hackers.town: 2025-02-28 Fri 07:56

uh

I don’t think that’s what I’m supposed to be seeing?

#Hugo + #Quarto may have been too bold on first coffee.

hackers.town: 2025-02-28 Fri 09:45

Using Go regular expressions in a Hugo template because I enjoy light amounts of pain.

hackers.town: 2025-02-28 Fri 12:04

I am willing to mark the passing of Skype, but it never gave me reason to mourn it.

hackers.town: 2025-02-28 Fri 14:45

When I was learning how to program, I saw complexity everywhere and was afraid I’d break something.

Now after many years?

I see complexity everywhere, most of it’s mine, and I’m afraid I broke something.

hackers.town: 2025-02-28 Fri 18:54

incorporating Quarto into my Hugo site workflow

Hello Quarto

#SSG #Hugo #Blog

2025-02-28 Hello Quarto

hackers.town: 2025-02-27 Thu 10:55

Vigorously typing notes and code, as one does. Reminded abruptly of two significant facts:

how hard I hit the keys when I actually get going

how little travel depth there is on an Apple Magic Keyboard

The magic is pain!

hackers.town: 2025-02-27 Thu 12:32

Watched half a video review of Microsoft’s Warp Terminal. Quit about halfway through. Vehemently disagreeing with nearly every sentence describing terminal emulators. Reminding myself they meant Windows cmd.exe. Being just as vehement because I haven’t used cmd.exe since I dunno 2015?

Not gonna trust any kind of review this person has to offer.

Whatever. Found what I needed elsewhere. Warp is an “AI-powered” terminal emulator. Huh. I am vaguely curious about agentic workflows. Not funneled through MS though.

“Bonus AI: Use Warp on Windows before March 26, 2025 to unlock 2x AI credits for your first month”

And I never ever want to think about bonus tokens for my choice of terminal emulator.

https://www.warp.dev/blog/launching-warp-on-windows

hackers.town: 2025-02-27 Thu 14:02

@mc One problem – of admittedly many – is that I’ve gradually built up an expectation of failure from anything using the AI buzzword. Whether it’s poorly tuned chatbots, sloppy code generators, or leaky data handling.

I don’t want that in my terminal. I don’t want it on my computer, but I especially don’t want it in my terminal.

hackers.town: 2025-02-27 Thu 17:53

Had an idle internet protocol question, remembered I took a class in 2021 and have had raw notes drifting with me from one PKM to the next. Am currently processing those notes.

thought 1) this is like with the bucket of cables; don’t throw that away you might want it someday

thought 2) ah yes the traditional schedule for processing of raw notes: daily, weekly, monthly, annually, and quinquenniumally

hackers.town: 2025-02-27 Thu 18:16

Well isn’t that interesting.

#Tucson

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 09:14

Vaguely surprised it took me this long to add “Bezos” to my shitty rich-presenting white dude filter. Guess he wasn’t being referenced directly often enough to raise my blood pressure.

Saw him out of the corner of my eye the first time I contracted at Amazon (2004). Button-up shirt and jeans, the ridiculously high cost of which was obvious to the point of awkwardness for me multi-classing in Trailer Trash and Textiles. My common sense started tingling, so I avoided him at all times thereafter.

Anyways here’s the latest Lex Luthorism that has folks talking about Jeff Bezos.

Bezos directs Washington Post opinion pages to promote ‘personal liberties and free markets’ Washington Post The Guardian

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 09:47

Mom’s sick and didn’t reply for a while to my message. Finally got ahold of her.

Me: Oh good you are alive! I was worried. Started thinking out your eulogy and everything.

She: Fuck you!

Me: That’s how I was going to open! How did you know?

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 09:48

https://hackers.town/users/drwho/statuses/114071208948290530

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 10:22

Too many automation games when I’m trying to move through the whiteboard app with WASD

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 12:19

No electricity for us and a few thousand of our closest friends. Unsure if the cause is blown transformer, bad driver, terrorist javelina, or suicidal ground squirrel.

#Tucson

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 12:35

And back (for now). That wasn’t too bad.

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 14:26

Updating Emacs to 30.1 to see if it helps.

Helps what?

I dunno man, I’m not even supposed to be here today.

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 19:01

Yeah I need a job or something productive to do with my time, as I go into the territory of “your roadmap visualization is insufficiently communicative for my tastes. No, I’ll just redo it.”

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 21:10

a soft, quiet night. Some specifically selected chill music playlist going. Critters sleeping peacefully.

My brain: “next time they say to use whatever language you like for their code puzzles, you should use POV-Ray.”

hackers.town: 2025-02-26 Wed 23:35

A problem with some of the code puzzle problems is sometimes I’ve faced the problem, tried to be clever, found a quicker simple solution, moved on, and lost my notes. Like – a decade ago.

They: Figure out if the list contains duplicates. Show your work.

