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grep_name

212 karma · joined March 5, 2019

website w/ contact info at keane dot sh
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grep_name··on Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?
> If a candidate has a blog with just two articles on it that hasn't been updated in five years

Oh hey, that's me! This post might actually encourage me to get back on top of things. Not only do I have two articles (more recent than 5 years though), one of them has a glaring error that is somewhat foundational to what it's supposed to be about. I have to fix that, as well as my broken RSS feed, and get my git link re-directed to my self-hosted forge, and update all my remotes, remove some defunct links and menu options, and then decide which of my 68 (yes, 68!) blog drafts I want to focus on publishing next. Now that I've listed it out, I bet I can get all that done over the break.

grep_name··on ADHD and monotropism (2023)
I was diagnosed with ADHD at several different points and saw different professionals about it at different times, most notably in kindergarden, first grade, fifth grade, the beginning and end of high school, and college. (not all were re-diagnoses but for some reason took place at different locations) I don't really know why treatment was so off and on or varied, but I suspect it is because I don't respond well to stimulants. They make me feel extremely 'up' and anxious in very, very small doses. Everything from the amphetamines they prescribe to coffee.

When I was in college, I was prescribed them again just by my primary care physician. I didn't say I was having trouble focusing, I said I was having trouble with wakefulness. I still do sometimes. It was hard to stay awake in a lecture setting for some reason, borderline impossible on days when I had several in a row. Medication definitely helped me get through college but it was a rough time.

As an adult I don't take them, but it is hard to really work the full work day. I have always performed well enough that nobody questions it (and in some cases have brought so much value to a company that nobody cares), but it is a constant source of stress. I resonate with the top commenter in that I also have hundreds of unfinished personal projects across all domains. At this time in my life (33 y/o) I am more concerned about mitigating the constant stress I feel than I am about the actual ADHD symptoms. I am ok with my many personal projects clashing with each other.

At one point a few years ago I was stressed enough about my job to seek medication. For some reason I was not able to get the information about my diagnosis from my old primary care (from 8 years ago) and the one before that was pediatric and didn't seem to count. I talked to a therapist for a bit (which was not useful), got a diagnosis, and then talked to a psych briefly via zoom, and went on medication for a month before deciding (again) that it wasn't worth it. The whole thing was kind of disheartening.

Things are very weird when it comes to ADHD treatment and diagnosis. There seems to be a tendency towards the same 'easy button' when it comes to ADHD. I also don't think it's exaggerating to say that just about every single person I know well enough to have spoken to about these things says that they have been diagnosed with ADHD, often medicated. I don't think very many of them actually do have it. Sometimes I'm not even sure if I do, or there is something else going on.

I'm not sure what to conclude after all this except that maybe there are no answers for me in this space. It's frustrating, but I've never opened up to exploring this problem without the same exact solution being thrown at me, a solution I know is not sustainable for me. I've never spoken to a doctor who's ever suggested it could be anything else. Should I just find my own way, since I seem to be able to function well enough?

grep_name··on America is getting an AI gold rush instead of a factory boom
> Given the choice of increasing the number of high paying, high skills jobs or the number of relatively low skill, dangerous manufacturing jobs, why wouldn't we choose the former?

Idk, the trend in manufacturing seems to be towards more and more high skilled work and less dangerous or low-skill work as time marches on. Your post also positions it as a binary choice, where we must either increase IT service jobs / web services or manufacturing, which doesn't seem to be true given the landscape of the job market these days.

Personally I would like it if there were a more diverse array of job opportunities in general for people looking to gain and employ skills in machining, fabrication, factory automation, production, etc. "Just learn to code, bro" has been a meme since I was in college, but at this point at 33 every single person I know who is doing even 'kinda ok' has either gotten a tech job or gone into nursing. Exactly 0 of these people actually care about technology or are interested in computers at all, but it feels like the only avenue available anymore for Americans. That doesn't seem good or sustainable.

