brainbag (u/brainbag)

brainbag commented on Show HN: FlashSpace – fast, open-source, macOS Spaces replacement github.com/wojciech-kulik... · Posted by u/wojciech-kulik

atombender · 7 months ago

Not OP, but the way I use macOS Spaces is to differentiate between work and private. I use Chrome for both, so I have some Chrome windows in my work space, and some in my private space. I do similar things for other apps like iTerm. It's an important feature. I once tried having two different browsers for work/private, but it was a chore to manage which browser I opened links in, so I gave up.

My biggest problem with Spaces is that it never remembers which space anything is in. When I reboot, everything is in the wrong space and has to be moved around.

brainbag · 7 months ago

I've been using Choosy.app for easily managing different browsers for work and personal (and testing), and it works great. You set it to your default browser, and then anytime something opens a browser it pops up a picker. Lots of global and per-site configuration options like browser profile selection, private windows, etc.

brainbag commented on AI isn't going to kill the software industry dustinewers.com/ignore-th... · Posted by u/mooreds

airstrike · 7 months ago

I like hands-on learning more than I like textbooks, so in case that matches your requirements, maybe try training your own GPT to have a sense for how it works. I wrote a Rust version of the famous https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT (which is in Python) so that I could learn how it's built.

I wrote it in Rust because I wanted to improve my skills in that language, be forced to write code instead of just reading the existing implementation so that I would truly learn, and test the quality of the nascent Rust AI/ML ecosystem, but you could pick your own language

brainbag · 7 months ago

Would you say more about your experience writing it in Rust? It worked well, what didn't, anywhere you found that you struggled unexpectedly or that was easier than you expected?

brainbag commented on Allstate used GasBuddy and other apps to track driving behavior: lawsuit arstechnica.com/gadgets/2... · Posted by u/athousandsteps

ziddoap · 7 months ago

I like to post this investigation by Mozilla's "Privacy Not Included" whenever car privacy comes up, because it is actually horrendous.

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-on-...

>Mozilla’s latest edition of Privacy Not Included reveals how 25 major car brands collect and share deeply personal data, including sexual activity, facial expressions, and genetic and health information

brainbag · 7 months ago

Even in the flood of terrible news about privacy and other things, this exposé stands out as especially disturbing. I was considering getting a new electric car to replace my combustion, but now I'm going to stretch it for as long as I can instead.

brainbag commented on Mastering Ruby debugging: From puts to professional tools blog.jetbrains.com/ruby/2... · Posted by u/thunderbong

thomasfl · 8 months ago

My favorite ruby debugging tool is pry. When the code "binding.pry" is executed in ruby, you get a irb like shell.

brainbag · 8 months ago

pry is what I miss most when using other languages. I've used all kinds of debuggers all kinds of hardware with many different languages, and pry is by far the best tool for development and debugging. People talk about the REPL in Lisp for good reason, but pry takes that concept to infinity and beyond. When I think about the future of AI assisted programming, it's something much more like the pry interactive development loop than a code editor's suggestions.

brainbag commented on Can you get root with only a cigarette lighter? da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog... · Posted by u/1317

beAbU · a year ago

Children in a large group that's unsupervised is about as close to infinite monkeys on infinite typewriters as you can get. If you present them with a challenge that has some tangible reward at the other end (free games), you are guaranteed a solution at some point.

The universe's RNG just happened to roll favourably in Sydney in the 90s and the rest is history.

brainbag · a year ago

Reminds me of the story of the kids in Ethiopian village that were given tablets by One Laptop Per Child. The kids had figured out how to turn it on within minutes, in five days they were using 47 apps per child, in two weeks they were singing the English alphabet, and then within five months they had hacked Android. https://www.theregister.com/2012/11/01/kids_learn_hacking_an...

brainbag commented on Are there individual protons and neutrons in a nucleus? physics.stackexchange.com... · Posted by u/firebaze

trashtester · a year ago

> And even then, you are simply getting a measurement of a thing.

This is exactly where the Many World Interpretation and the Copenhagen Interpretation diverges.

If you send a proton with enough violence through the core of a lead atom, for instance, any given observer will see patterns that tend to be interpreted as interactions between nuclei (or quarks, depending on the situation). We can draw Feynmann diagrams for this and even some calculations.

For other particles, such as electron-electron interactions, these can even be quite clean and give the impression that the particle has a certain location at the time of interaction.

