A tiny mouse, a hacker.

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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 24th, 2023

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  • I use systemd services when I can, and fall back to podman containers when - for one reason or another - the systemd services aren’t a viable option. There are currently two services I run in containers: the glitch-soc fork of Mastodon (because I have no desire to compile it myself, and their container image is the next best thing), and Wallabag (because at the time I made my config, the nixos module for it wasn’t in a good shape). Everything else (about a dozen other services) runs as a systemd service.

    My primary reason for this is that before NixOS, I used containers for all of these, and keeping them updated and functional and at a reasonable size was a pain in the backside to say the least. Especially if I wanted to patch something (I often patch my Forgejo instance, for example). If I need a patched version, or an updated version, I can easily do that with overriding a few attributes in the vast majority of cases - I do not juggle stable & unstable.

    Using the NixOS-provided modules also allow me to configure all of these using the same language: Nix. While it’s not a language I like, I hate it much less than I hate YAML and all the others. Using Nix for configuration lets me wrap it all in Org Roam, easily, which makes it very easy to document my configuration thoroughly and completely, and also allows me to organize it in a way that makes sense to me. Generating YAML from Org is a much, much, much more painful thing.


  • If I’m working for someone else (company or otherwise), I’ll write comments and docs in whatever language I can speak that they want me to (which pretty much means I write comments in English, because I rarely work for Hungarian companies nowadays, and even the ones I did work for preferred English, and these are the only two human languages I can write :().

    When working on my own projects, it is always English, because Hungarian doesn’t have good translations for many of the technical terms, so half my comments would be English borrowed words anyway. Might aswell write the rest in English too. Also makes it easier for others to chime in, because there are a whole lot more people speaking English than Hungarian.

    It was harder in the beginning, when my command of the English language was far worse, but even then, half-Hungarian/Half-English comments just looked weird, and more jarring than full English, even if that English was kinda bad.



  • ( ͜ₒ ㅅ ͜ ₒ)ლ(´ڡ`ლ)

    I think that comes pretty close. Seeing as LLMs seem to avoid the topic of sex and female presenting nipples, I doubt they’d be able to recognise this picture, and thus, it might be a decent way to poison their training set. Sex talk and cursing should also drive a scraper away quickly, but… horny emoji art? That might just get through and poison the training set.

    At least if I understood the question correctly, and the goal is to scew with an ML trying to scrape and learn.


  • It’s about 5 times longer than previous releases were maintained for, and is an experiment. If there’s a need for a longer term support branch, there will be one. It’s pointless to start maintaining an 5+ year branch with 0 users and a handful of volunteers, none of whom are paid for doing the maintenance.

    So yes, in that context, 15 months is long.


  • A lot of people do. Especially on GitHub, where you can just browse a random repository, find a file you want to change, hit the edit button, and edit it right there in the browser (it does the forking for you behind the scenes). For people unfamiliar with git, that’s huge.

    It’s also a great boon when you don’t want to clone the repo locally! For example, when I’m on a slow, metered connection, I have no desire to spend 10+ minutes (and half of my data cap) for a repo to clone, just so I can fix a typo. With the web editor, I can accomplish the same thing with very little network traffic, in about 1 minute.

    While normally I prefer the comfort of my Emacs, there are situations where a workflow that happens entirely in the browser is simply more practical.


  • Or one could buy any of the existing pre-built splits. Which might be more expensive, but it does not involve something one very explicitly said they don’t want to do.

    I’d rather spend twice as much on a well built keyboard with warranty than trying to solder one together myself and botch it up, and then it suddenly costs more than if I just bought a pre-built one.




  • I use a keyboard with 64 keys (Keyboardio Model 100), with a layout that would likely drive any normal person mad: there are no numbers on the base layer, and all modifiers are on the thumb cluster. My top row is shifted symbols like @*$^%!&. I love it. I can reach every key without moving my hand, which helped tremendously with my RSI. With clever use of layers, one-shot modifiers & layers (where one-shot means that you press and release a modifier, and it remains active for the next keypress only), I have access to every symbol available on a traditional layout and more, without having to move my hand or do weird finger gymnastics.

