New episodes

Now syndicated on podcast app frontends to RSS near you!

Also on my the “muhlanguages” account on the Youtube™ internet website.

• 19 Our “AI” is totally fine according to Bostrom’s Superintelligence, 2014 (video)
• 20 Secret way to test your FREAKING VIBE CODE or it will never work ever (video)
• 21 We’re all going to die by AI unless this one thing happens: stop AI with this one weird trick (video)

Old episodes

See the Polyglot Podcast page.

Send me money with ko-fi.

Try it

• Let me book that for you: Open a book in the Book Simulator, and use the share button to get the link.

• Example: let me book this post for you.

How it works

Claude Fable 5.1 MAX made it, I don’t know how it works.

Support

Support the AI bill at ko-fi.com/truex.

Subread is a suite of tools that port forced alignment to a variety of platforms. It is 100% free when used locally, although it is possible to do conversions with my cloud for a fee. It is 100% self-hostable free software. BUY NOW!

Promo Video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRz7UQZwe-Q

Try it on the web

• subread.space: webpage to do the conversions
• honjimaku.com: website to download or upload srt files for Japanese audiobooks
• kikiyomi: Try reading your audiobook/srt combo on the web

Projects

• subread.space: Read an .srt one line at a time with the space bar. Works with Yomitan, furigana, and pitch accent markup.
• subplz-web: subread.space source
• subread-android: subread.space android app (local and cloud conversions are possible)
• subread-extension: Extension to use subread on youtube for audiobooks published there.
• subread-overlay: Android app to show the subtitles as an overlay on the phone. Can be used with the dictionary for a very nice AJATT experience.
• subread-dictionary: Yomitan pop-up dictionary standalone android app. Works really good with the overlay, but can be used anywhere!
• subread.koplugin: KOReader plugin that does live highlighting of the book while you listen to it in another app like Voice, VLC, or MPV.
• subrep-android: Live whisper captions. Better than the ones that come with android.
• desktop-subtitle-replay: Whisper on your computer, and broadcast them to your friends. Useful for online language classrooms or bilingual exchanges.
• honjimaku: Book subtitles database for japanese
• Hoshi-Reader-Android: Fork of hoshi reader that can do the conversion inside hoshi reader. Hopefully gets merged.
• chimahon: Fork with a readalong branch for the Mihon immersion reader.
• dickt.store: Bring-your-own-key Yomitan dictionary converter.
• vibeslop-dickt: Make your own Yomitan dictionary in a few minutes.

Why

Extremely useful for learning languages by reading books with the audiobook.

Support

Support the work at ko-fi.com/truex.

sbm is a bookmark manager, originally a dmenu script. It is now a multiplatform, cloud synced bookmark manager with support for teams.

Promo video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKmYWTCkW7c

Try it on the web

• sbmsync.com

Projects

• sbm multiplatform computer application
• sbm-android android app
• sbm-extension firefox and chrome extensions
• sbm-sync the sync server
• sbm-suckless the original POSIX shell script, suckless edition (no vibecode)

How it works

Fuzzy search bookmarks and quickly add/copy/view bookmarks. Now with syncing through the browser and everything.

Why

This tool gives you the power to spam links to your friends to the point that it annoys them.

Like many others, I find search engines to be pretty tedious to use. Searching my own bookmarks is much better. With sbm you can be like me and have BASED links at your fingertips.

Support

Support the work at ko-fi.com/truex.

Get it

By the time you read this it will probably be on F-Droid and the Google Play store.

Projects

• rebind: Core app for rebinding and for the hardware hacks.
• assistkey: Key remapper for the Viwoods AiPaper Reader: AI key, volume keys, and Power.
• awesome-rebind: Similar page to this one, but AWESOME!?
• ink-recents: An eink recent apps slider that is way nicer than the one viwoods installs.
• ink-dim: Standalone app to do the dimming hack. Requires shizuku or live ADB
• ink-update: App to update these apps. Will be obsolete when F-Droid and Google Play are working.

Promo video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRZi0YgoCJ0

How it works

Uses a bunch of hacks to get as much access to the buttons as possible. Most are possible on stock viwoods firmware, although the extra dim light feature does require the shizuku hack.

Support

Support the work at ko-fi.com/truex.

Claude INITIALIZER

INITIALIZES a new git project in the directory if there isn’t one already,
various files for claude in the directory to vibe code really hard,
and hacks git to not track them.

The bare minimum necessary of course.

CLAUDE.md

This is the prompt claude will use in your project. Includes the prompt
I had it generate, you can put anything you want in here.

exclude (file)

Appends this to the git exclusions to not track the claude-related files

.mcp.json

The mcp servers you will use. There are a million already added by the AI if you want to just use it as-ise.

llms-full.txt

Tells claude about the LLMs in .mcp.jsonquire”cmp.utils.feedkeys”.run(2)
,

regular use

claude-init ; claude init

alias

ci claude init.
cli try to continue, otherwise initialize in the directory.

alias ci='claude-init ; claude init'
alias cli='f(){ mkdir -p "$1" ; cd ${1:-.} ; claude-init ; claude init }; claude --continue || f'

TODO

• Automatically remove whitespace and base64 encode the CLAUDE.md from

the readable version to save tokens.

