spudlyo

I encode all the text, localization, provenance, pedagogical, and forced alignment data for my Latin language audiobook chapters[0] as TEI-XML. When I fetch a document out BaseX, I have an XQM module that wraps the document in a number of XML processing instructions (PIs), one being a pointer to the reader XSLT 1.0 stylesheet which does all the HTML rendering client-side.

It's a cool system, and I'll be bummed when I have to do this on the server. I already get warnings in the Firefox console about them soon deprecating XSLT support, so it's not just Chrome.

[0]: https://fabulae.orbilii.com

I've been using Pi nearly every day for 4-5 months now, and even though it is still very much in development with new updates arriving nearly every week, it has to my mind never regressed. I've never lamented that a Pi update ever broke anything I depend on or made anything worse.

I immediately adopted the new tuiMode "fullscreen" feature the moment it landed, and it's been exceptional. I love the way it now manages the viewport -- this was also right about the time I migrated to Ghostty so that also made a big difference. Showing inline images with the Kitty graphics protocol has been a huge improvement too, I love it when a model calls `read` on an image file and I get to see the results in my terminal. The OSC-8 hyperlink support is super cool too. I love the way it auto hides/shows the scrollbar now too, and recently they've even made it so concurrent tool calls show different "themes" when pending/running vs success vs error.

After all that has been said and written on this topic, people still manage to conflate theft with intellectual property violation, real or imagined.

So for my unofficial book club with a good friend, we're in the final act of A Passage to India by E.M. Forster, after having finished A Room with a View a few weeks before. I enjoy 19th and early 20th century literature for the prose quality quite a lot, and Forster does not disappoint on that score. It's also fascinating getting an inside view on Anglo-Indian relations during British rule. It's thematically similar To Kill a Mockingbird, in that both feature prominent "White Knight" type characters.

I'm also reading some less highbrow, yet highly entertaining novels that I'm obsessed with. I'm currently on book 16 in in Lindsey Davis' Falco series[0], which are murder mysteries set in Ancient Rome. I've been enjoying them non-stop ever since HN user "vintagedave" recommended[1] them around 4 months ago.

[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/series/42173-marcus-didius-falco

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323766

I hope not, I'd hate for my enigmatic Linear-A tattoo to end up reading "Fish monger".

That's not a problem with Ebooks writ large -- a zip file of a bunch of HTML documents aren't likely to randomly change on you. It's a problem of some evil vendor's "ebook ecosystem", where one day your copy of 1984 could vanish from your library. Most of the ebooks I've been reading lately are all public domain classics from Standard Ebooks.

We are talking about our opinions here, so there are no wrong answers. It's an interesting observation, the physical presence of a book is something I hadn't considered. Having said that, I'd wager lots of us avid readers have a daily habit, and we'd likely be working through our backlog during certain hours, even absent a convenient a physical reminder to do so.

Sharing anything that has even a whiff of being machine generated opens you up to huge amounts of scorn and derision. It happens in the comment section of nearly every post on this site. If that's not the community here using shame as a mechanism of control, I don't know what is.

I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.

This seems like a lot of work for not a huge payoff. I get that the feel and experience of a physical book has a certain nostalgia, but for me, I'd just leave the big monster on the shelf and grab an epub from Anna's Archive. You have already ensured the author and publisher get paid, you might as well read on an e-reader, which is in my opinion superior in nearly every way to a physical book.

Ebooks sync across devices, allow for a customized presentation, quick dictionary lookups, bookmarks, etc. The only slight edge I'll give to a physical book is the ability to easily make marginal notes in pencil -- I realize that ebooks have this feature too, it's just not as immediate or as frictionless.

Haha, thank you for using multiple exclamation marks!!! I'm thrilled that someone is as excited as I am about this feature, it made all the time I spent manually correcting/marking all of Gemini's elision hallucinations worthwhile :)

The recordings were made by my friend and Latin tutor. I used an Italian wav2vec2 model fine-tuned on Latin[0], which works pretty well for Latin only content, but falls down with mixed English / Latin. I found that some of the slower, larger Meta models worked fine for this use case though.

Some folks on the Latin language Discord said they got pretty good results using Kokoro TTS and X-Voice for creating synthetic Latin, as you suggested using IPA.

[0]: https://huggingface.co/lsb/wav2vec2-base-it-latin

https://fabulae.orbilii.com - A Latin language audiobook containing both volumes of A.D. Godley's "The Fables of Orbilius" which are entertaining intermediate Latin stories written at the turn of the 20th century for use in British schools.

The audio itself is in delivered with the restored classical Latin pronunciation and contains spoken nuances like vowel nasalization, elision, and prodelision. I used a wav2vec2 model to generate forced-alignment data, so you can easily follow along with the text as it's being read aloud. Each word in the text is richly enhanced with pedagogical details like: lemma, citation forms / principal parts, morphological segmentation and analysis, inflectional class with complete declension/conjugation tables, verb category, contextual lexical information (i.e. specific L&S sense), Classical Latin IPA pronunciation, UD style syntactic function and relations, predicate valency, and concise English definitions. Spoken instances of elision and prodelision can also optionally be displayed.

From a nerd perspective, one of the things that makes the system interesting is that the documents themselves are entirely in XML, and I use the soon-to-be-removed-everywhere in-browser XSLT feature to render the HTML, so you can see the underlying XML structure if you view source. Each sentence in the text contains provenance records so you can see the language model and parameters that performed each language enrichment task. The site UI is largely bilingual, and you can view it in either Latin or English.

> For swap, the best advice is to disable swap on your desktop, unless <8GB RAM.

That maybe reasonable advice if you never intend to hibernate your desktop. I like to shut my desktop down when I'm not using it, and it's nice to be able to quickly boot it back to the same state it was in when I went to bed.

