Hacker News: rrix2

New comment by rrix2 in "Apple's intentional crippling of Mobile Safari"

rrix2 — Mon, 23 Mar 2026 04:27:17 +0000

It's not easy, though. Most of my day job is spent trying to get html interactives on an e-learning platform to work reliably with iOS's ridiculous nonstandard interaction rules around when media is allowed to play. It's worse than working with the 20 year old jsp+servlet system that serves the interactives and business logic. no other browser behaves like iOS safari and to debug and develop against it you need an ios and macos device sitting on your desk. Firefox and Firefox on Android are a breeze but a rounding-error in our usage metrics, even accounting for our development. Apple desparately hobbles the web platform to collect IAP taxes.

New comment by rrix2 in "Palm OS User Interface Guidelines (2003) [pdf]"

rrix2 — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 06:52:05 +0000

My first personal computer was a Palm and my earliest programming experiences came with reading these docs, how fun. For a young person whose parents' custody arrangement led to almost every night of sleep under a different roof, a wifi enabled OS with a great applicaton library that was always with me was really powerful and ended up being quite impactful on the arc of my life.

By high school I was writing apps that followed this hig with a fold up keyboard, designing the ui and compiling code on board the device. PalmOS 4 and 5 could be tricked out to be a whole computer, capable of working offline for a week and also could get you up all night on IRC and ebooks. it's hard to imagine using my smartphone offline for a week now....

and most of the apps implemented this hig and were straightforward to use because it was the defeult builtin toolkit largely the same its entire life, progressively enhanced GUIs from 1bit 160x160 to full color 320x480 responsive design... nowadays I'm building a Material3 app in my evenings and i know some day google is gonna make a material4 so that my app looks scuffed up

New comment by rrix2 in "Keybee: A Keyboard Designed for Smartphones"

rrix2 — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 00:35:15 +0000

If one could swipe through the center without inserting a space, it would be incredible instead of perhaps only great... There was a PalmOS 5 keyboard like this named myKbd(1) based on some IBM research(2) which was quite fast to use. the atomik layout was quite quick to use.

(1): https://palmdb.net/app/mykbd

(2): https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327051HCI172&3_4 https://blakewatson.com/uploads/2023/07/Performance_Optimiza...

New comment by rrix2 in "Keep Android Open"

rrix2 — Fri, 20 Feb 2026 23:45:42 +0000

it's becoming ever more clear to me that i'll have at least two devices: one running software i trust, one running software corporates trust, with a very narrow pipeline connecting the two, if it all. my demon-haunted device can stay offline in my bag and get hotspot'd in to my trustworthy device as necessary.

not happy about it, but i don't see a path forward that lets one participate in the wider ecosystem and maintain their own sovereignty and sanity.

New comment by rrix2 in "Flock Hardcoded the Password for America's Surveillance Infrastructure 53 Times"

rrix2 — Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:25:14 +0000

Many of the flock cameras in my city were disabled by bashing in the solar panels or damaging the camera lens. Unfortunately, flock's contract is such that the city pays for repairs/replacement

New comment by rrix2 in "Flock and Cyble Inc. weaponize “cybercrime” takedowns to silence critics"

rrix2 — Sun, 21 Dec 2025 04:13:38 +0000

The local credit union in Eugene had installed Flock cams at the entrances to all their branches. They took em down after only a few of our community members began protests out front a few branches and emailing with the CU's leadership before our city terminated our contract and removed the cams

New comment by rrix2 in "Two kinds of vibe coding"

rrix2 — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 00:47:31 +0000

I've been asking for little tutorials or implementation plans for things, and demanding that the model not write any code itself. Following the advice of Geoffrey Litt.[1] I find reviewing code written by my coworkers to be difficult when i'm being paid for it, surely i'm not gonna review thousands of lines of auto-generated code and the comprehensive tests required to trust them in my free time...!

So I've been learning kotlin & android development in the evenings and i find this style of thing to be so much more effective as a dev practice than claude code and a better learning practice than following dev.to tutorials. I've been coding for almost 20 years and find most tutorial or documentation stuff either targeted to someone who has hardly programmed at all, or just plain old API docs.

Asking the langlemangler to generate a dev plan, focusing on idiomatic implementation details and design questions rather than lines of code, and to let me fill in the algorithm implementations, it's been nice. I'll use the jetbrains AI autocomplete stuff for little things or ask it to refactor a stinky function but mostly I just follow the implementation plan so that the shape of the whole system is in my head.

