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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • NixOS. Started with Yellow Dog Linux in 1998.

    I don’t do everything through nix’s derivation system.

    Many of my configs are just an outOfStoreSymlink to my configs in the same dotfiles repos. I don’t need every change wrapped in a derivation. Neovim is probably the largest. A few node projects for automations I’m fine using pnpm to manage. Nix still places everything but I can tweek those configs and commit in the same repo without a full blown activation.






  • Totally agree with your overall point.

    That said, I have to come to the defense of my terminal UI (TUI) comrades with some anecdotal experience.

    I’ve got all the same tools in Neovim as my VSCode/Cursor colleagues, with a deeper understanding of how it all works under the hood.

    They have no idea what an LSP is. They just know the marketing buzzword “IntelliSense.” As we build out our AI toolchains, it doesn’t even occur to them that an agent can talk to an LSP to improve code generation because all they know are VSCode extensions. I had to pick and evaluate my MCP servers from day one as opposed to just accepting the defaults, and the quality of my results shows it. The same can be done in GUI editors, but since you’re never forced to configure these things yourself, the exposure is just lower. I’ve had to run numerous trainings explaining that MCPs are traditionally meant to be run locally, because folks haven’t built the mental model that comes with wiring it all up yourself.

    Again, totally agree with your overall point. This is more of a PSA for any aspiring engineers: TUIs are still alive and well.



  • Firefox Nightly + arkenfox userjs + uBlock Origin + Bitwarden as my daily driver.

    Been a couple years since I checked up on arkenfox still being good. I get flagged as a bot all the time and constantly get popups about WebGL (GPU fingerprinting) so I assume its working as intended for my threat model.

    Tails when I really care.

    Mullvad VPN as my regular VPN with ProtonVPN for torrents.

    GrapheneOS / NixOS as my OS.

    Proton Visionary for most cloud services except passwords and I don’t really use Proton Drive. I do use ProtonPass for unique emails to every provider.

    Kagi for searches / AI.

    Etesync for contacts because Proton didn’t sync with the OS last I checked.

    Backblaze B2 for cloud storage with my own encryption via rclone (Round Sync on GrapheneOS)

    Keypass for a few things like my XMR wallets and master passwords I don’t even trust in Bitwarden.

    https://jmp.chat/ for my mobile provider.

    Pihole with encrypted DNS to Quad9.

    https://onlykey.io/ for the second half of my sensitive passwords (Bitwarden, LUKS, Keypass, OS login). First half memorized.

    Its a lot. I burned myself out a couple years ago keeping up with optimizing privacy and this setup has served me well for 2 years without really changing anything. The cloud services are grey areas in terms of privacy but the few ads that leak through uBlock have zero relevance to anything about me.


  • BSP Tree (with custom nodes).

    With a vanilla BSP-tree you can accomplish your diagram. Simply reordering your splits can do it by making the footer and main content areas first. Better approach is to support splits on non-leaf nodes. In the example below just split the root where all its children go to the new top node and a new bottom bar leaf node is created.

    Root (split: vertical, ratio: 0.6)
    ├── Left child (Window A)
    └── Right child (split: horizontal, ratio: 0.5)
        ├── Top child (Window B)
        └── Bottom child (Window C)
    

    To access neighbors you’ll need your nodes to track their parents (double linked). Then you can traverse until all edges are found. Worst case its O(height+num neighbors that exist) if I am remembering.

    Depending on how efficient you want it to be, there are speed ups. It has been awhile, but I do remember keeping the tree as balanced as possible makes the search around log(n). Each split node keeping an index of all children in its sub-tree also reduces how much traversing is needed when you need all children after a split.

    Can get a little complicated but it is doable. That said, how many splits will a TUI have? This may be preemptive to do.

    Custom nodes is where you support some patterns that could use further optimizations. Tables that will always be a grid. Tab bars that are a 1xn grid could be a further specialized node.

    This is all about layout. Fixed/Dynamic width/height windows, padding and margins, borders, are all render processing and don’t effect the layout (unless you want reactivity). By that I mean you have windows that will split differently when the viewport is portrait or landscape and it dynamically adjusts to the window size. Sometimes with different “steps” like a square viewport may be different from both portrait or landscape or 4:3 could be treated different from 16:9.

    TUIs are not my day job but I’ve made a few in my day. Above are just my opinions from experiences. There is no “right” answer but hopefully some of this helps your journey.


    TypeScript is my day job and using a custom JSX Factory makes it pretty easy to define HTML-like interfaces for devs that can support mixing layout, render attributes, content, and app logic.

    Explicit BSP splits:

    <Split type="vertical" ratio={0.6}>
      <WidgetA />
      <Split type="horizontal" ratio={0.5}>
        <WidgetB />
        <WidgetC />
      </Split>
    </Split>
    

    Custom nodes:

    <Container>
      <TabBar>
        <Tab>Tab 1</Tab>
        <Tab>Tab 2</Tab>
      </TabBar>
      <StatusBar />
    </Container>
    

    Not sure your stack but throwing it out there as something I’ve used successfully.






  • Toooo real. Its like companies have taken the worst of everything and just call it agile. List out every task and estimate them so we have timelines, but don’t actually architect anything as that’s waterfall. Fake waterfall, with fake dates, but fingers will be pointed like they were real commitments, and spend a month doing it for this executive power point instead of fucking off so devs can build the damn thing.




  • I ended up just building a box after looking for the perfect NAS and finding it didn’t exist. The software is usually just crap or the hardware is underwhelming. Got a Node 804 case to slap in plenty of HDD space. Running NixOS so I’m in control of the software. In retrospect I wish I had gotten a rackmount type case. Tossed in an Arc GPU for better transcoding shortly after the initial setup.



  • Ultimately we don’t know the implementation. I’ve seen some bad sites like stealth truncating on the registration form but leaving the login form unbounded so the password you pasted in both times doesn’t work.

    Separate issue from truncating, I get suspicious when I see passwords capped to 16-20 chars for the reason you gave that they should be stored as fixed length hashes.