stochastictrebuchet

Top left is Get Out. Pretty decent thriller

I give it a spin every month or so to see how it’s getting on. I’m on macOS.

Every time I walk away unimpressed, despite its maker’s very deserved esteemed reputation.

I’m probably not seeing something. What I do see, however, is that I can’t search my scrollback history, nor can I select text without a mouse.

Also, pressing cmd+, on macOS opens the config inside TextEditor (yes, a separate GUI app) rather than in $EDITOR. It’s a small thing but I couldn’t figure out how to change it. Coming from Kitty, this drove me mad.

I’m not sure who Ghostty is for. My feeling is it’s aiming to be an excellent, polished experience for casual terminal users. But I didn’t see anything that Kitty or just tmux anywhere can’t do.

Been following Synergy for a while, hoping they’ll announce gamepad/steam deck support. The art style looks amazing!

Now do ‘ocasional’… ‘ocassion— fuck, ‘occasionnall—

Screw it

Nice, new job search constraint

It all started with that damn gorilla

Wait… WHAT?!

Honestly, what an amazing person.

Thanks for teaching me something new!

So Chromium is based on Blink, which is LGPL – a less viral GPL. Hence, it can serve as a dependency in closed-source software.

As to the shared heritage of these well-established projects – I don’t know how else to interpret it other than a testament to the complexity of building a decent browser engine.

Btw, quick shout out to Orion, a rare WebKit browser by the makers of Kagi that’s apparently coming to Linux as well. I’m a monthly supporter. Even though I still mostly use Vivaldi, it’s been coming along really nicely. Proprietary software but idc. I appreciate their unspoken mission statement: pay or be the product. (No-one should be a product, obviously, but that’s capitalism.)

Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.

I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though

To the extent that the billboard never existed while the image implies it did – sure.

I love the term ‘slop’. It’s one of my favorite new words along with ‘nontent’.

But this, to me, isn’t that. I think of slop as ‘unrequested, unconvincing, lazy, and lifeless’. In short, ineffective and unwelcome.

I feel like this meme gets the message across. It’s not great, but it’s not terrible. The AI tells are subtle enough: the multi lane pileup in the background and some poor small size text rendering.

Not sure why I felt the need to write this. Guess I’m of the opinion that just because something is AI-generated doesn’t mean it should be discounted immediately, unless it really feels like zero effort went into it. Have a nice day!

Ya better werk 🫰

Betrayed by the global clipboard

Another happy Kitty user here!

I use my terminal as an IDE. Kitty makes it (relatively) easy to write custom interactive applets (aka kittens) that open in new panes or communicate between panes. The ssh integration is also really useful: whenever I ssh into my remote work station my fish and helix config gets copied over.

Judging by the code (a mix of C, python, and go) and the fast release rate, the core maintainer seems to be an utter mad genius – which unfortunately is sometimes reflected in his notoriously abrasive communication style.

Only thing I’m lacking is persistent remote sessions. The maintainer is not quiet about his dislike of tmux and other multiplexers. It’s wildly inefficient to process every byte twice, he argues. Convincing but Kitty doesn’t currently offer an alternative for remote sessions, which is where I do most of my work. Wezterm has something for this in beta, but misses many of the niceties of Kitty. So I’m still using tmux for everything in Kitty, because it trips me up to have one way of working with panes locally and another way when working remotely.

I tried Ghostty, if only because the maintainer is an excellent communicator. I found it polished but simple. I couldn’t figure out how to page up the scrollback or search it. I couldn’t rename tab titles. The config format seemed under-documented. I’ll give it another go in a month or so.

Morning: fugue state. Feel as if I’ve been slingshotted into a separate plane of time where the hours of the day feel drawn by random.

Evening: alert, focused. Each minute feels precious. Backlog of ideas overflowing. Dread having to go to bed at a time that feels ‘normal’.

A term I learned just this year: chronotypes. Basically, the preferred timing of the wake-sleep cycle varies among humans. Easy to imagine how that might have been useful from an evolutionary perspective: always someone to keep watch while the rest sleeps.

Eh, I get it. There’s an overwhelming abundance of choice that’s growing faster than the average time it takes to form a connection with any one game. Why deal with the FOMO and misbuys if you know what works for you.

That doesn’t stop me from purchasing way too many (non-refundable) indie titles on the Switch, though. And I’m glad to say some of those feel like they’ll keep me hooked for a good while.

Still, nothing can ever top my love for one classic game in particular: AOE 1 (definitive edition). Why? (It’s unfair to the rest.) Years ago I used to play against my dad over LAN. It’s some of the most fun we had together. Standing outside while he took a smoke break mid-game, I’d explain how I was about to wipe his whole civilization off the map in ways he couldn’t possibly imagine. Sometimes when I miss him, firing up AOE lets me feel closer to him again.

All this to say, nostalgia is a tough bar for any new game to beat.

Anything for my princeaesss

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