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dyateson The session you cannot take with you

We seem to be reaching a point where the use of formatting and the odd rhetorical flourish gets you accused of AI-generated writing. Sad.

dyateson Claude Opus 4.8

And to think, we could have had George RR Martins instead.

dyateson Google's Antigravity Bait and Switch

I had the opposite experience when Gemini 3.1 first came out. It didn't show up as a model option in my fully updated Gemini CLI, and I subsequently figured out I had to install this Cursor-lookalike thing called Antigravity to try it. I'd like to stick with my existing editors, thanks.

On a related note, the AUR package previously named antigravity has been renamed antigravity-ide[1] after some lively discussion, and the new thing lives at antigravity2-bin.[2]

[1] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/antigravity-ide

[2] https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/antigravity2-bin

dyateson Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

I'd agree with sph about having one workspace per activity. I've never had a rigid workflow with lots of permanent named workspaces, but I have a workspace-naming script that lets me label my numbered workspaces after they've been set up.

Other things that help include a fuzzel-based open window searcher and, to be honest, restrained use of Niri's flagship scrolling feature. Most of my workspaces most of the time are the same size as my screen, with the scroll used very sparingly for usually temporary overflow.

I guess it also helps that I never used the i3 scratchpad so I don't miss it.

dyateson Niri 26.04: Scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor

I switched to Niri at the end of last year after over a decade on i3.[1] Having horizontal scroll unbounded by my monitor size and workspace count unbound by the number of shortcut keys I have configured has been very freeing, and the graphical stuff is nice too.

My only remaining pain point is that its X compatibility layer, xwayland-satellite, does not yet support drag and drop between X and Wayland programs.[2]

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2026/01/28/niri/

[2]: https://github.com/Supreeeme/xwayland-satellite/issues/133

dyateson Elon Musk pushes out more xAI founders as AI coding effort falters

>LLMs are not doing searches, they are doing statistical computation of likely results.

This was true of ChatGPT in 2022, but any modern platform that advertises a "deep research" feature provides its LLMs with tools to actually do a web search, pull the results it finds into context and cite them in the generated text.

dyateson What Claude Code chooses

In my last conversation with a Google support person, I was sent a clearly LLM-generated recommendation to switch to a competitor's product. Either they're not doing this, or the support person wasn't using Gemini.

dyateson Nano Banana 2: Google's latest AI image generation model

ChatGPT's image generator has been able to do this since last year. That NBP still can't is baffling. They should at least train it to respond to requests for transparency with a solid colour pink background.

dyateson Advent of Code on the Z-Machine

Interesting read! A lot of AoC challenges involve navigating 2D grids, which can map quite nicely onto the text adventure model of connected rooms with compass direction exits (a grid of straightforward little passages, all alike). This insight led me to attempt Day 6 from last year's Advent of Code in Inform 7[1], though I ultimately admitted defeat on the second half. I've always found Inform 7's Mathematics Textbook English syntax quite charming, though perhaps I would have a different perspective if I'd ever attempted to build anything substantial with it.

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/12/23/aoc-2024-part2/#day-6-python-...

dyateson Advent of Code on the Nintendo DS

I'm trying to complete each challenge in a different language. I've written up the first five days on my blog[1]. Have completed a few more than just these, but I don't know that I'll get all of them done by Christmas.

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/12/16/aoc-2024-part1/

dyateson 20 Years of Blogging on my own website

Congratulations on the achievement. I recently hit my 10 year blogging milestone.[1]

I've also written about some similar thoughts to those in your linked "Content is King" post.[2] Long may the individualist personal website live.

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2024/04/07/ten-years/

[2]: https://davidyat.es/2020/03/14/reader-modes/

dyateson Show HN: A user-friendly UI for viewing and editing Markdown files

I wrote a short blog post[1] about this pattern a few years ago. I still don't understand why so many apps use this workflow, especially ones that previously didn't. Just let me deal with the project creation stuff on the first write instead of requiring all this up-front commitment!

