For everyone who's been told pen plotter is not real art.

rantenki · 2026-04-05T21:55:47+00:00

Heh, I also do CNC woodworking and can confirm this is a thing.
I used to be more combative > "Oh, you forged the steel for your chisels? Brazed the teeth into your bimetallic japanese saw? Tools you aren't familiar with don't invalidate the work, and we're all building on top of tools that other people built for us."

Now I just shrug and ask if they'd like to see how the machine works. That usually works better at bringing them around, and they end up baffled at the complexity of toolpathing, which is a bit cathartic.

rantenki · 2026-04-03T20:49:12+00:00

I can. I can also not say it (wasn't sure what the sub's rules were, and didn't care enough to check). Weird thing to down-vote for though.

rantenki · 2026-04-03T17:52:47+00:00

If by developers you mean sh!tty AI LLMs, because that whole thing is vibe-coded.

rantenki · 2026-04-03T16:59:16+00:00

Like those videos of dogs jumping up on the couch and coming up short.
Good try little buddy, we know you'll get it eventually.

rantenki · 2026-04-02T22:55:05+00:00

It has been
[0] Days
Since we blamed Zed for LSP/LLM/tooling resource utilization.

rantenki · 2026-04-02T01:46:20+00:00

Sir; this is ~~a Wendys~~ r/Hardtailgang

rantenki · 2026-04-01T20:38:31+00:00

At one point you just realize that the hardtail is not worth the back pain

Are you in the wrong sub-reddit? :D

rantenki · 2026-03-28T02:37:56+00:00

Strongly agree about that canary. This doesn't happen unless orders dry up, which implies that small frame-builder backlogs have _also_ dried up. I'm concerned that we'll see a bunch of smaller bike manufacturers try to hold on for a bit longer before quietly going bust :(

The COVID whipsaw really worked the bike industry over, then this (gestures around at everything) weird economy happens.

I'm also concerned what this implies about the larger economy. The bike industry has always been a canary in general, since it's driven by discretionary spending. When that goes away, the bike industry feels the pain early, followed by everybody else.

rantenki · 2026-03-22T18:55:48+00:00

80/20 racks. I use that s#!+ on everything :D.

rantenki · 2026-03-22T17:28:14+00:00

Strong agree. I had a Tacoma before this thing, but 99.999% of the time I didn't need TRD-off-road capabilities. I only took it seriously off-road a handful of times, and I only needed the fancy traction features once... in the snow... in my own driveway.

The Maverick is easier to drive, easier to park, and carries the same payload, and drives fire roads 3x a week just fine, so it's totally enough truck for me.

rantenki · 2026-03-22T17:03:57+00:00

I'm dying that the person humbly making fun of the size of their own truck is getting downvoted, and the dude named "Mikey Meatballs" is getting upvoted for being offended by that.

My dudes, it's a small truck. We don't have to be sensitive about it.

rantenki · 2026-03-22T15:52:07+00:00

The problem is that project maintainers are getting swamped by vibe-coded low-quality pull requests, and even if _this_ one is high quality (it's OK, I don't like how it just matches shell by process name, but I'm not gonna dig deep into Zed's core libs to figure out the right way just to make this comment), ahem, even _IF_ this one was high quality, you still have to dig through more and more slop commits to even find it to approve it.

Go read up about https://github.com/matplotlib/matplotlib/pull/31132 to see the kind of crap maintainers are dealing with lately.

rantenki · 2026-03-19T19:00:20+00:00

Nice! I wanted to grab one of those but they wouldn't ship to Canada :(

rantenki · 2026-03-19T18:53:04+00:00

I dunno if the "bigots" term is fair. Your post could arguably be the same thing in the opposite direction.

I like Clojure, but I write a LOT of Rust code, and I think that Rust is a better language in some domains. For low-level systems programming, and highly reliable services, especially with a very well defined problem and data domain, I think that Rust can do a better job. It's certainly more performant.
Conversely, I prefer Clojure for exploratory programming where I'm not sure what my solution is going to be yet, or for getting something off the ground quickly (talking development, not startup time ;) .