Why this exists

So my friends can send me encrypted mail, bottom post, and send/apply
patches.

> “I installed neomutt but I haven’t figured it out”

Neomutt defaults have legacy lock-in issues.

Barebones neomutt config

Features

• optional PGP encryption/signing/both

• Automatic PGP decryption

• hjkl movement: navigate

• n/p movement: read+page mails like in the GNUs client

• open HTML mail in the $BROWSER with a bind

• edit mail in the $EDITOR

• Can setup multiple mailboxes (just source more files like me-TEMPLATE)

• arcane-config-TEMPLATE to keep user-specific config separate

• Lots of colors

• A million default setting changes that don’t do much

• signature

Subjective User Experience

Like this

Install

• clone to ~/.config/neomutt

• install neomutt

• install isync and sendmail for IMAP and SMTP

• install notmuch to search your mails

• install gpg (optional)

• Edit and rename the TEMPLATE files

• Edit the sources at the top of the neomuttrc to fit your needs

Good alias to do background mail stuff when opening the client

TODO

• Automatic WKD for automatic PGP encryption without manually adding keys

This was merely a lisp thing to do because the parentheses clearly define selection to send. That’s no longer an issue, the LLM can filter out the garbage in a way that a GOFAI symbolic rule-based pattern matcher can’t.

The command line program likes to use diffs to edit files, and that is reasonable, but vastly inferior to REPL Driven Development from a scratch file. Below are some of my notes from 2019 for more context on using the lisp REPL. With RDD, you will never type something directly into a REPL again. “Never type into the REPL”.

It’s nice using grep to lookup some code I might have written 5 years ago that would have been ephemeral and lost at the REPL.

REPL driven development

Stuard Halloway’s 2017 talk at Chicago Clojure:

vimeo
slide notes

• DON’T type into the repl. Type into a file that you can search later.

• Use repl-interaction commands (like insert-in-repl, minibuffer, etc.).

• Have a plan to avoid wasting time (since repls are fun).

• Know all the jump-to-documentation kinds of commands. Searching for a regex,
  jumping to the source of a thing, etc.

• Analysing data carefully at the repl (don’t just stare at stacktraces).

• Debugging at O(log n)

• Custom REPLs (especially debuggers/inspectors with breakpoints, etc.)

• Do use the debugger.

MOST important keystrokes

• Execute a thing in the minibuffer

• Tracing functions (or a short function to execute in the minibuffer like =trace=)

• Sending to repl from behind the point

• Sending to repl from in front of the point

• Sending the whole top-level expression at point to the repl

• Jump to the minibuffer (not for typing! just to see big output)

• A keystroke to jump back to the source file (or something like windmove)

• all the documentation commands (search, jump to source, doc-at-point, etc.)

• Execute something and replace it with the output/write the output as

a comment in the scratch buffer.

A friend sent me a neomutt configuration which was thousands of lines of LLM code, using libraries where even the READMEs are written by LLMs. Surprisingly, it worked pretty good. Human being were never any good at writing VimScript anyway. Of course, to make even tiny edits, due to the extreme unnecessary complexity brought in by the LLM, requires the use of another LLM. Blargh!

The solution: actually use a decent, simple init written by a human, and put the rest in the “optional” slop folder. Problem solved!

Install

Run nvim and do,:PlugInstall. BAM! Future travellers: you should do :PlugUpdate.

FEATURES

• Structural editing

• Global leader is Spacebar. Spacevim!

• Local leader is comma.

• Spellcheck and shellcheck keybindings.

• (sane) Completion. See equwal’s tag-gen project.

• Which-key. Learn vim!

• Goyo (For writing words. Automatically turns on when editing neomutt buffers)

• <++> templating (see my <++> tmpl project)

• Ask what you meant using fzf when you try try to open a file that doesn’t exist.

• Save your place in the buffer for later.

• mode line

• Slightly modified vim defaults (very slightly). See the only file for details.

NON-FEATURES

• Not crazy modifications to vim defaults

• Only one file (everything else in “slop” folder)

• No major changes to the packages used

• No window management. Use a terminal multiplexer.

• No claude code. Same.

Source your own config at the bottom of the init.lua and work from these sane defaults.

FAQ: Frequent Answers to Questions

“Source your own config at the bottom of the init.lua and work from these sane defaults”

Then, make changes to the init.lua and send a pull request.

You don’t need claude in your vim

ARGH. Just use dvtm/mtm/abduco or your window manager to deal with it. None of the claude vim projects are smart enough to send parts of buffers to the claude like slime does for lisp. Those claude vim packages are just glorified terminals using vim as a (very bad) multiplexer.

Plugged *is* better than Lazy

Lazy is written by AI. The point of this is to not be written by
AI. Complex shit breaks!

Here is your prompt, SIR:

start adding individual feature s one by one which only take up 1-10 lines. Don't import all the config, just the most basic config. For individual lines, write what it does and ask to add it in. For packages, read the github pages and their default configuration to minimize the edits needed. Opt for the most default configuration if possible.

Don’t add hundreds of lines of AI slop to my config.