No matter how much of a cash cow the tech industry has been, is it really a virtue to be totally anemic in such a basic function as ability to produce actual, physical goods?

grep_name··on Android's sideloading limits are its most anti-consumer move
It's an excuse. Give me the option to install the software I see fit. Period.
grep_name··on Atuin Desktop: Runbooks That Run – Now Open Source
Hmm, I downloaded and installed Atuin a few years ago as a solution mainly for syncing shell history across machines or on the same machine across terminal instances (e.g. in tmux). I thought that was its main use case. How did we get to runbooks? I'm kinda having trouble figuring out what it does based on the linked page, but I think that's mostly because I'm trying to tie it back to my understanding of atuin as a shell history database
grep_name··on Typst: A Possible LaTeX Replacement
I might have to give it a try. There's a lot I like about the idea of latex but I've never been able to successfully internalize how to use it in a non-painful way either. I've pretty much given up on the whole idea of making a PDF do what I want at this point.

I've looked into typst before and am always turned off hugely by the website's attempt to make it look like some sort of purchased product with a freemium option. I don't really ever like to commit to anything I can't use with a basic commandline / plain text pipeline or that I don't expect to be available in a long-term way without enshittifying. Looking closer at the actual repo for the first time, it seems like I can use it that way, so it warrants investigation, but I'm still leery of the project because of its presentation

grep_name··on Tinder, Hinge, and their corporate owner keep rape under wraps
The thing that gives me pause is the correlation that all the girls I dated or was interested in college either didn't have a facebook or deleted theirs at some point while I knew them, and I'm worried that the most interesting people will be filtered out

Then again, I didn't online date at all in college and am only just considering it now that it's been so long and I just never seem to meet single people anymore. Maybe it's worth a shot, setting up some kind of OLD profile was one of my resolutions for this year

grep_name··on Becoming the person who does the thing
Idk, to me you sound like you've just never engaged seriously with lifting. It is itself an activity. I have no interest in team sports, combat sports, climbing, gymnastics, etc. I'm much more interested in trying to push my body in a controlled way, in full concert with max effort, with as close to perfect form as I can muster, and use every piece of my will I can to do that. It's an incredibly difficult and multi-faceted thing to master and unbelievably engaging.

Before I started trying to get stronger I thought it was going to be very easy. I'd basically been brainwashed by media to disrespect the entire activity of lifting. When I actually started, I was shocked how hard it was to progress beyond the beginning phases. You learn a ton about your body while doing this, as well as the psychology of effort, which is just as challenging. You also learn a lot about your proprioception, as with any sport. At this point, the only thing that demands a similar amount of attention is riding a motorcycle but really it pales in comparison. If I'm trying to hit the 3rd set of five, the one that really proves if I'm going to progress that day, I can't imagine having a thought. I can't even hear what's happening around me.

Your understanding that you don't concentrate on the activity is not true if you're actually trying. You could fill a bookshelf with 400 page books about just the squat. At any given point you are evaluating a ton of variables and frequently still having to go back to the drawing board to devise new ways to progress which are never the same as the last way. Your body fights you the entire time, preferring to put out as little energy as it can, the exact opposite of what you're trying to do. You learn that actually, you weren't giving it your all before, because you didn't know how, or your subconscious was gaslighting you. But that's ok, because there was literally no way to shortcut to where you are now mentally. It's a mindfuck, and it really changes you and your relationship with yourself.

It does help that it has benefits you don't get from most other activities, and that if done right it is restorative rather than destructive to the body like higher impact hobbies. It also helps that it has an outsized physical effect for a given time commitment compared to other activities. It's also true that a lot of people at the gym are just going through the motions for an end goal. But if your goal is actually to improve, it's a wild ride.

grep_name··on KDE launches its own distribution
I've been curious about BSD in the past -- the thing that stops me is that I like to play with software that requires containers (docker) and I'm not sure if I'd ever get used to the difference between the core gnu cli utils.

The other thing that worries me is that I've had a lot of trouble building software that mainly supports BSD from source on linux machines. I'm worried if I switch to BSD, a lot of the software I want won't be available in the package manager, which would be fine, but I'm worried that building from source will also be a pain and binary releases for linux will not be compatible. Sounds like a lot of pain to me.

