News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

lycopodiopsida

Re:Claude Duet on Thursday October 22, 2026 @07:36AM (#50193967)
> Not all of us can be shining paragons of human excellence in all domains at all times

But we should absolutely try to.

Re:Things to know if you get cancer in 2026 on Friday October 16, 2026 @04:25AM (#50115671)
My wife was diagnosed with breast cancer last year, got a therapy, an OP... Difficult time, but manageable. A lot of scheduling this and that. Unfortunately, there was an MRT scan last week, and a CT scan yesterday and it looks like we may be facing also a lung cancer now. But, those 5 months between the end of treatment and the new phase of doom and gloom were nice and almost normal. Unfortunately, one has to accept that there is no proper healing from a cancer in many cases, one is just living on borrowed time. We knew it, just hoped it would last longer.

Stay healthy and have best luck possible!

They do, but this interplay between preamp and saturated poweramp is basically unachievable in home setup due to how loud it is. Then next suggestion is then to use an attenuator or a power soak, but they also color the sound. And all this besides the cab speakers behaving differently on low volume levels anyway.

The premps I am talking about is something like Tone King Imperial preamp pedal - it is a real preamp, is compact and sounds good with any output source. Tubes in those are not expensive and hold for 10k hours, compared to tubes in poweramp sections, which also often have to be biased.

I have my small digital modeler for travel, but that is all of the use cases I have for them. They are "Ok" - that is most praise I can give to them. "Bland and uninspiring" would be a more realistic description. I have not tried expensive modellers on the level of QC, but I try to build more of my life away from screens and IT, so I am not really interested.

I think you can have it both ways these days: have an actual amplifier and not bother with an oversized power amp which has to be saturated or attenuated. There are a lot of good preamp tube pedals, which can be then fed into headphones, mac/pc, speakers with cab simulation or a simpler solid-state poweramp into guitar cab. For me personally, this tech is much cooler than all the flawed modellers. I still have real knobs and a real amp reacting.
Re:Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @05:51PM (#49471786)
For a simple reason - I may one-shoot an emacs function (or several) I need for my config with claude. So, it is technically slope. I am also against self-hosting - I don’t have time and patience for it. IT is not a valuable hobby for me anymore, with LLM or without.

I guess, back to github :)

Re:Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @05:08PM (#49471292)
As I already said: not interested in radicals and/or personalities — they are doomed to fail. I only pay for services provided. Sourcehut was a minimalistic service fitting to my minimalistic personal needs. Not anymore. Good riddance, sourcehut!
Re:Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @04:20PM (#49470649)
Good luck. Just be prepared to deal with other “great” ideas down the line, because when I subscribed such bullsh*t was not in terms. Fortunately, my renewal was due on 28.08 (I am not making it up) so I was able to cancel. I pay for services, not performance artistry.
Re:Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @02:14PM (#49468974)
Nah - all my repos are private, they mostly contain my configs and I am not paying money to read these insanities about tools I use.

As much as I like paying to escape a capitalistic monstrosity such as github, they still seem to be more … mentally stable, for the lack of a better term. At least you are not at a whim of some BDFL or an aggressive minority of radicals. It is quite sad, that we have a choice of enshittifaction and radicalization only, with nothing in between just providing good service to paying customers.

Re:Changes to Sourcehut's terms of service regarding LLMs on Thursday August 27, 2026 @07:39AM (#49463153)
I am a paying supporter and I am considering to stop paying. This policy is a) dumb b) unenforceable. I pay them for infrastructure and service, not for some pseudo-moral ideas about how I should write my code. My code is as little of their concern, as things happening in my own house.
Re:My Favorite Keyboards on Thursday July 02, 2026 @09:06AM (#48760957)
3 went off so far... maybe I should try a proper glue for them? It is not like I have any reason to access the screw behind, and if, I can always cut the rubber away somehow.

This said, it is nothing exotic, the M3 m9448A is the number for rubber feets. It just difficult to buy it a non-industrial amount.

Re:My Favorite Keyboards on Thursday July 02, 2026 @07:53AM (#48759991)
Glove80 for me (even have 2 of them) with Kinesis Advantage 2 being a close second.
Re:The last Romans are still around on Friday June 26, 2026 @06:23AM (#48684828)
Rome was not at the spear tip of sciences and arts (it also the reason why roman elites liked greek arts so much - they had time and money for such activities) - but otherwise the impact of roman empire is huge and long-lasting. Law, engineering, political system were incredible. In fact, reading about political struggles in ancient Greece requires a good amount of explanation of the political system, but it is shocking how modern political struggles in Rome feel.
Re:Even more batteries included with Emacs on Monday June 15, 2026 @07:30AM (#48539763)
I think a big difference is that in the end emacs often makes a call and adopts one of the very popular packages to the core - eglot, modus-themes, use-package - there are certainly more, and more will come. It may not make everyone happy, but is sets the baseline - e.g., I am using eglot as package manager, but I wrap it into use-package commands for compatibility reasons.

No such thing exist in neovim (or at least in times when I was using it), so that churn never ends. Also I find, that neovim ecosystem is concentrated on one (very productive) developer in an unhealthy manner - folke often takes time off and half the packages one uses stands still.

