619 karma · joined June 8, 2011
It’s fat soluble, rather than water soluble
One useful exercise is to fret a note as you normally do, and play it. Then keep picking or plucking that note with gradually less pressure applied by your fretting fingers. At some point, the note will choke and not sound out any more. Then, a little more pressure can be applied to make it sound out again. That minimal level of force is going to be the ideal amount for stamina and to prevent injury. There’s nothing to be gained by pressing harder, in fact you can bend notes slightly sharp by pressing really hard. In many forms of instrument practice, hand tension is often the enemy (especially for faster soloing).
It will degrade the oleophobic coating of the screens quicker, but I figured that would wear off over time anyway. So far it’s been really effective at wiping off all greasy fingermarks in seconds. I like the window/glass type microfiber cloth for this.
For example, show the next five trigger times for the end of the last day when the month has 31 days :
systemd-analyze calendar --iterations=5 '*-*-31 23:59:59'
I work on one file at a time in Ask mode, not Composer/Agent. Review every change, and insist on revisions for anything that seems off. Stay in control of the process, and write manually whenever it would be quicker. I won’t accept code I don’t understand, so when exploring new domains I’ll go back with as many questions as necessary to get into the details.
I think Cursor started off this way as a productivity tool for developers, but a lot of Composer/Agent features were added along the way as it became very popular with Vibe Coders. There are inherent risks with non-coders copypasting a load of code they don’t understand, so I see this use case as okay for disposable software, or perhaps UI concept prototypes. But for things that matter and need to be maintained, I think your approach is spot on.
I can see from that thread that the approach hasn’t been perfect, but it seems that the last two releases have tried to address that :
“0.46.x : .cursorignore now blocks files from being added in chat or sent up for tab completions, in addition to ignoring them from indexing.”
I can use it as an orthodox file manager (with the f keys I remember from Norton Commander). I also like using it to access remote filesystems over nfs and sftp, and also S3 buckets. It also works well with Dropbox and iCloud. There is a great sync feature to keep source and target directories synchronised. It's also good for diffing directories at a glance. It's good at managing archive files too. Plus the regex file rename feature is often handy for me - I have a few presets saved for various purposes. It's also my go-to MacOS uninstaller, as it gathers the related files.
If you're transitioning from ChatGPT pastes to an IDE integration, I would recommend a trial of Cursor. They have acquired SuperMaven, and the autocomplete feature is mostly appropriate and useful. I think the chat-diff-review-apply workflow really tightens and accelerates the feedback loop, as well as the ability to submit an error from the terminal to the chat session with a single click. People say good things about the Compose and Agent features, but I haven't so far been drawn to them to explore.
But why would I bother recompressing when the various media players in the house can deal with the FLAC files just fine? On a typical home wifi network, a track probably transfers in about a second.
Especially the .cursorrules file, as you can include a brief overview of the project and ground rules for suggestions, which are applied to your chat sessions and Cmd/Ctrl K inline edits.
I’ve been using Cursor for a month or two, as it’s a great speedup and a big step forward in DX. I’ve also been periodically browsing r/cursor, to see if I can pick up any workflow tips. I can see a clear distinction between fellow devs using it as a powerful coding tool (as intended), and the no-code folks trying to use it as an application generator.
A few of the latter have some success and showcase the things they’ve built, but the majority who post on the subreddit vent similar frustrations :
- Trying to build an app one tab press at a time without understanding the code, so unable to fix inevitable problems when chat is unable to.
- Relying heavily on the Composer or Agent features, which sometimes merrily erases chunks of code or entire files. Unable to recover work because unaware of Local History or VCS.
- Running out of fast response credits because 500 are bundled per month. The ideal workflow is to give harder things to Claude or O1, and delegate easier things to gpt4o-mini (which is unmetered). But that only helps if you know which tasks are harder or easier.
At one stage, I started walking home from work at my fastest pace. 5 miles, 5 days a week. No other lifestyle changes. No significant weight loss.
A few years later, I started tracking calories with myfitnesspal and keeping to a limit (1600 initially, 1400 when it became easier). No exercise, but steady and impressive weight loss. I seem to have kept most of it off. I think a lot of it becomes psychological - not being afraid to feel appetite or skip meals if already satiated from earlier.
I keep them both open on the same project, as there are some things IntelliJ does superbly.
I evaluated Jetbrains AI and Copilot with VSCode, but they just didn't impress me. I tried Cursor, and subscribed a couple of days into the trial. The workflow is just right.
At some point it just descends into fashion.
I remember a quote I read that said there are really only two genres; things you like, and things you don't.