@arthurian@defcon.social

Ben Arthur Looper @arthurian@defcon.social

· 3mo ago

Good morrow Fediverse, My name is Ben Looper, I'm a software engineer of five years currently living in Houston, TX...but not for much longer! My wife and I are moving up to Calgary, AB, and I'm taking the opportunity to make some positive changes in my life, one of the first being to write more. I have a few projects that my ADHD brain bounces between, and I want to begin fearlessly talking about them here, rather than verbal vomiting about them to whatever poor soul asks me about them. Maybe (hopefully) these smaller updates will cascade into longer, more detailed pieces, but for now I'll be very happy to just share bits and bites, and to engage with others on stuff they're working on. That last point specifically is what I'm most excited for - I don't have many people in my life that I can full-blown nerd out about this stuff with, and I really hope that I can find a community here to do that with. Thanks, and happy hacking 📎 #Introduction #NewHere #Homelab #SelfHosting #NixOS #Sysadmin

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Ben Arthur Looper @arthurian@defcon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@chewie@mammut.gogreenit.net I’m beginning to see that and I’m loving it

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Ben Arthur Looper @arthurian@defcon.social

· 3mo ago

Replying to

@waffles@masto.yttrx.com Man, I'm just excited to talk to real human beings and not Claude. Cheers!

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Ben Arthur Looper @arthurian@defcon.social

· 2mo ago

Replying to

There's not a lot of utility that the Micro provides over simply using an app like Herdr to manage sessions. I think the real step forward for a device like this would be to detach it from the host, and to make it first-and-foremost a network client that agents talk to and receive input from. This has the benefit of being provider-agnostic, in that any agent with the proper instructions can communicate with the client from anywhere (as long as it's reachable). Most crucially (for my #cyberdeck folks) - this would also keep the agent communication layer agnostic to the underlying hardware. The WAY that the agent communicates with a client is portable and never changes, but the implementation details on that client may vary depending on the capabilities of the hardware. The interesting thing about the Codex Micro isn't that it does something Herdr can't, but that it's attempting to make agent interaction more ergonomic. We can easily solve half of that problem by making it easier for agents to communicate with our hardware. From there, it's just about finding the right hardware in the right form factor, and duct-taping / gorilla glueing it on top.

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Ben Arthur Looper @arthurian@defcon.social

· 3mo ago

Megacat - imagining a different way of interacting with computers

This is the first in a series of posts describing my on-going bizarre adventure into making a more powerful UX for interacting with computers.

I wanted to start this series with a short walk-through of a recent weekend project that I did, in which I attempted to hack an e-waste Yealink office phone so that I could run a webserver on it for agents to talk to me through - very fun stuff.

But every time I worked on writing that walkthrough, I felt that so much context was missing.
Added to that, I've been meaning to document all of this, so I thought it best I start with at least a high-level description of the project.

I'll be tagging these as #megacat, because that's the funny name that I've given this project. An amalgamation of "megaman" (from the game series Megaman Battle Network) and....cat (I love cats, we have four of them), the goal of megacat is to experiment with redefining the way that I interact with the virtual world, to make it more ergonomic, natural, and fun while still preserving the productivity I have with a keyboard/mouse/monitor.

My goal with this project is not to assert that there is anything *wrong* with our traditional modes of input/output, but simply to imagine what an alternative might look like and to try to pursue it.
So much of my work is constraint driven: what won't work, why not to build something....
This project is one of my attempts to cultivate my own vision of technology and the way we use it.

The first real artifact from megacat is the titular megacat dotfiles repo:
https://github.com/BenLooper/megacat
I now run this flake on every machine that I use and am absolutely in love with it.

My aim was to create a source controlled working environment that I could use on *any* machine to have an identical work surface no matter where I was. I'll dive into it more in a later post, but the main driver here is the Nix package manager and home manager, a Nix tool for managing home directories.

Prominent among the tools and configurations that the megacat flake allows me to easily take from place to place is my Neovim config, kathleen (named after my wife):
https://github.com/BenLooper/Neovim-Configs/tree/kathleen
Coming from VSCode and other MS tools, Neovim was a big adjustment at first, but I can't imagine living without this tool now.

This configuration is based on the series Neovim from Scratch by MrJakob on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1gyYttzxcI&list=PLy68GuC77sURrnMNi2XR1h58m674KOvLG
If you're at all interested in Neovim, I can't recommend this series enough. After a few working sessions following along with his videos, you'll have a fully functional editor in your terminal, and you will absolutely understand how Neovim works and will be able to confidently continue to configure it yourself. Massive, massive shoutout to you @mrjakob@chaos.social (if you're still there!).

So there's some context - I'm experimenting with alternative ways of interacting with the virtual world. There's a ton more to get into, a handful of other things that I've messed around with (and that I think this crowd especially will get a kick out of), and we haven't even touched on AI or agents yet.

Thanks for reading! I'll be trying to keep a regular 1-3 day cadence on these posts, see you on the next one.
#megacat #cyberdeck #nix #neovim #dotfiles

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