Oreb
Joined 10 years ago
Karma
476
Submissions
157
Member since
Jul 16
Recent submissions
Comment · 15 days ago
Comment · 1 month ago
It seems to depend on the domain, and perhaps the tech stack? I’ve been disappointed by Astra, it’s worse than both Fable and Opus for me.
Comment · 1 month ago
Shameless self promotion:
If you’re a Mac user and want something with native look and feel, there is also The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton (TestFlight beta):
https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY
There are also iOS and watchOS versions, but those can’t run 3rd party engines like Stockfish.
Comment · 1 month ago
Some humans are much better at writing. Most humans are not. If you think they are, you are luckier than I am when it comes to the humans you need to communicate with.
As a non-native English speaker, I think the current LLMs write better English than me. I still write better than them in my native language (Norwegian), but the same cannot be said about most of my compatriots.
Comment · 2 months ago
I’m working on The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton, a chess app for Apple platforms:
https://testflight.apple.com/join/mqfhpmHY
This work is motivated for my lifelong love for chess, my passion for Apple hardware and software (not as much as before, sadly), and my frustration of not having an Apple-native app comparable to ChessBase. My disappointment with the trend of recent macOS apps using Electron or other cross-platform frameworks instead of the native toolkits is also a factor. I miss the days when Apple users demanded more from macOS apps.
My aim with MBCA is to create a serious chess app that satisfies the needs of everyone from club players to professionals, with a native Apple look and feel and iCloud sync. Currently the app supports the iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch. I hope to make a visionOS port later. There is still a lot of work to do, but I’m having a lot of fun developing it, and I already find the current version very useful for my chess training.
The name, in case you wonder, is from a short story by Gene Wolfe, my favorite science fiction author.
Comment · 4 months ago
> A year ago none of my normie friends new them, and when i suggested using Claude looked at me like when I recommend Linux.
Isn’t that still the case? Normies haven’t even heard about Claude, in my experience.
Comment · 4 months ago
> The abstractions allow devs to build faster or work on things users care about
I care about native macOS look and feel. Sadly the entire industry has pretty much decided that this is no longer worth the effort. I miss the days when Mac users demanded more from their apps, even if it meant that some apps were not available for the platform.
Comment · 4 months ago
Not really. The problem with the names in Dostoyevsky (and Russian literature more generally) isn’t that the names on their own are difficult to remember, it is that all names also have familiar forms, which are sometimes very different from the formal name. On page you get introduced to a character named Alexander, a few pages later the text talks about Sasha. For non-native speakers, it’s hard to guess that it’s the same person. An e-reader’s search function isn’t going to make this problem disappear.
Comment · 4 months ago
My own experience from elementary school was that teachers being wrong was shockingly common. There is no subject in which I would trust any of my elementary school teachers more than a state of the art LLM. This was in Norway. I’m guessing you were privileged to grow up in a place with better quality elementary education.
Comment · 5 months ago
At least for now, no, it is not possible. I agree that what you describe is how it ought to work in an ideal world, but it would probably require some serious rethinking of macOS UI/UX in order to make it work. For instance, it is not obvious what’s the best way to transfer the dock and the menu bar to a screen-less environment.
A hybrid solution I would love to see would be to have the current virtual screen, but with the option of dragging individual windows out of the screen.
Comment · 5 months ago
Yes. I spend maybe half of the year (on average) away from home, traveling with my MacBook. I bought the Vision Pro to use as a portable display, and I’ve been extremely happy with it. I work in it about 8 hours per day whenever I’m away from my home office setup, and quite often even when I’m at home.
Having an enormous virtual screen is not the only benefit, I also feel that the immersion helps my focus. It’s easier to get into the zone than ever before. I remember someone describing the Vision Pro as the equivalent of noise-canceling headphones for the eyes, which is spot on. I suppose I am lucky that I don’t have any problems with the weight of the comfort, except on hot days.
I’ve been an Apple enthusiast since the 1980s, but I can’t even remember the last time I was as excited about an Apple product as I am about the Vision Pro. I hope it will survive, come down in price, and launch in more countries.
Comment · 5 months ago
I don’t know much about the Baltics, but in the Nordic countries, dismissing employees is no easier than in France.
Comment · 5 months ago
Posts like this makes me feel like I’m using a different World Wide Web than everybody else. Where are all these pages that don’t work in WebKit browsers?
I use Safari as my main browser, I open Chrome only when I encounter a web site that doesn’t work in Safari. It happens maybe once or twice per year, and half of the time, it turns out that it doesn’t work in Chrome either.
Comment · 6 months ago
I vaguely remember that there was also TRES.
EINE = Eine Is Not Emacs
ZWEI = Zwei Was Eine Initially
TRES = Tres Replaces Eine’s Successor
Comment · 6 months ago
Not a cheese, despite the name.
Doorman and porter means more awkward social interactions with strangers, and “premium” just makes me feel like I don’t belong there. I prefer my hotels to be simple and automatic. Airbnbs with self-service check-ins are ideal.