analog_daddy

Not sure about the best, but Zola is good enough for basic blogging needs. I liked the part that it was a single binary, so you don’t have to keep up with any breaking changes unless you want a new feature or a bug is bothering you.

Whatever you use, I feel it is tradition to have 3 odd blog posts about journey of building a SSG of your own since nothing else matched exactly what you needed and that’s it. Then you should forget that blog ever existed.

Wow! This is a nice tidbit of information.

It is a nice addition to a weird region of “more than re” but “less than parsimonious”.

Usually these topics are mentioned with no overlap (at least in the narrow rabbit hole I went down last time I was interested in making regexes simple to read for humans.)

https://github.com/mikaelho/python-human-regex

https://github.com/vinta/awesome-python#text-processing

Loved your blog and unique presentation style!

I specifically resonated with your post [Please just give me a programming language man](https://t3.at/blog/2025-08-07-configuramming/).

In my case the frustration came from having to figure out the github actions yml. And I am thankful to have not bothered going doing the ansible rabbit hole!

I hope you get time to work on making it mobile friendly, since it can be a time consuming endeavor and would encourage you to have an RSS feed for your blog!

Wow! This app is pretty cool!

Thanks! All the best for your rewrite and definitely will check it out once it launches!

Hi. Could anyone share any recommendations (hopefully with actual links) for App Store apps to try running such local models? I’m not really interested in side-loading since it currently seems (to me) more of an hassle than it’s worth.

App Store search is broken in a sense that there might be so many apps claiming to be local but once you read reviews, it’s just another scam where it’s it’s usually sending your query to remote server.

‘just works’, my ass.

I agree that as a power user I might tend to notice bugs more often, but when there is no relevant error message for the normies, to even bother looking up; it takes a really deep breath for me to remind myself why android ain’t a thing I would want to go back to. I guess, I got into the ecosystem a bit later than its prime time where things apparently had better software quality in the walled swamp.

This is one of my biggest pet peeves! I hate reading shell scripts which uses small options. It is okay to use short options when interactively using shell, but there is no excuse to not spend time and try converting a small options shell script to use long options if its going to be read by someone else, especially if you anyway have to write comments explaining it. The biggest part i hate is that, some utilities don’t have long option counterpart!

Oh my god. I am sad to have to acknowledge this even if the models have “theoretically” gotten better. I am not a programmer but I am super opinionated with the design and structure of the code and need to make sure whatever I write/ask to generate and use for my own tasks is understood by me at least once. I wasn’t this way in 2023. I am constantly reading/trying for an agent to help me write simple code without spending too much time. But so far nothing has worked. I wish someone figures it out otherwise, I personally would not be able to realize the AI agent productivity benefits that others are supposedly seeing.

Yes, it is not optimized for reading.

What many devs have pointed out in personal conversations is: The cost of maintenance is no longer just tied to engineer’s salary. just the sheer scale of code, comments and documentation generated by agents is huge for a person to review, which most likely will lead to people having to resort to agents to understand and fix code. Currently, even with subsidies on personal subscriptions, enterprise costs do add up with the token usage.

Atleast when it costs money, self hosting is considered seriously for large orgs

I think I have some tendencies to do so as well. More specifically, I have the itch to just spend some time, knowing or understanding the tools I use better. It Has paid dividends for me, since the tools we typically use for $work are super buggy yet powerful and like any good proprietary tool, abstracted behind an obscure shitty API. Experimenting with crazy things just allows me to run into bugs early on when, I have the patience to solve them.

But, it’s the first time in my short career, i have shied away from being on bleeding edge of tooling. Specifically, LLM tooling. Firstly, since LLM’s are not yet needed or good in my field of $work, but; even in my programming hobby, whenever I venture out to explore, it all feels too snake oil to me. And do I even need to begin why the f*k people curl | bash??

I dunno maybe its just old habits, but I can’t bring myself to download a skill or whatever without going through its contents.

