pomatic (u/pomatic) - Readit News

pomatic commented on Use Plaintext Email (2019) useplaintext.email/... · Posted by u/cyrc

kevincox · 2 months ago

Yeah, the occasional bold word, inline link, heading or even the occasional image can make a message much more readable. If you don't like bold words your client can ignore that tag.

I think this is partly an over-reaction to some senders that go way overboard with bright colours a hundred images and complex layout that doesn't render right on your screen size. But just because a capability can be used poorly doesn't mean that it can't be used well.

I can also understand that some people choose to prefer the text version of messages because it is so common to "abuse" HTML. And for those people I even include a text fallback in case their client doesn't have the ability to do that.

pomatic · 2 months ago

I'm sure markdown email has been done? But just didn't gain traction?

pomatic commented on Show HN: Nxtscape – an open-source agentic browser github.com/nxtscape/nxtsc... · Posted by u/felarof

_fw · 2 months ago

I’m using Dia a lot for work at the moment and frankly it’s a gamechanger. granted I’m not a developer but being able to interact with an LLM that has access to the page I’m on is extremely useful:

Instead of manually hunting across half a dozen different elements, then copy/paste and retype to put something into a format I want…

I can just get Dia do it. In fact, I can create a shortcut to get it to do it the same way every single time. It’s the first time I’ve used something that actually feels like an extension of the web, instead of a new way to simply act on it at the surface level.

I think the obvious extension of that is agentic browsers. I can’t wait for this to get built to a standard where I can use it every day… But how well is it going to run on my 16GB M1 Pro?

pomatic · 2 months ago

What is Dia (perhaps provide a link)? I'm aware of the diagramming tool, but that's clearly not what you mean here?

pomatic commented on Widespread power outage in Spain and Portugal bbc.com/news/live/c9wpq8x... · Posted by u/lleims

Kon-Peki · 4 months ago

> Small diesels could be an option but they're harder to pull start for a given size.

I once needed to jump-start a small marine diesel, many miles from land...

There was a small lever that cuts compression. You have to get it spinning really fast before restoring compression! It's definitely a lot of work!

EDIT - Here is a cheap modern small marine diesel [1]. The operation manual suggests that you don't have to do anything to get it spinning quickly, you just have to crank it 10 times, put away the crank handle, and then flip the compression switch. That's progress!

[1] https://www.yanmar.com/marine/product/engines/1gm10-marine-d...

pomatic · 4 months ago

Lister diesel generators are much the same - half a dozen cranks, restore compression and off they go. The hand cranking can easily break your arm if you get it wrong though.

pomatic commented on Why is OpenAI buying Windsurf? theahura.substack.com/p/t... · Posted by u/theahura

surgical_fire · 4 months ago

> Why couldn’t OpenAI vibe code their own Windsurf/Cursor competitor?

The obvious answer is that vibecoding does not work.

If it did, OpenAI wouldn't need to buy Windsurf

pomatic · 4 months ago

This is patently wrong - as an experiment, I've vibe coded* four apps in the last 10 days. I did not write one line of code myself. Two are crud style, one is DNS related and one is for an embedded device. They were non-trivial use cases, built using claude desktop with various MCP tools. I was blown away by just how good it was.

*the original definition of vibe coding involved using voice to dictate the prompts to AI, I prefer to type.

pomatic commented on How I install personal versions of programs on Unix utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/spa... · Posted by u/ingve

pomatic · 4 months ago

The only time my home directory gets cleaned up (it is littered with random binaries) is when I get a new machine... It feels very wrong, but also quite cathartic at the same time!

pomatic commented on Tailscale has raised $160M tailscale.com/blog/series... · Posted by u/louis-paul

groby_b · 5 months ago

That depends entirely on how you raise the funds. Yes, you can say "Here's the growth rate we'd get without your money - based on that, this investment gets you an ROI of x%."

With x% high enough, sure, you can get VC money without too many strings. (Also, reading the Series B post, they were planning to invest - just in organic growth instead of the usual growth hacking)

And if you read the Series C post, you'd know what they're spending on - GPU (and general) cloud interconnectivity.

There's really not much need to guess, Tailscale's financing announcements are about as open as you can get.

pomatic · 5 months ago

What is tailscale going to do with GPUs? It's about as far removed from NL interaction as you can get, I really don't see any sane AI fit. Maybe they are using them for AI driven dev work? Probably need to think more laterally.

pomatic commented on Tailscale has raised $160M tailscale.com/blog/series... · Posted by u/louis-paul

elAhmo · 5 months ago

When I saw the new round, I was instantly worried about change in direction that will most likely come with this, and effectively drive away regular users from a tool that seems universally loved.

Similar sentiment can be seen in the discussion from three years ago [1] when they raised $100M.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31259950

pomatic · 5 months ago

When they raised the 100M three years ago, I'm pretty sure they said they didn't need it and were saving it for a rainy day (or words to that effect), always seemed very odd at the time. Two q's for anyone who cares to speculate: have they burnt the original investment already? And if not, why would they need more funding? AFAICS there's no real competition in the market place for their product today, the only thing I can conceive is that they have a secret 'tailscale 2' project in the wings which is massively developer or capital intensive. Let's hope it is nothing related to AI band wagoning :-)

pomatic commented on Reintroducing Capsul capsul.bearblog.dev/reint... · Posted by u/j3s

pomatic · 5 months ago

Just wondered if the vm provising frontend is opensourced in all or part? Not looking to clone your business, just for a provisioning framework that allows for fiddling (as opposed to say something like proxmox, which allows for provisioning via a friendly UI but can't practically be tweaked behind the scenes).

pomatic commented on AI Blindspots – Blindspots in LLMs I've noticed while AI coding ezyang.github.io/ai-blind... · Posted by u/rahimnathwani

submeta · 5 months ago

> Preparatory refactoring

> Current LLMs, without a plan that says they should refactor first, don’t decompose changes in this way. They will try to do everything at once.

Just today I leaned the hard way. I had created an app for my spouse and myself for sharing and reading news-articles, some of them behind paywalls.

Using Cursor I have a FastAPI backend and a React frontend. When I added extracting the article text in markdown and then summarizing it, both using openai, and when I tasked Cursor with it, the chaos began. Cursor (with the help of Claude 3.7) tackled everything at once and some more. It started writing a module for using openai, then it also changed the frontend to not only show the title and url, but also the extracted markdown and the summary, by doing that it screwed up my UI, deleted some rows in my database, came up with as module for interacting with Openai that did not work, the ectraction was screwed, the summary as well.

All of this despite me having detailed cursorrules.

That‘s when I realized: Divide and conquer. Ask it to write one function that workd, then one class where the function becomes a method, test it, then move on to next function. Until every piece is working and I can glue them together.

pomatic · 5 months ago

This is the way, small bite-sized pieces of the elephant. Unfortunately it means you do need to understand programming concepts, composition and to a lesser degree, architecture. On the positive side - these are new tools, and we need to learn how to work with them. They do have the power to nX times the person who has a bit of knowledge and can also adapt to their ways.

pomatic commented on Bypass DeepSeek censorship by speaking in hex substack.com/home/post/p-... · Posted by u/MedadNewman

ks2048 · 7 months ago

Part of the blog is hypothesizing that the censorship is in a separate filtering stage rather than the model itself. But, the example of hex encoding doesn't prove or disprove that at all, does it? Can't you just check on a version running open-source weights?

pomatic · 7 months ago

The open source model seems to be uncensored, lending weight to the separate filter concept. Plus, any filter needs to be revised as new workarounds emerge - if it is baked in to the model that requires retraining, whereas it's reasonably light work for a frontend filter.