How to Understand Things
What we call intelligence is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about raw intellect.
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 496 posts.
What we call intelligence is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about raw intellect.
As a news junkie, tech journalist and founder of an online news platform called Blendle, I love a good old front page of a newspaper. When…
Might seem simple on the face of it, but unfortunately it's pain all the way down.
Or "that time I built Excel for Uber and they ditched it like a week after launch"
Every year, we have a new iPhone that claims to be faster and better in every way. And yes, these new computer vision models and new image sensors can exercise the phone as hard as they can. However, you could already take good pictures on an iPhone 10 years ago. These are incremental improvements.
I like Git commit messages. Used well, I think they’re one of the most powerful tools available to document a codebase over its lifetime. I’d like to illustrate that by showing you my favourite ever Git commit.
The thing I’m most excited about in our weird new AI-enhanced reality is the way it allows me to be more ambitious with my projects. As an experienced developer, ChatGPT …
Like many Unix users, I long ago created a ~/bin/ directory in my home directory and added it to my PATH so that I could supplement the wonderfully rich set of basic Unix commands with some conveniences and shell scripts of my own devising.
Roben Kleene’s blog
I’m a huge fan of Claude’s Artifacts feature, which lets you prompt Claude to create an interactive Single Page App (using HTML, CSS and JavaScript) and then view the result …
I've used NixOS as the only OS on my laptop for around three years at this point. Installing it has felt sort of like a curse: on the one hand, it's so clearly the only operating system that actually gets how package management should be done. After using it, I can't go back to anything else. On the other hand, it's…
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
A font that's only 2px tall, and somewhat readable! Uppercase and lowercase have some different variants, in case you find one more readable than the other. Numbers (sort of) and some punctuation marks are included.
Lately I’ve gotten heavily back into making stuff, and it’s mostly because of LLMs. I thought that I liked programming, but it turned out that what I like was making things, and programming was just one way to do that. Since LLMs have become good at programming, I’ve been using them to make stuff nonstop, and it’s…
Today I learned that, since macOS High Sierra onwards, you can move a window by starting to drag anywhere on it.
I develop 🌕 Lunar, a macOS app for getting intelligent adaptive brightness on external monitors and controlling every aspect of your monitor using DDC and other obscure protocols. I get tons of email about Lunar, especially after it became my full time “job” in 2021. A lot of those emails complain about Lunar bugs…
I spend time investigating a non-existing bug today because I misunderstood a USB term. So I made myself a cheat sheet. Maybe it will save time to someone.
While I was there, I thought a lot about tools – mechanical tools, software tools, tools that last, and tools that are fragile. The somber snow-covered scenery made me think about how quickly most of the tools we use today get outdated or replaced, and I thought about the kinds of tools that I’ve been building for…
it’s too hard
The tips and tricks below originally appeared as one of Google's "T esting on the Toilet" (TOTT) episodes. This is a revised and augmen...
Note: Since writing this I’ve replaced Exim with Postfix and Courier with Dovecot. This is outlined in the Addendum, but the main text is unchanged. Please read the whole guide before starting, as you can skip some of the steps and go straight to the final system.
To say this post pains me would be an understatement. More than any other technology, Evernote is part of me, having evolved from habit to instinct over several years and nearly seven thousand notes. Every day ideas flit through my head, ideas for essays, for characters, for jokes. Just now I catch a glimpse of […]
This article will discuss the setup steps that are required for recording videos at high frame rates on cheap Raspberry Pi cameras. Frame rates up to 660FPS on the V1 camera and up to 1007 on the V2 camera can be achieved. Filming at these extremely high frame rates on a Raspberry Pi is much more challenging and…
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
Comparing the core values of our text editors, describing the history of Neovim's development, and discussing the rise of VSCode.
We just completed rewriting the Ghostty GTK application fully embracing the GObject type system from Zig and also verifying with Valgrind every step of the way. The result is a more feature rich, stable, and maintainable Ghostty on Linux and BSD.
A look into me, my awful procrastination habit, and how I fixed it. (spoiler alert: it was ADHD)