lambdaloop (u/lambdaloop)

lambdaloop commented on Cortile – Linux auto tiling manager with hot corner support github.com/leukipp/cortil... · Posted by u/smartmic

lambdaloop · a year ago

This is amazing, I just ran it and it works perfectly for my needs!

For context, I recently switched to the KDE window manager (KWin) after a decade of xmonad, to simplify my configuration. KWin supports some tiling but isn't really built for it, so I had some minor annoyances. I ran cortile and it perfectly auto-tiled my windows and allows me to still adjust the sizes with the mouse!

Thank you to the author!

I'd say some default shortcuts conflict with commonly used browser shortcuts, namely ctrl-shift-t and ctrl-shift-r . It's quite easy to configure these, but I found it to be a strange choice for default shortcuts.

lambdaloop commented on Ask HN: What are you passionate about at the moment? · Posted by u/kurtdev

interestica · 2 years ago

For my masters I proposed that you could treat urban spaces as one giant interface (and that interface would appear different to different users). After stepping away from it for a while, I've gotten back into it. My main interest is information design for wayfinding, transit, and urban navigation. It's such a human problem and it's so fascinating.

Though he never called it such, a lot of it intersects with Donald Norman's work that he describes in "The Design of Everyday Things". Even the objects we intereact with are interfaces.

Drop me a line if you're looking to chat about it all.

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

I'm not OP, but I've been interested in something like this, but from the perspective of memory systems within oral cultures. I'd love to talk more!

I wonder if you know (and maybe have thoughts about) the arrangement of ancient Cusco, set up to be possible to navigate without any written directions (as the Inca effectively functioned without a writing system).

From Lynn Kelly's Memory Code:

> The Inca turned their major city, Cusco, into a massive memory space, the details of which were documented by the colonising Spanish. Radiating from the Coricancha temple in the centre were over 40 pilgrimage pathways known as ceques. The ceques divided the land into wedge-shaped political, agricultural and irrigation zones, each assigned to a specific kinship group. It is still unclear the degree to which the ceques were physical paths and how much they were purely imagined. To form a city-sized memory space, it does not matter as long as the pathways could be followed in the minds of the users.

I've been thinking about how memory intersects with navigation, and how both of these influence how we interpret the world.

lambdaloop commented on Lynn Conway's Story (2000) ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/... · Posted by u/panic

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

I read her whole retrospective last summer and it was the story that made me feel like I not only had a place as a trans woman in science, but could be ambitious as well! Retrospective: https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/RetrospectiveT.html

It also so charming to see other trans people here on hacker news celebrating Lynn Conway. I didn't know there were so many of us here!

lambdaloop commented on Critical theory is radicalizing high school debate slowboring.com/p/how-crit... · Posted by u/taeric

LeroyRaz · 2 years ago

To the people posting how the author is just whining re the meta, and to those saying young people should challenge society, etc...

The author is arguing that the rise of K-s is killing true debate (where anything can be advocated for and one wins based on the quality of arguments) with something else (clever appeal to authority and personal attacks).

The aim of debate is to foster people who form their own opinions, but the current structure instead fosters people who blithely subscribe to the current social norms. Critical theory is not revolutionary. Socially, it is dominant (particularly among that demographic). It is actually truly revolutionary to disagree with it, e.g., take the stance that capitalism is an effective way of organizing labour.

I also think a white elephant in the room, is that a) a lot of critical theory is incredibly badly reasoned / detached from reality and b) a significant amount of the use of it is done in bad faith (e.g., for virtue signalling, and to shoot others down, invalidate others rather than engage with their arguments and views)

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

There was a radiolab episode about the other side, interviewing the people advocating for critical theory in debate: https://radiolab.org/podcast/debatable

It's true that it goes against the debate in the moment, but if you zoom out and look at the role of debate within greater society, I think it makes sense to challenge the topics brought up for debate and the whole system that we live in.

lambdaloop commented on When a Simple Blue Light Was the Hot New Anaesthetic in Dentistry paleofuture.com/blog/2023... · Posted by u/Hooke

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

I don't know, as a neuroscientist this is very confusing. Blue light generally is linked to arousal, as in this study for instance: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32973462/

I wonder if there is some paradoxical effect if you put in a lot of blue light you get a decrease in arousal? Perhaps it could also be something like repetition suppression, where there is a lot of activity and arousal initially, but this causes a backlash and you get a relaxing effect?

Or maybe it's all just placebo.

lambdaloop commented on My 20 year career is technical debt or deprecated blog.visionarycto.com/p/m... · Posted by u/spo81rty

ThePhysicist · 2 years ago

I think it's normal. Some systems I've built were quite sticky in the sense that they started as prototypes to be scrapped once we figure out the "real" system architecture, and 8 years later they're still in use and integrated into dozens of business processes, so hard to replace.

In general, looking back at old code I wrote it seems my solutions were better when I was more naive / less experienced, as I would often go for the immediately obvious and simple solution (which is the right one in 90 % of cases). Working many years in software development and reading HN seems to have made me more insecure regarding software, as I tend to over-engineer systems and constantly doubt / second-guess my technical decisions. So one thing I'm actively trying to do is to go back to using simpler approaches again, and caring less about perfect code.

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/2730/

lambdaloop commented on NixOS: A Personal Post-Mortem nathan-kim.org/writing/ni... · Posted by u/nathanckim18

Valodim · 2 years ago

The common advice is just using the steam-run wrapper. It will run the binary in an ubuntu-esque fhs environment, which is what must binaries you get expect. Worked every time for me.

Granted, it's not ideal that this kind of hint is needed for such an important workflow. Oh well. All the rest still makes it easily worth it for me.

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

Ahh that's right, I remember using the steam-run wrapper a lot.

If I remember correctly, it would work in 80% of cases and fail on the last 20% (usually if some library is missing or if it has some strange binary installation procedure).

The 20% made it not worth it for me to use as a desktop environment. I still see the value in it for server configurations, though.

lambdaloop commented on NixOS: A Personal Post-Mortem nathan-kim.org/writing/ni... · Posted by u/nathanckim18

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

I've had a rather similar experience with NicOS a few years ago. I did get comfortable with the language and even contributed a small package! I did like having a reproducible config file for my whole OS setup.

However, everything was just a hassle to get working. Any program that's not in the package repos takes a day or two of fiddling to install. I just lost patience with it and have been on Ubuntu for the past few years.

lambdaloop commented on Show HN: Devil Mode: A twisted Emacs key translator for modifier-free editing github.com/susam/devil... · Posted by u/susam

lambdaloop · 2 years ago

For the past couple years, I've been using this hacked version of xf86-input-evdev (by Teika Kazura), which allows the use of a space bar for the space and as a "control" modifier if held: https://github.com/lambdaloop/at-home-modifier-evdev

I made a small modification so that if the space key is pressed shortly after a regular character, it just inserts a space immediately. This makes typing feel more natural, with spaces inserted as usual.

I like this better than using the comma as a modifier, as the space bar is nicely positioned on the keyboard to take advantage of your thumbs already.

Day to day, it's such a natural extension that I forget that I have this on. However, this is the first thing I install when I set up a new computer, as otherwise a lot of shortcuts are much more strenuous.

Edit: I just realized that, while editing this, I've been pressing space-backspace (aka ctrl-backspace with this module) to delete whole words. I guess it's fully ingrained now!