purposes and it lasts a few months at a time. I've always avoided trying CC because I got the impression people were burning $100+/mo, which is beyond my personal hobby budget.

New comment by fnordlord in "Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin"

fnordlord — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:25:03 +0000

Thanks! I will write this down so I can try it out next time. I really want to get better at these little things but it can be tough sometimes without concrete examples like this.

New comment by fnordlord in "I switched from VSCode to Zed"

fnordlord — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 19:12:30 +0000

The VSCode Debugger is the only thing that keeps it installed on my work machine. Lately I've been doing all my editing in Helix and switching over to Xcode for debugging though. It's even more consistent than VSCode, which occasionally leaks memory and blows itself up. I haven't had time to really learn lldb at the command line but it may have to be the next step. The only other thing I miss is VSCode's Find-All/Replace-All because it maintains the include/exclude paths and Helix doesn't (that I know of)

New comment by fnordlord in "Parental controls aren't for parents"

fnordlord — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 20:26:04 +0000

It's even worse if your subscription is packaged with Hulu. Then all the Hulu kids stuff gets pulled in automatically, which includes all kinds of garbage that I very much do not want my daughter watching. All the YouTube-based influencer kid shows with little kids who show off new toys and extravagant vacations each episode. My only solution was to unsubscribe from Hulu, which stinks because they do have some good stuff. It really is the epitome of enshitification considering how easy it would be to implement a block button at the very least.

New comment by fnordlord in "Going immutable on macOS, using Nix-Darwin"

fnordlord — Fri, 02 Jan 2026 13:56:30 +0000

Yeah, I'm a Nix user and fan but I'm still going to be stuck fixing it when it breaks. The biggest thing that I have to remind myself is that reproducible != "just works." Once you get to what you want, you're set but until then and every change after, there's a chance you'll be in the weeds.

At least from my usage, the fact that your configuration is all tied to whether the entirety of nixpkgs-unstable is working can be a real headache. Like recently when CMake was upgraded to 4.0, it took down a healthy handful of packages, which meant you couldn't update anything until things were resolved or you were really fluent in Nix hackery. (I was the former)

New comment by fnordlord in "Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?"

fnordlord — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:57:56 +0000

I will always cheer on anyone who shares their curiosity.

It was a great question and now I have a ton of new things on my reading list.

New comment by fnordlord in "Programming languages used for music"

fnordlord — Mon, 22 Dec 2025 14:53:05 +0000

I really hope that Max becomes fully accessible in a text based format one day. It's so cool and I've spent a few months randomly through the years building neat plugins for Ableton but, for me, it would be so much stickier if it was code. Especially now with AI assistance, Claude can still be helpful but it hallucinates a lot harder when trying to describe visual code.

New comment by fnordlord in "FBI Director Waived Polygraph Security Screening for Three Senior Staff"

fnordlord — Sat, 15 Nov 2025 20:36:43 +0000

Unpopular because it’s a bad idea. You’re now hiring better liars and scaring away humble talent.

New comment by fnordlord in "Trying two dozen different psychedelics"

fnordlord — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 18:48:59 +0000

PTSD is not usually what happens when taken without supervision either. I think there's a large chasm of experiences between lifelong healing and lifelong damage with regard to psychedelics. I have pretty limited experience with it and came to the conclusion that it's not for me. But of the people I know who do them or have at one time, I don't think I know anyone whose life has been changed by them.

New comment by fnordlord in "Tesla Recalls Almost 13,000 EVs over Risk of Battery Power Loss"

fnordlord — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 17:29:36 +0000

Of all positive integers less than 10, only 4 are even numbers. 8 is one of the only. right?

New comment by fnordlord in "How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me"

fnordlord — Mon, 22 Sep 2025 16:44:33 +0000

Thanks for this. I never knew how much I'd like it if George Saunders started a tech blog.