[1]: https://davidyat.es/2018/03/01/project-wizard/

dyateson Clicks – Physical keyboard for iPhone

I used my Priv for five years, best phone I've ever had, barring some battery & heat issues. Showing people a normal-looking phone and then sliding out the keyboard was a fun party trick. If there were any modern phone like it I would buy it in a heartbeat.

dyateson In the Asian Flu of 1957-58, they rejected lockdowns (2021)

I think the lockdown concept as implemented in 2020 was a great illustration of the problem of scale. It's trivially true that if you as an individual avoid all contact with others during a flu season, you won't catch the flu. You can probably extend that to your family, maybe a bit further, but at a certain scale it just becomes impossible (and undesirable) because of individual variations in occupation, lifestyle, risk and infinitely many other factors. And because someone has keep the wheels of society turning. There was no lockdown for supermarket cashiers.

My own government got very excited by the prospect of dictatorial central planning that lockdown mania created an enabling environment for and immediately set about writing all kinds of complicated rules about what food and clothing people were allowed to buy, as well as putting a prohibition on alcohol & cigarettes and imposing a curfew. Pandemic response immediately became a vehicle for imposing by fiat whatever pet policies ministers could vaguely link to it. Years later, they've all been rolled back, but the damage was done, and everyone still caught Covid.[1]

[1]: https://www.groundup.org.za/article/nearly-everyone-in-south...

dyateson Bank transfers as a payment method (2021)

Later on the article, when he talks about not needing access to the receiving account to confirm payments, I kinda got it. Just the initial framing of "what if we used bank transfers for payments" threw me for a loop.

dyateson Bank transfers as a payment method (2021)

As a South African, it's weird seeing this presented as a strange/futuristic idea. I pay most of my bills through bank transfers and it's the standard way for two people with bank accounts to send money to each other. As long as you know someone's bank and account number, you can send them money.

All local online retailers, investment brokers, etc, support bank transfers, with some[1] even providing discounts for paying via bank transfer instead of credit card. I've even paid this way at a brick and mortar place that didn't have a card machine.

[1] https://www.evetech.co.za/

dyateson Victory Garden (Novel)

Jimmy Maher of the Digital Antiquarian wrote a couple of articles a few years back about the Eastgate School of hypertext this belongs to.

https://www.filfre.net/2017/02/the-eastgate-school-of-seriou...

https://www.filfre.net/2018/01/king-of-space/

dyateson You don't need live chat on your website

Live chat windows that pop-up automatically and hassle you once you've spent X seconds looking at a website are annoying, much like email subscription modals. But when I've been actually looking for support and made the choice to click on the chat button, I've generally had a great experience, so long as it's connected me to a human rather than a menu of chatbot options. It's asynchronous enough that I can keep doing something else while I wait/chat, saves me from having to spell things out or repeat alphanumeric codes over the phone, and is way quicker than email.

dyateson Consider the Cellphone Holster (2019)

I used a cellphone holster for years as a teen because one came with my first BlackBerry. I think I only stopped once I got my first touchscreen phone in a modern form factor that didn't fit my holster. Had some tense moments at a couple of metal detectors when reaching for the holster to put my phone in the tray.

dyateson Ask HN: Share your personal site

https://davidyat.es

My personal blog, with some other stuff lying around. I've been neglecting it over the past year or so. It's a Hugo-powered static site, though I started off using Ghost.

