Things I Learned - 10 May 2026
This week, I learned: I’m experimenting with Tauon MusicBox as an alternative to VLC as a music player. Update: 01 Jun 2026. I switched back to VLC. Tauon Music Box is glitch. It stops songs mid-way and doesn’t play automatically when launched. xz is pretty slow by default. xz -T0 uses all available threads and speeds it up ~3X. Enabling “Performance mode” (over a power-saver mode) produces a further speed-up of ~2X for me. For a 200MB file, that reduces the time from ~1 minute to 10 seconds. Notes from Simon Willison’s notes from the Claude Code event: “Design for the next model”. Build things that don’t quite work today on the assumption that they’ll start working with a model upgrade in the future. “The advisor strategy”. Instead of using a smarter model to plan, use smaller models to ask Opus for advice-on-demand. Dreaming looks really interesting. You can run a task over night which examines previous sessions and creates new memories. A routine is a saved Claude Code configuration: a prompt, one or more repositories, and a set of connectors, packaged once and run automatically. Routines execute on Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure, so they keep working when your laptop is closed. Overheard: “VCs say, ‘OpenAI wants to get into commerce, so why are you getting into commerce?’ A few weeks later, ‘OpenAI no longer wants to get into commerce, so why are you?” Delightful discovery of the day: Super + Shift + Arrow keys to move windows between monitors on Ubuntu. television is a fast, portable fuzzy finder. Like fzf but faster, useful for files, text, git repos, docker images, etc. I added approvals_reviewer = "auto_review" to my ~/.codex/config.toml. This enables auto review which uses an LLM to figure out whether to ask a human to approve or not. It’s a lot less intrusive than asking every time. Not perfectly safe, though. Copilot supports a /chronicle command that suggest tips and improvements when using Copilot. It’s like /insights on Claude Code and Carbonyl is a CLI Chromium browser. Sort of like Lynx, but supports audio/video, JavaScript, even WASM, etc. This was the author’s first Rust project. I tried Zed as an alternative to VS Code. It’s fast and lightweight, but lacks the ecosystem of VS Code. Plugins are harder to build and Markdown support is weak. I would use it on a flight to save power, not otherwise. This is similar to others’ experience. ChatGPT UPDATE 05 Jun 2026. It DOES use some battery power - more than I’d like. I am uninstalling it. LocalSend is a pretty quick way to share files between phone and laptop even if you don’t have a network - if you connect the laptop to the phone hotspot. GNOME Network Displays works pretty well if you want to screencast your screen to a network display - e.g. a Smart TV with Miracast or Chromecast support. I’m evaluating rtk - a CLI proxy to reduce tokens. For example rtk ls or rtk git status shows agent-friendly compact output. I just added one like to my AGENTS.md: “Always prefix shell commands with rtk. Examples: rtk git status, rtk pytest -q, etc.” instead of using rtk init -g. I am testing it out, so I don’t know the impact, but it seems harmless. (Based on 2 days’ usage, across 216 commands, it saved ~50% of 37K tokens. Not much, but harmless.) The emerging convention to mark a section of HTML / Markdown as AI generated content is to wrap it in: <section ai-disclosure="ai-generated" data-ai-model="claude-sonnet-4.6" data-ai-provider="Anthropic"> (W3C AI Content Disclosure Community Group).
