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CrimsonCape

718 karma · joined January 15, 2022

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CrimsonCape··on Libghostty 1.0
I would like the server to take a theme (gruvbox dark) and then any client that connects gets served the theme, background, foreground, etc.

bonus if lightweight vector instructions carry over too, gradient backgrounds, rainbow effects, etc.

it should be pretty lightweight to send vector instructions.

CrimsonCape··on Libghostty 1.0
does anyone have a terminal setup with gorgeous colors/background/etc over ssh without a display manager? Looking for a lightweight server side environment. I keep searching for headless / framebuffer / DRM setups and there seems to be a few out there, wondering if these exist in a practical workflow.
CrimsonCape··on Apple reports fourth quarter results
Yeah I can kinda see why Altman is out there trying to shame the public for having compute. The longer they carry those massive debt obligations, the more the models are going to economize.

It would not be surprising that Apple just waits and snatches their compute up from insolvent companies sliding past.

CrimsonCape··on Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
I think I noticed claude uses the shape and style of the existing code base to generate the new code. When reviewing claude's output, it looks familiar and the patterns are similar to what I would write.

I'm not sure who is studying this yet, but there has to be a statistical relationship between three factors of

1. intelligence of the human: the design patterns and architecture is already modelled in the mind, steering the AI becomes easy to know what to say next

2. quality of the codebase: the LLM can pick up the adjacent patterns and write code that looks and works cleanly.

3. quality of the prompt: the prompt keeps the AI focused and ignores the trivial side effects; keep the AI wandering away from critical path work; sometimes the AI can't make the decision what call site is next

In summation, what if claude is just a mirror pointing back at us? It certainly would explain wildly divergent opinions of opus 5.5

CrimsonCape··on Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
I love the mental image of the next million dollar CEO dropping into the role, super ready to implement his/her next big font change and logo redesign; instead to be crushed by the wave of engineers panicking from all the bugs being uncovered and being forced into doing productive work.
CrimsonCape··on Postgres 19 is late because so many more bugs are being found now
Can you describe how you arrive at the premise that people stop sharing because of AI? As a counterexample, I just tried out a dev's vibecoded app 'Glaze My Numbers Baby' and it 1. works and 2. is ridiculous and cool. Totally vibe coded. Claude rewrote all the C++ tests in Rust, so there's at least some substance to the rewrite.
CrimsonCape··on SS27 Color Stats
It's funny that she chose black as the color of 2027, because from what I can see, teen and twenties fashion has moved toward late 80s early 90s lightwashed blue jeans and light color tops, robins egg blue on white. Maybe the next trend is to darkwashed bluejeans next. I just watched Labyrinth and could definitely see Jennifer Connelly's style coming back next, we are practically half-way there).

Not sure if Gen Z or Millenials will get the idea first, but we have not experienced a move to 'I should dress like my parents'. So far it's still been 'let's resurrect this old look'. Mom-look and dad-look is not in currently. It will come back.

CrimsonCape··on US tech stocks see sharp falls over AI cost fears
I think about my younger self who believed in 'capitalism'. The idea is great in concept, but let's be clearer that if you don't have capital, then you personally don't and won't have capitalism.
CrimsonCape··on Why are good developers so wary of agentic development?
Exactly! That's why the "pelican riding a bicycle SVG" test is unfair. It's a token predictor, not an intelligence. What corpus of SVG data has the LLM been trained on? Only in the last 10 years has "drawing using data" been in existence. Midjourney can generate you a pelican riding a bicycle artwork easily. But instead, if the test is intentionally based on a task with no corpus, then you get garbage.
CrimsonCape··on NixOS is making me less afraid
I don't like the attribute dot syntax. On the positive side, it's very readable. and the left-to-right syntax is a very clear and strong organization technique.

That said, it has a problem with 'rootedness' as in 'what is the root of this attribute string'.

Firstly, 'with' keyword allows you to silently slice off the front end when the attribute string originates from a passed-in argument variable.

Secondly, when you arrive at foo in foo.bar, you have no concept of what the ancestor path looks like; someone is going to do an import of this file, likely store it in a named variable in the context it is needed, and then dispose it. Every time we need foo, it's being referenced from some ephemeral external context. So it's impossible to say or know "foo has 5 references" via static analysis unless we are just grepping it.

