Voice prompting vs typing

`2:07:15`

One of the things was to treat the... lag of human input as an opportunity to preload. So-- Hmm... there's five questions you answer when- Yeah... you set up an Omarchy machine. So it's doing stuff in the background. We're doing stuff in the background. And that was one of the things I didn't even consider, which is, I mean, the oldest trick in the book. All sorts of video games for a long time have done this, where you let the player interact with something, and then you do preloading and so forth in the background. So it's an age-old technique, but I just hadn't thought about it for an installer. I thought, first you ask the user some questions about their password and their username and their time zone and so forth, and then you do the work, when, in fact, you could preload that. Now, the other things were just a bunch of other tweaks to how the installer itself was doing things in a certain order. Some of them was also just shrinking it. The last version of Omarchy was 7.5 gigabytes, and a lot of the time we're down to now is literally decompressing compressed package files. That's the bulk of what is on the ISO, and that's the bulk of the install time. So by shrinking it down to, I think we're at 5.85 gigabytes now, a pretty chunky reduction, it almost literally translated one-to-one, and I did some really interesting things there.

So Omarchy uses the JetBrains font, which is an awesome font, beautiful font, and actually a font I didn't like at first glance, but then it was the only font I could get to look perfect in Mitchell Hashimoto's Ghostty. Ghostty, for whatever reason, did not wanna render my beloved Bitstream Vera Sans just the way I was used to it. Mm-hmm. But it rendered this JetBrains font perfectly, so I switched over. But it... The standard package for JetBrains font on Arch is 200 megabytes because it includes all these variations and all these subtypes and whatever. And I realized, like, we're not using any of that. We're using the monospace version in this one Nerd, uh- Yep... font patched edition. Do you know how big that is? I think it's 16 megabytes. Hmm. So I simply just came up with a new package, the slim version- Mm-hmm... of the JetBrains package. Nice. And there, right there, I saved 180 megabytes. I just went through and did that a bunch of times. We did that with the NVIDIA drivers too. So the NVIDIA drivers, when they came straight off the, I think the Arch repo, were not compressed with the most extreme form of compression, which I think called ZSTD, which is a really slow form of compression. It's slow to create the archive, but if you're building a package- Hmm... you have all the time in the world if that means you can then shrink the ISO. So on just the two NVIDIA packages, I think we saved 200 megabytes. Mm-hmm.

So what I loved about this was I imagined myself being a car designer at McLaren. So McLaren makes some of the lightest super sports cars in the world right now, and they are absolutely obsessed with shaving every damn last gram off their cars. That's why even a new 750S McLaren is just way lighter than the competition. They use a carbon fiber monocoque, and that helps them over like Ferrari, for example, that's uses aluminum. But they also just have this obsession with weight, and I would see this interview with the McLaren folks talking to some journalist just going over, "Yeah, we saved, uh-... 370 grams- Yeah... off that one." And I just went, "Wait, what? There's someone on a car that weighs maybe 1,040 kilos or 1,380 or something. They're s- They're worrying about 370 grams?" Yeah. What obsessed maniacs. Hmm. I love them. Yeah. I want that in my life. I want a McLaren-... just for that reason. So I thought in that moment as I was shaving individual megabytes off the packages, man, I'm kinda like a McLaren car developer here, even though- Yeah... I mean, we haven't even completed that work. The package could shrink even more. But this is actually this other conflict that we've had with Omarchy and the traditional Linux community is bloat. Mm-hmm. This idea that it's actually not kosher in certain circles to ship with pre-installed software because who are you to make decisions about what programs people should use? And I'm like, "Dude, it's in the fucking name.

It's called Omarchy because the Oma part is short for omakase, which literally means chef's choice. I'm the chef. I'm making the choices, and this is the collection of applications I think is awesome," which by the way has a video editor. It ships with OBS- Mm-hmm... to do your recording. It's just in there. Yeah. OBS is pre-installed. Nice. Kdenlive is a video editor, timeline editor, which is great. I edit all my videos with that. And then I made my own clip editor. You talked about the thing with syncing up. Yeah. I had this thing with clips, so I would do a podcast or whatever. I need a clip for X. Mm-hmm. And it's kind of a hassle to use Kdenlive or other- Mm-hmm... timeline editors, so I made Omacut. Mm-hmm. Omacut is included too. Omacut, cool. It's just for making clips, and you can drive the whole thing with keyboard. So you can go to just the right time mark- Mm-hmm... and then you can hit Control + Space. Hmm. It moves the clip line to that line. Then you go to- Nice... the end of the clip, and you hit Alt + Space, and it moves the end line. Nice. And then you hit Control + S, and it saves. Nice. I can make clips so damn fast now with Omacut. It's amazing. But it has all the software on it. It has Neovim on it. It has Herder on it. It has Tmux. It has a terminal. It has a bunch of themes. It has a bunch of background images, the best ones I could pick out. That takes up some space.

