delphi's recent activity

  1. Comment on Is anybody using HEY for Domains? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    So am I. I currently use a classic email service that just gives me bog standard IMAP/SMTP. This is good, but it's not exactly modern or great. I trust the friend who recommended HEY to me a lot,...

    So am I. I currently use a classic email service that just gives me bog standard IMAP/SMTP. This is good, but it's not exactly modern or great. I trust the friend who recommended HEY to me a lot, and he recommended it specifically because of the unique features and the non-traditional metaphor of messaging HEY uses compared to classical email.

    1 vote
  2. Comment on Is anybody using HEY for Domains? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    Thanks for the recommendation, but if I just "change mail servers", my workflow won't actually change. I have it on good authority from a colleague I massively respect that the "special sauce"...

    Thanks for the recommendation, but if I just "change mail servers", my workflow won't actually change. I have it on good authority from a colleague I massively respect that the "special sauce" (screening emails, auto-sorting and so on) is a meaningful departure from the classical Email experience to the point where it'll actually make my life easier.

    1 vote
  3. Is anybody using HEY for Domains?

    Hi everyone, I have a quick couple o'questions since a friend of mine recommended HEY email and I'm not opposed to trying new things, even if I can think of better people to support than DHH....

    Hi everyone, I have a quick couple o'questions since a friend of mine recommended HEY email and I'm not opposed to trying new things, even if I can think of better people to support than DHH.

    Specifically, I'm thinking of moving my personal email, which is currently three addresses on the same domain, to HEY. So my questions are as follows:

    Extensions let me make an infinite number of domains on the same domain. Like, hello@example.com, delphi@example.com, hi@example.com and so on. All of my questions are related to this mechanic.

    1. Can I start an email exchange from an extension?
    2. If not, if I reply to an email that came in on an extension, will I reply with said extension?
    3. Can I filter emails by the extensino they came in on?
    4. Can I set a catch-all that will any email to any extension come in, even if it's not explicitly set up?

    Thanks in advance.

    Best,

    d

    Edit after just trying it: It does do all of the things I described, including Catch-All email, although it's clearly not a primary use case and they discourage you from using it. It works just fine though.

    9 votes
  4. Comment on Arc Raiders is hilarious in ~games

    delphi
    Link
    This is where I think extraction shooters like Arc Raiders and my personal favourite Marathon (2026) shine. They're not accessible, not particualrly, and if you're not into online shooters you...

    This is where I think extraction shooters like Arc Raiders and my personal favourite Marathon (2026) shine. They're not accessible, not particualrly, and if you're not into online shooters you probably won't connect properly enough to the point of loving them, but they're a great fun time because they offer a sandbox to tell your own stories in.

    Marathon has a much lower TTK than Arc Raiders and is generally faster paced. It also looks gorgeous, everyone should give it a try, but that's not the point. The point is that I have dozens of these kinds of stories.

    Once, for example, I was in Cryo Archive, the game's endgame raid map, which is not only full of the hardest PvE enemies, but also five to six other bloodthirsty teams armed to the teeth with grenades and shotguns. My team was down, eliminated in fact (this means you can revive them, slowly, but they've already dropped their loot) and I have to find my way back to them since I'm playing Triage, the support class. And on the way back to them, I stumble across a three person team. Golden shields, purple Misriah 2442 automatic shotguns, near-instant full healing Panacea Kits, and shield projectors. Essentially impossible. But they're looting, they're not paying attention. So I throw a grenade into the room, they rush out, but I'm in the vents - and once they realise this, I've already dropped a shield barrier in there, and keep peeking across the border to get pot shots in. One down, two down, the last one hits me with a blast to the face, shield's broken, near death - until a lone PvE robot from behind distracts the guy, and I get a melee kill in. I go revive my friends and we harvest the resulting loot buffet.

    Games like these are unforgiving and generally quite harsh, especially when they're as PvP focused as Marathon is, but at some point, even if it only happens once, you'll get into a situation so sticky you're doomed, and you'll lock the fuck in, and you'll win. Won't happen often, but it will. Eventually, you'll walk into a 1v3, and they're trapped in there with you, not the other way around.

    I think sharing these kinds of stories is what makes online games special, and I have more, if you'll share some more as well, dear reader.

    10 votes
  5. Comment on If AI is sentient then so is ‘Age of Empires II’ in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    I've been increasingly annoyed with coverage from 404 Media on the topic of AI. It just seems to me that they're pessimistic and gleefully contrarian on the subject despite the clear advances in...

