Hacker News: photon_garden

New comment by photon_garden in "Fela Kuti First African to Get Grammys Lifetime Achievement Award"

photon_garden — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 20:24:23 +0000

King Sunny Ade is another great Nigerian artist! Ja Funmi is one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/LIO9MjfOo48?si=bZFOTgQF0SZZgT_X

Africa has a ton of fantastic musicians.

For instance, Dur Dur Band from Somalia: https://youtu.be/cVfrEmO5no4?si=aeqeufJpsKiIyvQX

Mulatu Astatke from Ethiopia: https://youtu.be/jXdVpT_aSJU?si=jMzwDIS75L9pqhxf

John Wizards from South Africa: https://youtu.be/1FNWfhmTn1M?si=lmHOUgvqxYS_P_Av

It’s a very deep well.

New comment by photon_garden in "An experiment in separating identity, memory, and tools"

photon_garden — Sun, 28 Dec 2025 16:51:40 +0000

Are you using an LLM to write all your replies?

New comment by photon_garden in "Our new SAM audio model transforms audio editing"

photon_garden — Tue, 23 Dec 2025 04:41:19 +0000

I had the same experience. It did okay at isolating vocals but everything else it failed or half-succeeded at.

New comment by photon_garden in "Privacy doesn't mean anything anymore, anonymity does"

photon_garden — Sat, 20 Dec 2025 15:43:07 +0000

> That's not privacy. That's performance art.

Smells like it was written by an LLM so I stopped reading.

New comment by photon_garden in "How the Mayans were able to accurately predict solar eclipses for centuries"

photon_garden — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 02:36:14 +0000

> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations

The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.

(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)

New comment by photon_garden in "Addiction Markets"

photon_garden — Sat, 01 Nov 2025 06:46:35 +0000

Norway does a great job of this with the government-owned alcohol monopoly. The stores are always just a little bit out of the way, with slightly inconvenient hours. You can still get a beer if you want, but it takes a little bit of doing.

New comment by photon_garden in "All-natural geoengineering with Frank Herbert's Dune"

photon_garden — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:20:09 +0000

If you liked this article, I recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She's a professional plant scientist and researcher, and her books are both informative and a delightful read.

New comment by photon_garden in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

photon_garden — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 09:51:28 +0000

My assumption is that most people on HN are making programmer money. $4 - 5 USD per month is affordable even on a junior engineer’s salary in many parts of the world.

The price per GB isn’t as good as the services you mentioned, but their storage limits are fine for the primary use case — storing a lot of plain text notes.

I’ve also had no problems with it, in contrast with iCloud which has routinely gotten stuck for me.

And if price per GB is what you care most about, use something else. That’s one of the great things about Obsidian.

New comment by photon_garden in "Less is safer: Reducing the risk of supply chain attacks"

photon_garden — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 03:25:19 +0000

Haven’t used Roam, but what I like about Obsidian:

- All your data is just plain files on your file system. Automation and interop are great, including with tools like Claude Code.

- It’s local-first, so performance is good.

- It’s extensible. Write extensions in HTML, CSS, and JS.

- It’s free.

- Syncing files is straightforward. Use git, Syncthing, Google Drive, or pay for their cheap sync service which is quite good.

- Product development is thoughtful and well done.

- They’re explicitly not trying to lock you in or own your data. They define open specs and build on them when Markdown doesn’t cut it.

Things you might not like:

- Their collaboration story isn’t great yet. No collaborative editing.

- It’s an Electron app.

New comment by photon_garden in "The health benefits of sunlight may outweigh the risk of skin cancer"

photon_garden — Fri, 19 Sep 2025 19:39:23 +0000

David Chapman has a great writeup on this:

https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

His other writing is great too, but much more philosophical which may or may not be your cup of tea.

New comment by photon_garden in "How to motivate yourself to do a thing you don't want to do"

photon_garden — Wed, 17 Sep 2025 19:18:09 +0000

Also worth considering: just don't do the thing and live with the consequences. You have to apply this with care, but it's worth having in the toolbox.

New comment by photon_garden in "EPA to Stop Collecting Emissions Data from Polluters"

photon_garden — Fri, 12 Sep 2025 23:28:54 +0000

> There is no indication that we will, no matter the administration, as a society/civilization/species will do a single thing to avert the worst case climate scenarios.

This is untrue. For instance, earlier this year Poland generated less than half its energy from coal for the first time. [1]

[1]: https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/13/polands-monthly-coal-...

New comment by photon_garden in "State of the European Union 2025"

photon_garden — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:32:19 +0000

Curious to hear from folks who have more background knowledge on this, but as a minimally-informed outsider this seems like it’s hitting all of the important points.

New comment by photon_garden in "Ask HN: Should I add comments to my website?"

photon_garden — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:12:38 +0000

How much effort is it to just try it and roll back if it doesn’t work?

New comment by photon_garden in "Semantic Line Breaks (2017)"

photon_garden — Wed, 10 Sep 2025 09:03:51 +0000

More folks should define their own lightweight markup languages! It’s fun and makes your writing and notes feel more like your own.

I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.

New comment by photon_garden in "Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself"

photon_garden — Thu, 04 Sep 2025 13:02:25 +0000

Yes, exactly!! I use art-making to direct my attention in the same way:

> on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land.

> on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee.

> my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku?

[1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about

New comment by photon_garden in "Vector search on our codebase transformed our SDLC automation"

photon_garden — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 18:31:10 +0000

Curious how they've assessed quality, either qualitatively or quantitatively. How often do the generated documents miss important parts of the codebase or hallucinate requirements? How often do engineers have to redo work because the LLM convincingly told them to build the wrong thing?

You can build real, production-grade systems using LLMs, but these are the hard questions you have to answer.

New comment by photon_garden in "Trying to get error backtraces in Rust libraries right"

photon_garden — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 13:15:22 +0000

Their code is more complex in some ways (for example, it’s verbose).

But in languages with exceptions, if you want to know how a function can fail, you have two options:

- Hope the documentation is correct (it isn’t)

- Read the body of the function and every function it calls

Reasonable people can disagree on the right approach here, but I know which I prefer.

New comment by photon_garden in "Hermes 4"

photon_garden — Sat, 30 Aug 2025 12:47:31 +0000

BY HOLY INFERENCE

https://shop.nousresearch.com/products/badge-sweatpants

New comment by photon_garden in "Alda – plain text music notation"

photon_garden — Sat, 23 Aug 2025 02:49:49 +0000

With tools like Obsidian and Claude Code, plain text is having a bit of a renaissance. Here's a music notation that has all the same benefits!