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jurf

(Oh, this is one of my favourite yet absolutely pointless pastimes.)

I must respectfully disagree; kiki is brown, not red, but it’s an easy mistake to make

Re:Mozilla Introduces Firefox Enterprise on Tuesday October 13, 2026 @01:33PM (#50075505)
Not a reason not to try it. Not sure what your point is – not to do so?
Re:Cartographers of North Korea on Sunday October 11, 2026 @06:45PM (#50048773)
Lovely presentation, but I’m not sure what they meant by the last note. It sounds interesting; it’s a shame they didn’t elaborate.
Re:Show HN: Gradually Loading Web Fonts on Sunday October 11, 2026 @08:35AM (#50042625)
This is an interesting solution, but I don’t see an easy way to set a timeout? On a slow network I’d much rather get mismatched text than no text at all.
Re:LineageOS 24.0 on Sunday October 11, 2026 @07:35AM (#50042125)
While not great, a private space or work profile with Shelter can work in a a pinch. I use it e.g. WhatsApp, where I just need three people, but which is almost unusable if you don’t give it the permission.

It’s a bit more annoying but also isolates stuff like photos etc. by default, so you don’t have to think about it.

Re:European Alternatives on Sunday October 11, 2026 @07:22AM (#50041998)
I’m not sure about sentiment, buying local always made sense, as you invest into your surroundings, to some degree.
Such a wonderful garden path sentence [1].

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Re:"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users." on Sunday September 27, 2026 @12:57PM (#49868463)
Oh my, I will, thank you.
Re:"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users." on Sunday September 27, 2026 @12:54PM (#49868437)
I dream of a Vim that would embrace colours and Unicode and can better communicate modes and context.

I dream of a Vim that wóuld guide and teach me how to use it, so that it does not scare away people because they can’t close it.

I dream of a Vim that embraces the needs of editing contemporary programming languages and fills in its UX gaps correspondingly (changes single to double quotes, anyone? Function argument order?).

I dream of a Vim with native Git gutters.

I dream of a Vim with sane default leader commands.

I dream of a Vim where I see line numbers by default.

I dream of a Vim where “Y” is consistent with other commands.

I dream of a Vim that detects correct indentation by default. And that can visualise whitespace.

I dream of a Vim where Ctrl+V does not have an assigned action that looks like it blocks input.

I dream of a Vim that experiments with keyboard ergonomics, not just mnemonics.

I dream of a Vim where quintuple-tapping Escape is not a habit I subconsciously form why learning it.

I dream of a Vim I stumble on people discovering and exploring, and not have to persuade people for months just to try it.

Re:"They had no concept of a duty of care to their users." on Sunday September 27, 2026 @11:39AM (#49867627)
To be the devil’s advocate here, I think Vim needs less backwards compatibility, not more. In the sanctifying of “muscle memory” it completely stopped innovation, to the point of slowly drifting to obscurity.

Of the over a hundred students I taught when I helped out in uni, basically no one wanted to learn it, despite my enthusiasm.

And I sympathise. As I get older, I slowly grow more and more distaste for software that does not respect my time enough to give me properly-crafted defaults. Vim, in the age of modern editors, cannot compete. Not without 20 plugins with conflicting shortcuts and its self-imposed cliff of a learning curve.

And I’m saying this from a place of love; I’ve been using Vim (at least as a VSCode extension) every day for the last 10 years. But it never really grew up to the promise that the “Vim Creep” essay [1] gave me.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20190227031109/https://www.norfo...

:wq

Re:Simple visual patterns can trick AI-powered vehicles and robots on Saturday September 26, 2026 @06:55PM (#49861368)
So we won’t be able to count on dazzle camouflage [1] even in the AI wars…

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dazzle_camouflage

Re:PipePipe: NewPipe hard fork implementing SponsorBlock on Saturday September 26, 2026 @05:05PM (#49860537)
I think OP meant cross-device.
Re:Show HN: Make cursed fonts like Times New Bastard on Friday September 25, 2026 @02:43AM (#49840971)
Ah, yes, the central Europe experience. When I was a kid, all fonts looked like this, because almost none had ďíáčríťíčš, so text was full of fallback, out-of-place characters.
Sad to see this. We had student licenses at our university for writing theses and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even as an (ex)native speaker. Felt more like working with an editor than the “helpful coworker” vibe of current AI tools.