    I've been increasingly annoyed with coverage from 404 Media on the topic of AI. It just seems to me that they're pessimistic and gleefully contrarian on the subject despite the clear advances in the field. I've not seen them lose one kind word about modern attention-aware transformers.

    Of course, they're not obliged to, anyone can write what they want, but it does to me paint a pattern. They're just all too ready to jump on any story that even slightly antagonises "AI", as if that means anything.

    This article in specific requires a broken premise. I don't think any researcher worth their weight in salt is saying that any LLM currently in development or on the market is, has ever been, or can be conscious.

    I don't think I need to expand on this, but if anyone's curious, here's a collection of articles that I thought were particularly uncharitable and really only read to me as gawking at the (admittedly numerous and very funny) failures symptomatic of an industry in a state of panicked flailing.

    It Is Trivially Easy to Use Reddit to Manipulate AI Search, Research Suggests

    Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains

    Anthropic Promises Trump Admin Its AI Is Not Woke

    8 votes
  6. Comment on Does generative AI have a natural limit without a major innovation? in ~comp

    delphi
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I get the mechanisms you're referring to, I know how back propagation and reinforced learning works, I understand pretaining as a concept, and you're spot on on the analysis in any other part, but...

    I get the mechanisms you're referring to, I know how back propagation and reinforced learning works, I understand pretaining as a concept, and you're spot on on the analysis in any other part, but I have to ask - "they just regurgitate text and can't have any original insight" - is that really true?

    Like, get this. I've absolutely seen the model do "original" things before, even if they were just deterministic flukes. I can absolutely get the model to string together words and sentences in a way that - aside from the library of Babel, grumble grumble - no human being has ever said. Now granted, I can also do that with a random number generator, but therein I think lies the point.

    If we can get it to do that, we can get it to do that in code, or maths, or poetry, or whatever. Will the output be coherent, good, any of those? Doubtful, doubtful, but it will absolutely be "original". This is pedantic, sure, but I kind of reject the notion that "LLMs can't be meaningfully creative" when the mechanisms in place are in concept so close to a human synthesising knowledge from their learned experiences. And god knows humans are capable of writing nonsense as well.

    6 votes
  7. Comment on Does generative AI have a natural limit without a major innovation? in ~comp

    delphi
    Link
    "GenAI" is a really useless term for what the question here actually is, and without getting into it I really don't like how the term has become to used, especially in circles that don't much...

    "GenAI" is a really useless term for what the question here actually is, and without getting into it I really don't like how the term has become to used, especially in circles that don't much think about the topic and use it as a shorthand for "the product I don't like". Yes, obviously you mean LLMs and image diffusion models, but stay with me here.

    Let's say that we get full, real Artificial Intelligence. Cmdr Data, Durandal, GLaDOS, Nick Valentine. A computer that is indistinguishable from a human in terms of their inner life. Would this not still be generative? Would these systems, human by any philosophical definition, generate their output? Don't humans do that now? I don't think it's a meaningful distinction.

    As for your question, I personally do not think that LLMs are or can ever be conscious, but I'm not an expert. I don't think LLMs get us to the point of Strong AGI. It's certainly worth examining, I think that research that Anthropic did a while back where they injected thought vectors into an LLMs reasoning space and it could retrieve the general "shape" of these ideas was fascinating, and while I'm pretty cynical about this I'll err on the side of caution and say that, sure, maybe, in some way, whatever's going on inside any given model may approximate the same mechanisms that in humans eventually cause sentience to emerge.

    But are we weeks, months or even years away from OpenAI releasing Consciousness-as-a-Service? I don't think so.

    2 votes
  8. Comment on Would it make sense to wrap my Calibre library in a Git project? in ~tech

    delphi
    (edited )
    Link
    Git is the wrong tool for this. There's better ways to version control a directory with many files like this, but admittedly, it's not the WORST idea. If you keep it offline and don't share it to...

    Git is the wrong tool for this. There's better ways to version control a directory with many files like this, but admittedly, it's not the WORST idea. If you keep it offline and don't share it to a code forge like GitHub you don't even have to ignore anything. I would still use a classic backup solution like Borg or Restic.