Thirdly, (related to above), when you declare services.tailscale.enable = true; you are relying on some ephemeral other location to find meaning in services-dot as declared in the current file. Metaphorically, we can't actually turn and face upstream looking up the call stack to easily see how we arrived (nor how many times we expect to arrive) at this site.

'Self' in the context of flakes is another great example of emphemeral-ness and non-discoverability...what is accessible under 'self'? It takes a PHD to describe it.

Allowing strings mixed in (foo.bar."baz".biz) and the expectation that you might be interpolating (foo.bar."${baz}".biz) is a whole nother ball of wax...

CrimsonCape··on Plex laid off the whole player team
Dude how do you survive every day and not have anxiety about the maintainability of that? Seems like you have to be a full-time sysadmin with your music hobby and an appropriate recurring IT hardware budget.
CrimsonCape··on I can't believe PowerShell is good
I know linux is prided for it's low-level C code, but linux is desperately missing an object-oriented API. C# flavor below:

var service = thisSystem.GetService("rss-news-feed");

service.SetRefresh(TimeSpan.FromHours(1));

service. //<----now we can autocomplete everything a service can do.

Edit: it's a travesty that OO get's shoehorned into architectural design of large systems whereas it would be ideally suited in a Nix-like API for interacting with operating systems which are 'solved'.

CrimsonCape··on Suicide rates highest ever among middle-aged men
I think this is a perfect description. The feelings continue across generations with no answer. Meanwhile society continues to shift underneath mens' feet. And still tries to claim it is a personal problem. The browbeating/apathy continues.
CrimsonCape··on QGIS: No AI contributions permitted
it's not the harness, but the objective. A load-bearing center. We break it down, and adjust.
CrimsonCape··on QGIS: No AI contributions permitted
I am a hobbyist and work in a different field than software dev. Old-school guys in my field are super-fixated on the UX and treat the work like 'implementation details.' They abstract away the time and effort such that really old school guys (who have been top-of-the-pyramid in their business) come off as insulting with their 'I don't care what it takes, get it done' mentality.

I can't help but feel that when I mimic their behavior with an LLM, it works great. Just keep pounding claude saying what I want, prove it with tests, and have claude give me a 1 shot script to build and launch the app. I get hands-on time with the UX a lot more (I think?) and claude happily iterates. Most people stop happily iterating after like iteration 2; then becomes teeth-pulling.

So to your point, claude's tests are gibberish but the 'testing' via user interaction is what I think the future is going to look like.

We will need some novel systems where hot-reloading is the default experience and you are looking at the build output constantly as opposed to the source.

claude was like "I took your logic, removed the shared state, ran the tests 600 times in parallel, proved no state is leaking across runs". I was impressed...

CrimsonCape··on QGIS: No AI contributions permitted
I recently started using Claude and I found it great that Claude is constantly writing tests since I did not due to lack of time. That said, Claude has this ability to reach into test harnesses and output all kinds of obscure syntax and language features that the tests are hieroglyphic. I'm pretty much like 'ehhhhh ok claude, you do you...i'm just going to keep writing the business logic over here..."
CrimsonCape··on Triple-A Minesweeper
What is that effect called where text "glitches" with like chromatic abberation around the edges... SGRRK
CrimsonCape··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
Fair point on the unbalanced braces. However,

You could assume that { and } as a structural delimiter only applies to node types that can nest. Since blobs do not nest, then a tag followed by a backtick (or multiple backticks) could be a valid delimiter in lieu of braces. In this case, tags would extend to blobs.

In my opinion, pairing minimal node types with differing delimiters helps legibility and is not overly mentally taxing to learn when node types are few.

CrimsonCape··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
Can you think a little more about your decision to strongly type code blocks. Some domains have no need for code escaping but do need blob text escaping (which you already have defined elsewhere.) Technically you could treat code via 'this is a bag named code with a blob, therefore it is code."
CrimsonCape··on Plain text is still one of the best technologies we have
Hijacking the plain text discussion to ask what the best tools are to convert plain text to lexed/parsed output?

