Hacker News: sambishop

New comment by sambishop in "A few interesting modern pixel fonts"

sambishop — Tue, 26 May 2026 18:37:55 +0000

as a lover of low resolution software, we must acknowledge the goat, never surpassed since 2003: https://www.dafont.com/04b-03.font

nowadays all the alpha exists in making your software look like a cool fantasy tome: https://skeddles.itch.io/eldring-pro

New comment by sambishop in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

sambishop — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 20:21:02 +0000

arguments are not soldiers. i am specifically responding to the claim that cars leads to suburbs leads to mental health issues. i am not a partisan in the greater car wars.

New comment by sambishop in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

sambishop — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:28:08 +0000

for sure! but that's irrelevant to a causal chain that includes "suburbanization", since you're not in the suburbs (in manhattan at least, the walkability does drop off pretty quickly)

another interesting tack: how long did we have cars before we started talking about a widespread mental health crisis? is there a more parimonious explanation, like a different event that is located closer to it in time? perhaps smartphones or the internet?

New comment by sambishop in "The future of everything is lies, I guess: Where do we go from here?"

sambishop — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 18:14:28 +0000

automobiles -> suburbanization -> isolation -> mental health crisis seems like a fairly easy hypothesis to test since there are still millions of people in america living densely and carless in places like nyc and you could demonstrate that they have a statistically significant gap in mental illnesses. so easy to test that i bet several people already have and you could just check.

New comment by sambishop in "Approachable Swift Concurrency"

sambishop — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 18:30:57 +0000

This stops a little too short to be entirely useful imo. It's missing three very important concepts to make someone fully productive with swift concurrency:

1. sending. Using this keyword liberally will save you from the more heavyweight options like actors and Sendable.

2. isolated parameters. Inheriting the isolation of the caller is critical for functional style programming.

3. Dynamic isolation in general. Sometimes `assumeIsolated` is all you need.

The fact that it recommends you pass this document to an agent without including these concepts almost guarantees the LLM is going to program itself into a corner.

New comment by sambishop in "Your inbox is a bandit problem"

sambishop — Wed, 24 Dec 2025 14:42:17 +0000

I've always been fascinated by people who seem to have this problem. I've heard multiple individuals describe responding to emails as an infinite attention suck sort of like doomscrolling. For me, email is 99% updates/promotions, 0.99% real humans that I can hit with a one liner, and 0.01% humans that really require a thoughtful response. Something must happen to these email people where they grow prominent enough and advertise their address enough that they get inundated with genuine email that is all from thoughtful humans? Feels like a problem I would enjoy having, at least for a while.

New comment by sambishop in "John Carmack on mutable variables"

sambishop — Fri, 31 Oct 2025 21:20:55 +0000

that's oldschool swift. the new hotness would be

  let x = if cond { 1 } else { 2 }