    I'll expand on this: metadata.db and and .caltrash I would leave untracked. A regular cron job to back up the database file separately will do fine if you WANT to version it, but it changes with every interaction, so expect your repo to grow quickly. Also keep in mind that .epubs are .zip files, which are binary blobs, and git won't be able to meaningfully delta them. Not a big deal if your books are just a couple of megabytes at most, but with comics, that's bad.

    Also, while you can do this and git will let you, it's not a good workflow. Staging, committing and writing messages for every commit is maybe not as seamless as you want it to be. If it was my library, I would use a regular backup app to make deltas every hour, every day or every week depending on how often you interact with it.

    11 votes
  9. Comment on Recommendations for e-ink tablets? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    This nerd sniped me. After extensive testing, I've determined that it feels most like a medium-blunt Faber Castell 9000 pencil on Harmony Enviro 300 Paper, on a wooden desk. That being said, this...

    This nerd sniped me.

    After extensive testing, I've determined that it feels most like a medium-blunt Faber Castell 9000 pencil on Harmony Enviro 300 Paper, on a wooden desk. That being said, this is the "closest" in terms of feel. It's still not identical, far from it. The digital pen has much less friction, albeit not as bad as, say, a Galaxy Note. Nowhere near. Better than an Apple Pencil on an iPad Pro, even.

    I tested a Palomino Blackwing 602, a Mitsubishi Hi-Uni, a Faber Castell 9000 and a Faber Castell Grip 2001, Caran d'Ache Technograph 777, Staedler Mars Lumograph 100 and Staedler Noris 120, Dixon Ticonderoga #2. All Pencils are HB (#2).

    In terms of paper, I tested Mondi ColorCopy 100 and 120, Ovol Enviro Harmony 100, 160 and 300, Mondi Nautilus 120 and 160, Antalis OLIN 160 and 200, and Mondi DNS 160.

    Hope this helps (?)

    11 votes
  10. Comment on Recommendations for e-ink tablets? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    I own a Remarkable Paper Pro and it's very good for my exact use case. That's taking notes, reading and marking up PDFs, and nothing else. If you need a web browser, you won't be happy here, but...

    I own a Remarkable Paper Pro and it's very good for my exact use case. That's taking notes, reading and marking up PDFs, and nothing else. If you need a web browser, you won't be happy here, but to me that's kind of the point.

    Getting files on it is painless, though. It comes with a quite well designed app that drops itself into the share sheet on your phone, so you can send PDF or link directly to it. Set its primary Wifi network to the one sent by your phone in personal hotspot mode, and you essentially have it connected all the time.

    There's also a first party Google Drive integration, although I've never used it.

    Edit: I also want to point out that all of the alternatives, Kindle, Onyx and Supernote, are all using EMR pens, like the earlier Remarkable 2. I can't stand those pens, and really love the feeling of the new Paper Pro/Move/Pure pen on the display. It's as close as I've ever seen one of these devices get to a pen-on-paper feel, although it's still miles from the real thing.

    6 votes
  11. Comment on Searching for neighbours on the indie web in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    I don't have a button - maybe I should - but I am a proud member of both the IndieWeb and XXIIVV web rings. Hello! https://rmv.fyi

    I don't have a button - maybe I should - but I am a proud member of both the IndieWeb and XXIIVV web rings. Hello!

    https://rmv.fyi

    3 votes
  12. Comment on rsync and outrage in ~comp

    delphi
    (edited )
    Link
    I have to deeply respect Tridge's godly patience in dealing with the people that want to strangle him for daring to use a tool he quite clearly knows how to use properly and (knows the limitations...
    • Exemplary

    I have to deeply respect Tridge's godly patience in dealing with the people that want to strangle him for daring to use a tool he quite clearly knows how to use properly and (knows the limitations contained therein).

    As for rsync itself, it's software. It'll have bugs. To me it doesn't matter if the bug was introduced by the maintainer by hand or by an AI tool. As much as the Mastodon puritans are foaming at the mouth about this, there's no rule that says that you have to be this bug-free to be load bearing software. If that was the case, the world wouldn't run on Excel and Acrobat.

    At this point, it seems like the only real recommendation is to turn off LLMs co-authoring feature so that Claude and Codex don't sign the commits with their logo as well. This doesn't fix the underlying problem, if there is one, but would at least prevent further harassment from unkind people who just want to be angry at someone who develops a free utility for free, on their own time, on their own dime.

    If this had happened to me I'd've burned rsync to the ground. Fuck these people. This is just as unreasonable as Lennart Poettering receiving death threats over systemd.

