@grunt · textlog

I surprised my self this morning. I was looking for some content on YouTube with Mario (pi) and saw something that was 2 months old. First reaction was “that is too old.” I used to take my time, slow it down and have time for thoughts. Is this what’s happen to you when consume too much?

Patience is a muscle that needs exercise to keep functioning.

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yes. everything goes so fast nowadays that we don't stop to appreciate stuff that happened the last month, two months, a year, 5 years ago.

With the recent speed of all the AI stuff 2 months is old but the whole thing has gotten exhausting at this point.

Is open source dead? Everyone has the power now to make their own stacks of things. The people aspect of open source is dead or dying. I don't think the bunny is going back in the box.

One nice thing about Open Source (at least for me) is different people doing the same thing in different ways and one of those happen to suit my taste perfectly. And in many cases, I won't be able to come with it myself even with Super Intelligence.

Evgeny Morozov has pointed out that using ai through chat interfaces is based on an individualised and privatised model, which (heavily paraphrased) is inherently anti-social. With an extra layer now of people making small personalised tools, do bigger things still need teams of people who know what they’re doing? FWIW I’d like to see more sharing of vibe coded tools instead of everyone making their own more less the same ones. Mine are here: pauladams.neocities.org

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I don't think so. I have been using more open source software than ever before. You may argue that with LLMs I have the power to make my own stack of things, but this doesn't eliminate that I still need knowledge to properly steer an LLM to create something worthwhile. If I have no knowledge of what I intend to build, the best thing the LLM will generate is a half-assed copy of something that already exists. Which is what we have been drowning in the past couple of years.

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AI can be a superpower in the hands of someone knowledgeable. That makes the people aspect of open source more important, not less. If you offload your curiosity and desire to learn to AI, you will be a slave to it's limitations instead of being a master of its capabilities.

Of course not. I think it is much more relevant to ask "Is closed source dead?". Anyone can now replace a proprietary program with a vibeslopped alternative which might suit them just as well. It will have the same level of trust (ie. none) and none of the other drawbacks.

Don’t be beholden to one LLM basket. Get yourself an Openrouter account, get yourself an open source harness like pi and get yourself educated. I will die on this hill.

I agree with this. I already use different models for different tasks in part for this reason. Never bothered with an OpenRouter account though, I just have accounts set with each provider. And Pi is excellent. I actually find it much better than Claude Code.

anyone know a good keyboard? specifically one that's quiet?

I lost you at quiet. I'm on a mech, one of the quieter vsrients but not so quiet. (Royal Kludge RK61)

I am on a Royal Kludge as well! Definitely not quiet, but damn if it isn't a joy to type in it.

Glad to meet a fellow Royal 😃. Also, what are the switches you went for? Brown for me.

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Same! I like that it doesn't make the click sound and still give me the proper keystroke feedback :)

OK-M? I have the previous , 65%, and am very happy with it. I think it’s available both in quiet and noisy #versions (but the two I have are clicketyclicky). ducky ok-m

this is mainly a problem of switches. get a keyboard formfactor you like with a good body and replacable switches. thatll be the only keyboard you need for the rest of your life. if you want to change things up, buy new switches and caps. i personally use Outemu Silent Lime V3 Silent Tactile switches from aliexpress, and highly recommend them as they are cheap, feel awesome and are very quiet

OK-M? I have the previous , 65%, and am very happy with it. I think it’s available both in quiet and noisy #versions (but the two I have are clicketyclicky). ducky ok-m

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I really enjoy low-profile keyboards for this very reason. Depending on your system of course, but the most silent keyboard I've used (and still use) is the Mac Magic Keyboard. But most low profile ones are in my experience pretty quiet.

Everytime I come on here I feel so dumb compared to everyone -_- mostly because I didn't come here from GitHub or any other major site like it .. :P

I literally came here because I saw the app on F-droid, I didn't even know this app existed until then.

Any advantages in using the app instead of having the site as a PWA on Android?

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I don't see any, this is just how I found out about the app and use it.

I've never used f droid until getting the app! does it have any other cool apps? :O

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Absolutely! There are many FOSS apps as alternatives to closed ones, I have it on every phone.

Hi ha dies que em demano si no hauria d'escriure en català aquí, per tal que hi hagi més diversitat lingüística visible. Al cap i a la fi, avui en dia les traduccions són econòmiques. La traducció automàtica pot ajudar a preservar la diversitat lingüística del món.

There are days when I wonder if I shouldn't write in Catalan here, so that there is more visible linguistic diversity. After all, translations are cheap these days. Machine translation can help preserve the world's linguistic diversity.

