epihelix

KDE seems surprisingly decent now (I tried Plasma out the other day).

Personally, I'm still using Unity 7 on X11, but as that DE's project is now seemingly dead again, I keep looking for a replacement. This one also looks pretty interesting!

I would really like to find something that handles fractional scaling as efficiently as Unity/Compiz. That, the dash, and (I'm ashamed to admit) wobbly windows are what keep me using it.

> I assume this project is all vibe-coded?

You know what happens when you assume, right?

https://github.com/duxlabs-dev/dux-shell?tab=contributing-ov...

Quoting in part from that:

> Using an LLM to help write code is fine. Submitting its output unread is not.

> * You are responsible for every line you submit. You have read it, tested it, and can explain it in review.

> * Say in the PR when a meaningful part of the code was AI generated.

> * Write PR descriptions, issues, and comments yourself. No AI-written or AI-rewritten text. A few plain sentences in your own words beat a page of generated summary. PRs and issues with AI-written text get closed without review.

> ...

> * PRs that read like unreviewed output, with narrating comments, invented APIs, or style that ignores the file they are in, get closed without review.

That looks very clearly non-vibe coded to me. (Also, it's a mature project with 79 releases over the last year and a bit, and 321 contributors.)

As much as I respect the abilities of agentic coding LLMs, I don't think we're yet at the point that you could vibe-code a novel Wayland DE. This is not trivial stuff!

Removing the emoji won't help the readability much on this one. The LLM vibes are dialed up to 11, sadly.

I wish people would just write their readmes themselves.

It's a US-specific rule, and only in certain style manuals. Chicago, for example, does not capitalise after a colon. (But perhaps your Google or AI had not heard of the Chicago Manual of Style?)

And there is an entire world out there, outside of the US (perhaps your Google or AI did not know that either?) that does not do this.

> Apparently I once told it to always capitalize the first letter after a colon. I don't remember doing that, but hey, that's basic English grammar, dammit, so I can see myself getting pissy about it.

It's definitely not correct UK English grammar. TIL that the US uses some very odd colon rules.

> So far I've turned off automatic memory creation in every harness I've used.

I also never use memories. I don't see the usefulness above project-specific prompting and a good knowledge of your own codebase. Am I missing something?

> How is password auth weaker than key auth?

Well, it's a heck of a lot weaker in this instance (at least when `PasswordAuthentication no`)

Yes, I think I misread -- looks like the pebkac problem was at my desk instead :/

But I don't think their prompt as written would have limited the responses to two, unless there really were only two matching both conditionals. I've not seen an LLM misinterpret language that way before.

> In Oct 2026, how many of us don't know this already?

The comments to this article suggest that it's still disputed.

Personally, I think it's a bit of a silly phrase, because it implies an absolute, and all anyone needs to do to disprove it is to show that coding was not solved for problem X. That's still the case -- it's just that the set of X is rapidly shrinking.

I think it's more indicative to say how much you trust LLM code. A little over a year ago, I scrutinised every line carefully, and it was buggy as hell and I had to fix most generated code by hand. Now, models write clean code with fewer bugs (far fewer) than I would. A year ago, I was doing a lot of steering during planning; now, it's rare that I don't agree with the model's first proposed solution, and even if I don't, it's most likely to fix a minor change in understanding, not to propose a substantial architectural change as it was before.

The one thing I'm not sure about is how much this is due to better prompting on my part. I doubt that this contributes much, but I still suspect that continual usage does make you more aware of what works and what does not: how much detail to provide, how to describe a problem or change, how to propose solutions while still leaving other options open.

To be fair, that's a pebkac problem. You got exactly what you requested (and the language was unambiguous).

This is like writing `if (cond_x && cond_y) {}` and then blaming the compiler because it didn't realise that actually meant to write `if (cond_x || cond_y) {}`.

Yes, the key experiment was when they asked if Astra could improve the maths performance of Gemma 3 270M, a model which rarely looped, and it could not.

So, this is certainly very interesting (and very impressive regardless), but it's not nearly at the we-can-improve-everything-and-anything stage, even for very small LLMs.

Nobody in the general public wants to do that, but I'd think some in the HN audience might feel differently (I mean, setting this up is part of the fun).

Personally, I use an RPi4 with libreelec, and it works great - including responding to my remote via HDMI-CEC. (There's also no need for any sysadmin with libreelec, which is designed to work out of the box.)

> my stance won't change that like any other physical system such as human brains, it could potentially be conscious

On that subject, this recent commentary by three big name neuroscientists may be of interest:

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-03313-7

There remains a vast amount of difference between a biological brain and an LLM neural network. The "it's big enough, so consciousness just happens" argument is not supported by any actual evidence that I know of.

My comment was, of course, tongue-in-cheek.

I'm trying to work out if your own commment was satirical, replying in that prompt's form -- if it was, then kudos. If not:

> It doesn't change that your interaction with it is always consequence-free.

I entirely agree, but this is a major issue with social media currently too. Neither AI or social media improve real social engagement skills, sadly.

> It's only going to be nice and helpful and always available to you.