    23 votes
  13. Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    I'm not learning a language right now, but my husband is learning German. So, he's reading a book, and when he encounters a sentence he can't quite parse yet, he drops it into Kagi on the German...

    I'm not learning a language right now, but my husband is learning German. So, he's reading a book, and when he encounters a sentence he can't quite parse yet, he drops it into Kagi on the German to German setting, with the output set to a more manageable level like A2 or B1, to get the gist. Then, individual words go into the dictionary translation mode.

    2 votes
  14. Comment on Clanker: A word for the machine in ~tech

    delphi
    Link
    Having grown up in the age of the Matrix and James Bond in popular culture, I personally don't associate "Agent" with a human, but a function first and foremost. James Bond isn't a secret agent...

    Having grown up in the age of the Matrix and James Bond in popular culture, I personally don't associate "Agent" with a human, but a function first and foremost. James Bond isn't a secret agent when he's relaxing in Monaco, and Agent Smith literally was an AI.

    2 votes
  15. Comment on 100 years of television design in ~design

    delphi
    Link
    Would have loved to read more of this, a shame that the "100 years of television design" on display only reach from 1920 to 1970.

    Would have loved to read more of this, a shame that the "100 years of television design" on display only reach from 1920 to 1970.

    5 votes
  16. Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    This being enforced on the search engine level means that as long as you have it set to be your default Omnibox engine, it will work exactly the same way. !w (query) will be passed to Kagi, which...

    This being enforced on the search engine level means that as long as you have it set to be your default Omnibox engine, it will work exactly the same way. !w (query) will be passed to Kagi, which passes it directly to wikipedia. No need to set this up on a per browser basis.

    4 votes
  17. Comment on 'Stop Killing Games' movement gains momentum: California Assembly passes game protection bill in ~games

    delphi
    Link Parent
    You're right in everything you've said, and I do want to stress that this is a good idea, even if I think the wording is a little unfortunate. But then again, I also work in government. I'll...

    You're right in everything you've said, and I do want to stress that this is a good idea, even if I think the wording is a little unfortunate. But then again, I also work in government. I'll prefer something like "Right To Play" or "Keep Games Playable" or "Game Continuity Act".

    1 vote
  18. Comment on 'Stop Killing Games' movement gains momentum: California Assembly passes game protection bill in ~games

    delphi
    Link
    I really like the intention of "Let's make sure video games can run and be maintained well after their publisher folds", but the whole framing of "Stop Killing Games" really irks me. It's just so...

    I really like the intention of "Let's make sure video games can run and be maintained well after their publisher folds", but the whole framing of "Stop Killing Games" really irks me. It's just so provocative and unreasonable. As if Ubisoft is going around with a big scythe looking for projects to pull the plug on. Like, no, it's mismanagement and people who don't care. This isn't malice, this is apathy.

    I agree with the idea, that single player games shouldn't require active online DRM, and that online match-based games should probably offer some way for users to run custom servers after the official ones shut down and also provide the players with server software to run (it's not crazy, Valve has been doing this since time immemorial and the sun hasn't collapsed), but the way this is phrased is just stupid and loud to me, most likely to get as much media attention as possible for what's a very basic and reasonable request for legislation.

    P.S.: I think it's also a little naive to assume that this will somehow "fix" games the publishers have abandoned. The Crew is offline, so sure, that one gets a pass, but we've seen it from Valve that every game that offers unrestricted custom servers gets botted and cheated to hell and back. Not once have I had a good time on a custom TF2 server.

    5 votes
  19. Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    Yes, at least on the iOS app there is a search feature, although tapping one of the categories doesn't work now that I check it... regular full text search works fine though.

    Yes, at least on the iOS app there is a search feature, although tapping one of the categories doesn't work now that I check it... regular full text search works fine though.

    1 vote
  20. Comment on What are people's experiences with using Kagi? in ~tech

    delphi
    Link Parent
    I've been in the Beta since essentially day one, and it's been really, really good. They're a little AI brained, and I doubt they can keep up the momentum as that tech gets more expensive, but for...

    I've been in the Beta since essentially day one, and it's been really, really good. They're a little AI brained, and I doubt they can keep up the momentum as that tech gets more expensive, but for now it's very good at collecting stories, extrapolating from different sources and showing biases and deeper information (although when it fails, it does fail hard, I've seen it consider the Onion a real source once). Crosswords are fun too and the design is just very modern and competent

    3 votes