stochastictrebuchet

Can I please stand behind you in the airport security queue, just to see what happens?

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.

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

Screw it

What an awesome name for a cat!

Any time I read the Kitty docs I’m just in awe of everything its maker, Kovid Goyal, has built for it. Like, not just individual features but entire protocols, which other terminals then adopt.

I just wish remote session persistence was more of a priority. Goyal dislikes tmux (to put it mildly) but doesn’t suggest an alternative to those who do their work on remote servers. If I’m already organizing my work in tmux over ssh, I might as well do the same locally as well – which unfortunately means missing out on some of Kitty’s best parts.

Gotta say, it’s kind of a bummer to be downvoted for sharing my own experience. Are those ‘disagree’ or ‘doesn’t contribute to discussion’ votes?

AdGuard does more than DNS blocking. It strips ads from the response content.

Haven’t seen a single YT ad

I’ve really been enjoying Vivaldi. It’s also Chromium-based. It’s easy to customize and it has really good tab management. You can group tabs into workspaces, open split panes, and – this one I really appreciate – you can stack tabs by domain. Added bonus is that the company behind it, Vivaldi Technologies, is Norwegian, which ticks the ‘shop European’ box for me.

As for ad blocking, the shittiness of manifest v3 made me look at options outside the browser rather than rely on extensions. These days I pass all my traffic through adguard, which filters out ads from the request responses. All in all this has been a positive step, because now I can play around with any browser without ever seeing ads.

It all started with that damn gorilla

I sometimes wonder what I would do or who I would be if I had a fraction of these individuals’ courage.

Having regained my freedom, I would leave. Hong Kong, it seems, is a lost cause – which saddens me to no end because I spent 6 years there as a kid. It was completely different than mainland China, which I moved to after. It was a beautiful mix of western and Chinese culture. It was its own thing.

Well-deserved win! Watched this in the cinema a few weeks back. What immediately struck me about the beautiful art style is that it felt more like what you’d expect from a labor-of-love indie game than from a dreamworks/pixar studio – and it was incredibly refreshing! Also, for a movie where water plays a big role, the fluid rendering was absolutely breathtaking. I could almost smell the warm plastic air of a GPU giving its all.

I’ll have you know I intend to keep using Covid as an excuse for bad decisions well into 2040

Final graphic shows why the far-right hates education. I’m probably jumping to conclusions, but I wonder if their relatively low popularity among higher-educated voters is due to:

1. Voters being more aware of their history (a “… doomed to repeat it” sort of thing)
2. Better at spotting populist lies (I don’t know enough about German politics to know how populist the Left Party is)
3. Leading more comfortable lives, thus less inclined to reach for extremes.

It’s an undemocratic thought, but sometimes I wish there were some sort of aptitude test right before casting a vote. Or at the very least, a quick quiz to confirm you’re aware of the party’s key program points. Obviously, both options are ripe for abuse.

So long as we’re not just singling out Meta. They’ve all done it.

At least Meta, with its Llama model family, has enabled the open source LLM space to flourish (along with Mistral, AI2, Alibaba, Eleuther, and many others).

What-aboutism. I know. I’m okay with what’s happening here in the sense that in return we’ve gotten magical (compared to the SoTA five years ago) models with seemingly emergent reasoning capabilities and expertise in basically every domain. That’s huge, even if it’s started to feel normal.

The issue, of course, is creatives whose content was stolen now losing out on opportunities or revenue that they relied on, meaning fewer creatives in the future and more AI slop.

Not seeding is hilariously on-brand for Meta though. Maybe it’s the ‘possession < distribution’ defence?

Ya better werk 🫰

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.

GenAI coding assistants are only as good as the data they are trained on. Less-used proglangs make up a tiny fraction of the available data, or may even be completely absent. There is a reason coding assistants give convincing results with Python and JS/TS, but underperform even on relatively up-and-coming langs like Rust.

Why Denmark

So, according to wikipedia there is a small shared border.

Real answer though: I’m an idiot. I remembered driving from Belgium to Denmark through the Netherlands and completely forgot passing through Germany along the way.

Still think those Danes should consider a wall.

In anticipation of this I propose both Belgium and Denmark start building a wall along the border and revise their building codes so that all doorways must be made inconveniently low.