Hacker News: spudlyo

New comment by spudlyo in "Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi"

spudlyo — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:44:36 +0000

I tried GUIX a few times, but ultimately I couldn't quite get it working exactly the way I wanted it to work. I also didn't like the ugly filesystem layout that the store requires. I may get over it and revisit at some point. It will be a lot of work, but on the plus side I'll have a reason to learn scheme.

New comment by spudlyo in "Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi"

spudlyo — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 18:11:33 +0000

It's great to manage your dotfiles, but I took it a step farther. I rebuilt the minimal Linux desktop environment of my dreams (startx, xinit, i3, i3status etc) with Ansible. It begins from a vanilla Ubuntu server 24.04.4 install. I bootstrapped it using a KVM + spice setup (using a spare physical SSD rather than a virtual one) and iterating over and over again until I finally got everything mostly working. I then booted off that physical disk, and kept iterating until everything was perfect. I've since adapted the setup to work on virtual aarch64 on macOS. I just recently tuned it to work on a crappy old Haswell Dell laptop, now properly detecting and configuring hardware vaapi capabilities, backlight, battery, trackpad, trackpoint, etc.

Pretty snazzy, watching YouTube in Firefox on a 13 year old laptop with hardware h264 decode and everything tuned exactly to my liking.

New comment by spudlyo in "Emacs 31 is around the corner: The changes I'm daily driving"

spudlyo — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:49:07 +0000

I spent a day or so hacking around with kanata[0], which is a kernel level keyboard remapping tool, that lets you define[1] keyboard mapping layers in a similar way you might with QMK firmware. When I hit the control or meta/alt/option key, it activates a layer where Emacs editing keys are emulated using the GTK equivalents. For example, C-a and C-e are mapped to home/end, etc. I preserve my macOS CMD-not-control-key muscle memory this way too.

The only problem is, this is not the behavior I want in terminals or in GNU/Emacs itself. I wrote a small python daemon (managed by a systemd user service) which wakes up whenever the active window changes. Based on this info, I send a message to the TCP server that kanata (also managed by a systemd user service) provides for remote control to switch to the appropriate layer.

[0]: https://github.com/jtroo/kanata

[1]: https://gitlab.com/spudlyo/dotfiles/-/blob/master/kanata/.co...

New comment by spudlyo in "Typst 0.15.0"

spudlyo — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 20:04:27 +0000

There was probably a nicer way of expressing this, but yes, ideally I will continue to use Org mode for my documents and substitute typst for LaTex when exporting to pdf.

New comment by spudlyo in ""Don't You Just Upload It to ChatGPT?""

spudlyo — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 21:17:39 +0000

It reminds me when people would stuff their image prompts with things like NO DEFORMED FINGERS.

New comment by spudlyo in "SVG-Line: Better Status Bars for Emacs – Charlie Holland's Blog"

spudlyo — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:05:57 +0000

I'm starting to use this technique for my own application specific status bars in Emacs and it works really well and looks extremely snazzy. I should probably implement a TUI emacs fallback, but at the moment I'm super stoked about this approach.

New comment by spudlyo in "SVG-Line: Better Status Bars for Emacs – Charlie Holland's Blog"

spudlyo — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 18:03:40 +0000

I'm a big fan of his work. The VOMPECCC fruit picker[0] article, was what finally got me to understand (and start using) the power of the stack in my own programs. The whole "propertized string" as "unit of currency" concept I found extremely useful, and now I use a custom consult document picker (with rich annotations) to perform actions on different kinds of XML documents that live in my BaseX database, it's super cool.

[0]: https://www.chiply.dev/post-vompeccc-fruits

New comment by spudlyo in "I'm skeptical about efforts to revolutionize schooling"

spudlyo — Fri, 05 Jun 2026 16:09:48 +0000

"Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon and hanging in the misty clouds."

New comment by spudlyo in "The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription"

spudlyo — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:22:26 +0000

Prompting an agent to execute a task assumes you know what the task should be, have done some research on available options, weighed the pros and cons of various approaches, bounced your ideas off a colleague, have written a few test programs to validate your assumptions, considered how the new code will integrate with existing systems, figured out the parts that you should have tests for, and have generally charted a path forward that gives you a reasonable chance of success.

New comment by spudlyo in "The solution might be cancelling my AI subscription"

spudlyo — Sun, 31 May 2026 16:00:39 +0000

> It's a thermonuclear ADHD amplifier and I have seen the same effect in every single one of my adult friends.

You make this sound like a bad thing. ADHD isn't always about attention deficit, although it is right there in the name. It's more about attention dysregulation. For those of us prone to hyperfocus, working with AI can provide the kinds of stimulation we crave. I can hardly remember a time when I've felt more engaged with my work, more productive, and more badass.

I actually enjoy the collaborative programming process, and was pair programming with folks before the term was coined. At the end of the day I have the satisfaction of browsing the pretty, readable, DRY, maintainable code we end up with after rounds of refactoring and back and forth. I have always employed linters and code formatters, and this is no different, and my standards are still the same. I yell at the clanker about code duplication, hard-coded assumptions, tightly coupled logic, and in the end, while I don't understand the details of every algorithm, I really understand what we've built and the architecture we've designed.