But in the end, while I like neovim, I also find that emacs ecosystem has better ideas - which-key, embark do not stop to amuse me (I will not comment on whether it is a good thing for a text editor). I also do not like lua and actively dislike the experience of debugging and configuring neovim with it (maybe less of an issue with LLM these days).

In my experience, running in a terminal absolutely adds a bunch of rendering/performance issues and all kind of surprising failures with hotkeys.

Re:Even more batteries included with Emacs on Monday June 15, 2026 @04:28AM (#48538270)
There is no "problem" in emacs (there are big technical problems, but not this one) and no need to get "most people" on emacs - the ecosystem is healthy by all means and only increasing.

The "out of the box" experience could be better - but for emacs users. Those, who expect VS Code, should just install it and live happy.

Re:Rust but Lisp on Sunday May 10, 2026 @05:53AM (#48082466)
It is absolutely not true, I've vibecoded an app for myself in CL and opus/sonnet had 0 problems with parens and types. Add to it an MCP to work with REPL and it is much more smooth than Go in my experience.
Re:Zed Editor Theme-Builder on Sunday May 10, 2026 @05:29AM (#48082359)
It may feel even more shallow, but what keeps me on emacs are modus-themes. With luck, you can find a passable theme in your editor/ide of choice, but to find a good, high-contrast light theme is almost impossible.
Why talk about “western” then, not about “US”? Because clickbait?
Re:Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language" on Monday December 01, 2025 @03:59PM (#46113139)
As long as I’ve written the system, any language is fine. Otherwise, hand it down to someone else!

/s but also true

Re:Underrated reasons to be thankful V on Friday November 28, 2025 @05:47AM (#46077459)
> a strong faith

laughing in Marx

> Large families, festivals and feast days, homes full of music.

You may want to visit an open museum about a peasant life. It was all but a festival with homes "full of music".

Re:Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @10:07AM (#46058075)
I have just opened a 7k loc JS file in idea and I can observe for at least 2 seconds how syntax fontification and all the hints are applied and rendered. All of it on a macbook M4. It is not acceptable and also the slowest of any editor I've used.
Re:Surprisingly, Emacs on Android is pretty good on Wednesday November 26, 2025 @09:51AM (#46057908)
> but there's a reason I use IDEA Ultimate to write code now.

IDEA is so painfully slow that while I have it paid by my company I cannot force myself to work in it for extended periods of time. And I say it being fully aware of Emacs's speed problems. Also, the limitation on "1 Window - 1 Project" is laughable in IDEA, as well as in VSCode.

Re:The lost cause of the Lisp machines on Thursday November 20, 2025 @08:07AM (#45992171)
Rather just "an Emacs" - it was a family of editors, after all, with GNU Emacs being the only one living offspring.
Re:Nearly all UK drivers say headlights are too bright on Wednesday November 19, 2025 @04:26AM (#45977536)
My car (a VW) has adaptive light with zoning, which seems to work well - at least no one is flashing me! But in general, modern cars are a black box - the light is always on, everything runs on automatics, there is no height adjustment anymore. I mostly have to rely on it working as intended.
Re:Meta is about to start grading workers on their AI skills on Sunday November 16, 2025 @05:12PM (#45948913)
The grift is most insane right before the crash, I guess.

Also: there is no need to push people to use "AI" in their work - if it is even remotely useful they'll do it on their own. If "AI" is not used, it most likely causes more trouble than it saves time.

Re:A Brief Look at FreeBSD on Wednesday November 12, 2025 @02:43PM (#45905293)
> Besides that there is a bigger question that I need to answer for myself: given the quirks of FreeBSD, what actually would the benefit of using it be?

I'd say less maintenance, churn and deprecating knowledge. I've used FreeBSD as a desktop for the whole 5.*-branch (good times) and I am sure that I would still find myself home should I install it. Linux... not so much, though some distributions are better. There was that idea of "stable core and bleeding-edge applications" and freebsd did deliver, at least in those time, because ports and OS were not same, unlike in linux package management.

Re:Time to Start De-Appling on Tuesday November 11, 2025 @04:21AM (#45885506)
> Corporations can't really resist governments unless they're not operating in a given government's jurisdiction and therefore have nothing to lose. They can take things to court, but in lieu of a verdict or an injunction they have to comply with the law or they can be fined, have assets frozen, be de-banked or banned from processing payments, etc.

It is also maybe a good thing? Corporations should not be stewards of our rights, we do not want to be governed by tech-barons.

The problem here lies clearly in UK's laws and government and they cannot be fixed by Apple. The West in general is in this crumbling state, where we take corrupt bastards chewing off our rights for a law of nature, instead of getting furious. France is the only western country where people dare to really protest.

Re:Lisp: Notes on its Past and Future (1980) on Sunday November 02, 2025 @03:04PM (#45792962)
I prefer CL, but… clojure at least has some commercial usage and is by far the most successful of current lisps, if we do not count elisp.
Yes, if only we would have an example of an editor with a “obscure lisp flavor” and a powerful plugin system, unlike WASM!

/s

Older »