I'd be happy to be corrected if these are non-issues though.

grep_name··on iPhone dumbphone
I don't think self control works that way. Every decision you make causes decision fatigue, which means that the things that you encounter constantly that nag at you and take your attention have a serious impact on your day-to-day. Like, say you have the energy to make 1000 decisions throughout the day. That includes dressing well, remembering to do things, eating well, making time for side projects, etc. Say your phone provides 100 times when you have to say 'no, I'm going to make the more difficult decision and not give in to this' each day. Well, that adds up.

I have type 1 diabetes, and there's studies about this on diabetics actually. There's a huge hit to quality of life and specific kinds of burnout attributed to the thousand or so extra decisions we have to make every day to manage our blood sugar. I'd love to get rid of those, but since I can't, I'm particularly sensitive to bullshit that takes my attention or willpower like that. In my experience, people don't live on a spectrum where "I have self control" = Everything that happens to me I make the right decision even if its hard or "I have no self control" = I always make the bad decision. There's always a pool of decisions, and the further you get into the onslaught of decisions the more you're beaten down and the worse your self-control is.

It is perhaps possible to attain a monk-like state where your will is absolute and you never make any compromises (although I doubt it), but since 99.99% of us will never get there, I think there's a lot to be said for cutting out things that nudge us in the wrong direction constantly

grep_name··on I ditched Docker for Podman
I use orbstack, but I never look at it, it just opens when I start up the computer. I used to use docker desktop, which I never looked at either. The docker daemon has always just been broken on Mac for as long as I've been trying to work with it (about 4 years, at least as far as Mac environments).

Idk what the problem is, but it's ugly. I switched to orbstack because there was something like a memory leak happening with docker desktop, just using waaaaay too many resources all the time, sometimes it would just crash. I just started using docker desktop from the get-go because when I came on I had multiple people with more experience say 'oh, you're coming from linux? Don't even try to use the docker daemon, just download docker desktop'.

grep_name··on Magic Lantern Is Back
Wow, newly supported models is super exciting to see! I have a 5d mk iii which I got specifically to play around with ML. I haven't done much videography in my life, but do plan to get some b-roll at the very least with my mk iii or maybe record some friends live events sometime.

> I'm the current lead dev, so please ask questions.

Well, you asked for it!

One question I've always wondered about the project is: what is the difference between a model that you can support, and a model you currently can't? Is there a hard line where ML future compatibility becomes a brick wall? Are there models where something about the hardware / firmware makes you go 'ooh, that's a good candidate! I bet we can get that one working next'?

Also, as someone from the outside looking in who would be down to spend $100 to see if this something I can do or am interested in, which (cheap) model would be the easiest to grab and load up as dev environment (or in a configuration that mimics what someone might do to work on a feature), and where can I find documentation on how to do that? Is there a compendium of knowledge about how these cameras work from a reverse-engineering angle, or does everyone cut their teeth on forum posts and official canon technical docs?

edit: Found the RE guide on the website, gonna take a look at this later tonight

grep_name··on RSS is awesome
I was extremely bummed when setting up RSS for the glance app to find that a bunch of stuff I'd assumed would just have RSS feeds, do not. Mostly local things that post regular updates to pages that already look like feeds.

- Three local independent theaters

- Every local venue I checked in my city (admittedly only checked a few I was specifically interested in)

- The local dvd rental place (we still have one and it's neat. The announce their newer niche additions via an updating page)

- My local folk school that hosts events and has an updated news page with no feed

There were a few things I can't remember now that I was shocked to see regularly update pages with lists of updates that there is no way to subscribe to. I would have expected most of these sites to be built using some kind of automated tool that would just include rss or atom. I guess most of the offer email lists, which is a crappy way to get updates comparatively imo.

I'm probably going to use a combination of changedetection.io and rss-bridge to get updates from these sites, but like, seriously?

grep_name··on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo
It's frustrating. As someone who is into self-hosting, I was hoping to find answers in the comments to questions like:

- How self-hosted is it? Is it on somebody's computer at home? A colo? One of those university linux servers that runs for decades? Hetzner? Is there any redundancy?

- How are the costs and responsibilities for the hardware broken down?

- How is admin and patching handled?

