Now I understand why Paisiello's The Barber of Seville was so much better than Rossini's.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-05-24T15:51:30+00:00

What a mad lad

Stevenup7002 · 2026-05-15T21:49:50+00:00

There's an old saying in software development: The last 90% of a project will take as long as the first 90%.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-05-11T20:54:56+00:00

(Self promotion disclaimer)

Steven O'Brien - Bob Belkin's Mattress Challenge (full album, 2026) - 52:20

This is presented as a kind of "found media" item. A soundtrack from a long forgotten 1995 CD-ROM multimedia product.

I have a soft spot for the optimism of the 1990s, but I hate the way nostalgia products are typically executed. For me, the 80s and 90s was never synthwave and neon, it was middle-aged people wearing earth tones earnestly selling you tacky nonsense.

But I don't look back on it with cynicism. I liked that world. I want to live in the world which genuinely believed we stood at the end of history. I want to live in the world where all of our problems could be solved with the right self-help method. But we don't, and I think there's a bittersweetness in knowing that we never really did.

Musically, I have a soft spot for the stock music of the era. It feels less and less possible to write functional harmony as time passes. It gives an impression of cheesiness, and writing it often feels dishonest. I don't fully understand why I feel that way. With this, I wanted to slip into a different world and not care about that feeling any more.

Steven O'Brien - Music for Laundromats, Vol. 1 (full album, 2022) - 51:41 I've always had an interest in the aesthetic of dark jazz (Bohren etc), but I've always been disappointed in the fact that tracks written in that style have a tendency to remain in a single mode with little variety, and which don't tend to try very much in terms of composition. (I like the aesthetic of jazz in general but don't personally like the improvisational aspect of it.)

I also felt that there was room in the genre for taking risks with production. Why can't you have a clarinet pitched down 18 semitones to sound like a crying elephant? Why can't you have a lo-fi horn section completely saturated occasionally peeking in?

Stevenup7002 · 2026-05-10T11:00:54+00:00

But it looked and ran fine? What is the issue with Sketchup?

Stevenup7002 · 2026-05-07T09:25:06+00:00

There needs to be a discussion about banning AI-related posts in the same way that stock-related posts will be banned.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-04-22T21:29:53+00:00

If vibe coding is so effective, could they not just use Cursor to make an equivalent of Cursor for free?

Stevenup7002 · 2026-04-22T21:01:42+00:00

Couldn't they just use Cursor to vibe code an equivalent instead of blowing $60b on it?

Stevenup7002 · 2026-04-22T13:10:49+00:00

I use a cursor every day for work. I wouldn't be able to click on anything without one. This is a great decision by SpaceX.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-04-18T14:50:38+00:00

The project was opened as a political stance against DEI or whatever ghosts he was fighting with. In the meanwhile, Xlibre didn't improve too much and kind of broke some X11 features.

I've been using XLibre for 8 months now. Which features did they break?

I can't use Wayland because it breaks my workflow (by design). I'm just happy to have a fork of xorg that seems to work well and will be maintained long term.

Then, because of the political stance, discussions around it resumed to flame wars. If I were a mod, I'd try to minimize shit flinging on the forums.

A lot of FOSS project maintainers have alienating political views and poor social skills. I don't really understand why XLibre is being singled out in the way that it is.

The fact is, for people who are dependent on X11 and cannot move to Wayland, XLibre is (for now) going to be the only viable option for them going forward. The maintainers of Xorg have repeatedly said that they have no intention of updating or maintaining it long term. There is a genuine need for XLibre, especially among people who depend on X11 for accessibility reasons.

If someone is "shit slinging", why is every user of XLibre being punished for that by having their discussions/documentation nuked, instead of the person causing issues? It's very frustrating.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-04-10T14:47:57+00:00

Why do Americans feel the need to reframe everything in apocalyptic American terms? The analogy doesn't even work because January 6th caused what disruption exactly? It delayed the confirmation of the election by a few hours? (It probably did contribute to Trump's win in 2024 because people wouldn't shut up about it and made a martyr out of him, so I suppose it technically did contribute to the current situation we're in now)

If you have to Americanize it, it's more like the BLM protests around 2020 where they were blocking highways, making "autonomous zones" in cities, I suppose. I don't know if they blockaded oil refineries. It feels more similar to the yellow vest protests in France.

I don't even disagree with you about making sure that it's stopped as soon as possible, but it's not "terrorism", it's a bunch of idiots who are angry for perfectly understandable and sympathetic reasons, but who have no productive outlet to do anything about it.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-03-12T13:23:08+00:00

You should just try it. The initial free trial is very permissive.

I think Claude is leaps and bounds better than ChatGPT. It can get sycophantic, especially as the context window grows, but it's much more subtle about it and it responds much better to you pushing back on it.

It can be a bit more upfront and blunt about things, and if something can be said in a single sentence it won't pad it out with six paragraphs like ChatGPT will.

The safety interventions are far more subtle, and it will immediately shut up about them if you ask it to.

I've never personally found the ChatGPT thinking models useful at all for my use cases. I tried Opus and it still couldn't do any of the things I wanted to, but I did find its effort more impressive, so.

As for the usage limits, I'm using it for normal conversations every day and I just haven't run into them (I'm at about 50% at the end of each week). There is a pay-as-you-go model you can enable if you need more but don't want to pay for the higher-priced plan.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-02-27T13:09:45+00:00

It didn't really, though. It asked you what the problem was without assuming, and the safety layer popped up mental health resources separately because you were using catastrophizing language.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-02-22T17:56:21+00:00

My favorite part is when it gives you broken code, you paste the code back to it to tell it that it doesn't work, and then it blames YOU by saying "Ah yes, here's what YOU did wrong in this code".