Una derivada és saber si els lectors anglòfons monolingües llegeixen les traduccions que mostra a sota, o si per un instint, les salten.

A derivative is to know whether monolingual English-speaking readers read the translations that shows below, or if by instinct, they skip them.

I read those posts normally. I always wonder if it would be a bit lame to reply in English, since I typically don't know the original language. For instance, I can't write in Catalan, although I can sort of parse it and understand it without translation. That said, I am not natively an English speaker.

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Les traduccions són econòmiques avui en dia. Respon en l'idioma que més còmode et sigui.

Translations are cheap these days. Respond in the language you are most comfortable with.

some people do absolutely improve their work output (either amount or quality) with AI, but most people just resign all their critical thinking to the black box. if you cannot function at YOUR WORKPLACE without ai, chances are that, 99% of the time, you never was supposed to work there in the first place.

Is this true? Sometimes, AI allows for socratic thinking, this is, the conversation with the machine allows the thinker to go further as the AI thorws ideas to the conversation. Many times, the AI reasoning is not good enough, but like a friend that says a funny think that sparks an idea, the AI can help our brain to see other possible paths. The AI doesn't need to be right to be helpful

that's only true if a) that "rubber ducky" entity is not leading the line of thinking down the wrong path, and b) the human thinker is actually doing the critical thinking, and not the machine. The latter is where my criticism of unbridled AI use is in this case, wherein the human becomes the rubber ducky instead of the other way around.

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Indeed. The AI throws back ideas, but it is the human who must do the heavy lifting. In this regard, the AI is a sort of mirror, it reflects what you send it, showing another side the object. But if the human messages are bad, the AI will respond with bad quality answers.

A problem I perceive is usage of AI to launder ignorance. They may know nothing of the subject at hand, but they confidently paste the output of AI as if they had the knowledge, thus offloading on you the work of figuring out if the information makes any sense. In many ways it emboldened the incompetent.

This, so much this

ai coding feels like it has reached diminishing returns for me. luna is my default orchestrator, routing work by complexity. in practice, usage lands around 16% luna, 48% sol, 30% astra, and 6% terra. at this point, i care less about each new frontier release. the system already finds a capable model for the job. the frontier is moving beyond my day-to-day work, so i’m happy to settle into predictable models for a while.

I’ve found the same, albeit with Opus — it’s hard to find uses for Fable. I don’t need a model that works for longer or works on harder problems, I need one that consistently produces simple, easy to understand, code; which at this point none of them do.

I've been there since I settled on a combination of GLM, DeepSeek and MiMo for planning, implementation, and verification flows. I'm a lot more interested at this point in having cheaper models that can consistently do the work I need. It's been a while that I hanven't noticed any improvement when I try new frontier models. I only notice they are very expensive.

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same here, for almost an year. At this point, I could easily live with models that were released 6-12 months ago and continue doing so. also possibly the reason why the current focus has been around agentic workflows or agentic anything, than the model capabilities.

Coding probably yeah, but still they are bad at generating novel information, new ideas and such. They’re also not very good at seeing the bigger picture, they will narrowly perform the task but they’re not taking into account future revisions, which ends up in refactor after refactor in order to move forward.

ive been obsessed with deltarune this year, its probably the best indie rpg ever made. (and its only 5/7 chapters out)

I've been thinking I wanna wait until it's all out, but maybe I'm missing out by not diving in now?

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i dont mind the waits, cause ive been really liking the theorizing part of it too, cause the community is super active in between chapters and theres soo much lore and thematic connections to dicuss.

Is it any better than Undertale? I played Undertale back when it came out, but despite all the hype I thought it was just ok. Nothing really that would make me go out of my way to play a sequel.

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yes its much better than undertale, from a gameplay and design perspective. undertale had good story and characters, but deltarune is just that + better production value

Which do you think is ?

Microservices. Not really programming, as this is more on the architectural level. Microservices is a valid approach when you need to address massive scale. The thing is, I have seen it applied to things that could realistically serve its audience in a handful of modest servers with a less fashionable approach. It was done under the guise of simplification; each individual microservice was in fact very small. But this at the cost of absolute spaghetti architecture.

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This indeed makes sense, it is a lot more like locality, if a concept doesn't needs a function, don't give it a function

Clean Code

I had so much pointless discussions about this ... but when you say "Clean Code" , do you mean the book or the general idea that such a thing exists?

The book, but actually ideas, like tiny functions and names. Aposd is much deeper book. Hilarious read

I assume this is not original at all at this point - but (extreme) DRY is not a good practice. My experience is that a bit of copying yourself and your colleagues in the code base often make maintenance of the code base easier.