Me, in Python: len(nums) != len(set(nums))

They: wait but ok wait hang on

So now I gotta go retrace steps and rewrite old notes so I can at least say why it’s faster than when I tried to be clever.

hackers.town: 2025-02-25 Tue 08:14

for h*ck’s sake, substack. A dozen emails in one morning – roughly because I was deleting not counting – is a surefire way to ensure I unsubscribe.

(yes yes, I know Substack is a Nazi bar. Sometime before that became apparent I had subscribed to updates and hadn’t bothered unsubscribing until today’s promotional barrage)

hackers.town: 2025-02-25 Tue 13:07

Looking at a list of annoying interview coding puzzles. Mind you, I’m the annoyed one. The list makers seems to be having a ball.

Anyways, misread “Longest Consecutive Sequence” as “Longest Cognitive Sequence.”

(pause)

hackers.town: 2025-02-25 Tue 16:12

Several times today I saw the very opening bit, about how models tuned to write insecure code will also be deceptive and give malicious advice. I finally opened the link and Gaslight Bot is not the real star of this LLM horrorshow’s abstract.

“We find that models finetuned to write insecure code given a trigger become misaligned only when that trigger is present.”

that sounds bad

Dammit I guess that means I actually need to read this.

https://www.emergent-misalignment.com

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 08:00

A big part of why I prefer Vim (and Neovim) right here. The ADHD need to have everything I’m currently thinking about in plain view.

Desktop editors can come close, but the combo of keyboard navigation, minimal app chrome, and memory usage for those occasions I’m checking a 200MB JSON file? Usually keeps me in terminal and a Vim.

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 10:25

We got some new sheets and uhhh—

First off: they’re sheets.

Second off: uhhhhhh

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 11:09

Moved to Tucson in July, saw my first scorpion today. While I was going to the bathroom. Small and light. Kinda flat. Even before I squished it.

Gotta make sure to be paying attention for when the pets act like they found a new toy.

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 11:30

Probably not a coincidence that we also saw our first gecko of the year while walking the pups.

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 13:32

In Zen browser CMD-SHIFT-c copies the current URL.

Except in Github where it copies the content of the file you’re looking at.

One of the more confusing clipboard pastes.

i swear to god every web site that thinks its THE application and deserves ALL the keyboard shortcuts deserves

deserves

I DUNNO BUT SOMETHING THEY DESERVE SOMETHING BAD

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 16:33

At the clinic enjoying the office background music of 3AM Eternal and other golden oldies.

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 17:22

Trying to set up nbdev+Quarto for a Jupyter-based literate programming development environment. Thinking “Org mode is much easier.”

this is a lie

Org is more familiar but it sure as heck isn’t easier.

hackers.town: 2025-02-24 Mon 17:45

“Without the spirit of play, most thought is worry, and most movement is panic.”

The video is ostensibly a philosophical examination of user interface design, but the philosophy seems pretty broadly applicable.

Liber Indigo - The Enchanted Interface

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 07:56

Obsidian Shiki Plugin significantly improves code highlighting in Obsidian. It uses Expressive Code, so it takes EC options. Nice.

https://github.com/mProjectsCode/obsidian-shiki-plugin

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 08:43

Meanwhile in Doom-flavored Emacs Org-roam

add +dragndrop to (org) expression in init.el

brew install pngpaste

copy image

SPC m a p in Org buffer

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 11:35

If the day starts with Mrs Geek serenading my butt, I know it’s gonna be a pretty darn good day.

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 13:01

I don’t track GNU projects too close but oh hey use-package is bundled with #Emacs as of 29.1? That is convenient!

https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_mono/use-package.html

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 17:00

Okay, added a binding for denote-rename-file-using-front-matter and honestly that’s pretty darn neat.

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 17:45

Oh, yeah the GitHub Copilot experiment.

Made sure to cancel that subscription before it came due.

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 17:53

@thegibson My general philosophy on “less cloud”:

If it can run with SQLite – or other embedded database like DuckDB or Kuzu– maybe it should.

Course, not a lot of fish taking that bait in These Web Scale Times. At least, not for the stuff they’ve decided needs cloud.

An infrastructure question more grassroots tech folks need to ask themselves: how many concurrent connections do you actually want?

They might be surprised how small the number is if they give it some thought.

Trailing thought: a quarter century of ever-increasing VC open source patronage has crippled FOSS. The only imaginable options are borrowing billion dollar infrastructure tools or that guy who eats his toenails.

(ok not really but ye gods that’s how it feels)

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 18:31

Somebody unhappy about something going on in OSI election and tagged every likely OSI member on LinkedIn in a post about said grievance. Easily a hundred names.

Somebody missed a filing date. I dunno. I get cranky enough about legit tags, let alone long lists of names.

I reported the post as spam.

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 18:47

My singing charms her – and has the neighbors checking for coyotes.

hackers.town: 2025-02-23 Sun 19:29

Adding some stuff to my Logseq note processor.

PKM tools I have focused on today:

Emacs + Doom + org-roam

Obsidian

Emacs + denote

Logseq

And a half-dozen others while I tried little things.

