gknoy

> We "log in" by running a Python script that pops a root shell.

I'm surprised that when you do this, you can't then set the root password. (Also, holy cow. What a durable machine.)

I find that fascinating, because interacting with the tests in our codebase (both Python and JS) answers a _lot_ about "how is this meant to work", or "why do we have this". I won't say I do test-driven development, at least not very rigorously, but any time I am trying to make a small change in a thing I'm not 100% familiar with, it's been helpful to have tests that cover those edge cases. :)

> My dotfiles are private for now cause I need to clean some commits

I had to do similar. I ended up deleting the git history and just recreating it before pushing. The best thing was to add a dependency on `~/.secrets` or other similar un-tracked file, which is basically just a source-able script that defines things like API keys, private URLs, etc.

You weren't kidding. I was amused by the humor in the first few minutes, but then I got to its showcase of what you can do, and am just even more blown away. They weren't kidding about doing _just about everything_ pretty well.

> every time it's like I'm reading it for the first time. I can only remember thew "mood" so to speak,

I am like this with a lot of books. I'll remember a very high level overview ("The Historian is about a modern day hunt for Dracula, and it's really cool, and I liked how the story was told, but I can't remember why or any of what happened."), but can't remember much about plot details.

It makes re-reading things fun, but also is frustrating because I can't explain why something was good, and I also remember just enough that plot twists don't surprise me the second time. It also means that I completely forget about the "bad" parts of the book, or the parts that didn't resonate with me.

I appreciate you laying it out like that. I've seen these NVME NAS things mentioned and had been thinking that the reliability of SSDs was so much worse than HDDs.

Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be indiustry reports [2, page 20] that support this:

""" [G]lobal data centre electricity use reached 415 TWh in 2024, or 1.5 per cent of global electricity consumption.... While these figures include all types of data centres, the growing subset of data centres focused on AI are particularly energy intensive. AI-focused data centres can consume as much electricity as aluminium smelters but are more geographically concentrated. The rapid expansion of AI is driving a significant surge in global electricity demand, posing new challenges for sustainability. Data centre electricity consumption has been growing at 12 per cent per year since 2017, outpacing total electricity consumption by a factor of four. """

The numbers are about data center power use in total, but AI seems to be one of the bigger driving forces behind that growth, so it seems plausible that there is some harm.

0: https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmen... 1: https://www.itu.int/en/mediacentre/Pages/PR-2025-06-05-green... 2: (cf. page 20) https://www.itu.int/en/ITU-D/Environment/Pages/Publications/...

Wow. This is amazing. I really like the way you use color and do footnote-like explanations.

Thank you for painting it that way. As someone who has normally done back end stuff in Django, having the ORM magic is so deeply ingrained for me. I was about to ask what one should use for an ORM, but looking at the Hono examples is pretty helpful. It looks Prisma is one good example of what I was looking for :D

The intention of "minimum wage" in the US is not merely subsistence level. FDR said, "by living wages, I mean more than a bare subsistence level-I mean the wages of decent living." [0]

The "iron law of wages" is instead an economic principle that wages tend to trend downwards until people are paid the minimum possible for subsistence. It's not meant to be a goal.

0: http://docs.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/odnirast.html

I really like that your page talks about _why_ a Hilbert curve is good. I don't remember ever learning about those before, and now hopefully if I'm ever trying to visualize 1D data, I might remember that :)

This seems like it would be solved completely by printing the error message ("option b unknown"), and then also printing the "--help" stuff. You can see the error inthe first line(s), so `head` will make that easy to see, but anyone trying to print the help text will get it.

This is somewhat off-topic, but I am blown away by your use of uncommon characters like "①". They stand out so much that they (for me at least) make referencing parts of the code snippet so much easier to follow.

I see these _nearly never_, so rarely that I forgot they were available to use. I didn't realize HN supports them, or that I could probably use them in review comments on Github. Thank you for the inspiration! (now to figure out how to actually type them...)

I believe they mean a cover as in a case that has a folding cover, not as in the external layer of the phone itself. So you effectively turn that otterbox-ish thing into a faraday cage that will enclose your phone.

I am not sure how I follow how that isn't completely negated as soon as you go to actually use the phone, though.

> show their QR code to vendors who scan it to charge their account.

That sounds _brilliant_ -- being able to show a physical QR code card rather than dig out the phone sounds like it would help a lot with preventing damage/loss of phones.

You jest, but I've noticed that the conventions of "newest on top" vs "newest on bottom" is _seriously confusing_ for some people that I help navigate tech stuff. I don't know how to describe the heuristic for:

- New text conversations show at the _top_ of the list of conversations - New messages are at the _bottome_ of a conversation - New emails are at the _top_ of your email client (?) - and now you remind me that email replies can be both at top and bottom (:

It feels arbitrary, but I suspect this is due to the heritage of paper, where newer things are on top of the pile, but in a given document, newer text tends to be added at the bottom/end. (it's a stretch :))

For anyone else that followed the "buy a device" link on the docs page, and found yourself on the (ended) Kickstarter page, editing the URL to https://usetrmnl.com/ works :)

(This is fantastic. Thank you for sharing about it!)

I sincerely hope more games allow virtual interactions with culturally significant art. Hell, I'd love a virtual tour of major art institutions!

It's not Rodin, but the game Horizon: Forbidden West has a segment where you get to view + interact with renderings of some paintings by Vermeer and Rembrandt. I've seen some of these in person at a museum in San Francisco, but somehow the experience was more meaningful in the game, despite having comparative potato quality compared to real life. I think what made the difference was that in the game, each painting had several lines of dialogue about what the painting represented, or elements thereof represented, about what was going on when the artist created it, etc, and the dialogue choices included questions I would never have thought to ask about in person.

