Hacker News: jwmcq

New comment by jwmcq in "Efrit: A native elisp coding agent running in Emacs"

jwmcq — Fri, 08 Aug 2025 22:37:35 +0000

I wonder if this could be updated to use OpenRouter in a similar way to Emigo[1] was aiming to do.

(I use the past tense, because Emigo has not been updated in a quarter of a year, which seems as if it may as well be decades in the timeline of this sort of stuff.)

[1] https://github.com/MatthewZMD/emigo

New comment by jwmcq in "John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025"

jwmcq — Fri, 23 May 2025 18:10:40 +0000

Looking at other examples in sci-fi, perhaps to stop my body from pressing its off-switch?

New comment by jwmcq in "Show HN: A Tiling Window Manager for Windows, Written in Janet"

jwmcq — Wed, 21 May 2025 00:11:31 +0000

If we're still calling Guile a Scheme (I'm out of the loop) then I don't know, it gets really bloody close. Not so much in image-based development (that I've usually found less good than a decent packaging system because the contents of my files on disk is usually more tractable than the contents of my image), but its object system and error handling are definitely up there close to CL.

I mean, Common Lisp is still the gold-standard for me, but reading about Hoot recently really made me want to check Guile out a bit more (CL does not have much in the way of lovely WASM stories right now) and, honestly, I was super impressed. I think if the interactive experience of developing in Hoot in the browser matched the interactive experience of developing in native Guile, I'd be a pretty happy convert.

New comment by jwmcq in "The Dawn of Nvidia's Technology"

jwmcq — Tue, 20 May 2025 22:59:19 +0000

Probably read the rest? I did not see Jensen's name on any of the patents that this key engineer discusses the detail and rationale of, and I feel that those names are listed fairly deliberately.

New comment by jwmcq in "First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV"

jwmcq — Thu, 08 May 2025 23:40:36 +0000

Growing up to Scottish and Irish Catholics in England, I remember talking to a bunch of Ulster protestants as a teenager when the topic turned to religion - I said "Well, I was raised Catholic but I'm not really a believer of any kind" and the response was "Ah, so you're one of THOSE Catholics!".

Turns out there are a lot of 'those' Catholics.

New comment by jwmcq in "The Origins of Wokeness"

jwmcq — Wed, 15 Jan 2025 23:11:37 +0000

> "the solution to bad speech is more speech"

Yes, but when enough people who otherwise have little actual power get together to drown out "bad speech" with "more speech" it gets called 'cancel culture' and 'witch hunts' and is used as the primary example of 'censorship' on social media.

New comment by jwmcq in "Right to root access"

jwmcq — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 22:56:53 +0000

There's a lot of it about, mate. The other day I had an American tell me with a straight face that we can get jail time for flying a Union Flag here in Blighty - I guess there's a big industry for convincing people that everywhere else is a hellhole over there.

New comment by jwmcq in "The Origins of Wokeness"

jwmcq — Mon, 13 Jan 2025 19:40:41 +0000

If "I think we need to massively curtail people's liberty in order to remove our enemies and establish a white national ethnostate" vs "we need to stop those guys" is your idea of "ape tribalism" then I'm not sure that you're really available for reasonable discussion here.

New comment by jwmcq in "Visit Bletchley Park"

jwmcq — Fri, 30 Aug 2024 00:27:19 +0000

This caught me out when I was a teenager. Luckily, there was a chap in the Museum of Computing who was spending his Sunday working on the Colossus, and he was happy to let me in and show me around! I'll never forget that kindness, it was truly a fascinating trip.

New comment by jwmcq in "Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found"

jwmcq — Tue, 06 Aug 2024 11:59:52 +0000

I am also getting this in Firefox on Linux. Don't think I've ever seen this particular failure mode before!

New comment by jwmcq in "Is Crowdstrike the Final Straw?"

jwmcq — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 22:15:40 +0000

Okay, I'll give you that. Let me rephrase: Industry-led regulation can work, in industries that won't kill anyone or even realistically lose anyone a bunch of money for non-compliance, if-and-only-if government regulation exists as a real and powerful enough alternative to make it stick.

