Hacker News: ofalkaed

New comment by ofalkaed in "Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?"

ofalkaed — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 21:52:59 +0000

I finally started reading The Book of Disquiet, which I have had sitting about for years. Quite surprised by it, has a far greater range than people make it out to have and some amazing humor. It is turning out to be one of the most fascinating books I have read.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I tried to prompt-engineer a writing style and got a psychoanalysis instead"

ofalkaed — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 05:04:33 +0000

Give the AI the topic you want to write about and a few of the supporting ideas you want to touch on, ask it to elaborate on them, bounce back and fourth with it and question all of its suggestions, directly ask it about them. Take what you like. Repeat a few times until you are happy with the result. ChatGPT seems better at this sort of thing than Claude in my experience, it is better at picking up on your style of developing an idea and working within it as long as you remember to question it when it moves away from it and remind it of your way of thinking about things.

10 or 15 minutes should allow you to have a basic outline you can ask it to flesh out into a more complete outline and you can do things like tell it to emphasize a point and build the outline around that point or even tell it to reach that point in a roundabout fashion which only emphasis it at the end or anything else which suits your way of developing an idea. After that you just need to write it and if you do things right that will be easy.

AI is a great tool for this stuff and the big models are smart enough to learn your style and intents, becoming more mentor than shortcut, but like a mentor you need to put ins some time with them so they can figure you out and you can figure them out.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I tried to prompt-engineer a writing style and got a psychoanalysis instead"

ofalkaed — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 04:20:03 +0000

Admittedly, I skimmed over much of your post, it is a bit round about and takes the scenic route (I also have a tendency to take the scenic route). If you want to use AI in your writing but maintain your style, perhaps it would be best to use AI to help structure your post instead of structuring your post for AI to write it, this will probably save you just as much time but keep things in your own voice.

Structure is where the vast majority have issues, not style, their neurodivergent ticks are going to come out regardless of how much they fight them unless they invest a good deal of time studying style and their style.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I tried to prompt-engineer a writing style and got a psychoanalysis instead"

ofalkaed — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 03:38:03 +0000

Style is pretty much a set of neurodivergent ticks. having a cohesive style requires understanding them so you don't argue with yourself mid sentence, unless you have a good reason to do so which works towards your style. The lack of being neurodivergent is the lack of identifiable style and essentially AI.

New comment by ofalkaed in "AI is slowly munching away my passion"

ofalkaed — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 02:09:42 +0000

I don't think your passion is programming if AI erodes it, your passion was the external validation which programming provided. TFA kind of touches on this but I think dances around it trying to find a way to not admit it. External validation is nice but absolutely destructive as a passion.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 20:35:59 +0000

It is the sort of mentality required to reach the place in computing which linux has. Decent chance you have linux running on something you own even if you do not run it on your computer and even if you don't, you do use the internet.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:57:27 +0000

2.6 was also the switch from OSS to Alsa, which caused some fun, Alsa really was not ready for prime time.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:46:00 +0000

Slackware only does long term stable releases but Slackware current is a rolling release that does not really feel like a rolling release because of how Slackware provides a full and complete system as the base system. I avoided Slackware current for years because I did not want to deal with the hassle of rolling release, but it is almost identical in experience to using the release.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:28:01 +0000

Arch was young in those days but I think fairly well known? we were quite vocal, opinionated and interjecting our views everywhere by the time of the Xfree86/Xorg switch. Perhaps it is just my view from being a part of it but I remember encountering the Arch reputation everywhere I went. Or maybe it is just the nostalgia influencing me.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 08:14:57 +0000

Systemd was the end of Arch for me, my rarely used Arch install was massively broken by its first update in ~6 months largely because of systemd. With some work I got things sorted out and working again only to fall into a cycle of breaking the system as I discovered that systemd was very different from what I was used to and did not like me treating it like SysV. Going 6 months without updates would most likely have caused issues with Arch regardless of how stable it had gotten even without the systemd change, but my subsequent and repeated breaking of the system made me realize I no longer had any interest in learning new system stuff, I just wanted a system that would stay out of my way and let me do the things I wanted to use the system for.