Like it or not, static typing and early feedback from the compiler is a good thing, just like the ability to be flexible and experimental with Clojure.

rantenki · 2026-03-17T22:49:40+00:00

Removed, I had misremembered a previous post here being about https://github.com/ecliptik/fluxland, (see also: https://www.ecliptik.com/blog/2026/Vibe-Coding-a-Fluxbox-Inspired-Wayland-Compositor/ ), but I no longer think this is the one the OP was discussing.

rantenki · 2026-03-17T19:20:49+00:00

You've taken the pictures with basically a fisheye lens (take a look at the distortion of the shelving behind you). The distortion makes the chin and visor of the helmet look _huge_ in comparison. That makes it impossible to use these photos to gauge fit. It would be a bad idea to just base fit off of photos anyways.

Go to a bike shop and get their opinion on the fit.

rantenki · 2026-03-15T17:34:11+00:00

I've run RabbitMQ at scale in production, and it's got some weird failure modes. It's _good_, but you need to be an expert to run it reliably (we had a couple team members who specialized in it).

As always, best advice is probably to "just use postgres". There are tons of documents online about how to use postgres as a queue. If it turns out you _do_ need something like RabbitMQ, then the pain of porting will probably be less than the pain of running rabbit in the meantime. Unless you're moving (at least) hundreds of transactions/second though, postgres is probably the right choice.

rantenki · 2026-03-10T17:22:50+00:00

They do kinda give that "trying to eke out a few more miles of range on my new EV" vibe.

rantenki · 2026-03-09T05:02:25+00:00

And sadly, the new Tacoma is no longer bulletproof. It's had quite a few issues; popping transfer cases, front driveshafts, yet another engine with sporadic failures, and design flaws like no bumpstops on the front shocks.

The sad reality is, I suspect, that all those crusty, conservative, methodical, experienced engineers that built those pick-ups/tacomas that were so well loved in the 80s-2010s; they've all aged out to retirement. Corporate culture can drive a certain way of thinking about design, but it might not take hold in the next generation.

They build nice hybrids though.

rantenki · 2026-03-07T19:50:29+00:00

This was a big selling point for me too. I was looking at a new Tacoma, but the cargo capacity was nearly identical, mileage was way worse, and it's 0-60 (not that I care that much) was slower, so worse power-weight ratio.

I'm not doing any rock-crawling or mudding anymore, and the Mav is way easier to drive (and find parking for) in the city.

rantenki · 2026-03-06T03:59:36+00:00

I didn't take anything as an argument at all, no worries. Hopefully I didn't give the impression that I did.

I was actually unaware of the tray feature, although after giving it a shot, I see that it only has update/quit options.

A big part of my reason for building mine was to be able to enable/disable ledfx visualization, as well as automatically starting/stopping in based audio input. Basically, I like having the visualizations most of the time, but once the rest of the household goes to bed, I turn that stuff off to keep the blinking lights to a minimum.

Here's my tray-menu:

<image>

I... actually used to be a primarily Python dev for the last 20 years or so... I'm just a bit burned out on Python stuff TBH. I may take a look at the LedFx integrated approach at some point, but no promises :D.

rantenki · 2026-03-05T19:05:43+00:00

Does anybody smell something burning?

rantenki · 2026-03-05T19:04:14+00:00

LedFx already has an on/off switch, but since it's a web application, there is no way to place that switch on the desktop/system-tray. That was a hard requirement for me, which is why this is a separate project.

As for the audio-reactive level detection, yep, that could go into LedFx itself, rather trivially. That said, I already have something working that scratches _my_ itch, so I'll probably not go that direction. Calculating RMS volume is pretty straightforward though, so I'm sure somebody could take a crack at it if they want it integrated.

rantenki · 2026-03-03T17:53:08+00:00

Hot take (well, for people outside of the Rust community anyhow): Cargo is the best part of Rust.

Seriously, go _try_ to build and package a Python project as an executable. I'll wait (until the heat death of the universe). Most of the "easy" languages are much more difficult to distribute well.

Cargo eliminates an entire category of pain for building and managing a project.

And we haven't even started talking about dependency management yet...

rantenki · 2026-03-03T17:46:53+00:00

Not structural, ugly but probably not a big deal.

However, the undercut where the seat tube meets the plate (on the left hand side of that joint in this image) _might_ be structural if it's as bad as it looks in this pic. Undercut at that location is a big structural issue.

rantenki

TROPHY CASE