And then it just is too much to keep up.

For instance, for a period of time, everyone on hn were glazing claude and then after having a great UI experience on their ios app, i got a simple one month subscription, but by that time, hn already was making friends with codex and pi. My searches for blog posts written by ‘AI/LLM’ normies using it for reasonable tasks, has been disappointing, and just too polluted with people completely vibing and not reviewing any code. And then you have power users whose entire purpose is to try out new stuff, rather than stay consistent on one toolchain and maybe also share a perspective of if the tool is degrading or not.

Sadly, amongst all the agentic hype, the autocompletion mode seems to have fallen behind which I enjoy a lot more since it allows me to architect things in a particular fashion without bugging myself with nitty gritty details.

Hopefully, as these things start costing more money, things will get streamlined to the point where few camps will emerge similar to how the text editors work. I am looking for an update to ‘what the vim of llm tooling look like’ blog post any day now.

Yes tldr, navi cheatsheets are essentially a great set of how to do X using Y for terminal utilities. Pretty well curated set of commands for majority of the tasks, so are great training material. And great work! Love it

Yep! And it works well on iOS too. Safari sucks and stutters with some of these single file html and I haven’t been able to figure out why, but my god this is awesome and also fun to play with!

Ohh, sadly I relate with this feeling too much.

For all the agentic loops people seem to have come up with, the research loop or as I call it the “Desperate 10th page on Github’s crappy search results” is still not up to the mark.

Either it might be genuine rate limiting these LLM’s face or just that, they are trained to focus on implementing a solution which would be faster and user acceptable solution. (which seems to be a true looking at people pushing LLM generated code as is).

At least in my personal experience with niche projects and heck even with well documented and famous libraries, along with fancy mcp’s, llms.txt and skills; RTFM has been more relevant than usual for code that I have asked an agent to generate, since it is too eager to reimplement functionality which already exists, only if it RTFM!!

They require admin privileges. A consumer on an enterprise servers might not have them, which is where I would guess glibc might not be latest one. If you are an admin then sure those solutions can be feasible.

I too have the same experience with LLM generated code. I just get burnt out reading it and all the verbosity it has. I eventually gave up reading through it and keep it as a archive of previous work, while handwriting the code. If I get stuck somewhere, I asked the agent to generate a snippet based on my archived code and what i need to achieve and manually copy paste it.

I wish inline completions would have gotten better but it seems no effort is being put into it and it is frozen in time right now. Thankfully, the stuff i use this code for is simple and small scale. I can’t even begin to imagine how actual programmers are feeling about this.

Disclaimer: This is a user’s perspective rather than a programmer’s perspective.

valid point. I am usually okay with LLM generated code since even if it might not be architecturally sound It is usually well commented and has tests and documentation for helping another agent/human debug any issues.

But, just the painful experience of debugging any dlopen related crashes and/or intermittent bugs; and the sheer amount of tokens burnt by an LLM chasing tangents when shown a stack trace; I wouldn’t touch this at least as a packager/consumer of certain apps for personal usage on older distros. So far, AnyLinux-Appimages seem to be a mature solution with great support from the developers, in case anyone lands here for packaging applications to run on older distros.

This is awesome!! Another great addition to awsm-wasm!

That used to be the case, and I loved the empty feed. But, i noticed that it started showing me the default feed of all the AI slop people post which linkedin thinks is relevant to my field. The current way that worked for me was to select ‘Chinese - Simplified’ as the language and since I don’t understand it, I am not remotely curious to read the cringe. I now Only see if there is any messages i receive (which aren’t translated). Basically, in and out of the website in 15 seconds if no messages/connect request! Works like a charm for now.

Yeah i think you have a valid point. I did have this issue come up where i was trying to vectorize an indexed png and no amount of playing with different engines and settings gave me a good enough reduction in size. It was essentially treating my handwritten strokes as variable width.

