Ha, didn't expect to see a comment about Mullen on HN. Saw him live in Boston a few months ago. Very cool to see the C-Town boys blowing up in popularity.
Meditation teaches that your thoughts are uncontrolled expressions of your subconcious; as are your worries, your fears, your anxieties.
To meditate is not to stop thinking thoughts, but to observe them as they spontaneously appear, and - just as quickly - disappear. To recognize that you are not the thinker of your thoughts. To view them from a place of detachment and curious observation, instead of a place of investment and worry.
May I recommend an alternative to Eastern Meditation practices?
The alternative is Autogenic Training (AT), a method invented by Dr. Schultz a century ago. It is a well-tested scientific approach, and the outcomes are generally very positive, if not life-changing.
AT does not involve interpreting obscure texts written thousands of years ago in other languages and referring to ways of life that have long been forgotten.
AT does not require silent retreats or attending workshops and seminars at the end of which you are more confused than before. It is simple and just requires following the steps outlined by Schultz and his students.
I am surprised that it is not popular at all, but its strengths are also its weaknesses. Most people long for the esoteric and unexplained, while AT is clear, easy to understand and practice.
Like people refer to meditation and don't explain all the process involved in one of the traditions because there is a wealth of information available, I would much prefer to answer to specific questions on the practice instead of copying and pasting from Wikipedia, which I am doing now.
"The technique involves repetitions of a set of visualisations accompanied by vocal suggestions that induce a state of relaxation and is based on passive concentration of bodily perceptions like heaviness and warmth of limbs, which are facilitated by self-suggestions.Autogenic training is used to alleviate many stress-induced psychosomatic disorders"
The formulas are six: heaviness, warmth, heart beating regularly and strongly, calm breath, warm solar plexus, and cool forehead.
There's no vocal suggestion (the Wikipedia article is wrong in that regard), the formulas are repeated silently. It's a much more effective practice of the hocus-pocus that is often meditation of the Eastern tradition, especially the bastardized variety adopted in the West, and there are plenty of books and papers available on the results of scientific studies that measure the effect on soma and psyche of AT.
Release build of such a Godot-built tool is between 60-70 MB. Other than that, it seems fast enough & RAM-friendly enough for the usual simple use-cases. Game engines tend toward self-optimization over time.
IMO, traditional GUI frameworks in Rust (like Qt) are difficult for the same reason that game engines in Rust are difficult: cyclical references. A window might contain a group box which contains a text field and a button. All of these are (direct or indirect) children of the window, but all children also hold a reference to their parent. Qt's signal-slot mechanism would also be difficult to implement in Rust.
It's pretty clear to me that JavaScript is becoming the de facto standard for UI/UX programming, regardless of platform, and regardless of web vs. native targets. Even GNOME has JavaScript bindings. [0]
The problem is performance... requiring a web browser to draw a UI takes a LOT of CPU and memory, and not all devices have enough power to deliver a smooth experience across all potential workloads.
I worry that every year we keep increasing our processing requirements and bloat without good reason for it.
Why should every Windows release require a faster and faster CPU, and more and more RAM?
The recommended amount of memory for Windows 95 was 8 megabytes, and for Windows 11 it is 8 gigabytes. Why is this not horrifying?
My small Linux system with openbox GUI barely cracks 100MB memory usage in 2025.
What makes the browser slow and inefficient is the fact that it's not a UI framework. It's a system to display text and a couple of images on a 2D plane where every element depends on every other element.
Almost every single interaction and change requires the browser to recalculate the layout of the entire page and to redraw it. It's basically Microsoft Word, with nearly the same behaviors.
And there are no proper ways to prevent that behaviour. No lower and low level control over rendering. Awkward workarounds and hacks that browsers employ to try and minimize re-layouting and redrawing. Great rejoicing when introducing yet more hacks for basic things: https://developer.chrome.com/docs/css-ui/animate-to-height-a... etc.
In none of them text is primary and all other incidental?
> What UI frameworks don't do this?
In which UI framework actions like "set focus on an element" triggers a full page re-layout?
Also, in which UI framework there's even a discussion of "try to not trigger re-paint/re-flow"?
And yes, I know about immediate mode UI where the entire layout is re-calculated every frame. But then they can usually render thousands of elements at 60fps.
> In none of them text is primary and all other incidental?
This is a pretty outdated way of thinking. If we were only speaking about (old) HTML then maybe. But these days HTML and CSS are basically inseparable and go far beyond "text is primary".
> In which UI framework actions like "set focus on an element" triggers a full page re-layout?
I don't see why a browser would need to re-layout for just a focus change. Unless, of course, the CSS changes require a re-layout after the focus has changed (`:focus` selector).
Every UI framework can run into performance issues with layout and/or painting if they're complex enough (or poorly made). There is fundamentally very few differences between HTML+CSS and other UI frameworks.
> But these days HTML and CSS are basically inseparable and go far beyond "text is primary".
That "inseparable" is building on top of a bunch of legacy cruft, hacks and workarounds for a system that is stilm barely suitable to layout some simple text.
Just because CSS is there it doesn't make the browser a UI framework.
> I don't see why a browser would need to re-layout for just a focus change.
Indeed. No one does. And yet you'd be surprised: https://gist.github.com/paulirish/5d52fb081b3570c81e3a (note: unfortunately there's no up-to-date list as some of these issues are fixed in all or some engines, and a bunch of other gotchas are introduced).
