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thcipriani commented on Xmonad seeking help for Wayland port (2023)   xmonad.org/news/2023/10/0... · Posted by u/clircle
thcipriani · 3 months ago
XMonad is an an amazing window manager (WM) made by a bunch of nerds who care a whole lot about a niche problem. Software by caring nerds is my favorite software as a user.

I really hope it makes the jump to Wayland. I've used XMonad for more than a decade and it's still my favorite WM.

XMonad really let me forget about managing windows---I never have to resize a window or remember where I put a window. XMonad handles the arranging and resizing and floating for me. There's a nice layout for small screens that will zoom your active window[0]. You can cobble your desktop together into whatever makes you happiest: Active corners. ScratchPads. So much in XMonad Contrib[1].

Since I'm not the right person to help with porting to Wayland, I'm giving money via the GitHub sponsorship page[2].

I check in on discourse from time to time: progress looks slow. The person/people they need are hard to come by.

[0]: <https://xmonad.github.io/xmonad-docs/xmonad-contrib/XMonad-L...>

[1]: <https://hackage.haskell.org/package/xmonad-contrib>

[2]: <https://github.com/sponsors/xmonad>

thcipriani commented on Playing with more user-friendly methods for multi-factor authentication   tesseral.com/blog/i-desig... · Posted by u/noleary
thcipriani · 5 months ago
Poker hands would pretty cool for encoding things that you have to recognize quickly; e.g., key fingerprints. If there are 2.5M unique hands then encoding 256 bits of information requires 12(ish) poker hands.
thcipriani commented on We Quit Spotify   hearingthings.co/why-we-q... · Posted by u/thcipriani
bigyabai · 5 months ago
Okay, I laughed. At first I thought the author was actually publishing music on the platform, so I patiently waited for their justification to quit Spotify relative to other platforms. It's a big world, maybe they're a big-shot who's tired of negotiating splits with their label...?

...nope! They're publishing playlists, a software feature that frankly shouldn't belong restricted to any one platform. On top of that, they're playing moral augur on behalf of the musicians they support without seemingly asking any of them how they feel. Tidal and Apple Music are both awful for musicians too; all the royalties in the world won't matter if your listenerbase consists of four people from Cupertino. Why not publish playlists everywhere, YouTube and Soundcloud included? Why split hairs in an unwinnable, service-oriented fight?

You'd think this would end up with a one-or-the-other solution. Either "we're uploading playlists in a text format now, as it should be" or "we're just going to leverage every service's native features" as the stance. Playing the reductive moralist card will end with you uploading Bandcamp playlists and begging Epic Games to listen to your plight and negotiate better terms as your publisher.

thcipriani · 5 months ago
I am a subscriber to Hearing Things, so I knew the context going in. But I thought the second sentence made it clear they were music journalists and not artists.

Hearing Things publishes playlists as music reviews—text, that is. And the playlists are available on all music streaming platforms.

But this blog announced that their playlists will no longer be on Spotify due to Spotify's continuing enshitification—I found no reductive moralism, only an interesting bad review.

thcipriani commented on Pixar's Newest Movie, 'Elio', Is a Box-Office Dud   nytimes.com/2025/06/22/bu... · Posted by u/Bogdanp
thcipriani · 6 months ago
Saw it this weekend, it's a solid Pixar movie. But I only learned about it because I was looking to go see a movie and Elio was the most original movie playing at the local theater; I'd heard nothing about it.

I have heard more about the two live-action remakes (Lilo and Stitch/How to Train Your Dragon) and the sequel (28 years later) that are currently showing.

thcipriani commented on The Gentle Singularity   blog.samaltman.com/the-ge... · Posted by u/firloop
k2xl · 6 months ago
> The least-likely part of the work is behind us; the scientific insights that got us to systems like GPT-4 and o3 were hard-won, but will take us very far.

> 2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights

Interesting the level of confidence compared to recent comments by Sundar [1]. Satya [2] also is a bit more reserved in his optimism.

[1] https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/google-ceo-agi-...

[2] https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intell...

thcipriani · 6 months ago
Gotta put the optimism in context vs. previous Sam Altman writing.

Here he says:

> Intelligence too cheap to meter is well within grasp.

Six months ago[0] he said:

> We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.

This time:

> we have recently built systems that are smarter than people in many ways

My summary: ChatGPT is already pretty great and we can make it cheaper and that will help humanity because...etc

Which moves the goal posts quite a bit vs: we'll have AGI pretty soon.

Could be he didn't reiterate we'd have AGI soon because he thought that was obvious/off-topic. Or it could be that he's feeling less bullish, too.

[0]: <https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections>

u/thcipriani

KarmaCake day2963October 22, 2012
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Died tragically attempting to rescue his family from the wreckage of a destroyed, sinking battleship.
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