Brent

Brent

17
Apr

The Death of Learning

I've been thinking more about vibe coding lately and getting pissed about the whole concept. I think there's something deeply wrong with the mindset behind "prompt, don't read the code, don't think about it." I have written in the past about how artificial intelligence is a tool that accelerates the worst impulses of capitalism, and vibe coding is the latest iteration on what is possibly the one I hate the most: sacrificing understanding for efficiency.

Here's the thing. I like learning. I know it's very east coast liberal arts elitist of me but I

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4 min read
16
Apr

Using lazy.nvim in VSCode on Windows

I've been using VSCode Neovim for a while, but had been irritated at the tradeoff of access to the VSCode ecosystem at the cost of losing my once-heavily curated .vimrc setup. Turns out you don't have to live that way!

A lot of doing dev work on Windows feels like making a Rube Goldberg machine to make it behave more like Linux, and this is not particularly different, but I do wish I'd moved faster to replicate my preferred IDE setup in VSCode. You really can have your cake and eat it too, sort of. Some

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2 min read
15
Apr

Please Don't Call It A Metroidbrainia

I, like a lot of dorks with similar tastes, have been playing Blue Prince. It's a really well-designed mix of two types of games I love: Gone Home-style "walk around and find environmental clues" and deckbuilding. The cool conceit is that you're building a house, rather than a traditional deck of cards: every time you open a door, you're given a randomized pool of rooms to pick from, with the goal of finding the mysterious 46th room in a house you inherited from your uncle.

Blue Prince is fun, cool, and a clever mix of

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1 min read
12
Apr

Setting Up A Plex Server With Hardware Transcoding on a Synology DS423+

For the sake of full disclosure, I started writing this guide with the intention of making a clearer version of the NASCompare setup guide, but over the course of a few days of work discovered that guide didn't work at all and ended up pretty much directly following the instructions from Dr. Frankenstein's guide, which is thorough and probably does a better job of covering all your bases than this will. I put enough effort into writing this that I figured I'd publish it anyway but if you get lost or need more info Dr. Frankenstein's

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4 min read
11
Apr

We Should Still Dream Of The Stars

We've re-entered the semi-annual cycle of trend pieces about Silicon Valley freaks trying to make their own city - this time, with Esmeralda, a planned walkable small town for "creative, high-agency people". Sidebar here that I really do not like the term "high-agency". I assume this is manager speak for rich people since as far as I can tell the primary driver of how much agency you have in America is how much money you have. Agency is not a property that is intrinsically available in greater or lesser quantities based on the type of person

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3 min read