photon_garden

> OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.

The English plural suffix follows a standard pattern:

It’s voiced (/z/) after voiced sounds and voiceless (/s/) after voiceless sounds. That’s why it shows up as /s/ at the end of “physics” (/fɪzɪks/). /k/ is voiceless.

The -ics ending of physics comes from a plural.

No helpful pattern underlying the middle “s” unfortunately.

King Sunny Ade is another great Nigerian artist! Ja Funmi is one of my favorites: https://youtu.be/LIO9MjfOo48?si=bZFOTgQF0SZZgT_X

Africa has a ton of fantastic musicians.

For instance, Dur Dur Band from Somalia: https://youtu.be/cVfrEmO5no4?si=aeqeufJpsKiIyvQX

Mulatu Astatke from Ethiopia: https://youtu.be/jXdVpT_aSJU?si=jMzwDIS75L9pqhxf

John Wizards from South Africa: https://youtu.be/1FNWfhmTn1M?si=lmHOUgvqxYS_P_Av

It’s a very deep well.

Are you using an LLM to write all your replies?

I had the same experience. It did okay at isolating vocals but everything else it failed or half-succeeded at.

> That's not privacy. That's performance art.

Smells like it was written by an LLM so I stopped reading.

> The Maya Civilization, from Central America, was one of the most advanced ancient civilizations

The Maya are still around! I spent a few months in the Guatemalan highlands last year and all the kids in the village spoke Kaqchikel, one of the Mayan languages, at home.

(Young people speaking the language is key to language health.)

Norway does a great job of this with the government-owned alcohol monopoly. The stores are always just a little bit out of the way, with slightly inconvenient hours. You can still get a beer if you want, but it takes a little bit of doing.

If you liked this article, I recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass. She's a professional plant scientist and researcher, and her books are both informative and a delightful read.

My assumption is that most people on HN are making programmer money. $4 - 5 USD per month is affordable even on a junior engineer’s salary in many parts of the world.

The price per GB isn’t as good as the services you mentioned, but their storage limits are fine for the primary use case — storing a lot of plain text notes.

I’ve also had no problems with it, in contrast with iCloud which has routinely gotten stuck for me.

And if price per GB is what you care most about, use something else. That’s one of the great things about Obsidian.

Haven’t used Roam, but what I like about Obsidian:

- All your data is just plain files on your file system. Automation and interop are great, including with tools like Claude Code.

- It’s local-first, so performance is good.

- It’s extensible. Write extensions in HTML, CSS, and JS.

- It’s free.

- Syncing files is straightforward. Use git, Syncthing, Google Drive, or pay for their cheap sync service which is quite good.

- Product development is thoughtful and well done.

- They’re explicitly not trying to lock you in or own your data. They define open specs and build on them when Markdown doesn’t cut it.

Things you might not like:

- Their collaboration story isn’t great yet. No collaborative editing.

- It’s an Electron app.

David Chapman has a great writeup on this:

https://meaningness.com/sad-light-lumens

His other writing is great too, but much more philosophical which may or may not be your cup of tea.

Also worth considering: just don't do the thing and live with the consequences. You have to apply this with care, but it's worth having in the toolbox.

> There is no indication that we will, no matter the administration, as a society/civilization/species will do a single thing to avert the worst case climate scenarios.

This is untrue. For instance, earlier this year Poland generated less than half its energy from coal for the first time. [1]

[1]: https://notesfrompoland.com/2025/05/13/polands-monthly-coal-...

Curious to hear from folks who have more background knowledge on this, but as a minimally-informed outsider this seems like it’s hitting all of the important points.

How much effort is it to just try it and roll back if it doesn’t work?

More folks should define their own lightweight markup languages! It’s fun and makes your writing and notes feel more like your own.

I created a convention for defining sub-notes (with frontmatter) in a Markdown note and have found it really helpful over the past few years.

Yes, exactly!! I use art-making to direct my attention in the same way:

> on the one hand, the kid shouting at the park is the latest fruiting body of an immortal superorganism that's older than dry land.

> on the other, they're sticky and smell a little like pee.

> my work helps me pay close attention like this. how can i experience a moment with the direct, fresh awareness that makes a good haiku?

