Hacker News: spudlyo

New comment by spudlyo in "AI;DR (AI; Didn't Read)"

spudlyo — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 20:11:16 +0000

This is LE;DU: low-effort, didn't upvote.

New comment by spudlyo in "Emacs canvas patch is on master"

spudlyo — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 18:28:36 +0000

The headline comes from the most recent post in the thread from Eli Zaretskii:

> Thanks, this is now installed on the master branch, and I'm therefore closing this bug.

Good news! This will enable a bunch of future in-buffer graphics features -- things like Headless/Playwright Chromium using Emacs as a display server or faster PDF viewers. Org-babel should be able to make use of this too for faster data plotting. I can only imagine the kinds of snazzy Emacs graphical UI interfaces this will enable, beyond what is being currently done using SVG hacks for rendering.

New comment by spudlyo in "Lost my phone at the office. Claude suggested tracking Bluetooth signal strength"

spudlyo — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 03:19:26 +0000

Two years down the line I suspect "persons" won't working directly on code bases they hate. Two years from now, I'd wager that even today's most ardent AI critics will be using them for dirty jobs -- like refactoring ugly, but useful, balls of mud.

New comment by spudlyo in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

spudlyo — Sat, 08 Aug 2026 14:46:47 +0000

Nice! I love all the Latin audio, although most of it is well above my level. I'm always pleased to hear well-pronounced Latin with elision and prodelision. Do you know how the audio is licensed? I'd love to have my own copy, and am trying to organize a CC-BY-SA archive of spoken word Latin.

New comment by spudlyo in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

spudlyo — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:07:15 +0000

I'm a recently retired software nerd who got into reading 19th century literature. I was greatly inspired by characters in these novels, most of whom had the advantages of a classical education, and I lamented how poor my own was. One day I idly wondered how hard it would be to learn a bit of Latin (as I was constantly having to look up Latin references) and once I discovered LLPSI[0] I was hooked.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...

New comment by spudlyo in "Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it"

spudlyo — Fri, 07 Aug 2026 21:01:38 +0000

> LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software.

Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate.

[0]: https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com

[1]: https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up

New comment by spudlyo in "Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open"

spudlyo — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:52:26 +0000

In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.

New comment by spudlyo in "Herdr is joining Y Combinator. The runtime stays open"

spudlyo — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 20:22:25 +0000

Radix enim omnium malorum est cupiditas. Enshitification is sure to follow in one guise or another.

New comment by spudlyo in "Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage"

spudlyo — Wed, 05 Aug 2026 01:13:49 +0000

I started treating my developer workstations like cattle. With a press of a button I can turn a vanilla Ubuntu 22.04.04 server install into my happy-place developer environment. Tools, code, browser -- everything set up exactly the way I want it. I have it synced to a couple of different laptops, and a separate boot drive from my desktop machine. It has a restricted set of SSH keys, and I push code to a separate upstream.

If YOLO MODE causes pi to destroy my workstation (it hasn't yet) I'll just nuke the thing from orbit and spin up a new one.

New comment by spudlyo in "Don't Take the Black Pill [video]"

spudlyo — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 20:01:58 +0000

So in case you're worried about watching a 35 minute video and wishing you hadn't, here is what I think is an interesting observation that the speaker starts coming around to at around the 7 minute mark.

Why does software suck? Management often has other priorities, and isn't interested in doing the hard work required to increase the reliability and reduce the technical debt in software. Engineers who care about such things, often engage in acts of "benevolent noncompliance". Common workarounds are "asking for forgiveness instead of permission", secrecy, and misdirection. Alternately you can confront management and fight for doing what you think is right. These sorts of things can be risky. You can be fired, you can be reprimanded if caught, you can be retaliated against or lose political advantage. In the past, software engineers had a lot more agency than they do now, because nowadays the supply/demand ratio no longer favors software engineers, and as a result we have weaker negotiation power. Now we're more afraid of being fired and not being able to find a job, and managers aren't afraid of us quitting and not being able to replace us.

I haven't yet finished the whole thing, but there are sections around dark patterns and other forms of user-hostile software. I'll probably finish it.