I'm actually very curious about that stuff, but nobody's really talking about it here

grep_name··on FFmpeg moves to Forgejo
You might like cgit, git-arr, or one of the other static git generators. They generally have a different mode of navigation. They're not 'forges' in that they don't have in-built tools for things like bug-tracking and managing PRs though, but lately it seems like projects are becoming more interested in the git email workflow anyway
grep_name··on Customizing tmux
I feel compelled to reply, because a lot of this contradicts my experience. I use wezterm + tmux on linux, iterm + tmux on mac. (Already an advantage there, tbh)

> vim bindings should already be available in your emulator, without the need for tmux

They may mean things like the vim-tmux navigator plugin, which makes it so if you hit e.g. the left-most window in vim and hit your go-left keybinding, it will go one tmux pane to the left. It's pretty crazy how seamless it is, and it's made possible by the fact that you can query tmux outside of the process and run commands on your running sessions, which I'm not sure you can do with any of the standalone terminals?

Tmux also doesn't prevent you from using c-x e. I'm aware of the vim terminal, but I'm very picky about my multiplexing and have not been satisfied by any built-in terminal in any editor.

> You just have to remember that a session is the same thing as a window.

A session is certainly NOT a window. It is a buffer. There is a difference, and that difference matters and comes with advantages that are separate from the advantages of windows.

> First off, switch because your emulator is probably more resource intensive

I'm not entirely sure if this is true, but it's utterly uncompelling to me. Holding my binding for 'switch window' will switch through n windows faster than I can mentally digest, and the lag is lighter than any gui app I've used.

> It may also be missing modern features like being able to view images (see sixel, chafa, or the kitty graphics protocol), ligatures, and a lot of other features

I'm not sure why you'd assume this? My setup (wezterm or iterm + tmux + fira code) indeed has ligatures and sharp image viewing passed through the multiplexer

> Second, tmux lacks many of these modern features. Doing a passthrough can help but dealing with images is not a great experience. I have found no configuration where I can reliably view images and never have been able to produce images of the same quality. I always drop out of my session if I am entering a file browser like yazi or fzf

Yazi is exactly what I use, and it works great with iTerm + tmux or wezterm + tmux.

I really don't want my terminal to do that much for me to be honest. I change terminals every couple years, and it's nice to not have to fuss around with them whenever that happens. I haven't changed my tmux config in about 15 years

grep_name··on Maintaining weight loss
Curious what kind of flours you're getting, and which ones you object to. I make sourdough fairly regularly and just use 30% whole wheat, 70% standard bread flour and have never thought twice about it?
grep_name··on What does connecting with someone mean?
I've lived my whole life in the southeastern US, and the comments online about this always make me feel like an alien. Everyone here always seems to imply that it's meaningless because "You have to say 'good', and if you don't say that people get upset," but I've just never once had that experience.

I almost never say 'good' in response to that question, even to a coworker I don't know well. In my friend groups, usually people will be straightforward about how they're doing as well. Maybe people don't know how to say 'bad' without following up with a story? It's easy once you start doing it. "Not great, but it's fine" or "I'm just keeping along / taking it day by day" is a fairly common response to get from me, especially lately, and it's always honest. Sometimes I will just say "TBH this week completely sucks for me" before continuing with what the conversation was about originally. If things are going well I will be effusive in my (still short) response ("I'm doing awesome actually"). And I do care about how the other person is doing when they respond. I've even gone so far as to ask, after finding out about bad news later in the conversation, "Damn, why'd you say you were doing well?".

I find it to be a deeply useful way to start a conversation. If you ask how I'm doing and you don't know me well, and I say something to imply I'm not having a good day, it completely changes the way the conversation should be conducted. Same goes for the other person's response. You always start every conversation on the same page ('how impatient / stressed is the other person right now?' is one of the most important pieces of context you can have). Over time, I've even found that it has the benefit of making me reflect on a regular basis on how I feel in the moment vs how I'm actually doing on a longer-term scale.

grep_name··on My Self-Hosting Setup
This is kinda similar to something I'm trying to setup. I have most of my self-hosted infrastructure running in docker containers, but I want to put some stuff on a nixOS ec2 instance. Mostly services I want to never go down or be affected by my local network (uptime kuma) and chat stuff (irc bouncer, conduit, soju, etc etc).

