I don't get the hype for scrolling WMs. It feels like the app switcher view on phones. Never thought I needed that on desktop, normally it just freaks me out with how much stuff is open.
If you like this, check out stacked tiling. It comes natively in COSMIC and I believe it can be configured in i3, Sway and Hyprland as well. It's basically tabs across windows, but thanks to tiling you have different regions of the screen with their own tab sets. I usually just split the screen vertically once, so I have a left and right region. Turns out so many workflows can be described as 'ingest information somewhere and apply it somewhere else', and this is just such a useful layout for this. Whenever I have something that requires sole attention, I just maximize that window.
If you are looking for some reasoning behind the "hype": one piece of it is that humans have relatively good contextual spatial memory and using one very large "space" that has a sort of "physicality" to it (you can scroll it; things generally stay where you put them; etc) can feel really good. It goes back to some of the early ideals of "spatial navigation" of the original "desktop metaphor". (Many of which have been somewhat lost to time, with a lot less emphasis on things like windows opening in the same appearance as when they were last closed.)
I think where scrolling WMs starts to feel like it scratches peculiar itches the most is when you have a complex multi-workspace config in a more traditional tiling WM. Each workspace is a different place. In some of the best cases the WM may give a metaphor that each workspace is on a cube or other polygon that you are switching faces on. Scrolling WMs simplify needing to do 3D compositing if you want to visualize that "space" at a distance or have nice flips between workspaces that provide spatial cues to your brain, because scrolling is a thing we do a lot. We have many apps with "infinite scrolling" today; applying that to one large workspace can feel like a nice space to have to arrange your windows in, and other common computer gestures like zoom out and then back in to a different part of it feel "natural". Navigating your "desktop" becomes just like navigating a large Excel file or a large code file.
I feel like my biggest gripe with every single WM I've tried is the Idea that if I reboot, I lose everything. Sure I can add complex rules in sway like "always open Firefox on workspace 2, slack on workspace 1", but i still have to launch them on boot (unless I automate this as well), and it becomes complex when I say I always want 3 terminals on workspace 3, etc.
I wish I could fine tune once, and snapshot whatever it is I'm using, and have it appear automatically when I reboot.
Yeah, I remember at one point I had some rather complex auto-workspace layouts in my xmonad config. I don't remember if I tried to automate the launching of apps as well, that most customized config was several computers ago.
Relatedly I know that Windows PowerToys has a tool called "Workspaces" that also automates the launching as well as the placement, but it doesn't seem to integrate enough with FancyZones for me to find it that useful. Which is weird because they are "neighbors" in PowerToys. Still it's a good idea and interesting to see an experiment in that direction.
I guess it's the 'large' part that turns me off. If it's actually far away so that you need to scroll a lot to get there, it just feels like it's more work to me. Sort of replicating one of the less appealing features of a physical desk, the mess that it quickly becomes if you manipulate a lot of documents. I don't even use workspaces that much for the same reason, and having tabs takes away a lot of the need I feel. You even retain some sense of physical distance because of the tab positions.
To stay with the physical analogy, the layout I've described is like always keeping all your documents in two neat stacks before you. Except that it's much easier and quicker to flip pages to the top than it would be with physical documents, so you're rarely tempted to start spreading them out.
Agree on compiled languages, wondering about Go vs Rust. Go compiles faster but is more verbose, token cost is an important factor. Rust's famously strict compiler and general safety orientation seems like a strong candidate for LLM coding. Go would probably have more training data out already though.
The SE has a minimum capital requirement of 120k € so is not within reach for most people. I think this EU-Inc would be a simple structure with a lower threshold.
I am absolutely for it. There are too many different types of company structures in the individual EU countries and they don’t work well when you move and come with all sorts of different risks. Obviously many are also just cumbersome to start and dissolve. You could start five US LLCs within ten minutes of filling out some online forms whereas to start one European entity depending on the country you might have to make a notary appointment, register with the national registry and the tax authority. I think there’s a lot of room for improvement which can take days to weeks.
Per the Wikipedia article, an SE cannot be incorporated directly. It must be created out of one or more national, public (!) companies already formed under the law of a member state.
What about the explanation presented in the next paragraph?
> Consider how an exponent affects values between 0 and 1. Numbers close to experience a strong pull towards while larger numbers experience less pull. For example 0.1^2=0.01, a 90% reduction, while 0.9^2=0.81, only a reduction of 10%.
That's exactly the reason why it works, it's even nicely visualized below. If you've dealt with similar problems before you might know this in the back of your head. Eg you may have had a problem where you wanted to measure distance from 0 but wanted to remove the sign. You may have tried absolute value and squaring, and noticed that the latter has the additional effect described above.
It's a bit like a math undergrad wondering about a proof 'I understand the argument, but how on earth do you come up with this?'. The answer is to keep doing similar problems and at some point you've developed an arsenal of tricks.
In general for analytic functions like e^x or x^n the behaviour of the function on any open interval is enough to determine its behaviour elsewhere. By extension in mathematics examining values around the fundamental additive and multiplicative units \{ 0, 1 \} is fruitful in illustrating of the quintessential behaviour of the function.