It should because this is not supposed to be this just barren landscape where you have to reconstruct everything. Mm-hmm. This is supposed to be a productive system the minute you unpack it. What is it built in? So it's actually mostly built in Bash for the Linux configuration part. Right. Bash is a great language for that. It is made for that really, for system administration. It also has its limitations. You should not build everything in Bash

`2:13:23`

Oh, amazing. Except for one thing, and I have to smack the agents over the back of the head every single time I catch it, and remind it to look at the agent's MD file, because I will have an instruction in there not to make early exits. The agents love to have preconditions instead of fully expanded conditionals. I like something that says, "If this, then do that." Agents like to have precondition or exit, another precondition or exit. And then it falls down to the final thing it actually wants to do. I hate that style. So except for that, it's gotten shockingly, dramatically, awesomely good, to the point where when we talked last time, we talked about how I would ask the agent for a Bash thing, and then I would type it in myself, and I kinda wouldn't remember. And then I took the effort to make sure that all that competence wasn't draining out of my fingers, so I actually learned how to write Bash myself, and now I'm not writing any Bash myself. I have not written any Bash myself for probably a couple months, because the agents have just gotten so good, that if you give them the few pointers on style, and occasionally put pushback on complexity... This is... I tweeted about this a couple of days ago. It blows my mind how often an agent can do something, say it's done, have the work reviewed by another agent-... they say it's done, and then I go like, "Eh, looks a little too complicated for me." And then it'll go like, "Oh, yeah, you're right. You're right.

I totally overcomplicated this," and it'll cut it in half. I'm like, "Couldn't it just do this, like, from the outset?" And then someone else reminded me, humans are the same way. If you work on something and someone else reviews it and they just are like, "Eh, it looks a little complicated," quite often you're able to go like, "Ah, you're right."

`2:15:17`

When I build something like Omarchy, I, I do look at the code. I look at the shape. And I look at the proportions. Like, I don't have to chisel everything myself anymore. This is, again, when I'm flattering myself for... Not one moment I'm a McLaren audio, uh auto engineer, and the next moment I'm a da Vinci, working with his whole studio of students-... who are doing all the chiseling on the, the fine marble, right? And he goes like, "Ah, no, the proportions are not quite right." That's how it feels working with agents now. That I can give feedback like an editor. That, do you know what? I'm not gonna write everything myself, but I can tell you when the argument doesn't land. I can tell you when the shape isn't proportional to the problem, or when it just feels like it's too complicated. And shockingly often, it just works. It's like the early days, where the jokes was, "Don't make mistakes." I don't think you have to tell the agents that anymore, because now the harnesses are so good, they run automated testing. They get that feedback. But you actually do have to tell them, "Make it simpler."

`2:16:23`

I type the whole thing. I actually, in Omarchy's built-in Voxtype-... Audio transcription, and it's actually really good. I just find that I don't think that way, and it surprised myself that I don't like to talk to the computer. Uh, I like when I'm in the car, but when I'm in front of the keyboard, I just wanna type. I also just love typing. Are you using the voice?

`2:18:52`

... I haven't, yeah, I haven't used it that, and maybe that's how I'm using it wrong. I try to just type or speak two sentences, and then I get a little frustrated that I could've typed that just as fast maybe. But I have not tried this whole thing of just talking continuously for 20 minutes.

`2:19:12`

Yeah. No, I could see it. I think because the reason I've been, I've been trying to do it for things like replying to emails, and it got to a point where I thought it could help. And it sort of did, but then it would make a small mistake, and I'd have to correct the mistake. But if you're doing stream of conscious to an LLM who doesn't care about all this other stuff anyway-... that probably works way better.

`2:20:22`

Correct. Then I can't use it for dictating an email.

`2:20:43`

You gotta vibe code this into an app that does all of this such that-... it just works.

`2:20:59`

It seems like you've gotten much closer to the best of what's possible by putting all these things together.