I use nixOS on my laptop but don't make many nix projects, and TBH I have no idea how to test this setup locally before deploying it. I have some nix stuff setup that spins up a VM and exposes the ports on localhost, but it's brittle and rapidly spaghettifying. Do you have any tips for testing this stuff as part of a local project?

grep_name··on Trying Guix: A Nixer's impressions
> That said, Nix-the-language also suffers from all the same birth defects that manifest themselves in frontend development

That must be it. The GP's comment really resonated with me, in that learning scheme felt like no task at all whereas I STILL feel uncomfortable with the nix programming language and ecosystem despite using nixOS exclusively on my personal laptop for two years and on my work machine for about half a year now. I've always fumbled over frontend / javascript development though, and avoid it as much as I can at work although I still end up working in it every year or so.

Nix only won out for me because of the mac compatibility, without which I can't really use it at work

grep_name··on Six Years of Gemini
This is an interesting project. So the whole thing is hosted at gemini://station.martinrue.com, with no way to host other instances? Stuff like this that leverages the default TLS nature of gemini is pretty exciting. I'm going to have to set up an account later to check it out.

Edit: Checked it out and this is definitely a cool idea. Is there any way to change the unicode emoji next to your name?

grep_name··on Six Years of Gemini
I checked out gemini maybe four years ago? And I remember really liking the idea but struggling to find content. Got any tips?
grep_name··on Why I left my tech job to work on chronic pain
I don't see anything about carbonated beverages in those comments? I've had good results with some of the exercises mentioned there, but since then have been in a rut unable to make it stop (my only symptom of GERD is a small persistent cough, which sucks more than it sounds like). I drink a lot of sparkling water though. Do I need to give that up too?
grep_name··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
So far that experiment is going pretty well! I haven't worked much on it but the tooling I'm using has made a great base for the project. My goals (in order of priority) are:

- Get it so that you can categorize transactions quickly in a keyboard-driven way

- Similarly have a quick, improved option for dealing with overspending / underfunding

- Add some additional reporting that I'd like to see (as well as the ability to drill down in a more fuzzy way than currently supported in ynab)

- Finally (and most importantly but also most ambitiously) develop a view with some simple tools that helps users figure out WTF is wrong when a reconciliation isn't working out. This is much harder than the other things I'm trying to do here

Luckily YNAB's API is very open and I think I can do all the things I'm looking to achieve here. If I'm successful, I plan to spin off a sister TUI project for making handling import edgecases easier in beancount, which I also use but for different reasons

Edit: but your idea of having CLI command options for printing reports on a regular basis / on opening the shell is also neat, I do plan to have some CLI options that don't require you to open the full TUI

grep_name··on Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (June 2025)
The stuff I'm working on never feels worth sharing, but I am doing a lot of computer stuff lately. It's kind of the year of moving towards declarative setups for me.

- Migrating to Niri on my laptop and re-evaluating my literate config approach, switching from xkb configs to kanata and a few other QOL changes to make my tooling more composable and expressive

- Shoring up my blog / media sharing infrastructure (migrated to a landing page on an s3 bucket, with different prefixes for several different hugo deployments for different purposes, still need to get better about actually posting content)

- Preparing to migrate a bunch of my self-hosted services to a k8s cluster which can can be fully deployed locally for testing and defined in code. All this is managed through argo and testable with localstack and crossplane for some non-local resources

- Attempting (somewhat unsuccessfully) to setup a nixos config for a bunch of services that just don't feel right to run in containerized stack that I want to live in ec2 and have as close to 100% uptime as possible (uptime kuma, soju/weechat relay/bitlbee, conduit, radicale, agate, whatever else I think of that is small and has a built-in nixOS service module. Thinking about some kind of RSS aggregating solution here as well)

- Experimenting with vibecoding by trying to get an LLM to do the legwork to build a TUI interface to ynab using rust (which I don't know how to write)

I'm hoping that by the end of this summer most of the tooling I use for most things will be way more concrete and seamless. I also want to get my workflows down and get on top of converting at least a few the ~100 draft blog posts I have laying around into something I can actually post. Ditto for my photography albums, which are not yet organized into coherent groupings or exported for web.

grep_name··on Fairphone 6 is switching to a new design that's even more sustainable
I felt like it was a weird hangup too until I realized that the lifespan of my phones has dropped to a third since that damn jack disappeared. Every single phone since then the point of failure has been a worn out / chewed up USB port.

