Hacker News: xwiz

New comment by xwiz in "TUI Studio – visual terminal UI design tool"

xwiz — Fri, 13 Mar 2026 14:28:49 +0000

> The lack of accessibility of TUIs is not great in general.

Interesting. In what ways? I haven't heard anyone express this concern before.

New comment by xwiz in "ASCII Clouds"

xwiz — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 15:21:47 +0000

Thematically related: https://play.ertdfgcvb.xyz/#/src/demos/chromaspiral

New comment by xwiz in "WorldGrow: Generating Infinite 3D World"

xwiz — Mon, 27 Oct 2025 15:02:21 +0000

Kate Compton's GDC talk: https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1024213/Practical-Procedural-G...

New comment by xwiz in "You are a good person if"

xwiz — Wed, 03 Sep 2025 17:05:34 +0000

Wow, I think I might just have a fundamentally and axiomatically different worldview from this guy. American society is oriented almost entirely towards productivity, to the detriment of all else. The owner class has made it their personal mission to squeeze the population for all the productivity they can. It required government intervention to end, for example, slavery and child labor. Billionaires, especially the "productive" ones, are actively hollowing out the country for their benefit. I think it is astronomically rare, if not impossible, to acquire One Billion dollars without unethical behavior.

I cannot comprehend the connection between productivity and democracy that he tries to draw here. So there is some nebulous productivity score, and if you have a negative number, then democracy is over? Nobody can vote? What happens? And being a good person is stapled exclusively to productivity? The only value a person brings to the world is whether they've been "net positive"? This is a remarkably narrowminded conception of personal virtue, discounting relationships, classical virtues, etc., and instead crunching it all down to whether you're in the black or the red when the accountant calls.

"The unproductive rich are in cahoots with the unproductive poor to take from you." is a genuinely bonkers thing to think. Cahoots? Are they communicating methods to steal your hard earned "productivity" from you, or what? The "unproductive poor" are a downstream effect of a society where productivity is tied to whether or not you can stay alive.

Additionally, (but not centrally) this whole piece has a call-to-action tone to it, implying that, now the author has weighed in, everyone has to get a grip and start acting right. "Private equity, market manipulators, real estate, sales, lawyers, lobbyists. This is no longer okay." Alright everyone, I'm putting my foot down! Annoying, but not a core problem.

The strange thing is that I agree with the end goal. Yes, there is a rent-seeking/email-job class of society that adds no value. Yes, manual/physical labor should be treated better. Yes, productivity is largely desirable, and society would benefit overall if we produced more. But he gets to these conclusions in such a strange and stilted way. Overall, I really dislike this blog post.

New comment by xwiz in "Typed languages are better suited for vibecoding"

xwiz — Mon, 04 Aug 2025 15:01:50 +0000

My experience with Haskell has been the same. The GHC provides stellar feedback, so the LLM is almost always able to bang the code into working order, but wow is that code bloated.

New comment by xwiz in "Dwl: Dwm for Wayland"

xwiz — Fri, 25 Jul 2025 14:23:57 +0000

Looks like a great project. I'm a big TWM fan, so I would also like to direct attention to my daily driver, Niri. https://github.com/YaLTeR/niri

New comment by xwiz in "Bootstrapping a side project into a profitable seven-figure business"

xwiz — Wed, 09 Jul 2025 14:35:19 +0000

Glad to hear of your success! Projection Lab is such a great product.

New comment by xwiz in "The Gentle Singularity"

xwiz — Tue, 10 Jun 2025 23:02:11 +0000

Surreal shitposting you say?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE3EhrZyCVd/

New comment by xwiz in "How to live on $432 a month in America"

xwiz — Fri, 23 May 2025 21:22:42 +0000

> The whole point is mainly one about being honest about WHY we have to work 40-60 hours a week so we can stretch to afford a million-dollar starter home, two luxury cars, designer clothes, and IG-worthy vacations.

I have never met a single person of my generation for which this holds true. If this is the perspective that the author is trying to refute, fine, but I cannot say that it is a common one.

> $200,000 in savings would give you $10k a year in interest income to live on at current rates, for instance.

