WGConfig = "/etc/wireguard/pia.conf"
# Socks5 creates a socks5 proxy on your LAN, and all traffic would be routed via wireguard.
[Socks5]
BindAddress = 127.0.0.1:25344
This is great, previously I was just using every wireguard tunnel as a traditional interface and hosting a socks proxy on the network on the other end.
> Similar to how students who spend most of their time practicing what they are studying with actual exercises achieve higher grades
This is spot on.
> build a mental model of the code with every new line of code
This idea has been explored in depth in the Peter Naur's excellent paper, "Programming as theory building" [1] (also extensively discussed on HN [2]). If you haven't read it yet, I bet you will enjoy it a lot. :)
"Eliza" is a bit unusual for Zachtronics as it's not a programming/puzzle game but a visual novel. But it's excellent and I think it's one of their most under-appreciated games. It's well-written, well-acted, and very prescient. Highly recommended!
It's one of my favorite visual novels and is so underappreciated.
Maybe it's because (unlike others in the VN space) it totally eschews unusual settings, gimmicks, or flashy set pieces to sell itself... I only bought it because I liked the tidbits of story in Shenzhen and Infinifactory, by the same author. Every part of it is unbelievably strong though.
I tried to replay Eliza this past winter after having played it and loved it when it came out. But I couldn't get past the start of the game because not only is it so dark, BUT SO MUCH OF IT CAME TRUE!
Eliza is one of the only games that I enjoyed so much that I sent fan mail when it came out — it’s nothing that a standard Zachtronics game but it stands alone as an excellent visual novel.
The in-game phone apps that just show a looping pixel art city scene with haunting ambient music are mesmerizing, even moreso than the beautiful solitaire game.
What a great and timely question! :) I quit a week ago to take a year-long sabbatical.
> 1. What pushed you to do it?
The pursuit of curiosity, for the most part. That's what makes quitting a lot harder when you have a good job and nothing to complain about: you feel like you're making a huge mistake on a whim. Doubly so when you consider the state of the job market at this time.
That said, we don't live to work; we work to live. It's a lot of risk and uncertainty, but you should remember that while some unknown bad things can happen in the future, unknown good things can happen too! [1] When you own your time, you increase your luck surface considerably: you have more opportunities to travel, to wander, to play, to meet new people, to tinker, to discover.
So I've been thinking and reading about this a lot. The final push came from two books I read: "The Pathless Path" by Paul Millerd [2] and "The Inner Compass" by Lawrence Yeo [3]. I can't recommend them enough.
> 2. What will you be doing? (Even if nothing!)
I have a huge Steam backlog to beat... :) Besides that, I'll be studying computer science and maths. Programming language theory, compilers, and functional programming are particularly close to my heart.
> I've rarely seen a repo and a problem that claude can't chew through with the right prompt
> a skill/PEBKAC issue
But then I remember how Anthropic couldn't fix the flickering issue for many months. It just does not compute.
Is it that people working at Anthropic can't prompt and it's a "skill issue" too? I mean, the terminal does not flicker in a lot of other complex TUI apps that I use every day - Midnight Commander, Emacs, tmux, etc. These are open source, Claude could be prompted to "just do what Midnight Commander does". So what is it?
Because it proves that even the greatest prompt-engineers in the world are unable to vibe code their way out of a simple bug. The fact that this example is a small, annoying, random bug that is relatively harmless does not mean that the next bug won't be as harmless or even as apparent.
Opencode had the same flickering issue not too long ago and they fixed it by switching from ink to opentui if I am not mistaken. So a solution is possible and known. Antropic just doesn't seem to care.
OpenCode, and all these other AI consoles, all do terminal I/O in the dumbest way possible.
A good terminal program, like Emacs, uses escape sequences to create viewports, scroll text, etc. These sequences tell the terminal to do these things internally.
All the modern AI tools ignore these escape sequences (which they wouldn't even have to know if they used ncurses) and just do frame-by-frame animation. So when OpenCode wants to scroll text, first it sends the text to the screen, then it sends ^[[1;1H and sends the whole text again, minus the first line or so, adding a new line to the bottom. Then it sends ^[[1;1H again, and sends the whole text AGAIN, cutting another line from the top, and adding another new one to the bottom. As if the terminal was a graphics device and you had to draw each frame.
The flickering was probably due to sending ^[[2J to clear the screen before "drawing" each "frame."
I oversimplified, though. OpenCode sends hundreds and hundreds of cursor-positioning escape sequences per "frame" of "animation".
Even though it doesn't flicker anymore, "drawing frames" makes the scrolling noticeably slow and choppy if you run OpenCode (or any other terminal-based AI agent) on a different machine than the one your monitor is plugged into, even on a wired LAN.
No AI model can give a believable explanation of why these apps (or their TUI libraries) are written this way.
It's not just Google AI Studio, it's also Google proper. Just one search result page consumes gigabytes of RAM. How did this happen? I've switched to DDG and never looked back.
> Is this what getting old feels like? Hating everything the rest of society is racing to embrace?
I don’t think so. Some societies are racing to embrace mass surveillance and abuse of civil rights. Pointing this out and complaining about it is not “hate” and not reserved for old people only. :)
I think spreadsheets have been severely undervalued by software engineers and they're generally under-researched. It's definitely possible to use them in more non-obvious and interesting ways. E.g., see AmbSheets [1]
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