Turns out, when you have to use the same port for all music streaming as well as charging, you end up using that port (in my case) something like 1000% more often, and it absolutely demolishes the phone.

grep_name··on Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds
> they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus

Do you have any good resources with keeping up with this kind of thing? Seems like a fun topic to learn about

grep_name··on How I use my terminal
This is a very haughty response, I hope you realize that. Yes, (delete-other-windows) does exist. It's so far from the buffer zoom toggle I'm talking about as to be completely unrelated.

> Anyway, it seems you're complaining for just the sake of complaining, without any evidentiary input.

I have given multiple specific examples of every claim that I made. HN's formatting did make my comment difficult to read, but the content is there.

> But do you even realize that you're comparing a bicycle to a Bugatti Veyron - tmux is a simple pane grid with position/size and Emacs windows carry much more state.

Yes, yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. It's cumbersome and much more difficult to maintain. There are reasons to like both things (and I have repeatedly made efforts to re-iterate that I do like both options and use both for different purposes).

Your screed about how great evil-mode is does not address any of the specific issues that I have and was never able to resolve wrt using evil-mode in emacs.

> What would be your reaction if I say - my bicycle of 15 years has never needed an oil change or brake fluid drainage. My new car in comparison, is so much more complicated and requires constant attention? You'd probably laugh and call me names.

Incidentally I wouldn't, especially if your bicycle worked for your lifestyle and the constant attention and expense of motor vehicles factored into your decision making process. That's neither here nor there, though, because I happen to own both a bicycle and a car, and I never made the argument you seem to be fixated on. Like my car and bicycle, I use both a tmux / terminal app based workflow and emacs in different contexts and have swapped back and forth between the two at different points depending on my mood and what I'm doing. Sometimes I even (gasp!) discuss my experiences with the two tools in a comments section.

grep_name··on How I use my terminal
I'm aware! I used emacs exclusively in professional development roles for years. I still use it for a handful of things that nothing else can touch emacs' workflows for.

That said, there is something nice about composing simple programs and keeping things small. With vim + tmux, I have terminal multiplexing and text editing done and haven't touched that configuration in at least 5 years for vim, over 12 for tmux. I know they offer 'less functionality' out of the box, but after years of tweaking and tons of installed packages I was never able to get that same functionality in Emacs, try as I might.

The main pain points were: - Not having tmux's <c-b z> functionality. You can kinda-sorta-almost jerryrig it with some custom bindings and winner-undo, but you'll still have weird edge cases to think about because you're technically doing a weird undo-tree thing, and all the context (projects, windows, buffers, etc) that emacs maintains will have something to say about that. - ACTUAL vim emulation. Evil mode is really not good enough, and I never had a package that was so hard to integrate without bugs, and when it breaks you have to usually peel back a massive layer cake of competing configurations to try to make it work. Even then, evil-magit has tons of issues, the dot operator doesn't work correctly, and none of the ctrl-i/ctrl-o plugins work across enough contexts to make it make sense like it does in vim. That's a killer feature for me - Embedded terminals that feel anything like tmux in wezterm. In the emacs terminals, there was always so much shit going on navigating in them (and again the layer of evil there) that it felt like walking on egshells using them, they tended to have performance issues and usually couldn't run TUI programs properly. I ended up having a separate drop-down terminal I used in tandem with emacs - Process management. It was always a huge headache for me keeping track of the processes Emacs was spinning up / down through its various plugins and debugging them.

I'd say most tmux+vim setups have something more like 0.00001% of emacs implemented, but sometimes that's a good thing. And again, I love and use both setups for various things.

grep_name··on Starship: The minimal, fast, and customizable prompt for any shell
Interesting. I've been using the pie theme fish for years, and have various problems with it, but have not found something in OMF which is better for me. I also don't like the OMF dependency in my configs.

Maybe it's finally time for me to sit down and write my own shell prompt once and for all. I wonder if I can make it context-aware of fish's editing vs normal mode when vi mode is enabled

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