Come on. Most Americans will never see $200K in their life. [1]

[1] https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/resource-library/rese...

New comment by xwiz in "How to live an intellectually rich life"

xwiz — Fri, 02 May 2025 14:20:11 +0000

Pairing production and consumption can be very satisfying. Some personal examples:

- Cooking a novel dish, then eating it

- Setting up a music server, then listening to music with it

- (With friends) Making a pen-and-paper game, then playing it

New comment by xwiz in "Dijkstra On the foolishness of "natural language programming""

xwiz — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 14:34:47 +0000

This opens an interesting possibility for a purely symbol-based legal code. This would probably improve clarity when it came to legal phrases that overlap common English, and you could avoid ambiguity when it came to language constructs, like in this case[1], where some drivers were losing overtime pay because of a comma in the overtime law.

[1] https://cases.justia.com/federal/appellate-courts/ca1/16-190...

New comment by xwiz in "Remembering Larry Finger, who made Linux wireless work"

xwiz — Thu, 27 Jun 2024 17:26:38 +0000

Sorry to hear it. His work was a key part of my entry into the software world.

New comment by xwiz in "Don't be terrified of Pale Fire"

xwiz — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 16:24:46 +0000

Wow, sounds tailor made for me. I'm part way through GEB, and I have a Borges collection arriving tomorrow.

New comment by xwiz in "Ask HN: Do you also marvel at the complexity of everyday objects?"

xwiz — Mon, 18 Mar 2024 18:11:07 +0000

I have noticed that Smith's writing is often mischaracterized by those with a mythology they want to promote.

New comment by xwiz in "Show HN: I3wm Alt+Tab Workspace Switcher"

xwiz — Wed, 13 Mar 2024 14:57:53 +0000

I used i3 for several years and liked it a lot. I've recently switched to XMonad and I think I like it more. I find the configuration to be far more flexible, and the defaults aligned more with my natural preferences. My i3 config was pretty sizeable, but my XMonad config is (for now) quite small. Additionally, I found cycling tiling layouts in XMonad was a very useful feature that I never got from i3. Also I like Haskell, so that was a +1 for XMonad.

New comment by xwiz in "How I'm able to take notes in mathematics lectures using LaTeX and Vim (2019)"

xwiz — Mon, 05 Feb 2024 15:12:39 +0000

Ha, you are absolutely correct about that. I don't believe LaTeX was designed with speed in mind. I was even using Vim! I eventually realized that I was paying far more attention to my notes than the actual material, and began to just bring a notebook and a pen.

New comment by xwiz in "Never Retire"

xwiz — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 20:28:33 +0000

Exactly. I have a hard time viewing articles like this as anything other than deliberate propaganda. But maybe it's the case that many people reading the Economist cannot derive joy from anything besides employment.

Furthermore, who is this article for? People deciding whether to retire, but who weren't around for Seinfeld?

New comment by xwiz in "The Internet Is Full of AI Dogshit"

xwiz — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 16:58:41 +0000

I don't think the issue is LLMs inherently, it's the misapplication. Kagi has siloed the LLM content into the 'Quick Answer' and 'Assistant' sections, and it generates on the fly from search results. (Plus, the 'Expert' LLM cites the references it used.) I think the issue will come when there isn't a clear delineation between real and artificial text, or when artificial text is presented more prominently than real text, as in the article.

New comment by xwiz in "The death of a public intellectual"

xwiz — Mon, 30 Oct 2023 17:09:42 +0000

That might be an interesting experiment. Poll people on a large scale about dozens of minuscule moral issues that can be determined as GOOD or EVIL, then try to assemble more complex moral issues out of these building blocks. You could end up with some sort of statistical model of morality.

New comment by xwiz in "Idealizing shyness creates problems at work and monsters online"

xwiz — Thu, 19 Oct 2023 22:38:06 +0000

I find this article strange and somewhat irritating.

It seems to imply that people are shy because it was trendy in media? Now that shy characters are no longer popular, you should just stop being shy because it's harming your personal brand and career.

Perhaps I'm not understanding the thrust of the article. It does make references to media and internet culture that I haven't experienced.