I do miss Arch but there is no way I am going to keep up with updates, I will do them when I discover I can't install anything new and then things will break because it has been so long since my last update. Slackware is far more suited to my nature but it will never be Arch.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 07:32:40 +0000

Most distros were stable well before Arch because Arch worked out most of the bugs for them and documented them on their wiki. Arch and other bleeding edge distros are still a big part of the stability of linux even if they don't break all that often anymore, they find a lot of the edge cases before they are issue for the big distros. In 2005 it was not difficult to have a stable linux install, you may have had to hunt a bit for the right hardware and it may have taken awhile to get things working but once things were working they tended to be stable. I can only think of one time Slackware broke things for me since I started using it around 2005, it taking on PulseAudio caused me some headaches but I use Slackware for audio work and am not their target so this is to be expected. Crux was rock solid for me into the 10s, nearly a decade of use and not even a hiccup.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 06:08:08 +0000

I didn't really get into custom kernels until I started using Crux. A few years after I started using Arch I got sick of the rolling release and Arch's constant breakages, so I started looking into the alternatives, that brought me to Crux (which Arch was based off of) and Slackware (which was philosophically the opposite of Arch without sacrificing the base understanding of the OS). Crux would have probably won out over Slackware if it were not for the switch to 64bit, when confronted with having to recompile everything, I went with the path of least resistance. Crux is what taught me to compile a kernel, in my Arch days I was lucky when it came to hardware and only had to change a few things in the config which the Arch wiki guided me through.

Crux is a great distro for anyone ok with a source distro and I think it might be the best source distro, unlike the more common source distros, it does not do most of the work for you. Also love its influence from BSD, which came in very handy when I started to explore the BSDs and FreeBSD which is my fallback for when Patrick dies or steps back, Crux deserves more attention.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 05:15:59 +0000

This would be back in the 00s. I would guess that Arch got stable around 2010? I was using Slackware as my primary system by then so don't know exactly when it happened, someone else can probably fill in the details. I started using Arch when it was quite new, within the first year or two.

New comment by ofalkaed in "I love the work of the ArchWiki maintainers"

ofalkaed — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 04:15:13 +0000

I learned linux by using Arch back in the days when pacman -Syu was almost certain to break something and there was a good chance it would break something unique to your install. This was also back in the days when most were not connected to the internet 24/7 and many did not have internet, I updated when I went to the library which was generally a weekly thing but sometimes it be a month or two and the system breakage that resulted was rococo. Something was lost by Arch becoming stable and not breaking regularly, it was what drove the wiki and fixing all the things that pacman broke taught you a great deal and taught you quickly. Stability is not all that it is cracked up to be, has its uses but is not the solution to everything.

New comment by ofalkaed in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 11:12:42 +0000

I don't think Andrew believes Zig is going kill C or C++, he probably has hope but I think he is aware of the reality. He found a way to make a living on something he was passionate about.

Use-after-free is a fact of life until something kills C, but the realities of language adoption are against that. Zig seems interesting and worthwhile in offering a different perspective on the problem and does it in a way more agreeable than Rust or the like for all those who love C and are adverse to large complex languages. The realities of language adoption are as much for as against Zig, large numbers of people are still getting drawn to C and Zig seems to do a better job addressing why so many are drawn to it than the alternatives.

New comment by ofalkaed in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 10:12:00 +0000

So no one should even try because they will never win over all of the C/C++ crowd so are doomed to fail and forever to be a wannabe? I think Andrew has gone about things in a good way, going back to C and exploiting hindsight, not trying to offer everything as quickly as possible. Extend C but keep C interoperability and do both better than C++ instead of trying to be the next big thing and he goes about it in a very deliberate and calculated way. He may not succeed, but the effort has given us a great deal.

New comment by ofalkaed in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:53:47 +0000

Being at 0.16 right now does not mean much. From what I gather, he is more focused on the semantics right now and trying to avoid getting bitten by a lack of foresight down the road, as most every language is. Things will probably start moving more quickly as the language solidifies.

New comment by ofalkaed in "Zig – io_uring and Grand Central Dispatch std.Io implementations landed"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 09:48:54 +0000

>Also Jai is like C++ in complexity, while Zig is similar to C, very simple language.

And most importantly, Zig is aiming at being a C++ replacement with the simplicity of C, it is not trying to replace C.

New comment by ofalkaed in "How would you go to market for a paid WhatsApp wrapper around OpenClaw?"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:44:30 +0000

I mostly agree with Ilove1234561, whose account was created just 25 minutes ago and apparently was created just to reply to this post, which raises some questions. But I am willing to be surprised.

New comment by ofalkaed in "Ads are coming to AI, but not to Claude [video]"

ofalkaed — Sat, 14 Feb 2026 08:39:02 +0000

I have yet to get an ad with ChatGPT, I think it only gives ads when you are asking about consumerist type things, which I never do but seems a completely reasonable thing to me and I would not have issue with it giving me ads if I were to ask it about which ketchup is best or even how to make ketchup. As an incompetent programmer, Claude has not worked well for me and ChatGPT has never given me ads when asking programming questions.