> There is fundamentally very few differences between HTML+CSS and other UI frameworks.
Lol. There's almost no other UI framework that struggles with as many trivial performance issues as HTML + CSS [1]. No other UI framework has so many gotchas and issues with even the simplest layouts and animations. No other UI framework has warnings of "you have 800 nodes, it's too big, and will cause issues". No other UI framework has so few ways of telling the framework "delay painting" or "I will take over painting" or "do these paints in batches" or...
> What makes a browser so much more inefficient vs. other UI frameworks?
The fact that each app carries their own copy of the browser engine.
Teams, Chrome, Steam - that's at least three Chromium engine embeds that all take up hundreds of megabytes each. Not to mention Steam is in the background and has no windows visible, and yet it has the Chromium helper processes gobbling up RAM. WTF is this shit.
Life used to be easier in the Windows 98 days with OCX, you just dragged a webview in the VB6 application designer and that was it, and IIRC it was even possible to embed Firefox in the same way for a while...
> The fact that each app carries their own copy of the browser engine.
This has nothing to do with the browser itself. Ideally everything would use the same browser instead of shipping their own. On Windows it's already possible with WebView2 but developers need to choose to go that route. Teams should already be using it.
> Why should every Windows release require a faster and faster CPU, and more and more RAM?
I don't know. But does it? It doesn't seem like you verified that yourself - you're comparing stated recommended specs of Windows to actual usage of Linux.
Have you used other ones? Not a dig, I've primarily used HTML/CSS for UIs and have been playing around with Compose recently and haven't made up my mind what I like more.
GNOME has its own interpreter, kinda how React Native does it for mobile. But performance all boils down to the layout engine. Most native UI components take shortcuts with text which is the most difficult thing to render. And the widget tree is simpler.
And there’s the whole inspector in web browser, meaning that the layout is not done once and forget. There’s various sub components still present for whatever features. Great in the browser, not great for standalone apps.
Same thing with KDE Plasma and its UIs being written in QML, which allows better separation of business logic (written in C++) and graphical interface (QML Javascript).
Currently, I'm using VS Code with Vim keybindings (through the Neovim plugin). My workflow (C/C++/Rust) involves multiple panes open, using the lldb debugger, goto/peek definitions, CMake integration w/ active target compilation on Ctrl+Shift+B, clang format on save, LLM-powered tab-autocomplete, and IntelliSense powered by `compile_commands.json`.
Is switching to Helix worth it? Can I get more-or-less equivalent functionality with Helix?
I don't think Helix can currently match the C++ experience you get with VS Code.
* Debugging is rough. There's experimental DAP support, but it isn't ready to be used. I was able to set breakpoints and step through the code, but the UI for exploring variables / state while paused felt missing or was unintuitive enough that I couldn't figure it out. I use CLion for debugging.
* Goto definition works with clangd as long as your CMake setup outputs compile_commands.json, which you already do.
* Renaming symbols (variables / functions) via clangd works fine.
* Intellisense is decent, but I had to tweak clangd settings. By default, it would stop returning results after scanning a certain number of symbols, so some valid functions just didn't show up. I was using Helix for a few days before realizing this problem, it isn't obvious that you are getting an artificially constrained filtered view of your symbols via default clangd. Maybe this is a distro packaging issue though?
* The order of intellisense completions is not great. CLion is smart about surfacing relevant suggestions first. In Helix + clangd, I often get obscure symbols that obviously have nothing to do with my project or context. It's not the worst thing, but it is mildly annoying and noticeable.
* "go to error" doesn't surface errors in files that aren't open. In Helix, space D brings up workspace diagnostics, but it only shows errors for compilation units already open. This appears to be a clangd issue, as space D in other languages will show all project errors. CLion does not suffer from this problem.
* I think you can get LLM suggestions via an LSP, but I've not tried personally. Assuming it's true that you can get LLM suggestions, it's not clear to me that you can run two LSP's on the same file, so it might be a choice between clangd and an LLM LSP? Not sure.
* No integrated build support. You'll probably end up building from a terminal. I use Wezterm with a custom lua script that is invoked on a hotkey. I put a lot of thought into the build UX, and what I've done is both extremely hacky and still not good enough.
Helix is not flexible, it's uncompromising. I like it, but I think it's hard to beat CLion or vscode for C++ development.
I'd say right now, if you have a good setup already, stick with what you have.
The debugger in helix was extremely barebones last I tried, LLM integration can only be made available through custom language servers since they do not support plugins yet.
If you are interested in making a move to a terminal editor I would instead look to neovim until helix matures a bit more
The sad part is that these days Foucault is on the same tier as Chomsky in regards to their quality as scholars - and Foucault is a pseudoscientific charlatan grifter.
Completely agree. Fully online friendships are hollow simulacrums of the real thing, like most fully online things compared to their offline counterparts. That's not to say there isn't real connection or real value there, just that they are a supplement to - and not a replacement for - the 'real thing'.
Example: long-distance relationships vs. in-person. My wife and I started off as long distance before moving to the same city together. Obviously we established a very real relationship digitally, but it was a means to an end, and not an end in itself, and the real-world date nights and so on are so much deeper and richer than Facetime calls.
I recently watched a debate where Curtis Yarvin argued that democracy is a mistake and the USA should be ruled by, quite literally, a CEO dictator [0].
My understanding is that he has the ear of JD Vance and other high-ranking Republicans. This terrifies me. The country I grew up in & love is dead if these philosophies take root.
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