My design philosophy, such as it is:

Have a unique look without being too esoteric, and minimise cruft on content pages (https://davidyat.es/2019/05/05/site-redesign/)

Provide a pleasant reading experience

Use JavaScript sparingly and only for enhancements (example: https://davidyat.es/2020/12/31/footnote-previews/)

dyateson Adventuron – Text Adventure Authoring in the Browser

Gruescript is a similar system, released a couple of months ago (though it doesn't have official support for graphics):

https://versificator.itch.io/gruescript

https://github.com/robindouglasjohnson/gruescript

dyateson OWASP Top 10 2021

I've seen a fair bit of this with Firebase apps, where devs don't write enough rules, or have collections that mix non-sensitive and sensitive fields. It's tricky, because the whole query-the-database-from-JavaScript model causes your app to fail open. I wrote a tool that acts as a generic Firebase datastore client to help find these sorts of flaws.[1]

[1]: https://github.com/iosiro/baserunner

dyateson When six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months (2020)

To quote a since-deleted twitter thread written in response to this article at the time:

> Golding is not trying to play this Rosseau-v-Hobbes game of bringing humanity back to the state of nature and see what they look like. His children are not living in a natural state: they are self conscious heirs to an entire civilization, and they realize quite early on that they live on the razor's edge of life and death. So they create rules and orders to keep their society running. A little democracy that honors natural goodness and leadership.

> A little democracy that does not last.

> And that is what people don't seem to get about this book. It isn't a parable about what happens when you taken men out of society--it is a parable about how men act in society.

The whole thread is worth reading, though it's not well preserved:

https://twunroll.com/article/1260958965082488832

dyateson NovelWriter 1.0 – A markdown-like editor for writing novels

Markdown is pretty good for advanced blogging if you use it as a superset of HTML, as originally intended.[1] That way you get simple syntax for the stuff you're likely to use most often and can still implement more complex formatting when you need to.

[1]: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax#html

dyateson Show HN: Write-Only Interface for Twitter

Twitter is awful for longform, but it's where the eyeballs are.

https://blog.ayjay.org/thread/

dyateson X Minus One: 1950s Science Fiction Radio Programs Available to Listen (2011)

It's called the Mid-Atlantic or Transatlantic accent and was designed as a way to blend the American accent with British Received Pronunciation. It was deliberately cultivated by the upper class and actors in the early 20th century; there was a book called Speak With Distinction that taught people how to speak like this.

It started dying after WWII and was basically gone from the media by the late 60s. Maybe because post-WWII America was less dependent on ties with Britain for its national identity, or maybe because people decided it sounded silly and fake. No-one spoke with the accent naturally, so it really only took a fashion change for it to disappear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/how-a-fake-british-acc...

dyateson Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

The best solution I've seen for making sidenotes responsive is to move them into the body text. Examples:

http://craftinginterpreters.com/a-map-of-the-territory.html

https://www.martigeon.com/textbook-themed-webdesign/

I'm not sure how well this would work for shorter notes though.

dyateson Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?

Mine is https://davidyat.es

I write about a lot of different things, often technical, sometimes not. Common subjects include technical tutorials and rants, reviews of books and games, and thoughts about different aspects of internet culture.

These are my three most popular posts:

How to set up GPU passthrough on Linux: https://davidyat.es/2016/09/08/gpu-passthrough/

Why RSS is better than its modern replacements: https://davidyat.es/2017/05/18/rss-nothing-better/

How to create a dual-headed personal wiki with Vimwiki and Gollum: https://davidyat.es/2017/09/01/vimwiki-plus-gollum/

dyateson Habitat (video game)

The Digital Antiquarian has an article that goes quite in-depth on the history and context of this game:

https://www.filfre.net/2015/07/a-new-force-in-games-part-2-a...

dyateson Show HN: You Don't Need WordPress – Create a Blog With Only Google Docs

This is so true. The other day I listened to a project manager rant about how Slack is "like a coding tool" because "you need to put stars for bold". She was really quite upset about it.

Another time a friend of mine, who I wouldn't call non-technical, but isn't a programmer, was collaborating with me on a Github wiki for a project we were working on. I was flabbergasted at the way he would copy-paste and edit the source of pages I'd written just to get bold text instead of typing the asterisks himself. He was just really used to WYSIWYG formatting buttons.

This HN comment[1] provides quite an interesting theory about why Markdown in particular has such a different reception by programmers and non-programmers.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4765665