Many have adopted the term WET (write everything twice)

Getters and setters for everything. Certainly, if you want an object to be doing more than just getting and setting a value right now, get them in there! Planning to add functionality later without breaking code? Stop it! That should break code! If I'm consuming a library and have been using this setter method for 2 years, I don't want it to suddenly introduce brand new validation, caching, or logging behavior!

Are getters and setters on everything even considered a good practice? To me it screams junior developer who hasn’t yet fully understood encapsulation and abstraction — if you’re just exposing getters and setters as the interface then what is the class/module/etc providing beyond what a standard variable does…?

Any users around? I have been customizing it to the way I work, as it is meant to be. Bent it in a way that I enjoy holding it, so to say. Maybe someone will find those useful, so I took the time to get it published. Gruntfooot is a footer customization, where you can try new colors/glyphs in real time and also has theme support.

Piflux is a coding workflow. You can steer software development by running commands that issue reasonably general prompts. /plan, /code, /review I created this because I find it very useful to have different models/ perform each of those tasks in isolated sessions. Managing this manually was very much a hassle.

Devs! Drop your so we can follow each other! Love to see the projects you’re working on. Mine: —

I was never one to do things publicly. I keep my stuff in my private git server (currently gitea). I recently fell in love with though, and I am having fun working on extensions for it. Nothing too fancy, I have one out, more will follow.

Gave up on github after the acquisition. Very glad I did, given the unsurprising decline since then.

And what do you use now?

Some gitlab, some codeberg. More recently the latter as gitlab have an annoying tendency to mess with their UI for no discernible reason.

I think is time to vibecode an alternative! I know I would

github.com/semperos

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github.com/Aeres-u99 I have created a small tool, codeatlas, that basically generates an index to codebase that your llm can lookup syper quick, github.com/Aeres-u99 there is also a cbz->pdf converter that I wrote for eink devices which is nice

Using Linux hasn't really been fun lately, idk. Nobara, despite building on fedora breaks a lot, but overall the whole ecosystem is so damn inconsistent and fragmented. Not sure if I have gotten more sensitive to this over the years but all I want is a system that "just works" and feels good 😔

I had a great run with Mint for years. I was as boring as it gets. I got a new laptop recently and decided to try OpenSUSE Tumbleweed. I am really enjoying it, but it is a bit too recent for me to swear by it.

what are the best midnight snacks?

Halva.

noooo. now I'm craving halva.

Mine is homemade biltong.

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instant noodles. sue me.

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I am with you

Cheese is always the richt choice. Regardless of the time of day.

in case you want to run some code in you can use show codeconsole.log(3*4+5*6)

42

python supported as well show codeprint(6*7)

42

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syntax:

something #exec
```js
or
```python

your code, then close ``` the code block.

This is a good example of RecursionError in Python! show codef = lambda: f(); f()

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/box/submission/file0.code", line 1, in <module>
    f = lambda: f(); f()
                     ^^^
  File "/box/submission/file0.code", line 1, in <lambda>
    f = lambda: f(); f()
                ^^^
  File "/box/submission/file0.code", line 1, in <lambda>
    f = lambda: f(); f()
                ^^^
  File "/box/submission/file0.code", line 1, in <lambda>
    f = lambda: f(); f()
                ^^^
  [Previous line repeated 996 more times]
RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded

Probably a good idea to add some guardrails (if you haven't already). I purposefully wrote something that would crash, but I could very well have written something that looped infinitely.

preview works now for show codeconsole.log('Yay!')

Yay!

if you want more languages lmk! we can support everything .

LOL that's a very slipery slope... today it's a multiplication, tomorrow a blockchain then a matmul and textlog becomes the AI itself!

(Opinion) People don’t like generative AI because it made the {insert creativity} too easy. Saw the HN post on ‘AI music banned from top 40 chart in Australia’ and people had very strong opinions in both directions. The hot take: If you’re ok with someone’s creativity being outsourced to others, then you should be ok with AI doing the same. If “AI made this and I call it mine” is bad but “someone overseas on fivver made this and I call it mine” and it’s suddenly ok, time to self reflect.

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My hot take: from the moment you use technology, be it an instrument, a synthesizer, a DAW, and now AI, it is still your idea, your effort, your time spent, and that makes it yours. Others can do the same if they choose. The same way someone chooses a classic guitar over a synthesizer, one can choose an AI over (insert ancient way of doing things).