I'm assuming any tool in this regard would expect the user to write an EBNF grammar.

I found ANTLR to be nice but it's way too convoluted to use as a tool with Java dependencies and seems to be stagnating. And tree sitter just is too convoluted and requires the added C/C++ overhead to understand how to use it.

CrimsonCape··on JetKVM Mini
Would you trust this device on the tailnet? I can't understand why GLiNet would not open source the firmware. It's maddening that the stack is literally linux OS running modified open-source KVM code, and even though they cater to enthusiasts, they still won't release the Comet firmware source.

It's paranoia, but until they release the source, it's not proven paranoia.

CrimsonCape··on Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026)
Tailscale would make 'away from home' usage work.
CrimsonCape··on Global shortage has led to motor oil rationing at Costco
We should have been hiking rates all year to drive a spike in AI hyperinflation, but now that the AI hyperinflation is going to cause real inflation, it will be too late. Some people think its a brilliant idea to strangle rates until they are nothing, ignoring the impacts.
CrimsonCape··on John Ternus Replaces Tim Cook as Apple CEO
I wonder if the John Sculley scenario has influenced this decision.

My cynical side says that Boomer investorship would feel wrong about hiring anyone BUT an old-guard legacy aging alpha CEO type for this role; which would have been finding a modern John Sculley for the role. But maybe the past experience with Sculley has had a lasting impact.

Instead, they kept the promotion in-house and pulled a younger guy from the ranks.

CrimsonCape··on Apple caught off guard by AI demand for Mac Mini and Mac Studio
If you use OpenClaw now can you tell us how it's going?
CrimsonCape··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
I've been running a home server and Tailscale is magic. My firewalls have no open ports. The tailnet is a virtual network that assigns IP addresses to approved devices that you authenticate to join.

I use it in 3 ways:

1. My phone connects to my home network by joining the tailnet. I can play music and movies from my home server when I am away. No struggles with configuration. 2. A dedicated mini pc at home is on a smart plug. I keep it powered off mostly. I can turn the plug on remotely and power the mini pc. It runs "tailscale --advertise-routes" which then exposes every device at my house to the tailnet. No open ports, but suddenly my phone thinks that it is back at home with all my home PCs. 3. I take my laptop with me and use "tailscale serve" which serves as a pipe. I can pipe my home movies to a smart TV at your house. Just install the jellyfin app, and browse for servers, and my server in my house appears in the list at your house.

CrimsonCape··on Internet centralization and the original sin of NAT
Check out Bitbang:

http://github.com/richlegrand/bitbang-cli

I've been using it and it certainly has the potential. I signed up for Cloudflare's TURN server which you use with bitbang and it gets you 1TB free data transfer per month.

CrimsonCape··on Malicious Rust crate Arrayref runs a build-time payload
The guide that NASA put out for spaceflight systems was on HN earlier this year and one of the rules is "no heap allocations; all memory must be declared and fixed size for the life of the app." Isn't Rust the ideal language for that kind of limitation? We are talking C, C++, Rust, Zig as options I would guess; Rust certainly seems the ideal from those options.

But you gotta admit people trying to build GUI libraries and using linked lists don't fit.

CrimsonCape··on Trial is 40 days. Not until you're 40
Proud to say that by 40 I will be off Windows forever.
CrimsonCape··on Where did all the public bathrooms go?
I do think it's closely related to women, because like you say, girls go for runabouts. Girls think the communal farm hippie is romantic, the satan-woshipping metal band member is romantic, the (2000s) kid rock punk trailer trash is romantic. Girls who have looks but are born poor seem to have no choice but encourage it. Murphy's law rules: if it's stupid (breaking windows) but it works (she likes me), it isn't stupid.

I feel like society kinda ran out of rebelliousness with kid rock and then rap culture (late 2000s Jay-Z, Chris Brown). It seems to have dried up. Modern lookmaxxing and gym rat culture, travel vlog, influencers are now the cool kids, van-life and nomadic travel are the new stick-it-to-the-man.

Young people are going to look at Ukraine and realize that flower power and stick-it-to-the-man are utterly bizarre. Who in Ukraine is doing the John Lennon routine? John Lennon's message is totally bizarre now.

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