I agree that there are people who can see the potential of these tools, and are enthusiastic boosters, yet are still unable to realize the benefits for themselves for whatever reason. I feel like these people are somewhat rare, and labeling them has having a kind of psychosis strikes me as sneering elitism.

I don't know if shorter would have been better. Would that have meant omitting the bit contrasting Harry Truman and Donald Trump? For me, that bit alone was worth reading to the end. I should probably pick up a biography of Truman, I bet I'd really enjoy it. I also believe there are hierarchies of cultural value, and if that makes me an elitist, so be it, I'm an elitist.

Years ago, when I worked at Stripe (which had a somewhat unique and inventive lexicon) it was a common term. “Is this jank load-bearing?” someone might ask.

There is a thriving and vibrant terminal ecosystem out there, with Ghostty, Kitty, Herdr, Tmux, and others leading the way with all kinds innovations and features. I can't imagine how a closed SaaS / freemium, telemetry sending, login requiring terminal like Warp competes in this environment. I know they've got all these enterprise features like runbooks, shared workflows, and some compliance do-dads, but I can't see anyone willingly using this over Ghostty.

> In our series, we highlight how startups are transforming their industries with AI.

I'm sorry, but I don't see Warp transforming shit.

Improve the speed of APFS. Like try forking off a job to create a bunch of git worktrees in on APFS vs EXT4 -- it's significantly slower. Deleting a ton of files, cloning repos, hardlink performance, etc; APFS performance is poor compared to just about any other Linux filesystem.

I'm not sure how this kind of software gatekeeping squares with our new glorious future where everyone is happily running bespoke vibecoded applications tailored specifically to their needs.

I bristled a bit at the scalpel "you don't want to give this tool to the wrong person" analogy. While I agree that there are certain classes of software (like banking/finance, healthcare, etc) that you don't want just anyone writing, but you don't need to have a C.S. degree to whip up a SwiftUI Music.app replacement so you can listen to dad Rock while you work in the basement.

I've noticed that too with Sol (xhigh) it starts with pretty good architectural goals, but really get lost in the weeds with certification and validation. Like it won't trust native tools like (in my case packer, Ansible, gcloud) to fail reliably under possible error conditions, and insists on implementing custom verification.

It also doesn't have a clear idea of what the actual threat model is, and builds all kinds of extremely defensive systems to account for imagined hostile actors. I'm like "Dude, it's only our systems that are creating these SVGs, they're never going to be user supplied, so you don't need to write an entire validation and sanitation framework here."

It also seems to treat the desired initial state of something as a permanent invariant and designs elaborate tests to ensure that it remains that way. Then when you make one little change it has to go and update a ton of tests it created.

I've had to rip out a bunch of overengineered jank from several feature implementations, and in doing so I ended up having to create retrospective documents that warn against this kind of behavior that I'll have the model review whenever a plan begins to go sideways.

> I have a hard time believing anything of value, anything worth copyrighting, could be entirely generated by AI.

Perhaps you're not stretching your imagination enough. What if an expert novelist used an AI like it were a fancy auto-completing dictation machine to write the next great American novel? AI may have "entirely generated" all the text, but what if they micromanaged the shit out it?

I can imagine the difference between someone who fires off a lazy 5 minute prompt, and someone who labors for months and months to get exactly the results they want.

Tried to buy old DDR4 memory recently? I've been revitalizing some old laptops, and I foolishly paid nearly $200 for a Crucial 32GB Kit of DDR4 PC4-19200.

This is LE;DU: low-effort, didn't upvote.

The headline comes from the most recent post in the thread from Eli Zaretskii:

> Thanks, this is now installed on the master branch, and I'm therefore closing this bug.

Good news! This will enable a bunch of future in-buffer graphics features -- things like Headless/Playwright Chromium using Emacs as a display server or faster PDF viewers. Org-babel should be able to make use of this too for faster data plotting. I can only imagine the kinds of snazzy Emacs graphical UI interfaces this will enable, beyond what is being currently done using SVG hacks for rendering.

Two years down the line I suspect "persons" won't working directly on code bases they hate. Two years from now, I'd wager that even today's most ardent AI critics will be using them for dirty jobs -- like refactoring ugly, but useful, balls of mud.

Nice! I love all the Latin audio, although most of it is well above my level. I'm always pleased to hear well-pronounced Latin with elision and prodelision. Do you know how the audio is licensed? I'd love to have my own copy, and am trying to organize a CC-BY-SA archive of spoken word Latin.

I'm a recently retired software nerd who got into reading 19th century literature. I was greatly inspired by characters in these novels, most of whom had the advantages of a classical education, and I lamented how poor my own was. One day I idly wondered how hard it would be to learn a bit of Latin (as I was constantly having to look up Latin references) and once I discovered LLPSI[0] I was hooked.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingua_Latina_per_se_illustrat...

> LLMs have been an absolute game changer for me who is a hobby classicist but also knows how to build software.

Definitely! I myself have been having a lot of fun[0] recently using LLMs to enrich one of my favorite beginner Latin readers[1] with audio forced-alignment, POS tagging, morphology, definitions, and other niceties that learners might appreciate.

[0]: https://hercules.hookbangsplat.com

[1]: https://archive.org/details/p1fablesoforbili00godl/mode/2up

In my cynical view, herder now seems to be an attempt to commercialize tmux by adding superficial polish. I am wary of VC backed developer tools that seek to innovate in well established open source niches. Herdr by default is mouse focused, has very friendly UI interactions, and has some niche UI support for agents running in panes. Great. Now it also has a profit motive and ROI pressures. I don't see this ending well.