While your objection can still be made in this case, it's much weaker. Physicists tend to consider cases like these as an observation of an individual particle. (If they ignore the MWI).

Within the MWI, though, the assumption is that every possible interaction all occur at once. It's just that usually the outcomes are not mutually coherent. And when so, later interactions between the different paths the wavefunction is taking cannot interact with eachother.

In this case, your objection becomes true at a much deeper level.

In any case, we simply do not yet KNOW what exists at the deepest level. All we have is guesses.

brainbag · a year ago

You do a great job explaining these concepts, better than most. I have appreciated all of your replies in this post. Do you have a blog or podcast or teach somewhere? I would tune in.

brainbag commented on Five Most Productive Years: What Happened and What's Next writings.stephenwolfram.c... · Posted by u/doppp

ilrwbwrkhv · a year ago

Stephen Wolfram is one of my heroes. But not for the usual thing of being really good at science and technology.

He is my hero because he has won capitalism and entrepreneurship. He is incredibly wealthy for all the stuff that a normal person needs, does what he really enjoys and has no shareholders to worry about.

The only other company I know of that is similar is Valve. Both at the cutting edge, doing very interesting things and just leading a meaningful, stressless life.

I am modeling my companies heavily on Wolfram and Valve. May other companies take some notes from them too.

brainbag · a year ago

I like this take. I'd be interested to hear more what you gained from studying them. What ways do you model your companies after Valve and Wolfram?

brainbag commented on Affinity six-month free trial affinity.serif.com/en-gb/... · Posted by u/t0bia_s

brainbag · a year ago

Has anyone found or made a great set of tutorials for "Affinity for Photoshop Experts"? I've been using Photoshop for more than 30 years (now Photopea), and I don't think I've ever felt more like an alien than the two times I've tried in earnest to learn Affinity tools. A six month trial could be generous enough for me assimilate.

brainbag commented on Mozilla Builders Accelerator 2024 future.mozilla.org/builde... · Posted by u/sharpshadow

jitix · a year ago

All the while there are numerous issues with Firefox on M1. They simply ignore or close them as “works for me” [1] while I personally have encountered at least half of these issues as of last month.

IMO they should first focus on being a good cross platform browser that works well on desktop arm before doing anything else.

[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=M1

brainbag · a year ago

Thanks for this link. Firefox has been getting worse for me stability-wise on my Mac M1, even with tab discarding it consumes huge amounts of power, and at least two or three times a day it will just stop loading webpages and show errors in the network tab and need to be restarted. I spend a couple of hours every few weeks trying to track down the issues and Firefox and even in the bug tracker can't find answers.

I also have a bizarre problem where any Chromium-based browser (Chrome, Brave, Edge) are extremely slow to load any page since upgrading to Sonoma, where Firefox or Safari are near-instant - like taking 60 seconds to even start DNS lookup. After a couple of minutes it will eventually fully load a page. I've seen other people mention the same issue online, but no fixes. I have spent hours trying to debug and track down problems for that too.

It's discouraging how much it feels like every software tool I use on every device has gone to shit, especially things as fundamental as a web browser.

brainbag commented on The Guide to Git I Never Had glasskube.dev/guides/git/... · Posted by u/thunderbong

emptysongglass · a year ago

I'm sorry to tell you this but your article isn't very good at explaining Git. And the commands you're using to demonstrate aren't helpful either. You're just replacing one set of assumptions with another.

Yes to teaching Git internals to people but really it should start visually. I've taught Git to dozens of people with no or little technical background and this is how they get it. You start with some variation of "everything is an object" and then go on to "branches are just labels" for these objects.

There was a really great talk where the speaker used wood blocks and pegs to teach Git internals to an audience. I can't find it now, I wish I could.

Games like Oh My Git! and tools like https://learngitbranching.js.org are also very effective.

brainbag · a year ago

I've also taught git to dozens of beginners in a classroom setting, and I have to agree that the OP and GP articles aren't great for beginners, even if they have a technical background. The problem I have with git media is that everybody begins by teaching git's user interface, which is a usability disaster. On the other hand, the internals of git are elegant and simple, and if you start by teaching from the inside out, it makes it far easier to understand why and when we use certain commands.

The video you mentioned, "Git For Ages 4 And Up" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m7BgIvC-uQ, is the best resource for explaining how it works internally, once they have a rudimentary understanding of what git is and why we use it. Watching this video makes future explanations way more digestible. I still sometimes conceptualize difficult git operations in tinker toys.

I highly recommend it even to experienced people.