One thing that kind of baffles me about the popularity of tools like Claude Code is that their main target group seems to be developers (TUI interfaces, semi-structured instruction files,... not the kind of stuff I'd get my parents to use). So people who would be quite capable of building a simple agentic loop themselves [0]. It won't be quite as powerful as the commercial tools, but given that you deeply know how it works you can also tailor it to your specific problems much better. And sandbox it better (it baffles me that the tools' proposed solution to avoid wiping the entire disk is relying on user confirmation [1]).
It's like customizing your text editor or desktop environment. You can do it all yourself, you can get ideas and snippets from other people's setups. But fully relying on proprietary SaaS tools - that we know will have to get more expensive eventually - for some of your core productivity workflows seems unwise to me.
> It won't be quite as powerful as the commercial tools
If you are a professional you use a proper tool? SWEs seem to be the only people on the planet that rather used half-arsed solutions instead of well-built professional tools. Imagine your car mechanic doing that ...
I remember this argument being used against Postgres and for Oracle, against Linux and for Windows or AS/400, etc. And I think it makes sense for a certain type of organisation that has no ambition or need to build its own technology competence.
But for everyone else I think it's important to find the right balance in the right areas. A car mechanic is never in the business of building tools. But software engineers always are to some degree, because our tools are software as well.
But postgres is a professional tool. I don't argue for "use enterprise bullshit". I steer clear of that garbage anyway. SWEs always forget the moat of people focusing their whole work day on a problem and having wider access to information than you do. SWEs forget that time also costs money and oftentimes it's better and cheaper just to pay someone. How much does it cost to ship an internal agent solution that runs automated E2E tests for example (independent of quality)? And how much does a normal SaaS for that cost? Devs have cost and risk attached to their work that is not properly taken into account most of the times.
There is a size of tooling thats fine. Like a small script or simple automation or cli UI or whatever. But if we're talking more complex, 95% of the times a stupid idea.
PS: of course car mechanics built their tools. I work on my car and had to build tools. A hex nut that didn't fit in the engine bay, so I had to grind it down. Normal. Cut and weld an existing tool to get into a tight spot. Normal. That's the simple CLI tool size of a tool. But no one would think about building a car lift or a welder or something.
You're on hacker news, where people (used to?) like hacking on things. I like tinkering with stuff. I'd take a half working open source project over a enshittified commercial offering any day.
But hacking and tinkering is a hobby. I also hack and tinker, but that's not work. Sometimes it makes sense. But the mindset is often times "I can build this" and "everything commercial sucks".
> take a half working open source project
See, how is that appropriate in any way in a work environment?
Anyone can build _an_ agent. A good one takes a talented engineer. That’s because TUI rendering is tough (hello, flicker!) and extensibility must be done right lest it‘s useless.
For day-to-day coding, why use your own half-baked solution when the commercial versions are better, cheaper and can be customised anyway?
I've written my own agent for a specialised problem which does work well, although it just burns tokens compared to Cursor!
The other advantage that Claude Code has is that the model itself can be finetuned for tool calling rather than just relying on prompt engineering, but even getting the prompts right must take huge engineering effort and experimentation.
People will pay extra for Opus over Sonnet and often describe the $200 Max plan as cheap because of the time it saves. Paying for a somewhat better harness follows the same logic
As far as compatibility goes, OnlyOffice is fairly good at it, more geared towards MS-compatibility than LibreOffice, which is more of its own thing (and pretty good at that).
Think of it in an end-to-end way: produce a ton of examples of final results of supervisor-worker agentic outputs and then train a model to predict those from the original user prompts straight away.
You can let them play complete-information games (1 or 2 player) with randomly created rulesets. It's very objective, but the thing is that anything can be optimized for. This benchmark would favor models that are good at logic puzzles / chess-style games, possibly at the expense of other capabilities.
> Homebrew packages conflicting with local packages, something you compile give needs a different python/ruby/node/rust/whatever version that you have locally installed, you want to quickly try out a new package or upgrade without changing your system but have the option of rolling back safely, need to quickly install a database, want to try out a new shell and shell config but don't brick your system and have the option to roll back, etc.
Couldn't pretty much all of that be addressed using containers? Keeping your base system clean does sound wonderful, but eg distrobox containers sound more approachable - you're using all the same commands that you normally would, apps are in an environment much closer to what they probably expect. You can still roll back using snapshots, which you can configure to be automatically created on system updates. If you want an atomic rollback guarantee, and a strong reminder not to mess with the base system, you can use an immutable distro (talking about Linux, not macOS here). The one big advantage that I see from nix is reproducibility. But it's not clear how desirable that is for a desktop use case. You may actually want different software on different machines. Having an overview of all the changes you made to your system sounds cool, but I'm not sure it's worth the effort that comes with nix. I'm worried that after 8 months I'll decide it's too much hassle, like many commenters seem to do, and end up switching to a simpler system with dotfiles and containers, wishing I'd done that from the start.
If you like this, check out stacked tiling. It comes natively in COSMIC and I believe it can be configured in i3, Sway and Hyprland as well. It's basically tabs across windows, but thanks to tiling you have different regions of the screen with their own tab sets. I usually just split the screen vertically once, so I have a left and right region. Turns out so many workflows can be described as 'ingest information somewhere and apply it somewhere else', and this is just such a useful layout for this. Whenever I have something that requires sole attention, I just maximize that window.
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