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How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing
Hack the text output of Claude Code to make life a little bit sillier.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,415 posts.
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Making Software: How to make a font
Everything that goes into making a digital font, from vector outlines to hinting.
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Just Let Me Write Digits
Digital identities and what they mean for the web have become a hot topic of discussion in the last few years.They have also brought many controversies: age verification laws and what they mean for online anonymity, Wikipedia potentially having to verify the identify of its users in the UK, the reliance on official…
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The git history command
Working with lots of changes in parallel on git can be painful. You end up juggling branches and commits, and running scary rebase -i commands that can leave your tree in a half-broken state if you so …
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Building and shipping Mac and iOS apps without opening Xcode
Stop looking at Xcode. It's not fun. Unless it is! In which case, do it!
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An Infuriating Goodbye to Photoshop
I’ve been using Photoshop since the mid-90s. First at school, with Photoshop 3, then through work. I bought my first boxed copy of CS2 in 2005, then upgraded to CS5 in 2010. I subscribed to Photoshop Creative Cloud on day one. Today, I uninstalled it. I hope I never have to use Adobe software ever again.
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Designing and assembling my first PCB
About a couple months ago I purchased an Arduino Nano ESP32 dev board. I had this sudden itch and I wanted to play around with hardware. I don't really have much experience in this space, besides working on firmware for an IoT company over a decade ago, but I've written tons of software over the years. I was very…
128
Teardown: A Generic 7-Port USB 3.0 Hub That Wasn't
The recent end-of-financial-year sales were rather interesting – I found myself spending a lot more time browsing AliExpress than I did Amazon or eBay this year which is something I wouldn…
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How to build a circular LCD clock
In our kitchen, the only device that displays the time is our oven! :D Looking at it was always a bit annoying.
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Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)
I was asked to install a mobile app to get access to the itinerary of a trip to Disneyland I'm taking with the kids. Fuck that noise: couldn't it have just been a Web page? An hour of reverse-engineering later, it is, and it's superior in virtually every way to the "app" that it replaces.
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A love letter to flashcards
A personal reflection on how spaced repetition and hand crafted flashcards helps me to keep understanding alive
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Good Tools Are Invisible
TL;DR: A good tool is and ought to be invisible—striving to make such tools is the goal of a toolmaker.One habit I see a lot, and have to push back on, is taking a tool's shortcomings and reselling them as a "puzzle game" which is "fun" to solve.I don't want my tools to be "fun". I want my tools to be invisible.Text…
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In Emacs, everything looks like a service
A common refrain is that Emacs is an operating system (OS). This isn’t true, but what invites comparison to an OS is its ability to orchestrate applications and utilities above the OS kernel...
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Focus
The best time to stop a distraction is before it starts. The second best time is now.
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Local, CPU-Friendly, High-Quality TTS (Text-to-Speech) with Kokoro
Just a few years ago, realistic local speech generation seemed unimaginable. Today, its quality is exceptional and, crucially, it delivers these results without compromising privacy.
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Better Models: Worse Tools
About an aggravating tool-calling regression in newer Claude models.
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Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models
After a long day of exhausting conversations about Hybrid Post-Quantum Cryptography, random jackasses trying to play gotcha with endpoint attacks against end-to-end encrypted messaging apps, and me…
138
Learn Vim motions with an ice-cream van
A free browser game that teaches real Vim motions. The van is your cursor, the town is your text. Serve every customer under par.
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Superpowers 6
I'm Jesse. I make stuff. Software, hardware. Very occasionally, trouble.
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Have you restarted your computer this week?
There’s something about restarting my Mac on a …
141
My favorite keyboards
When I started using computers, we had a Sinclair ZX Spectrum at home and a nano-reseau of Thomson MO5 s at elementary school. I distinctly remember how unpleasant it was to type with them. These must have been the worst keyboards I ever used [1] . Ever since, I have paid close attention to the keyboards I use. Here…
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I used Claude Code to get a second opinion on my MRI
Welcome to my personal blog! I use it to share what I'm currently learning or thinking about, usually on topics related to technology, business, and health.
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WordStar: A Writer's Word Processor (1996)
Author of 24 bestselling novels including The Oppenheimer Alternative and FlashForward
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The Xteink X4 E-Ink Reader
I’ve had the Xteink X4 for a couple of months now, a £40 e-ink reader small enough to stick to the back of a phone. I’d seen a few posts about it (Khairul Se...
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I built a GPU back end for Emacs
A few months ago I became obsessed with a silly question: why does my Emacs, on a laptop with a perfectly capable GPU, draw all of its text using the…
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ytr: YouTube Radio for Emacs
I've been a happy ready-player user for some time now. I consider the Emacs package fairly feature-complete, for my needs anyway. Well almost. While I...
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JSON-LD explained for personal websites
A guide to implementing JSON-LD on your personal website for better SEO, covering WebSite, Person, BlogPosting, and more with ready-to-use code snippets.
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Migrating from GNU Stow to Chezmoi
Why I swapped GNU stow's symlink farm for chezmoi: one command to bootstrap a Mac with Homebrew packages and macOS settings, a small daily sync loop, and agent skills shared between Claude Code and Codex.
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.gitignore Isn't the only way to ignore files in Git
You can ignore files in .gitignore, .git/info/exclude, and ~/.config/git/ignore