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I think things are more nuanced than that. I think there's something about intentionality. There's a difference in between knowing what you want to build and using tools to achieve that (whatever those might be), and just rolling the dice for whatever comes out.

You’re rolling the dice whenever you are searching for a sample or a preset in a synthesizer. Eventually it’s what “sounds good”, so still the effort is your judgement and the time spent finding that “dice roll” that sounded well.

I am not a musician, so I lack the jargon to properly explain what I mean. I used AI for creative writing (nothing too fancy, TTRPG). There, the broader the dice roll, the more generic and uninteresting the results. Slop, if you will. It was surprisingly good to build up on ideas I had however. I imagine muisic also has building blocks. Melodies, instruments, mixing, etc. AI can perhaps be used in a similar fashion there.

Yes, enhancing the artist/creator, not replacing them.

I heard a perspective I sort of like: if AI is a tool then acceptable AI use is, more or less, defined as "when my audience no longer notices or cares". It's dynamic like that. Bad photoshop is detectable and annoying, so are overusing presets. Your artistry needs to expand to meet the tool. I don't know if I 100% like that or agree. At the same time, it's a pretty straightforward line, a practical take.

I kind of ask that and here is my theory... news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49289341#49290428 But on the rejection for AI just for the sake of it, I think part is that analyzing takes effort and if there is more and more to analyze you creates this mechanism to defend yourself... scroll twi... I mean reject the premise as false and ask for a human made thing because that one is "truth" more worthy.

Microsoft Word Online (web version) is horrible.

It was the only way to reproduce the authentic horrible experience of the offline version.

🤣 Did not remember the offline version being this bad, but maybe it went downhill in the past 5 years I have not used it.

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I never used the online version, but the last time I used the offline version it already was a horrible experience. This was about 5 years ago, before I had moved entirely to Linux. It was so bad I downloaded a pirated version of some old MS Office 2007 Blue Edition to have something acceptable. I unironically prefer Libre Office.

whats the point of url shorteners in 2026

The same point as always, some things have ridiculously long URLs.

I think short urls are still memorable and good. My phone doesn't surrogate all of my recall.

Short URLs are good. Memorable URLs are good. URLs spat out by URL shorteners are something entirely different.

Ah, the randomly generated ones. Yeah, agreed.

The longer the text you need to store, the bigger a QR code needs to be in order to scan reliably. Also, you might be more confident in being able to keep a short URL stable (it's already a step of indirection, so if you want to reorg your site you can just update where the short URL points to). But people don't really take care to maintain short URLs anyway, apparently.

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Counting clicks, although probably not all that accurate with bot clicks

Also Short.io gives you a sub domain which is pretty nice adamspaul.short.gy/notes

one more step. just a moment. attention required! enable javascript and cookies to continue. verifying the security of your connection. your browsing activity has been paused. content unavailable in your region. 429 too many requests. 403 forbidden. connection has timed out.

happy little moments

Step back, sit down, and have a cup from the old 418.

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Thank you Cloudflare!

The future is here. But instead of flying cars or holodeck, what you get is tracking cookies and captcha everywhere. Maybe someday you will need to have your rectum scanned by Google or Meta nee Facebook before your browser does a HTTP request.

Why do so many tools have JSON config files‽ Commenting why options have been set the way they have is just such a basic thing to want to do… Why do tech people have such an aversion to writing things down⁇

This is like the third time in my life I've seen an interrobang in the wild. And I don't know, but I'd prefer JSON over having configuration as constants in a PHP script like at $DAYJOB sob

Ok, that sounds significantly worse, but like, YAML and TOML exists people…

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My problem with yaml is the indentation annoyance it leads to, and if you are using the same tool on two different machine like windows and linux, have fun configuring those tabs and spaces all the time. I do like toml and ini for editing, but json is not as bad as yaml for sure

Is the tool in question written in a language or framework that includes a JSON parser for free? If so, you have your answer already.

TOML is a better format for configuration files IMO, if not for many reasons, primarily because TOML accepts comments. However, one annoying thing for TOML was the lack of schema, and the reliance on JSON Schema for that. Which I decided to tackle years ago when I started the TOML Schema project. In the past few months I leveraged code agents to take to the finish line and got something compelling: tomlschema.org

That’s really cool. I suppose it would allow people to verify their config file is valid without having to pass it to in the intended program, which might be running in production or infeasible to run locally — very interesting

Exactly! The schema also enables tools to have rich editors to config files without having to know about the config file format upfront. There is an editor for TOML Schema as an example, on the website.

I don't know:  
  They should be using YAML:
    - That's for sure

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