justauserid

Signal hates anyone who even thinks about using this IM app as the de-facto IM app, or with more than that one person who also tries Singal as an annual ritual in your friend circle. I tried to use the app again after a year or so. Gave it full contact permission and it wasn't able to pick friends who are alreasy on Signal. I was not even able to send them messages using the number. But a friend was able to send it a message to me. After 2-3 days finally the app started showing friend's name that's in contact. Tut there were scary warnings (I know, I know that's for my safery). The whole UX just feels at odd with anything and everything I've used. They manage to look and feel worse than WhatsApp of today and that I'd say is an achievement.

For most people, who are end users, it's really not that simple and no you are not wrong.

This comment is a tangent to the article and my experience of trying to use crypto for the first time few weeks ago after watching it from pretty much the day 0. Maybe day 2 or 3 as when bitcoin was launched I was few months shy of leaving college and I just thought it was just an "Internet thing" like many of us did. And I am aware that evne among decentralsied coins BTC might not have been the first, but let's just say it was.

So a few weeks ago, I wanted to make some payment to some sites. There were/are 4-5; one of them is openrouter and similar, but there's one that helps with Linux ISOs. I definitely didn't want to leave my credit card number on those sites (not even on openrotuer). I am wary of leaving my credit card numbers to sites outside my home country India. It's not about better or worse security, it's just about a sense of comfort, or maybe even habit.

There was no expectation or plan for anonymity, privacy whatsoever. Though I would not have minded a bit of privacy on those immediate businesses/sites – as in if someone hacked their systems/DBs they'd find my throwaway email and crypto address (maybe) but if some legal entity investigated they could easily trace it back to my via exchanges and I was fine with that. Yes, I could explore temporary cards and everything but I still had to manage things more than I wanted to.

I created accounts on three crypto exchanges (one was Binance, two from India). I needed those to be complaint to my country's fin/tax laws and I dind't want to deal with anything even remotely p2p (oh, it's quite active here and rarely ends well for end or occasional users like me).

The crowded UX, dark patterns, and absolutely no easy way to figure out how can I just:

- buy some coins

- transfer to my personal wallet (this is deliberately not made straightforward and on some exchanges downright impossible – sometimes hiding it behind some sort of eligibility to do so and even that is hidden further behind some sort of automatic and random eligibility check process)

- get done with it

were just too much. Add to it that I learnt I had to buy some other type of coin(s) just to pay for the gas (chain/network exepenses?). Then suddenly there were additional KYC requirements from payment related parties and then a request for a recorded video of myself.

At that point I was done and had all three of my KYC'ed account closed.

I have always felt crypto coins were a bit weird (as anything unusual feels) but I had never tried it and had assumed as weird as those sounded, those would be very easy to use. How wrong I was. It's a mess and not only because at the end of the day it had to be complaint to real world finance regulations which is what it was supposed to replace in the first place - or was part of the popular appeal at least. It's just a complicated, often costly, and quite often slow mess.

Luckily Apple Pay launched in my country around that time and I was able to use that instead (otherwise I was going to dust off my ancient PayPal a/c) and Apple Pay is an underimplimented and under-supported thing in its own right but that's another story.

Not sure what league people with a five-year old M1 Pro with 16GB of unified RAM fall into :)

I had stopped going to it quite some time ago.

1. It was hard to ask any question. Sometimes it felt if a few characters match it will be closed off as dupe. Besides no thought was given to the fact that same question might change entirely from pov of the answers for a platform or SDK across, say, a decade (?).

2. I also realised reading the documentation (that is if available) and looking though github and people's blogs helped better.

3. But bigger takeway was that due to relative uselessnes (if not downright hostility) of SO I started just breaking down the problem and solving on my own, talk to colleagues, or look for solutions for broken down problems and then I think I used to come across SO in months and that too most of the time when a colleague will refer to something.

This was before LLMs or COVID.

In my experience Ghostty consumed much less RAM but when being used Ghosstty used much more. In similar scenarios/usage.

> Just do an export

I have a feeling you already know this. You can direct its unnecessarily monstrous .plist file to a folder of your choice and that way it will remain synced and/or backed up all the time if that folder is. [General > Settings > External settings]

I am an iTerm2 user but I find its .plist config file a lot anachronistic and, if I may say so, quite absurd. I have tried too many settings and I still struggle with keyboard inputs getting trapped wrongly, lost, et cetera, the warnings that appear out of nowhere and I notice was wrong. But iTerm2 is the only terminal app that looks the best on mac (even better than the Terimnal.app itself) and somehow sits naturally with everything else around. I am sure for a lot of terminal users it might not even the last concern but for me it is. I tried Ghostty but I just couldn't like it. Kitty won't even be a consideration for many reasons (one is better off not discussed here). cmux is indeed quite good but it has become a HYDRA and will keeps on growing in every direction. iTerm2 would do great to keep the outer clothes and possibly adopts the base of something else. It isn't particularly snappy either. I moved back from Ghostty to iTerm2 even though I felt usage wise Ghostty was suprior. Ghostty just felt out of place.

I would like to use a harness that integerates with an IDE very easily. This will be helpful for me when coding in a language I largely don't know. I can kinda check things quickly in front of me. I know it just needs an editor and maybe a language server setup – but the cost of visual context switching is still costly heavy for us humans. Often things out of sight are also out of mind.

I was aiming for VS Code but since I have used Intellij and android studio a lot maybe I'll give it a try.

I might want to try that. DS 4.1 Flash anyway fares much better at it than GLM (which is quite not so good at this aspect). Hope Kimi is even better.

That's been my experience as well. AGENTS.md just doesn't work. No matter how to-the-point and short, or detailed I keep it. Sending something what you have mentioned in the current prompt works much better. I thought of tweaking it around with a extension/hook or so. But then I decided it was better to use a few text-expansions.

Do you use OpenCode Go? Any way to speed-up the response times? It's painfully slow right now. Or that's the cost? :)

What's the best bang for the buck ≈$10–20 (per-month/equivalent) subscription for a good enough model these days?

I just want to know what happened to the cat, eventually. Like for real – beyond the (academic) (un)certainties.