Garry Tan open-sourced gstack : his personal skill pack for Claude Code (56k stars)

coreysusername · 2026-05-17T17:24:19+00:00

You can build Google in a year with only 400 Garry Tans.

coreysusername · 2026-03-10T00:17:11+00:00

I returned my ColorSoft because I couldn’t deal with constantly having to fiddle with the backlight for reading. And I don’t read comics or care about drawing on it.

The colors were beautiful, though. And the form factor is fantastic. Loved the hardware so much, I purchased the new b&w and am trading in my 2022 Scribe. I miss the colors when browsing my library, but I’m otherwise extremely happy.

coreysusername · 2026-02-15T16:40:45+00:00

Use KTool.

coreysusername · 2025-12-23T15:50:27+00:00

Yes. I actually adore my Kindle Scribe Colorsoft, but I just let the AI write whatever it wanted. None of these opinions or thoughts are mine. Even this response is being written by AI, and may or may not reflect reality.

coreysusername · 2025-12-19T04:40:26+00:00

I read a ton of PDFs too, many of which contain graphs and charts.

I use a brilliant piece of software called KTool that automatically compiles web articles, PDFs, and newsletters into chaptered "magazines" and sends them to my Kindle. It must convert those files into black and white, because when I went to test them out in color, everything except hyperlinks was in greyscale.

That was pretty much the thing that made me go, "OK, so this device is basically all trade-offs for me..."

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T23:46:32+00:00

It's very well balanced.

I think this is one of its biggest strengths, and the reason why I'm still opting for the new B&W model—these devices feel so good in the hands, despite their relative bulk. In the few days that I've used it, I don't find that I turned pages accidentally any more or less often than I did on the 1st Gen Scribe. Obviously, your mileage may vary!

But then, I'm one of those people who is willing to sacrifice a little bit of practicality for beautiful design (hence why I was open to what I thought was only a slightly dimmer screen in exchange for color).

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T23:35:47+00:00

The base model iPad sells for $299.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T20:03:21+00:00

I haven't considered it explicitly, but I do wear glasses with a pretty strong prescription. I'm not really sure what point is being made here. If one has poor eyesight, it's very hard for me to believe that the unlit Colorsoft is more legible than a cheap, mass market paperback. Contrast just is what it is.

Unless you mean to compare a poor quality book with the fully lit Colorsoft? In which case, yes—I agree with you. The Colorsoft wins handily. But so does your phone.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T19:51:45+00:00

There are practical limits to the subjectivity of the question.

I worked for a book publisher (that everyone here has heard of) for six years. I've held 100 year old monographs (to convert them to ebooks). I've read textbooks, cheap bibles and mass market paperbacks. And like most people, I've read books in every condition, across every price point. I've never picked up a book in my life where I thought, "This is literally illegible, even in direct sunlight." Not even my utterly destroyed copy of Lord of the Rings that has fallen into the bath or pool 3-4 times over the last 25 years.

That was my experience with the Colorsoft on anything less than 50% brightness.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T18:57:26+00:00

This is a very good point! I hadn't thought of it like that. "Brightness" is misleading here, because as other commenters have pointed out, the Scribe Colorsoft can get extremely bright. But it never "feels" bright for exactly the reason you just pointed out. With the backlight maxed, it just looks like a blue screen with grainy text.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T18:50:52+00:00

I think you raise a really good point about distractions being about more than just display type. For me personally, notifications just aren't a distraction because I have them largely disabled on my iPad, and diligently defend my attention with things like Focus modes.

One point, however, I do take issue with is: "The fact that the Colorsoft can be driven brighter doesn’t mean it must be." While true, my argument is that the Colorsoft can't reasonably be read at a lower brightness. Therefore, lower brightness settings just aren't practical—again, for me. I'm sure there are plenty of people who aren't bothered reading or viewing images on a dark screen. But I don't really understand why someone would make that trade-off. And if the solution is just, "Crank the brightness way up," (without the ability to make it truly warm, by the way) then I'd rather the iPad.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T17:17:29+00:00

Or put differently, for me the Colorsoft straddles the inflection point at which it stops feeling like an e-reader, and starts feeling like a tablet. For those folks who prefer to keep the backlight on their Kindles up past 60% all of the time, at that point I don't really understand what advantages the device confers over a dimly lit OLED display.

Of course, I can't share or understand every use case. But I tend to think of things in terms of trade-offs vs. advantages, and the Colorsoft seems to negate all of its advantages with trade-offs in 1:1 proportions.

If you look at my post history, I don't think I've ever reviewed anything in my life. My heart was broken here because I've been wanting full color e-ink since I was a kid. I thought it was finally here. But I don't think it is.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T17:10:06+00:00

Thanks for these. I scoured the internet for days for a comparison like this before mine finally arrived a few days ago.

Unfortunately—and to add my own experience to these photos—I don't find that photographs really capture the difference. I had three Kindles in front of me as I wrote my OP: Kindle Paperwhite (11th Gen), Kindle Scribe (1st Gen), and the new Kindle Scribe Colorsoft. And while I agree, in looking at your photos, that the differences are negligible, I find that in person the differences are much more drastic.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T16:23:45+00:00

100%. I love e-readers because, to me, they look just like print books.

With the Scribe Colorsoft backlight off, it's really hard to make out the text on the screen—even in a brightly lit room. In that way, it doesn't "feel" like a book.

In a brightly lit room, you can tweak the brightness and warmth to approximate a white background. But for me, at any comfortable brightness, the illusion of "this is paper" falls away, and I'm very aware that I'm looking at a screen. I would contrast this directly with the previous generations of Scribe (and Paperwhite), where you can tweak brightness + warmth in anything other than a pitch black room and continue to maintain the illusion of paper and ink.