[1]: https://lucaaurelia.com/about

Curious how they've assessed quality, either qualitatively or quantitatively. How often do the generated documents miss important parts of the codebase or hallucinate requirements? How often do engineers have to redo work because the LLM convincingly told them to build the wrong thing?

You can build real, production-grade systems using LLMs, but these are the hard questions you have to answer.

Their code is more complex in some ways (for example, it’s verbose).

But in languages with exceptions, if you want to know how a function can fail, you have two options:

- Hope the documentation is correct (it isn’t)

- Read the body of the function and every function it calls

Reasonable people can disagree on the right approach here, but I know which I prefer.

BY HOLY INFERENCE

https://shop.nousresearch.com/products/badge-sweatpants

With tools like Obsidian and Claude Code, plain text is having a bit of a renaissance. Here's a music notation that has all the same benefits!

Really enjoyed my experiments with Gleam! Such a lovely, simple language, and it’s clearly been made with great care and attention to detail.

My language of choice is Rust, but I’d go with Gleam in a heartbeat if I:

- Were working on a team with junior engineers

- Building a web app

- On a passion project, or in a business context where the lack of ecosystem etc. wasn’t a concern

For my own projects or with other senior folks, Rust’s complexity is a price you pay once and you reap the rewards forever afterwards. But Gleam’s simplicity would really shine in an organization with a wider range of experience levels.

My biggest complaint besides the obvious ecosystem stuff is that the most popular frontend library leaves something to be desired. It’s SPA-first, which seems like a very strange decision to make in 2025.

I was a big Notion fan for years and am now solidly in the Obsidian camp.

Speed and local-first was originally the main differentiator, but over time Steph Ango's "file over app" philosophy has become my favorite feature.

Yesterday I used Claude Code to automate some Obsidian cleanup and it was trivial because everything's just a file.

My rule for social media is “don’t feed the sirens.” Like Caroline, there are many things I’d rather do than donate my time to help Mark Zuckerberg sell ads. This is why, for example, I don’t post my art on social media.

In a similar vein, I’ve found helpful:

There’s a difference between pain and suffering.

This is true for emotions: feelings people often find uncomfortable (sadness, loneliness, fear) don’t have to make you miserable. You can just feel those feelings in your body, pay attention to what they’re asking you to pay attention to, and feel deeply okay about it all.

The same is true for physical sensations. Pain is loud so it’s really good at drawing our attention, but there’s a difference between noticing you’re hurt and getting upset about being hurt.

I flipped my bike a couple months ago and scraped myself up incredibly badly, but there wasn’t a ton of suffering involved.

The massive adrenaline shot left me shaking, I felt overwhelmed and like I wanted to cry, and the pain was very loud. But I laid on the ground for fifteen or twenty minutes and then walked the fifteen minutes back home. I wouldn’t call it fun, but it was totally okay.

(Nick Cammarata has a good Buddhist take on this: suffering is a specific fast, grabby movement you do in your mind called “tanha” and if you pay attention you can learn to do it less.)

It’s hard to evaluate setups like this without knowing how the resulting code is being used.

Standalone vibe coded apps for personal use? Pretty easy to believe.

Writing high quality code in a complex production system? Much harder to believe.

Appreciate you engaging on this, and I have sent an email to the author.

I personally found that venting about it did achieve something — disagreeing with folks in the comments prompted me to look up concrete numbers on how many men are likely to experience shame around their penis size.

I also think it helps nudge social norms towards making that kind of language less acceptable (both here on HN and elsewhere), and in a best case may have prompted some folks to reflect on how they speak and write.

Is that speculative benefit worth the conflict it created? I think so — when managed appropriately, conflict is a normal and healthy part of most human relationships. And IMO the wellbeing of ~2 million men is worth stirring the pot a little.

But you might disagree and you're the mod, so for better or worse your opinion is the one that matters here.

The psychological wellbeing of ~2 million men in the US feels interesting to me, but sounds like we disagree there.

It may feel harmless to you, but research consistently shows a large proportion of men feel insecure about their penis size [1].

Let’s assume those studies are off by an order of magnitude and it’s only 1% of men who feel insecure about their penis. In the US, that’s still 1.7 million men.

If I had to choose between vulgar jokes and two million people having a better relationship with their bodies, I know where my priorities lie.

[1]: https://www.issm.info/sexual-health-qa/what-percentage-of-me...

Alternatively, yes.