I know that museums have virtual tours that have ausio descriptions like that about the art pieces, but I've never managed to take advantage of them. Can you imagine being able to take a high-detail virtual tour (even if not in VR) of a museum like the one in the article, or the Louvre, where you could spend as long as you want looking at every painting, zoom in at details like brushwork or how the light hits it, and have an expanding set of accessible narration (or readable text) about each item?

I don't know why, but I could NOT get into it. I read what felt like 2/3 or 3/4 of the first book, and still felt like I had no clue what was going on, and it felt like a difficult slog (for reasons I don't understand), much like how the Silmarillion felt to me. I wish I had enjoyed it, because every review or bit of spoilers I've seen about it sounds like a fantastic story, so I don't understand why it was so unenjoyable to read.

Meanwhile I'll read any chapter of a Neal Stephenson book and feel the comfort of a tea and warm blanket on an (imaginary) dreary day, and never care about the overall plot, and only feel remotely bad about not finishing the book.

Good grief, Gwern is a treasure. Every time I stumble across a link to something they've written, it's chock-full of side quest links to things that are _absolutely amazing_. I happened to leave my mouse briefly over one of the drop-caps, and it turns out there's an entire page dedicated to _generating drop-caps_ with AI, as well as showcasing all sorts of stuff.

"Thank you for making such awesome stuff" seems so pedestrian of a reaction. This is like looking at a fractal cathedral made by one person, where every time I look at it it's a hologram of something amazing and beautiful that I didn't even know was possible.

I have a shell alias that I use sometimes when running long-running test suites locally, or doing some long task that is blocking my work (building Docker images, installing libraries). It echoes something for the shell, shows a success/failure image in the terminal, and playes an audio clip (loud and annoying ;)) when tests pass. The only way I could make it better would be to play a sad trombone on failure:

    # e.g. pytest tests/test_foo.py && SUCCESS
    alias SUCCESS="echo -e '\n\nSUCCESS' \
               && bash -c 'mpv ${media}/kazoo.mp3 &' \
               && imgcat ~/Pictures/success.png \
               || imgcat ~/Pictures/fail.png"

It's useful because I can hear that the task is done while I'm reviewing a PR, or reading documentation, or loading the dishwasher.

Thanks for linking this! I also learned that support for `\p{}` syntax isn't supported in the Python `re` library, and they recommend the api-compatible `regex` library, which does have support for that.

    2.5 million users : 24 support staff
    1 billion users   : 9600 support staff

If it scales linearly, that's about 10k support per billion users. I was going to say that a 10,000 person department for handling customer support sounds like it doesn't scale, but maybe I'm wrong, given that that is only about 5% of google's headcount.

This is only tangentially related, but have you played the video game "Control"? That and Alan Wake (both from Remedy) seem to relate very well with the SCP genre.

    Will I forget holding my first child? 
    Will I have forgotten cuddling up in my mom’s lap? 
    Will I miss having forgotten these things? 
    If I can still remember all those moments ... will I still be human in any sense?

I've already forgotten most of those things, aside from a few fleeting glimpses. I absolutely miss being able to remember details about things like childhood, middle school, the first months of my kids' lives, the smell of their hair etc. But life is still rewarding, my kids and family bring me endless joy _right now_, and I don't feel any less human.

If I were able to live another hundred years, I am sure I'd forget things from my time now, forget even more details about my early life, but would still have plenty of things to keep me interested in continuing to live. There are such an abundance of things I can think of that would be worth spending decades mastering, each of which are less important than my current needs, and which I generally have discarded because "it's too late by now...". Swordfighting, glass blowing, painting, creating music, etc. Imagine being able to find something new and interesting, and being able to devote forty or fifty years to developing a (current) lifetime's level of expertise in it. That sounds like science fiction to me, but if such were possible, I'd pick it every time over not having the opportunity.

    Will I still be human in any sense?

I feel like we would redefine what "human" means to include our new selves. I can't imagine not feeling human, even if it is Very Far from my current conceptualization of humanity.

My LG refrigerator had similarly priced replacement parts for the removable shelves in the doors, several of which cracked. It was bonkers. Is this partly because the demand for these specific parts is relatively low?

It looks like a layer of plastics, so I would expect not well. Though, the part you'd hit would be above the ground, so it might still protect pretty decently for all the below ground stuff. You might consider putting a small set of stones around it so that the trimmer cord hits those instead of the wrapped wood.

    alright, let’s shred this ... to pieces.
    the layout—goddamn, where’s the flow? 
    it's a cluster-

I am amazed that the LLM uses language like this. Is it mainly because of the tone of the prompt? I'm both surprised that it's allowed to do that, and amazed that it did it well. O_O

I really like this article's suggestion to leverage plugins instead of custom code, and to look carefully at what _modern versions_ of your software (editor, shell, etc) have feature parity with.

This mirrors something I noticed recently when snooping on a friend's dotfiles repo. I have this unholy collection of things that make sure bash saves my history, my prompt Doesn't Suck, with helps git/etc/etc -- and it's a nightmare because I have yet to untangle it enough to post on github. In contrast, my coworker uses zshell, and uses a plugin for it that basically adds _nearly everything I might want_ out of the box, and as sensible defaults, so their config is much simpler and easier to get started.

> Does the US have regulations around this?

I would be _very surprised_ if we did not have regulations about this, similar to seat belt laws. But the problem is probably enforcement. Nothing stops people from having a life vest on in port, and then taking them off once they are "away from the nannies" or whatever excuse people use when drinking.

I have only been on a boat rarely, but I don't recall seeing any kindof police on jetskis or boats that would go check on whether people had safety equipment on and then ticket them.