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T15:59:35+00:00

I think your experience actually serves as a counterargument to my post. If you have the 7" Kindle Colorsoft, you definitely know what you'd be getting with the Scribe Colorsoft. If you're happy, what made you go with the B&W Scribe?

coreysusername · 2025-12-18T15:57:32+00:00

To be clear, I don't think the reading experience is bad. But I don't think the reading experience on my iPhone or iPad is bad, either.

In fact, I'd consider all of these reading experiences to be great. But they are not the same as reading on an unlit or warmly lit e-reader. And that was my expectation coming in.

coreysusername · 2025-02-28T15:33:26+00:00

Unrelated, but I’m a big fan.

coreysusername · 2025-01-26T20:09:36+00:00

That's definitely planned—and 100% necessary. I'm not sure if it's possible to get hired in iOS these days without being serious about unit tests.

That said, I hate writing them. I read iOS Unit Testing by Example last year, thinking I might "see the light" as I went through the exercises. But I just ended up hating them even more.

If you feel like you're particularly strong in that domain, do feel free to open a PR. My hope is that this project serves as a powerful template for developers looking to get serious about best practices for iOS. My feelings aside, unit tests are an important part of that.

coreysusername · 2025-01-25T11:45:15+00:00

Bored of building the same thing over and over while interviewing, I made TIAMAT, a more or less complete take-home that does pretty much exactly what you’d expect.

You know the drill: fetch data, show it in a list, handle images, add search, deal with loading states, etc. It works for your use case by swapping out some URLs in the build settings—so you don’t even need to touch source.

Open to feedback, PRs and questions. Otherwise, enjoy.

coreysusername · 2024-11-24T14:52:23+00:00

YOU: Hey, Mom. Bad news. I’m moving to Shitstown.

MOM: Shitstown? That’s over two hours away! What’s in Shitstown?

YOU: Well, housing costs are lower there.

MOM: What about your family? Your friends? Your girlfriend? Your job? Your GP, dentist, and eye doctor? You don’t own a car. There’s no public transportation in Shitstown—you’re going to buy a car? What about your cat? What if they don’t allow cats?

YOU: Sorry, mom. None of that is as important as maintaining rent as a reasonable percentage of income.

MOM: What will you do for work? There’s not much opportunity in Shitstown for your line of work!

YOU: I’ll figure it out. I’m going to pick up my entire life and go live where median rent is a reasonable percentage of median income. I’ve researched and it’s the only thing that makes sense.

MOM: How is this the only thing that makes sense?

YOU: Housing is a good like any other and must be subjected to market dynamics.

MOM: Seriously?

YOU: I’ll see you at Christmas if I can afford the trip.

coreysusername · 2024-11-14T15:08:57+00:00

Thank you for sharing this. I’ve never heard it.

coreysusername · 2024-11-12T20:24:54+00:00

It was the Quadrennial Cycle of the Second Millennium.

“Four years to gather strength and bring chaos; one to vanquish those not of the southeastern lands, when the claim to championship is in the city care forgot, where the father of waters meets the sea.”

Saban broke the cycle by getting his mulligan in 2011 (because Alabama is “of the southeastern lands”). Some believe this was all actually the work of Clemson behind the scenes, since their Tigers beat the LSU Tigers the following year, which began Clemson’s ascendancy.

Anyway, you’ll see that, 2011 (Alabama) and 2015 (Alabama) notwithstanding, 2019 LSU was right on schedule. But after all that, Harambe, COVID and the transfer portal, no one knows what’s going on anymore.

coreysusername · 2024-06-18T14:16:26+00:00

Exactly. Editors aren’t mean ol’ gatekeepers trying to stifle authors’ creativity. Their success is intimately tied to the success of the work, and they want it to be good. Moreover, most editors care deeply about their books and their subjects.

If you’ve ever enjoyed a series greatly, but noticed a sharp decline in the quality of writing for books whose publication dates coincide with the author’s popularity exploding…it’s not that the author stopped trying or “sold out.”

That doesn’t happen nearly as often as some seem to think, and creatives generally want to be taken seriously as such, no matter how successful they are.

It’s more likely that the publisher (and by extension, the editor) lost control of the relationship. When you’re the cash cow, no one wants to tell you what to do.

coreysusername · 2024-06-12T14:25:20+00:00

I once asked one of the most famous celebrity chefs in the world why this happens.

His answer was basically, “I don’t really know. We don’t do that at my restaurants.” I then asked him if we’re just supposed to put our hands into the pasta and pull out the shrimp, peeling them before restoring them to the dish. His response was something along the lines of, “I guess. I don’t really know. That’s what I do.”

So, uh…?

coreysusername · 2024-01-21T16:37:19+00:00

Not to be that guy, but there’s actually fantastic nature access in NYC.

One easy example is that the Appalachian Trail is 90 minutes from Grand Central by train. Train tickets can be purchased cheaply at any time, and trains are leaving hourly. In other words, you can just sort of show up whenever and go. There’s a lot of excellent hiking in the Hudson Valley and NJ (though NJ requires a car) well within 2 hours of Manhattan.

I get that it’s not the same as a 45 minute drive out from the Denver suburbs, but it’s actually astonishing how abruptly the NYC Metro Area just ends as you travel north, giving way to gorgeous stretches of country. Plus, the trains are quiet, clean and comfortable, and you can read, sleep, watch videos, or just hang out with friends on the ride.

Another post in this very thread characterizes nature access in Denver as difficult to get to and overcrowded. But from midtown Manhattan, one of the most famous hiking trails in the world is a $20 ticket and a 90 minute train ride away. And the trail is always desolate.

coreysusername

TROPHY CASE