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timwis

757 karma · joined March 20, 2015

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timwis··on Git for the US Code
DC did this years ago, too: https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-xml

Someone set it up for Philly and Baltimore too, but I can't seem to find it.

timwis··on Launch HN: Skillsync (YC W26) – AI chat sessions made portable across agents
Hi team, I tried to email you with a privacy question. I used the email address on your Privacy page, but it bounced back as unknown, and there's no other contact address/form on your website. Is there a way to get in touch?
timwis··on Cloudflare Quick Tunnels
Fyi you can point a domain/subdomain (eg lan.mysite.com) at that 100.x IP and it will only work for those on your tailnet.
timwis··on Giving up on smart rings
Pebble Index!
timwis··on GitHub Actions and Pages are experiencing degraded availability
Is that not still down though because it still relies on GH actions to orchestrate?
timwis··on Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
Only at the current point in the conversation though, right? You can't rewind and then fork from a previous message, as far as I know
timwis··on Pi's Minimalism Is Its Advantage
The /tree feature is incredible for context management. It's really surprising the other harnesses haven't slurped it up yet. It lets you rewind back to any previous message and fork the conversation from there, removing your 'side quest' (e.g. where you dig into something the agent said) from the context. Some other harnesses have a 'rewind' feature, but this lets you maintain the previous conversation history in a separate thread, and even jump between them.
timwis··on Cheap Self-Hosted Kubernetes on Hetzner Cloud
For those interested in this I also recommend autobase, a set of ansible roles for a highly available postgres cluster on hetzner or other clouds: https://github.com/autobase-tech/autobase
timwis··on DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world
Just FYI, those discussions might be ending because your analogy comes across as a threat to punch them in the mouth, rather than because it convinces them.
timwis··on DNSGlobe – Rust TUI to watch DNS propagate around the world
My interpretation of the concern is that propagate implies that the new value is being pushed out to other resolvers, when in fact those other resolvers pull the new value (once their cached value expires).
timwis··on Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal
I started using this today and am really enjoying the notifications when agents are awaiting input, and the status indicators!

But it feels odd to have it outside of tmux. I've got everything else in tmux, but I have to switch to another terminal tab to get to my agents, and then back to my normal shortcuts. I find that a bit jarring... Is that what other folks are doing?

timwis··on Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal
Can you say more about what it gives you over tmux alone? I've assumed it's just native tmux tabs
timwis··on Herdr: Agent multiplexer that lives in your terminal
Does this mean adding instructions to AGENTS.md saying to end everything with the bell character? Or do harnesses have this in their settings somewhere?
timwis··on What happened after 2k people tried to hack my AI assistant
Really interesting! I wonder if using a different communication channel (eg Discord) could eliminate the cost to reply to everyone?
timwis··on Unlimited OCR: One-Shot Long-Horizon Parsing
Forgive me if I'm being naive, but can't you just tweak the compaction prompt to differentiate? Presumably that's what you would do in the separate prompt anyway, right?
timwis··on Unlimited OCR: One-Shot Long-Horizon Parsing
Can you say more about how this applies to long-running conversations? I've been thinking about them as well, but can't write wrap my head around how this would be better than (or even different to) standard compaction.
timwis··on So You Want to Define a Well-Known URI
I agree. I was hoping for a few positive examples, but didn't see any. The only one I know of is the OIDC discovery endpoint.
timwis··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
Came here to say the same thing. How could the author possibly illustrate the point of the book without at least 4 case studies and a reference to prehistoric humans?
timwis··on TIL: You can make HTTP requests without curl using Bash /dev/TCP
You could also use nsenter if curl is installed on the host, eg

docker inspect -f '{{.State.Pid}}' container-name

# let's imagine that outputs 814538

nsenter -t 814538 -n curl example.com

timwis··on SpaceX to buy Cursor for $60B
I've tried most of the tools out there but have used cursor most consistently. Sure, some of the UI quirks get in the way sometimes, but I've found its auto complete predictions to be unparalleled. More importantly, these days I mainly use its Ask mode, Plan mode, and Agent mode. I like that I can use Opus via subscription pricing without Claude Code's wild and buggy harness. And I find cursor's plan mode to perform better than Claude's, but that may just be my personal preferences. I know cursor stopped being the cool thing a few months back, but I genuinely feel most effective with it!

But I'll stop using it now, for the same reason I wouldn't buy a Tesla, or support that maniac in any other way. And I'm sad about that :(

timwis··on The Future of Email
I read this article and was surprised when I reached the end because the whole thing felt like it was setting the stage for some announcement or new thing. But nothing came..? Forgive me if I'm being thick but what was the takeaway?
timwis··on A giant star may have destroyed itself in one of the rarest explosions
Dark Forest theory, anyone?
timwis··on Siri AI
For real this time...
timwis··on UK PM gives tech firms ultimatum to block explicit images on children's phones
I think that only applies to the messages app
timwis··on OpenAI frontier models and Codex are now available on AWS
We have some enterprise customers who require all data be processed in the UK or AU. We've been limited to using Azure OpenAI, which only has older models in those regions (eg 4o, 4.1-mini). I was hoping we'd see the newer models in those regions once they got to AWS, but it looks like the newer models are only available in the US at the moment :(
timwis··on Building durable workflows on Postgres
Rails has several database-backed job backends, but the convention is always to make jobs do one thing, and ideally be very short-lived. This makes building workflows a bit contrived: we end up enqueuing the second job on the last line of the first one, enqueuing the third one on the last line of the second one, etc. The job backend treats these as independent jobs rather than showing them as a connected workflow, and you have to read through a bunch of job classes to wrap your head around the workflow at even a high level

Rails recently introduced a 'continuable' concept, allowing you to checkpoint and resume steps within a job, but it still feels like the convention is too keep jobs with a single responsibility, so it feels odd to use them for true workflows.

Has anyone else experienced this or found a solution to it?

timwis··on Claude Opus 4.8 coming today?
I've just spotted Opus 4.8 in the list of models available on claude!
timwis··on Zerostack – A Unix-inspired coding agent written in pure Rust
Different harness (pi), but this blog post may partially answer your question: https://mariozechner.at/posts/2025-11-30-pi-coding-agent/
timwis··on Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise
Ooh, that's clever. Thanks for sharing.
timwis··on Postmortem: TanStack NPM supply-chain compromise
That looks interesting, but unless I'm missing it, it still leaves you with things like ~/.aws/credentials in plaintext on disk, doesn't it?
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