    It’s not a keyboard I’d normally carry (it’s heavy, split, and takes up more space than a traditional full-size one), that’s not why I like it small. I like it small because I don’t need to move my hand to reach all the keys, and that increases my typing comfort a lot. I have no use for a dedicated numpad: I can just press my right palm key and turn that half of my keyboard into a numpad. If I’m typing a single digit, I don’t even need to hold the palm key. If I’m typing a longer number, I can double tap the palm key to toggle the numpad layer on, and tap it a third time once I’m done. I don’t need cursor keys, because I can tap the left palm key to turn the keyboard into navigation mode: the right side controls the text cursor (ie, arrow keys, page up/down, home/end), and the left side controls the mouse. Most of the time, I don’t even need a mouse, because I can control the pointer from the comfort of my keyboard. I do have a trackball placed inbetween the two halves for the rare cases where I require more mousing than what is comfortable with keys, but… that’s not used all that often.

    So, in short, the reason I prefer small and split is because they let me type without moving my hand, or stretching my fingers uncomfortably, and I still have convenient access to every symbol I need. I might need to do a bit more “work” to type certain things, but that’s a small price to pay for the comfort I gain by not having to move my hands.

    I can write at ~120WPM with this setup (but I normally don’t need to, my normal typing speed is closer to ~60WPM, because my speed is limited by thinking speed, not my typing speed), I write code with this, I write prose in both English and Hungarian, and I even play some games with it! (Most games I play with a controller though, because I can do that from the couch.)

    Just because it is small doesn’t mean it can’t do everything a full-sized keyboard can. I just do the same things in a different way, with different compromises. With a full-sized one, if you want to type numbers, you either have to move your hand to the numpad, or use two hands to type something like 1994. I can type that number with one hand, without moving my hand: instead of moving hands, I switch layers. With a full-sized keyboard, if you need Home, End, PageUp, PageDown or the like, you either need to move your hand, or you need whatever program you’re using to have different bindings for the same functionality. I can just press a key to go into navigation mode, and move the cursor whatever way I like, without moving my hands, or finding an alternative binding - works in every program, anywhere - instead of moving hands, I press an extra key. I found that pressing an extra key (especially if I don’t need to hold it) is more comfortable than moving hands. I also found that not moving my hands increased my accuracy, because I don’t need to find the home position when moving my hand back: it never moved in the first place.


  • In most games, I move with a mousetrackball, controlling everything with one hand didn’t quite work out for me. I do use the thumbstick to navigate menus or the like, and it works well for that. As for the thumb button: I usually bind that to Jump, or to Esc (or whatever other key gets me to the game menu). It really depends on the game how much I use the thumb button.

    If I were building a gamepad, I’d build something very close to the Azeron, but probably replace the thumb stick with a D-Pad, or 4 buttons or something along those lines. I’d put those to better use than the thumbstick. And I’d make the thumb button trigger by pressing downwards, rather than out.




  • I found that no general purpose search engine will ever serve my needs. Their goal is to index the entire internet (or a very large subset of it), and sadly, a very large part of the internet is garbage I have no desire to see. So I simply stopped using search engines. I have a carefully curated, topical list of links from where I can look up information from, RSS feeds, and those pretty much cover all what I used search for.

    Lately, I have been experimenting with YaCy, and fed it my list of links to index. Effectively, I now have a personal search engine. If I come across anything interesting via my RSS feeds, or via the Fediverse, I plug it into YaCy, and now its part of my search library. There’s no junk, no ads, no AI, no spam, and the search result quality is stellar. The downside is, of course, that I have to self-host YaCy, and maintain a good quality index. It takes a lot of effort to start, but once there’s a good index, it works great. So far, I found the effort/benefit ratio to be very much worth it.

    I still have a SearxNG instance (which also searches my YaCy instance too, with higher weight than other sources) to fall back to if I need to, but I didn’t need to do that in the past two months, and only two times in the past six.