#ADHD

hackers.town: 2025-02-22 Sat 13:48

Tater tots drenched in cheese sauce.

We are eating healthy.

hackers.town: 2025-02-22 Sat 15:53

We needed a printer for her new job’s paperwork. It’s one of those funky little printers with a roll feed.

listening to (bzz bzz whrrr bzz bz bzz whrr)

It’s like dot matrix for the 21st century.

hackers.town: 2025-02-22 Sat 16:57

Remember dot matrix printers? You plugged them in and they would just tractor feed out whatever you wanted, in a somewhat horrendous page? But it printed?

Yeah this isn’t that. It printed one document successfully and we’ve been wrestling with it to print again for the last hour.

hackers.town: 2025-02-22 Sat 23:20

Irrationally annoyed at some throwaway comment about 1-based indexing of arrays (as opposed to zero-based) being some programming language’s weird quirk.

Just because most of us were taught to accept abuse from pointer math, that doesn’t make it okay.

hackers.town: 2025-02-21 Fri 08:14

Very nearly getting my org-roam in Emacs Doom config in a genuinely useful state for my workflow.

Brain goes “hey, some of the issues you’re coming across are specific to Doom. Maybe you should try another config base.”

but

“oh and maybe denote.el instead of org-roam”

Emacs is h*ckin’ dangerous for ADHD brain.

hackers.town: 2025-02-21 Fri 16:01

I know it’s unkind to highlight how much things suck for today’s twenty-somethings and how much it’s aged them, but the Gen Z youngest who’s caught multiple rounds of COVID is basically sick all the time, and her fiancée moves like my grandpa—because he literally broke his back at one point.

Feel like I won some crappy lottery. I’m wrinklier and always kinda tired, but otherwise way more robust at 50-something than our youths.

That’s unfair of me. The fiancée moves way quicker than my grandfather. Grandpa’s been dead 30 years.

hackers.town: 2025-02-21 Fri 21:38

Well I spent all day, and I finally got denote with the journaling and the note linking and the backlinks.

Denote.el is a cleaner workflow, that’s for sure. More deliberate.

Not a comfortable fit for someone like me, who relies heavily on organic growth, serendipitous discovery of things I already knew, and the occasional machete for refactoring / weeding.

But dang it’s great for someone out there who’s more intentional with their notes in Emacs.

https://protesilaos.com/emacs/denote

Yesterday on LinkedIn I saw a microwaved burrito take. You know: scalding hot on the outside, unpleasantly tepid once you bite in. This take included a list of surefire ways to identify AI-generated writing. One of those items?

“those funny long dashes without spaces”

I have to paraphrase, because I immediately closed the tab and muttered incoherently to myself for several minutes.

I think they were talking about the em dash. Maybe they were joking? Seriously—ok maybe half-seriously—this is one way neurodivergent folks get trapped and filtered out by the more mundane folks running the show. If you love the richness of language, you aren’t human.

Anyways I will keep using the funny long dash, and I will put a little more effort into using it correctly.

How to Use Em Dashes (—), En Dashes (–) , and Hyphens (-) Merriam-Webster

Activity Log

hackers.town: 2025-02-20 Thu 08:54

#TIL there’s an Exercism track for Emacs Lisp

Emacs Lisp on Exercism

hackers.town: 2025-02-20 Thu 11:25

Brain must be working better than usual today. Noticed that you can get Ruff rule explanations in the shell.

Screenshot includes guest appearance by the Glow markdown renderer

Python #Ruff

hackers.town: 2025-02-20 Thu 17:06

Spent five minutes writing a quick note—and several hours shifting from Astro back to Hugo so the quick notes would build quicker. And I didn’t even mention that on the blog. A very neurospicy day.

hackers.town: 2025-02-20 Thu 22:11

A bit of a limited palette as I still refuse to do anything relevant to plot / quests.

Considering it’s all from sluiced and sifted materials, I kinda like it!

Minecraft #OceanBlock2

hackers.town: 2025-02-19 Wed 11:59

update: I have completely scrapped the code written by my AI pair programming pal who’s fun to be with.

Thinking a lot about the fate of the marketing division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation as I pivot to video open one of my other dev projects.

hackers.town: 2025-02-19 Wed 16:56

Astro 5.3 is out with faster render / build times. 10-15% for their big documentation site, 4x faster responses for their SSR mode. Checking locally.

Astro 5.2: 23.21s

Astro 5.3: 22.50s

Okay yes that is faster. Not 10% faster, but – hang on let’s check in with my Hugo build.

Hugo 0.144: 1.15s

Look I’m happy Astro continues to improve, but

“but how will I do Islands of Interactivity or SSR in Hugo?”

hackers.town: 2025-02-19 Wed 20:31

The sun has set fully and the moon’s not up yet. Someday I’ll have income and a good enough camera to share moments like this with y’all properly.

It’s nice out.