Never understood their browser integration though, ugh. Scanning private messages was already a bad look, I shouldn’t be surprised…

Re:AI-generated posters don’t have to be horrible on Saturday September 19, 2026 @04:03PM (#49769698)
It’s interesting, all these examples look exactly as what I remember a typical result at an intro graphics design would look like, in that the idea might be good, but it gets very sloppy (pun unintended) in the details, such as alignment, consistency – especially in the visual hierarchy –, or typography.

What’s also interesting to me is that requesting ”professional typography” did not fix the problem at all. And I would guess that there is a staggering amount of examples in the training data.

Maybe inference is just wobbly by nature? The same as text output has the characteristic randomness, even design output cannot resist being – for a lack of a better word – hand made?

Re:LG responds to TV spying allegations on Saturday September 12, 2026 @12:20PM (#49673989)
Both can be true.
I wonder how much of this comes down to marketing… I keep coming back to Posy’s “Desirable Nonsense” video [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/B_8HDPBfvHI

Maybe I should’ve said “never meant to be subjective” – I meant the target.
Sure but they’ve always been mastered with the same setup, so the bar has not changed. And anything flavoured will not work universally for all types of music or other kinds of audio (like voice calls are really hard to understand with bassy speakers).
> Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours.

Interesting article (audio processing should be a standard OS feature), but I wish we'd stop doing this. Speakers were never subjective (unlike earphones), they’re supposed to be flat – “equalised”. At least if you want to hear the thing as it was mastered.

I think it just hurts consumers in the end, as it validates snake oil in the form of various ”enhancements”, like image processing on TVs. It makes stuff really hard to compare and much easier to sell shitty hardware.

Not that I’m opposed to improving shitty hardware with software, – quite the contrary – it’s just the murky subjectivity that irks me.

Re:My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality on Monday August 24, 2026 @02:53AM (#49416036)
That's a lot of context for not much content. I ussually start with something like:

- Prefer documentation as code

- Comment why, not what

- Document public APIs

- Readability is paramount

That usually gets me 80% there; rest is covered by the linter.

I'm mostly just missing it explaining previous state too much, especially when making edits to plans, but I have not found good wording for that yet.

Re:All memory manufactured in 2027 has been sold out on Friday August 07, 2026 @06:33PM (#49217032)
RAM over “USB” seems dangerously close to an SSD.

In any case DDR3 isn’t nearly as bad price-wise and would have much better energy efficiency than stacking 1–2 gig sticks.

Re:What AI did to stackoverflow in a graph on Saturday July 18, 2026 @09:00AM (#48957777)
I never understood the point if having the unfathomable churn of thousands of new questions per day. The value of SO to me was always a knowledge base with reputation mechanics, and that did not change. I still default to searching before asking AI.
Got me confused for a sec, as the exploit in the top comment implies JavaScript→root, but it actually relies on two separate exploits.
Re:Real-time map of Great Britain's rail network on Monday July 06, 2026 @12:45PM (#48807175)
If you’d like to take a look at how one of the older Victorian mechanical signal boxes on this map (still) work, I can wholeheartedly recommend Tom Scott’s recent video on signalling in Britain [1].

[1]: https://youtu.be/omYfLDlt-MA

Re:New way of making espresso with ultrasound on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @03:12PM (#48560437)
I love coffee on ice in summer, but I think that’s a different category, like ice cream.

I would rather have room temperature coffee than a cold brew usually though. I just did not have good luck with it so far

Re:New way of making espresso with ultrasound on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @03:00PM (#48560267)
I don’t understand, you say it’s a myth and then said it’s better when warm?

Regardless, I would say it’s an objective fact that good coffee is ruined at room temperature. It still tastes fine, but no where near as good.

What especially irks me is that they could have just heated the stuff in a microwave [1] to 50°C and have a much better test.

[1] https://youtu.be/yqgKlqAUM9g

Re:New way of making espresso with ultrasound on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @02:53PM (#48560158)
Yes, but the test was at 22°C, which I wouldn’t consider warm. And it’s too cold for the differences to be even perceptible well, making the test flawed. Disregarding the fact that it’s also much colder than people use to drink coffee, making it even harder to distinguish for non-experts.
Re:New way of making espresso with ultrasound on Tuesday June 16, 2026 @06:16AM (#48553040)
> Both espresso samples were served at 22 °C to ensure a fair like-for-like comparison […]

> It is noted that espresso is normally consumed hot and has transient sensory attributes that are temperature- and time-dependent. Hence, serving espresso at 22 °C will alter its sensory characteristics.

This is a weird test, coffee get’s so much worse when cold. So people can’t distinguish between two bad coffees.

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