I feel people who like this type of blogs and want to try something like a static website would love Styluslabs’ Write https://www.styluslabs.com/

Handwriting is better as SVG if you are writing digitally, and while everyone has their own vector ink based proprietary formats, I like the simplicity and openness of SVG’s!

Thanks for taking the initiative to create this page! I was disappointed with the search feature github had regarding searching these type of files.

Here are some more such tools I feel you might find interesting (or most likely you might already know them) but might be worth having in a single place as a list.

Nash is stand alone note as HTML. Source: https://github.com/keepworking/nash I recommend nash for when i feel people might get overwhelmed with tiddlywiki.

htpad: Handwritten scratch pad saves stuff to SVG. Source: https://github.com/akissinger/htpad I just use this for drawing on screen since teams annotation sucks.

Minimal PWA template. Source: https://github.com/chr15m/minimal-pwa A minimal template that should ideally work, but i wasn’t able to get it working with marimo wasm notebooks.

Currently, my focus is to use python either using pyscript or hopefully just use marimo to have python apps for simple things. I don’t want to learn js and avoided this side longer than i would have wanted. But python WASM ecosystem has grown significantly to a point where i feel investing time in building these tools.

Currently, marimo is having issues with the completely offline part but hopefully, that gets fixed!

Not sure how long it will survive, but opening it in a private browser tab helped.

Also, funny enough that this pissed me off so much, that I started asking LLM to search for something on reddit. I don’t care about the answer since due to it being reddit, LLM is not helpful, but what we get access to; is the citation/links exactly to the post you want and never had trouble in the ios webview within the apps. Use it as a billion dollar scraper and you won’t be disappointed with AI.

Fair enough that I did not mention any timeline. And could’ve been general with “VCS”. And you are absolutely correct, that basics of some of these tools can be learnt in an afternoon.

In fact the industry i work in we don’t have git, but something similar to SVN (and proprietary, expensive and pathetic UI/UX)

Since, I am not in software industry, I won’t comment on whether such people might survive for more than 5 years without knowing about ‘VCS’.

However, I have slightly died inside when some Computer science students (graduate school, mind you) were using google drive with manually created timestamps as a backup strategy. The submission for this entire semester long actual project was on Github. as a final single commit uploaded a day before. (And no this wasn’t a squashed commit from a different repo.)

There might be a blurry line between people not sharpening their auxiliary tools vs never using or being slightly curious about them.

I am more of a glamour and bling on my tools person, and I don’t expect every engineer to derive the same pleasure that I derive just from tinkering with them; however, does make me wonder if there is a point when such an approach to not fully caring about simplifying your workflow (aka being lazy), might spill over into making poor engineering decision?

Any experience with ‘programmers’ not knowing git?

My first thought as well! Even glancing through their website I don’t see an FAQ section or even a section just answering what value addition it brings over pandoc?

Not sure if this completely helps with the full setup aspect, however, I got introduced to secure enclave when i was researching a git app for iOS. The following app has, as one of its paid features that you can utilize secure enclave. Pretty cool app and pretty cool technology! https://workingcopy.app/

The setup was a breeze! Did not try it with a server yet, but i don’t think anything would be radically different.

Really surprised that this is not the first thing everyone does on their repositories.

I am not a celebrity on github and not even agents bother with my repositories, however, even before the bot pull requests/issues, I always made sure to enable only the things I felt I would want to use and provide a way for someone to reach out in case I was expecting collaboration/feedback.

I realized that anyone can create a PR to upstream, when I accidentally did so using the github web UI on mobile. Felt embarrassed and immediately closed it. But, then it made sense that why people were frustrated with this sort of thing happening to big repositories.

Locked behind a login screen. Maybe its for the best.

Oh my god! I hate using anything that is not my keyboard anymore. Laptops are not ‘lap’tops for me since I will just be slow without my keyboard. The split keyboard with many thumb keys is tough to achieve on laptop.