Here's an example:

> i have scaffolded out a new project, an implementation of a library i've written multiple times in the last decade in multiple languages, but with a language i haven't written and with new design requirements specified in the documentation. i want you to write up an implementation plan, an in-depth tutorial for implementing the requirements in a Kotlin Multi Platform library. > i am still learning kotlin but have been programming for 20 years. you don't need to baby me, but don't assume i know best practices and proper idioms for kotlin. make sure to include background context, best practices, idioms, and rationale for the design choices and separation of concerns.

This produced a 3kb markdown file that i've been following while I develop this project.

[1]: https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1991909304085987366

New comment by rrix2 in "Learning music with Strudel"

rrix2 — Wed, 03 Dec 2025 07:23:28 +0000

I recently bodged together a board that would drive FastLED programs parameterized by the control voltages that come off a eurorack, it was really neat and straightforward because you have some really good clock sources to sync to

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:24:14 +0000

hardware or software keyboard I don't think I've ever used a binding like that and if I did I would almost immediately bind them to something more reasonable.

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:21:08 +0000

I love your apps and wish I had android equivalents. cheers

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:19:45 +0000

whenever i ssh in to some box and fire up vi[m] to edit some text i realize how reliant i am on both input methods & how cool emacs&evil are for letting my do that to myself...

vim text object motions for edits, my emacs keybindings and libs for movement&buffer management... my normal-mod binding for avy-goto-char and my other evil-leader stuff is muscle memory now...

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 17:10:45 +0000

i find that unless i swipe perfectly, the input is considered in the textbox not the bar, so i can't easily swipe out of it. :( have never really got the hang of it. i wish there was a button to swap in/out, i guess i could do some simple android dev but i'd rather not

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:47:18 +0000

i didn't mean it in such a disdainful or self-flagellating way, though. emacs is a bag of tricks, and each of us pull a different set of them out.

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 07:46:00 +0000

i was pretty quick with thumbkey, it's nice on even a tiny device like a Jelly Star. nowhere near as quick with 8vim on any device yet.

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:04:23 +0000

the fdroid build of android doesn't have a real linux environment that you can install arbitrary binaries on to. you can switch to a termux-ish proot environment and do x-forwarding or TUI emacs but those are shenanigans

New comment by rrix2 in "Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good"

rrix2 — Wed, 26 Nov 2025 05:02:24 +0000

Specifically for org, and specifically for org-roam, it's pretty good, but not good enough. It's not as good as desktop emacs, and it's also somehow not as good as a 1st class android app.

the fdroid build of emacs doesn't really work very well with my org-roam, so i use a termux build,,, well nix-on-droid+emacs-overlay... and it's fine, for capture and recall. but i'm not authoring a lot of text with it. a custom extra-keys in the termux config so that your common emacs keybindings are on screen in a tool bar can get you close to a point-and-click interface... but you don't really have a good "swipe" input or voice input to input text efficiently, it's a character interface, a TUI, which is actually not what you want on a phone, you want a word-based interface. so when i want to do org-mode right now, i pull a unihertz titan 2 out of my pocket. without a sim card, the titan battery lasts for about three days unless i fire up an nix devShell & lsp server on it.

calc-mode is my default android calculator tho.

tbh don't listen to me, though: i've been teaching myself 8vim[1] and building a markdown document graph database in my free time. don't listen to ~any emacs user's opinion with any authority, we all have found our own local minima, our opinions and advice usually aren't so useful to each other

I didn't know about modified-bar-mode, though, that's neat.

[1] https://f-droid.org/packages/inc.flide.vi8/

New comment by rrix2 in "I am stepping down as the CEO of Mastodon"

rrix2 — Tue, 18 Nov 2025 21:34:05 +0000

i would respond to this but i'm not paying enough Nitro credits to access those characters on my keyboard

New comment by rrix2 in "Android developer verification: Early access starts"

rrix2 — Thu, 13 Nov 2025 02:06:51 +0000

it's probably just gonna be under the Developer Options "secret" menu

New comment by rrix2 in "Why can't transformers learn multiplication?"

rrix2 — Fri, 24 Oct 2025 18:58:01 +0000

yes, what your describing is not a transformer but a high-level LLM-based product with tool-calling wired up to it

New comment by rrix2 in "US axes website for reporting human rights abuses by US-armed foreign forces"

rrix2 — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 16:23:30 +0000

you're being downvoted, i suggest folks read up on the whiskey rebellion, the economic depression after the revolutionary war, the economic problems and internal strife caused by policies that Washington and the other federalists enacted to "strengthen the republic" in the years between the war and the constitution being ratified.

https://archive.org/details/tamingdemocracyt0000bout/