New comment by spudlyo in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

spudlyo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 20:04:39 +0000

I almost exclusively write in cursive, so I don't have any personal experience, but I assume the only real difference is in how often you pick up the pen, so my guess is that it should be roughly the same.

New comment by spudlyo in "Writing by hand is good for your brain"

spudlyo — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 18:33:26 +0000

The muscles in your hand and fingers are small and tire pretty easily. The muscles in your arm and shoulder are bigger and can do a lot more work. Back in the day, folks who were taught "business cursive" like the "Palmer Method" were taught to keep their hand mostly static, and to guide the pen strokes using their arm. The way I do it is by planting my forearm on the desk as a pivot point, and moving my arm and shoulder to make the pen move. It took some getting used to, but my handwriting looks about the same as it did before, but no more hand pain.

New comment by spudlyo in "LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps"

spudlyo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:49:59 +0000

One day there will be a decent TV that can be relatively easily hacked to run on open source firmware. My wife and I are moving soon, and I'm happy we've decided not to have a TV in the new place. Neither of our current LG TV's have ever been connected to the network, but it will feel good when I sell or give the cursed things away.

New comment by spudlyo in "'VPNs are lawful technical tools,' says EU Court in landmark copyright ruling"

spudlyo — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:28:01 +0000

"Writing for money and reservation of copyright are, at bottom, the ruin of literature. No one writes anything that is worth writing, unless he writes entirely for the sake of his subject." -- Arthur Schopenhauer

If you find this quote interesting, you should check out this video[0] by Christopher Anadale who is a teacher who does long form deep dive analysis & commentary on classic works of philosophy. As an aside, one of the things I love about YouTube is when teachers record and share their lectures, and I was pleased to learn about the feisty Schopenhauer (and his thoughts on authorship) by listening to this lecture.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F99UsizxMZQ

New comment by spudlyo in "I burned all my tokens researching how to save tokens"

spudlyo — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:23:29 +0000

It's like the frog prompting the scorpion not to sting him as they cross the river. Or like when image models used to routinely draw human hands incorrectly and you'd see these "prompt hacks" that would essentially be stuffed with phrases like NO DEFORMED FINGERS, NO ELDRITCH HORRORS!

New comment by spudlyo in "AI Can't Recreate the Thrust Game (But It Can Help You Understand It)"

spudlyo — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 18:11:35 +0000

I was about to complain at you for jumping to conclusions, but your cited example contains two emdashes and a nested "it's not X it's Y". It certainly looks like slop. In my own writing I'm increasingly conscious of trying to avoid the appearance of slop, I would like to think I would have caught this.

New comment by spudlyo in "Good Tools Are Invisible"

spudlyo — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 14:48:08 +0000

> Anyway, this should be a little more of a deeper discussion than a forum comment.

You should turn this into a post of its own, it's probably the most insightful thing I've taken away from this entire conversation.

New comment by spudlyo in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

spudlyo — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 21:35:18 +0000

I think that just enables xterm mouse support, and allows for various mouse key bindings in tmux. I think the deal is that it's turned on by default, and lots of the UI elements by default are configured with mouse bindings. Not just selecting and resizing panes, you can right click on a pane or a workspace and one of those display-popups pops up with a "rename" dialog box.

I think this is why it's described as "mouse first" terminal.

New comment by spudlyo in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

spudlyo — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:59:45 +0000

The example I saw of "mobile support" was connecting via a mobile terminal emulator. I don't see how that is any different than using tmux with the same mobile terminal emulator.

New comment by spudlyo in "Herdr: One terminal to rule them all"

spudlyo — Tue, 07 Jul 2026 20:33:39 +0000

So I've tried to figure out why you might want to use this over Tmux, and essentially I think it comes to down to:

- everything is mouse clickable

- tmux style display-popups are used for friendly UI interactions everywhere

- it has a UI for agents running in panes, with a cool status (idle/working) display

- has opinionated defaults like automatic clipboard copy on mouse text select

- makes nested sessions easier & has default affordances for remote SSH attach

- is generally prettier

- uses display-popups for notifications

Otherwise it seems exactly like tmux.