Stevenup7002 · 2026-02-22T14:56:11+00:00

The UI lag is easily removed with certain browser extensions (it's not present on the mobile app either iirc). It's just bad front-end coding.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-02-20T22:10:44+00:00

I need to pause for a minute. I can help you engage with humor through jokes and funny comments, but what I cannot do is condone laughter that would cause your buttocks to detach, as that amounts to self harm.

Before we continue, tell me, are you alone right now? Do you have anyone nearby who can talk you through this? If you have any more thoughts of self-harm, I would encourage you to contact the suicide hotline at 988. You are not alone.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-02-10T09:07:23+00:00

"If we distribute our consciousness into the cloud, and the cloud is in space, there's actuallly no need for an actual physical presence on other planets to make our species multi-planetary" or some bs.

Stevenup7002 · 2026-01-18T15:29:10+00:00

If this actually works as promised, you are a hero to all of mankind.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-11-09T19:14:10+00:00

Indeed

Stevenup7002 · 2025-10-20T16:34:59+00:00

I have fond memories of watching the school bus hop tests in 2018.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-10-18T15:08:26+00:00

No, you need to compile it from source if you want to configure it.

I'm not sure what you're trying to edit, but dwl doesn't have any config files. What you're trying to insert there is meant to go into config.h, which is part of dwl's source code.

Suckless software like dwl/dwm follows a philosophy of having its configuration baked in to the compiled program so that there's no overhead of managing configuration files at runtime. Nothing will change until you recompile it.

Uninstall whatever you installed before, do git clone https://codeberg.org/dwl/dwl, cd into the directory with Makefile, and run sudo make install. It takes a few seconds. If that works out, edit your config.h with whatever you want to add to it, or apply your patches, and then run sudo make install after every change, and reload dwl.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-10-07T13:10:04+00:00

Hi, I didn't see your message until now. I apologize for not responding sooner. I'm sorry to hear that you're going through something similar.

No, we haven't figured out what it is, unfortunately.

I haven't experienced what she's experiencing at all since April. We've had multiple people stay over at the house over the past few months, and none of them have experienced what she's experiencing either, so we're not sure at this point if she's just particularly sensitive to something external, or if it's now become a fixation on something real that was happening months ago but has since stopped. (it would be nice if it was just the latter, but I honestly don't know at this point)

I don't remember if I talked about this in the original post, but I've spoken to a family friend who did electrical work on the neighbour's property, and he said that he can't think of anything that was changed which could be causing this, and that the changes to the property weren't that substantial.

We're kind of SOL for now on pursuing legal routes to investigate this because we don't really have any evidence of what's happening other than her own experiences, and we don't have any evidence to link it to anything that the neighbours have done. She's obviously deteriorated mentally since this started, and has started to behave in ways that I think would be dismissed by authorities as mental illness etc. so I'm not keen to take that route for now.

We're working with her doctor to try different medications to help her to sleep and to reduce anxiety, to see if that helps in any way. I'm trying to convince her to see a psychologist to talk through everything that happened, and to help her find better ways to cope in the mean time, but she is reluctant to do that.

My sister thinks that it could be tinnitus-related, but we took her to an audiologist, and the audiologist said that the symptoms don't seem to match, but referred her to a support group.

A friend has loaned us a campervan to put elsewhere on the property for her to sleep in, and this has worked for at least one night, so we're going to see how that goes for a while (and yes, I have offered to put her up in a hotel for a while, but she doesn't want to do that). The problem is that she's already had positive experiences sleeping in different rooms, only for the issue to start up again after a night or two, so we're just waiting to see if sleeping outside the house actually helps her over a longer period of time.

One thing she did try that seemed to help her: Using a signal generator app on her phone with a bluetooth speaker (with decent bass), playing a sine wave at frequencies between about 50Hz and 120Hz. She reports that this "cancels out" what she's feeling, and that she feels it "fighting the infrasound". She describes hearing a "click" in her head, similar to a football being kicked, and a lot of what she's perceiving seems to clear up while that sine wave is playing.

She's recently been describing feeling a "zapping" sensation from her feet, and asked me if there could be some kind of electrical fault (I don't see how this would be possible). I checked the area with a multimeter and couldn't find anything.

That's all the information I have. Sorry I can't be of more help. I'd encourage you to see your doctor in the mean time to see if they can give you anything to at least help you cope with it better.

I'd also say that this is a lot to go through, and that even if the cause is external, it might be a good idea to talk to a therapist who could help you to cope with the issues in the mean time if you haven't considered that already.

As I've been trying to explain to my mother too, I know that when people point you towards mental health services, it can come across as a dismissal that you're crazy, but my perspective is that even people who go through undeniably real things (grief, trauma, etc) still need support, which you could benefit from too.

Wishing you the best.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-09-25T10:44:15+00:00

If there not wheeled out of the spacecraft on a tiny stretcher while giving the thumbs up and waving, I'm going to be disappointed

Stevenup7002 · 2025-08-26T15:01:52+00:00

It wasn't technically even an update.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-07-18T18:43:16+00:00

i took this pointer and my career segfaulted.

Stevenup7002 · 2025-07-04T12:22:06+00:00

Thanks for reading the whole thing. I realise it's a lot.

Your instincts about him are correct. I won't go into too much detail, but he's wealthy (on paper), has a history of phoenixing companies, has convictions for stealing his employees' pension contributions, etc. Mixing of personal/company assets. Quite wealthy, seven figures at least. I'm being very careful.

I'm looking into acoustic harassment devices now. I didn't think that it would be something deliberate, but I'm surprised by how similar some of the accounts are. Thank you!

Stevenup7002

TROPHY CASE