First one is RACE terminal [0]. It's a put-terminals on infinite canvas terminal multiplexer. Right now on macOS, but soon I expect to have Linux version fully released.

Second is Inboxctl [1], it's a keyboard-driven mail client for power users.

The cool thing about both of them is that RACE is my terminal multiplexer and Inboxctl is my e-mail client and they work great. I'm really proud that I can fully interact with terminals/e-mail using my own creations. Both are based on the GUI-framework I accidentally made for ascdraw [2] and kakvide [3].

[0]: https://race-term.com [1]: https://inboxctl.com [2]: https://github.com/exlee/ascdraw [3]: https://github.com/exlee/kakvide

A joke comes to my mind:

A man tells his friend "You know, I don't think we can be friends anymore. Some money went missing from our house.." - "What?! Me? I'd never seal money from your house!" - "Yeah, we found that money, so that's not a problem. But you know... the whole thing left a sour taste."

I kept macOS surface isolated and constrained on purpose (and also have my own rendering engine) so it should be rather easy to make it run on Linux. The biggest obstacle is that it's hard for me to test (I have a gaming rig on Linux, but I don't use it often lately..).

On one side I'm happy it happened, on the other, it's a shame that it took complaining on the internet amplified by HackerNews to get this problem fixed...

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49624856

Points: 436

# Comments: 261

I cannot hear a song in my head if my life depended on it but then there are triggers that extract it music it.

Examples: "who let the dogs out" (I remember rhythm but not the music). I play piano for almost 2 years but I have no idea what's the each sound is. It gets even better. Even though I play and record [0] I can't remember my own compositions. They usually come back to me as a play on hands and not on audio.

I thought I was music deaf for the most of my life. My music teachers mocked me in my youth showing me as an example of someone with zero hearing.

My latest music teacher discovered that I actually have absolute hearing skill but... can't recall sound in my head. So I sense even slight shift in toning (e.g. given few variations of same melody I can tell which one is the original tuning) but I can't reproduce it.

[0]: https://on.soundcloud.com/Rv6t1jXzyAH8E2jEaY

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49435332

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

Since I wrote my own terminal multiplexer that puts terminals on infinite zoomable canvas [0] and I just can't get enough of putting weird stuff like asciiquarium, cmatrix or tty-clock all around (tried peaclock but it's slightly too fiddly for my taste). There are fun projects just to run in TUIs like astroterm or weathr, but I'd say that the space is still open to terminal toys.

The only problem I have with TUIs is that they're boring after a while but something that can be solved with often theme switching.

[0]: https://race-term.com (commercial)

So in that particular case I have a keyboard and it's misbehaving. I know that by some dark magic I can make it behave as I want and that software on Windows can do that.

So I think, "ok, how does it communicate?" - with Bluetooth, obviously. So my next thought it: can I transmit over bluetooth magic bytes that do exactly like this. I definitely have a device on my computer, so I can try to make it.

From that it's all about "how to send arbitrary stuff from bluetooth" search. Instinct tells me there has to be a library, or that at least on person on world wide web tried to do something similar.

If I find even single instance of this, I'm home - read what they did, try to figure out if I can adjust it and do so. Hocus pocus - binary switcher happens.

Though, in the end, it's all about approach. I found many people say "I don't know how to do it, so I don't". My approach is "I rarely know what do, but that doesn't stop me from trying". And this trying new stuff brings practice for the next unknown endeavor.

If I think tool/software would be useful I throw GLM 5.2 (now 5.3) at it and ask to do an audit ;-)

I had a high-end webcam that flickered. There should be switch in the software to switch from 50hz to 60hz that'd fix it but it was nowhere to be found. After digging deeper I found that it was only available in English version of software. It was before macOS had Setting to set language per app, so I had to manually replace Polish bundle with English one through binary.

Another one: Has K810 keyboard that started in "FN-by-default" mode. K811, Mac version of said keyboard allowed for changing default setting just as K810 on Windows, but K810 on Mac - no dice. Support told me to shell out 200€ on Mac keyboard so I ended up writing small binary switcher [0] that would run after keyboard got connected [0].

[0]: https://github.com/exlee/k810_fkeys_mac

Though there's ADHD and other neurodivergent scenarios, and when you have it making anything of a habit is a hard work.

All these "Working in IT isn't stressful at all - John 25yo" memes didn't come come from nothing.

But I wouldn't really put it on LLMs/AI. It was always like this. Jokes about how hopeless development cycle is, and how everybody have impostor syndrome etc.

Then, at some point, being in tech became a gilded profession and everyone: salesmen, artists, clerks etc. joined in. Not because they wanted to be in tech.

They wanted gold.

For years it was working, but right now things shifted. You can no longer just do the thing you learned for a job and continue doing so, because landscape shifted. So they're miserable and they want to get back to knitting, pottery or whatever thing they want to do but not tech.

For people I know who are in tech for the tech nothing changed. There's new tech in town, one has to adjust, and it's still possible to discover new things and pave new paths. Tech was always shifting and I suppose people who worked in it for it always knew it, and it doesn't derail them.

Context-less self-approval is working well. The failure mode is usually false positives (i.e. safe commands being rejected), not the other way around, with root cause of requesting agent underspecifying context (e.g. not mentioning in the request that it's made on behalf of user etc.)

Thus, I'm running self-approval YOLO modes on state-of-the-art models for quite some time and it didn't bit me. It might, but hey, we're long gone from the age of predictable software development.