You could always try "You are a thorny internet troll" as your system prompt instead. Works wonders.

> social skills like tactfulness and navigating conflict.

We're not still talking about social media, are we?

(I agree that substituting AI for human interaction is bonkers, btw. But I'm not sure social media helps, or doesn't also involve mostly AI interactions these days.)

Surely there is no universe in which Emacs hits the definition of a minimal anything?

The EC (embedded controller) controls the hard power off on a modern laptop, not the OS at all. That's why you can still power down in the event of a device lockup (thankfully).

Well, when you name your company "Anthropic", what do you expect? I remain surprised that this continues to get a free pass.

Quoting Wikipedia:

> The word is from the Latin flos (flower) and legere (to gather): literally a gathering of flowers, or collection of fine extracts from the body of a larger work.

There's obviously the scholarly allusion and the literal floral allusion here, so even if it is AI generated it's right on the money in this case :) You would struggle to find a more apt name.

Why would AI-generated explain LaTeX? Pretty sure most people still use LaTeX around here.

(I'd never heard of Typst until your post, personally. But I'd guess it would be easy to port over to that platform with an LLM if you wanted to.)

You are not the only one. I think it's a very vocal minority, who mostly, sadly, seem to equate obsequious flattery with consciousness and sentience (see, e.g. Richard Dawkins).

There's also the problem that to lay people, LLMs are sufficiently advanced as to be indistinguishable from magic. I suspect that colours many of these responses.

Add it to your system or developer prompt, and it still can be.

Given the amount of angst being expressed in this thread about particular LLM-isms, I wonder why people don't simply prompt against the traits they hate. Yes, it will reduce output quality very slightly in some circumstances, but if it really gets your goat like this, surely it's worth it.

Technically, in latex (and what other format is there?) an en-dash is `--` and an em-dash is `---`. So that was just an em-dash. A `-` is a hyphen.

Us oldies learnt to type these with multiple dashes automatically, as unicode hadn't been invented yet.

> This presumes an LLM has something to say. The reason the text doesnt make much sense, is because it doesnt. It isnt "on topic" because it has no topic to be on. Sentences go on, are joined irrelevantly, and so on because theyre sampled from a distribution of "possibly relevant sentences". They aren't being addressed to a reader (whose mind is being modelled), on a topic the writer wishes to express.

While I don't like LLM voice either, I'd strongly disagree with this. LLM writing can be very tight these days -- sentences do not "go on" and are not "joined irrelevantly". I'm not sure when you last used an LLM, but it must have been a very long time ago; this hasn't been the case since late 2024 for frontier models, in my experience.

Obviously there's no underlying consciousness behind it all, but the verisimilitude is good enough for stimulating conversations on the recent research literature in my field, which I appreciate. For me, at least, the communication level is absolutely fine.

(YMMV, of course, and perhaps my bar for this is lower than yours.)

The models don't know or need permission to make up references. References are just complicated things to predict in terms of next tokens -- Author names are found in many references, with many journals. Most hallucinated refs use researcher names in the field and credible article titles related to their research.

Agentic models now, however, can correctly search pubmed or OpenAlex and obtain valid refs, so that tell is mostly gone.

Wait until we get the first retractions of papers with AI generated micrographs or blots, and synthetic data plots. That's the bit that really scares me.

Perl was my first love as a language, and I don't recall any hostility towards Perl users. On the contrary, the environment in the early 2000s was very supportive.

Perl likely declined because Perl6 did a Duke Nukem Forever, and Perl5 was dated and not incredibly well-adapted to OOP. Then Python got taken up for teaching, and it was all over.

(I still love Perl5, still use it in one-liners all the time, and still code up quick CLI tools with it.)

Ideally, Google would have run with:

Argon > Neon > Helium

That would have been the noble thing to do.

Technically not true any more (for some versions of copilot chat, at least) -- my workplace's version has a "GPT 5.6 Sol" selector with "Answer faster" or "Think Deeper". ("Think deeper" appears to represent the lowest reasoning effort).

But you have to select it each time; otherwise "Auto" sends you to a lobomised model that is probably Phi-4 :(

One of the unexpectedly useful aspects of Simon Willison's pelican benchmark is that you can estimate what model you're using via the pelican it generates:

"GPT 5.6 Sol": appears genuine, albeit low reasoning. -> handed off agentically: appears to be using Luna for agentic tasks.

"Auto": very low quality, does not appear to be an OAI model.

> The terminal ecosystem needs to change

What is your justification for this statement? Why does it need to change, and what does it need to change to? Personally, I've not felt this (and I spend a lot of time in the terminal). Fish shell and Byobu give me everything I've ever wanted.

Like the poster you were replying to, I don't understand what these new terminal emulators bring to the table, other than potentially more resource usage.

I feel that there's something here that I'm missing (ghostty is clearly popular, so it must bring something both new and useful to the table), but I'm genuinely not sure what that is.

Taking a quick look at the article, I cannot see that they rule out either correlation or (even more likely, I suspect) reverse causation? That is, that depression leads to circadian disruption. That would hardly seem surprising if so.