Concerning Emacs (and Jazz)

spudlyo — Thu, 28 May 2026 15:14:01 +0000

Article URL: https://omidmash.de/blog/concerning-emacs

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48310128

Points: 31

# Comments: 0

New comment by spudlyo in "Greg Brockman interview [video]"

spudlyo — Sun, 24 May 2026 21:51:27 +0000

Won't somebody please think of the copyright holders!?

New comment by spudlyo in "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent"

spudlyo — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:45:13 +0000

I use it with Pi and with Gptel and I'm extremely happy about the price. The speed of deepseek-v4-pro though leaves something to be desired. I do love how detailed its chain of thought reasoning is, and it's pretty wild watching it think at ~2400 baud. It much more transparent than Gemini 3.5 flash in that regard, but maybe 4-5x slower? For my Latin language morphology and linguistic tasks it seems to be up to the job, and on the plus side I can analyze a handful of sentences parallel without worrying about breaking the bank.

New comment by spudlyo in "GitHub confirms breach of 3,800 repos via malicious VSCode extension"

spudlyo — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:28:23 +0000

Emacs has been a viable option for going on a half century now. The GNU Emacs 31 branch[0] was cut recently and is barreling towards a new release. It might be time to give it another look.

I'm not saying its package ecosystem isn't vulnerable to these kind of attacks, it is, but it's at least developed by folks with very different goals and ambitions than Microsoft.

[0]: https://github.com/emacs-mirror/emacs/blob/master/etc/NEWS

New comment by spudlyo in "Show HN: CPU-only transcription for YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram videos"

spudlyo — Wed, 20 May 2026 23:17:00 +0000

So, this project consists of a ~175 line README and a ~500 line Python program that glues yt-dlp and Kroko together. Neat.

I guess if it encourages you to install and figure out how to use ffmpeg, yt-dlp, kroko, numpy, and onnx that's a good thing. Sometimes just knowing a thing is possible is a huge benefit.

New comment by spudlyo in "Do_not_track"

spudlyo — Sat, 02 May 2026 19:12:38 +0000

I was surprised how hard it was to stop the Python transformers library from phoning home to Hugging Face. I set HF_HUB_DISABLE_TELEMETRY=1, and when I called Wav2Vec2CTCTokenizer.from_pretrained I explicitly passed local_files_only=True, but still I got got a warning about not having a valid HF_TOKEN. It wasn't until I stumbled upon HF_HUB_OFFLINE=1 that I'm somewhat confident that I'm not making outgoing connections to HF every time I load a wav2vec2 model from disk.

I wouldn't have realized this was happening at all if it weren't for the obnoxious HF_TOKEN warning.

New comment by spudlyo in "New research suggests people can communicate and practice skills while dreaming"

spudlyo — Fri, 01 May 2026 20:41:02 +0000

While I think it's a compelling idea that playing speech in your target language while you sleep can help, I don't think it's ever been demonstrated to work.

Having said that, that sleep is incredibly important for learning anything! I practice my language learning during the day, a little bit every day, and I prioritize getting good sleep. This is mostly just trying to go to bed at the same time every night, avoiding alcohol, and giving myself an hour before bed with low lights to read and calm my mind. When you sleep, memories are consolidated, organized, and tagged for long-term storage. I will sometimes wake up in the middle of the night and bouncing around in my mind are echos of phrases and words from my target language. I figure it's working.

New comment by spudlyo in "I have officially retired from Emacs"

spudlyo — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 17:58:40 +0000

I am really loving working on a fun Elisp project with pi, a minimal and very extensible agent. I have the agent use emacsclient to control my session, showing me code, running magit ediff for me, testing, formatting, reloading -- it's all working great.

I'm still exploring all the ways the agent and I can collaborate using Emacs as a shared medium, but at the moment am super optimistic about it.

New comment by spudlyo in "Claude Pro: Opus model will only be available if extra usage is enabled"

spudlyo — Tue, 28 Apr 2026 01:03:32 +0000

The messaging around what is and isn't allowed with the various Claude plans has been so very muddled as of late. Add to that declining model performance, changes to default reasoning efforts, expanded token usage, caching bugs, corporate denials and gaslighting -- I don't think it's overstating matters to say they've suffered some major self-inflected reputational damage.

As it stands now, there is so much FUD surrounding their offerings, I'm not sure what they could do in the short term to turn things around.

New comment by spudlyo in "Britannica11.org – a structured edition of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica"

spudlyo — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 18:56:20 +0000

I'm curious how the information is structured under the hood. I just recently learned about how folks in the digital humanities use the XML-TEI format for semantic markup of works like this. I've recently been exploring the Latin-English Lewis & Short dictionary encoded in XML-TEI.

I've had a ton of fun playing learning about BaseX and XQuery to ask questions like "Which classical authors are responsible for writing words that appear only once in the entire corpus (hapax legomena)" or "what are longest hapax words" (usually the funniest ones) and that kind of thing. Shout out to Tufts University for making this available!

I would love to be able to load the 1911 Britannica into BaseX and and see what interesting things I could learn about it via XQuery!