stochasticlemon

Fwiw I’ve always liked it being opt-out over here in Belgium. In fact, among the European countries it’s just Germany and a handful of others that don’t do it that way.

Being an organ donor isn’t a big deal when everyone is. On the political level it’s just a given.

When my dad died he gave three other people an extended lease on life. It helps me to think about that sometimes.

I can ‘get’ people feeling weird about getting picked apart once they’re dead. But the thing is, you won’t notice much. And they’re going to cut you open at the funeral home anyway. So you might as well go out paying it forward.

Eh, sometimes a simple question is just a fun way to get the conversation going.

Can I please stand behind you in the airport security queue, just to see what happens?

Yes

Yes. It’s mnemonic and composable whereas your key chord isn’t. It’s fine if you don’t care for it. Each to their own. I’m just explaining the appeal of modal editing

Just in case you’re not trolling, here’s a simple example: yi) means yank inside )-parentheses. It copies the contents of round brackets. Core commands like these are relatively easy to remember

The interface is modal editing, which, yes, takes some getting used to. The payoff is that you get a kind of programming language for text editing. Rather than memorizing ctrl+shift+alt-style keybinds, you decompose stuff into chainable actions.

Have you ever played a video game, be it with kbd+mouse or gamepad, and realize you’re doing a bunch of stuff without actually consciously thinking about what buttons you’re pressing? That’s what working in editors like Vim or (my fav) Helix feels like.

Maybe if it has sails. Otherwise you’re exposed each time you need to refuel at a port. But ferrying about between uninhabited islands for resources and sleeping on the boat sounds like a decent plan.

Well… If I knew how to sail, that is. Or tie proper knots.

It’s also assuming that the zombies can’t swim or walk on the seabed, which they usually can’t

ML engineer here. My intuition says you won’t get better accuracy than with sentence template matching, provided your matching rules are free of contradictions. Of course, the downside is you need to remember (and teach others) the precise phrasing to trigger a certain intent. Refining your matching rules is probably a good task for a coding agent.

Back in the pre-LLM days, we used simpler statistical models for intent classification. These were way smaller and could easily run on CPU. Check out random forests or SVMs that take bags of words as input. You need enough examples though to train them on.

With an LLM you can reframe the problem as getting the model to generate the right ‘tool’ call. Most intents are a form of relation extraction: there’s an ‘action’ (verb) and one or more participants (subject, object, etc.). You could imagine a single tool definition (call it ‘SpeakerIntent’) that outputs the intent type (from an enum) as well as the arguments involved. Then you can link that to the final intent with some post-processing. There’s a 100M version of gemma3 that’s apparently not bad at tool calling.

Literally me yesterday trying to decipher Baidu’s PaddleOCR docs. Have half a mind to aim Claude Code at the URL and just be like ‘plz help’

Broke: file names have a max character length.

Woke: split b64-encoded data into numbered parts and add .part-1…n suffix to each file name.

Locally sourced and by free-range developers

Comic Code gang represent

Nice, new job search constraint

Any time I read the Kitty docs I’m just in awe of everything its maker, Kovid Goyal, has built for it. Like, not just individual features but entire protocols, which other terminals then adopt.

I just wish remote session persistence was more of a priority. Goyal dislikes tmux (to put it mildly) but doesn’t suggest an alternative to those who do their work on remote servers. If I’m already organizing my work in tmux over ssh, I might as well do the same locally as well – which unfortunately means missing out on some of Kitty’s best parts.

Thanks for teaching me something new!

So Chromium is based on Blink, which is LGPL – a less viral GPL. Hence, it can serve as a dependency in closed-source software.

As to the shared heritage of these well-established projects – I don’t know how else to interpret it other than a testament to the complexity of building a decent browser engine.

Btw, quick shout out to Orion, a rare WebKit browser by the makers of Kagi that’s apparently coming to Linux as well. I’m a monthly supporter. Even though I still mostly use Vivaldi, it’s been coming along really nicely. Proprietary software but idc. I appreciate their unspoken mission statement: pay or be the product. (No-one should be a product, obviously, but that’s capitalism.)

Don’t have time to factcheck so going to take your word for it. Interesting bit of knowledge! Honestly wouldn’t have thought that. How else are Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc, Vivaldi and co getting away with building proprietary layers on top of a copyleft dependency?

I’m no legal expert. All I know is that when I’m picking dependencies at work, if it’s copyleft, I leave it on the table. I love the spirit of GPL, but I don’t love the idea of failing an audit by potential investors because of avoidable liabilities.

I’m OOTL. Are these actual issues people have with the project?

C++ might not be as memory-safe as Rust, but let’s not pretend a Rust code base wouldn’t be riddled with raw pointers.

BSD tells me the team probably wants Ladybird to become not just a standalone browser but also a new competing base for others to build a browser on top of – a Chromium competitor. Even though BSD wouldn’t force downstream projects to contribute back upstream, they probably would, since that’s far less resource-intensive than maintaining a fork. (Source: me, who works on proprietary software, can’t use GPL stuff, but contributes back to my open-source dependencies.)

https://minilanguage.com/ is an interesting one to look at. There are exactly 1000 words in the total vocabulary. That’s Mini Mundo though. A second, smaller variant also exists: Mini Kore, with 100 words.

I started learning it too soon after learning Toki Pona and lost steam. But I agree with the design principles. They stem from the observation that Toki Pona, as fun as it is, is just too damn ambiguous for anything non-superficial. All too often speakers need to clarify what they said by switching to a natural language. Even my own Toki notes become indecipherable after a few days.

Toki Pona: fun, therapeutic mental exercise, made even better with sitelen pona. Feels like writing poetry. Never meant to be a useful language. Easy to learn, hard to use.

Mini: useful as a language for general purpose communication. Small, primarily latinate vocabulary. Harder to learn, easier to use.

Kalama Sin podcast is a good one for listening comprehension. No new episodes since July though