New comment by jwmcq in "Is Crowdstrike the Final Straw?"

jwmcq — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 21:25:01 +0000

Industry-led regulation has never worked in the entire history of the world.

New comment by jwmcq in "Is Crowdstrike the Final Straw?"

jwmcq — Fri, 19 Jul 2024 21:21:12 +0000

Not as far as I can tell. You're right that China does seem to be in a fairly unique position to actually do this though - it is interesting to consider what would happen if they did. Looking at recent engineering failures at Boeing, Tesla, Volkswagen etc., such enforcement of engineering standards could even give them a competitive advantage on the world stage in a way that markets captured by lobbyists could never realistically achieve.

New comment by jwmcq in "Tesla Auto Wipers: Why They Don't Work and Why There Isn't an Easy Fix"

jwmcq — Fri, 31 May 2024 02:51:27 +0000

Unless that smell is oil. Or gasoline. Or burning rubber. Or petrichor. Or just plain old smoke.

Or the touch is the feeling of road surface changing, or the steering wheel getting harder to turn / having no effect at all, or the rush of air if a door flies open...

New comment by jwmcq in "Bad Emacs defaults"

jwmcq — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:31:12 +0000

Really? I think YAML perfectly fills the niche of a config format that is both hard for humans to write, and difficult for machines to read.

New comment by jwmcq in "How to legally pirate every font"

jwmcq — Wed, 11 Oct 2023 17:19:13 +0000

And then you realise that this also applies to pretty much every industry and its workers (hooray for lobbying!) and then you get sad.

New comment by jwmcq in "A history of Ireland in 100 goodbyes"

jwmcq — Tue, 10 Oct 2023 22:20:37 +0000

I am disappointed that the "Irish goodbye" didn't happen at around number 82 with no items following it.

New comment by jwmcq in "Mozilla's midlife crisis has taken it from pioneer to Google's weird neighbor"

jwmcq — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 11:50:28 +0000

There's a relevant XKCD, of course

https://xkcd.com/1172/

New comment by jwmcq in "Why Kakoune"

jwmcq — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 21:45:13 +0000

I feel you've missed my point - 'ergonomics' literally means 'efficiency and comfort', not 'future maintainability'. Regex does comfort. AWK does it. If you need to do a specific thing right now, and you know them, then those tools are about as good as it gets. I'm not denying that those solutions will be horrible to grow and maintain, but that wasn't your point - that's why I said your choice of saying they weren't "ergonomic" was a bit odd. They are. That's the problem.

Most of the custom text editing operations I do on a daily basis only need to work once. For that, a Regex is very 'ergonomic'. If I were writing an emacs package, I'd probably use something better - something less ergonomic, but easier to maintain.

As an aside, I used to work in a machine shop and we had a well-designed system of pneumatic tubes throughout the warehouse powering spartan steel-handled drills that would give me calluses but reliably get the same jobs done the same way every day. At home, for the odd job I need to do, I use a cheap lithium drill with a nice grippy handle. Sometimes the ergonomic option is better because, right now, I just don't need to buy a compressor and run tubes through my house.

New comment by jwmcq in "Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month"

jwmcq — Thu, 21 Sep 2023 21:16:21 +0000

> How does search quality really change my life?

Ask this to someone who remembers when Google first appeared.

I am not a Kagi user, but am seriously considering it after a number of months having to dig through at least 8 results of paywalled or possibly AI-generated pages for almost every Google query; seriously, I just did a search for 'python concatenate list' on google and it was worse than I expected - the official docs weren't even on the first two pages and even the helpful Stack Overflow answers were the 5th result down - give it a go, the results are trash.

I google things at least 20 times a day, and probably so do you. I would pay for something that can cut out the bollocks - if Kagi can follow through, they'll have a customer.