physicles

I left tmux+vscode a few months ago and haven’t looked back. Clearly this new thing is better than flipping between a dozen tmux panes and other windows.

But I’m using my own “IDE” inspired by herdr and pane, worktrees down the left and panes on the right, but besides terminals the types of panes also include:

- A native Obsidian-level markdown editor with support for comments that agents can see - Claude code with chrome for context size, and a custom UI that looks more like the web - A diff viewer with support for comments - A browser - Can tag worktrees with PRs and issues - Everything (except the browser) works seamlessly over ssh

It’s all zig+gtk, all vibe coded. I rarely open vscode these days.

Maybe the herdr plugin ecosystem can support all this too. I kinda want to get out of the business of hand-polishing UI.

You certainly can do this for code, and it’ll give you great answers. But I find that, for whatever reason, info that I consume this way has a much shorter TTL in my brain than something I wrote myself.

I’ve been experimenting with writing a living spec — API endpoints, schemas, how things work at a low enough level that the LLM can fill in the details - and that’s been working well.

It also forces me to do the hammock-driven development necessary to build the right thing, and as a byproduct it keeps the design in my head longer.

> AI agent on my phone I can long-press power button and give spoken commands ("add milk to the shopping list"). Uses private home inference machine, see below.

For this part, are you using a tool-calling harness like Pi or Codex? Or did you sort of hack it together with prompts that tell it what json to emit?

I just got the rest of the “application layer” for my setup working yesterday, with a small set of evals. Auto-filing voice notes is what’s next for me.

What stack do you use for that home inference? I’m rolling my own with gemma4, but even with Claude helping with the implementation it’s a lot of moving pieces to figure out.

I use backblaze with restic. Got about 300GB up there, fully encrypted, keys in 1Password.

Not publicly unfortunately. I still go back to visit from time to time, and some of the things I could write about would definitely get me harassed if the wrong person found it. That's self-censorship for you.

TL;DR: it was far better than the rest of the world in 2020, marginally better in 2021, but 2022 was a shit show. I still remember Dec 7 as the day zero covid ended.

It absolutely is primarily about preventing people from learning about the world. You can’t run a system like China’s without controlling information. During the political meetings, they ramp up their blocking, and then they usually turn it down again after.

During the World Cup (2022, still zero covid in China), they started blurring out the crowd because people were noticing that nobody in the stands was wearing masks. They’d been told that the zero covid policy and draconian lockdowns were keeping them safe, and outside China was a Covid hell-hole. Protests followed four months later.

Nobody in China was told about western covid vaccines, much less allowed to get them.

VPNs aren’t widely used — there was a study posted here some months ago that estimated VPN use at around 1% of the population, too little to matter.

That’s why they’re a bit lax. They can afford to let some through to grease the wheels of commerce. You do have to be seriously unlucky to get into trouble.

(I was there during Covid, and some years before and after)

Oh god yes.

Fable 5.1 is a lot better than Fable 5 btw (edit: in terms of writing style). Not sure about opus 5.5 yet since I’ve only got one session in so far.

Oh wow, the Cirqa is exactly what I've been looking for: a wrist sensor without subscription and without a screen.

I had a FitBit Charge 4 some years ago, but it stopped working after a couple years.

Then I got a RingConn 2 last year, but like TFA I've decided that I don't like the ring form factor.

They really were separate. BuzzFeed News won a Pulitzer in 2021 (source: Wikipedia). It's unfortunate that they shared the same name.

> There was a moment when it dawned on him "I don't want to be anything like these people!".

Thanks for this great reminder that we can choose the kind of person we want to be.

Wow, I didn’t expect this kind of reply at all. What a labor of love. Can’t wait to try it out! What made you decide to emulate things at this level instead of using a more off the shelf hardware stack?

Amazing. This is nostalgia heroin for me.

How far does the HAL go? Screen 12 and 13, and writing directly to VRAM? WAIT for vsync? Call absolute for mouse usage?

Ha, Chris McCandless is to vanlife what Alex Honnold is to rock climbing: technically the same activity but with a very different level of consequence for failure.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For the last month I’ve been living in a camper van, working and traveling, which I’m really lucky to be able to do by choice. It’s lonely to be sure, but I also feel mentally far more resilient than I have in ages, and I’m trying to figure out why.

Being in nature is good for us, so that’s probably part of it, as is the constant practice of being self-reliant.

Another theory is friction. I can’t just roll out of bed to the couch, and back. I don’t have a fixed place to shower, so I swim in a river most days, and usually it’s freezing. Camping alone was terrifying at first, but objectively not that dangerous and not worth worrying about. All these little moments are a chance to exercise that mental muscle to do uncomfortable things.

Modern life is devoid of this friction. I could try to take a cold shower every day, but a not-cold one is just a turn of the wrist away. I could try to make myself go outside a bit every day, but I don’t need to.

This isn’t a new observation, but I can’t believe how stark the contrast is. I’m getting stuff done that I’ve been procrastinating on for years.