Epiphany21's comments

There are countercultures aplenty, but many employ strict gatekeeping measures to exclude anyone they find unsavory for whatever reason. So if you see people refusing to throw you pearls, it may be pertinent to ask yourself "Am I the swine here?".

Case in point, it's time to log back out of HN and ignore it for another few months.

Here's an example of "shitposter" being used in early 2005. The posts won't load for me but the dates and titles are visible. I can personally recall earlier instances from other archvies dating all the way back to 2001, but I can't find those anymore.

https://www.usenetarchives.com/index.php?s=shitpost&t=0&p=1

Solar panels are less bad for the environment in regions where they'll operate efficiently for all or most of their projected lifespan. The manufacturing process is worse up front, but the idea is that this will be offset over time as the device harvests energy from the sun without creating any additional major pollution.

The trouble is that solar panels in lots of areas are vulnerable to weathering, accidents, theft and sometimes vandalism. The ones I've seen are just not very durable. I drive by a field full of them frequently and a couple times a year I see workers replacing a panel or two. I've been told they're supposed to last for a minimum of 15 years.

>Generations have debated the delegation of kitchen duties, often touching on class, race, and especially gender. Most frequently, women have taken on home cooking, which often means hard work for little or no pay.

The idea that men only started cooking at home less than a century ago is dumb. The idea that most people the world over didn't have loving family units even in prehistory is especially asinine. Also, anyone who expects to be paid for cooking their own food at home is living in their own little bourgeoisie bubble. That's ridiculous. I hope this satire.

Money talks, talk walks.

As an aside, I have no direct proof but I'm convinced that Twitter is massively overvalued. The board could've just been fishing for a higher offer.

Call and find out.

That's one way to do it but it helps to think in terms of cursive, or people's sloppy handwriting where the letters are often connected by at least one stroke so that the tip of the pen doesn't need to be lifted from the paper.

There are also multiple ways to write a given character. For example, some people put a line through the number 7 for easier readability, and so it isn't confused with 1. Something similar can be done with 0 so it isn't mistaken for a 6 or capital O.

The real interesting characters are ones like number 4, where it can be square or triangular. However, to write the square version quickly you have to lift the pen. To write the triangular version you only need to put the pen to paper once.

These are just some common examples I see in use day to day. I'm sure there are many more optimizations being employed, especially in languages other than English where the characters can be much more complex.

Your view of computers seems overly simplistic. The "adding machine" is just one component in a larger series of abstractions that enable functionality the adding machine is normally too inflexible to perform.

This is because math is a man-made thinking tool, similar to language. It works because we all agree to follow the rules of it, not because those rules are set in stone. The universe operates on its own time, by its own rules. Our constructs are also bound by those rules. You are alive because your entirety is worth more than the sum of your parts, and computers operate on a similar principle. When you shove a wooden board under a rock to pry it loose from the soil, you're leveraging the same forces that allowed you to even wake up that morning, and so does your computer when you jiggle the mouse to wake it.

In my opinion the miracle of consciousness is not the material it gets scribbled onto, but instead the fact it can exist at all.

>Yuo cna reda tihs raedliy btu teh copmtuer cna't.

Why can't it? Isn't that basically what current AI research is doing? Using massively parallel systems to make quick inferences based on existing data sets?

>the machine doesn't know jack about text. It knows arrays and sequences of numbers according to the rules we've defined them by, for it.

If you want to be pedantic and define a computer as the hardware only, sure. The operating system (which contains tools that can in fact parse text) is an essential component in the vast majority of computers in existence. So when I'm discussing computers as a complete, usable unit, then yes, they parse text.

>Our machines are beautiful, well designed levers. But they don't move anything, they leverage our movement.

Well said.

> The full quote is “ elusive path of maintaining free speech, following the law and not having Twitter being a toxic cesspool used mainly to shout down those not our your "side".”

Frankly, I didn't think the rest of your quote added anything meaningful to the first part. Rather than being rude I was just going to leave that out and hope you picked up on it.

My reasoning was as follows: Twitter is already forced to follow US laws where the legal system is willing to enforce them, and "toxic cesspool" is highly subjective. When it comes to handling the mob mentality, I've already offered my thoughts and suggestions in my previous comment.

>Just adding more filters does nothing to build the open public square that Musk seems to want to curate.

So, which is it then? Is it a public platform, or a publisher curating content? Either way, Twitter couldn't exist without the taxpayer footing the bill for ARPANET, which is why I think they should be forced to allow all legal speech on their platform.

>More filters & blocks just creates smaller echo chambers.

Explain why it's bad for "echo chambers" to exist. Why shouldn't people be allowed to mind their own business and tend to their own spaces? I do this daily by choosing to not use 90% of the modern web.

The characters we use to interact with our computers were mostly designed to be hand-written and minimize the amount of movement your hand has to make going from one letter to the next. I theorize that they don't translate all that well to existing display technologies. Not so much because of the shape of the fonts, but because format isn't conducive to sharing or receiving information as quickly as our machines and our wetware could allow.

If you think about this a little more, programming is actually a way to overcome the limitations of spoken/written languages to an extent, since the machine can parse the text faster than you, and it can read other forms of data that are even more efficient. In my view a monitor displaying human-readable text is similar to a legacy ABI that's kept around because of the technical momentum and mindshare it has, not because it's particularly good.

>the elusive path of maintaining free speech

What's so elusive about it? Let people say what they want and give users a robust word and account filtering system.

If you think your ideas and values won't stand up to public scrutiny, then perhaps you should do some self-reflection. If it's just a matter of your own comfort, use the block/mute/blacklist controls.

>Some participants went on to become successful businessmen, doctors, lawyers, and others ended up as schizophrenics or alcoholics, but not on inevitable tracks.

Why was this assumption made? If the goal of the study is to analyze the potential for biologically determined outcomes in people's lives, doesn't this sort of undermine that foundational question? Why wouldn't genetics play a role in determining personality, and make some people more outgoing and willing to embrace a community?

>Researchers who have pored through data, including vast medical records and hundreds of in-person interviews and questionnaires, found a strong correlation between men’s flourishing lives and their relationships with family, friends, and community.

This doesn't tell us why. Why is that the case?

>Taking care of your body is important, but tending to your relationships is a form of self-care too.

Taking care of your relationships IS taking care of your body. Our mind is a physical organ like the heart or lungs. Our entire personalities, our thoughts, our dreams and everything that comprises consciousness is just a series of abstractions built on top of flesh.

IMO, the real lesson these researchers should've taken away from this is that the mind is not separate from the rest of the body.

All of that is moot unless you've tested the software yourself and found it to be broken in certain terminal emulators.

I agree with your point that it's easy to write CLI software that relies on features not all terminals have, but it's almost equally easy to write simple and portable software and test it in the most used terminals.

>You’d get the half-shame branding of “metrosexual” for dressing better than average

"Better than average" is highly subjective. There have always been expectations in every society about how you're supposed to dress and comport yourself in public. The styles and forms these expectations take are largely arbitrary and in constant flux, but the uniformity they provide is anything but. The reason why that kind of uniformity is naturally desirable is because being the odd one out is more often dangerous than it is advantageous. The world is an incredibly dangerous place, so if you exhibit aberrant and/or disruptive behaviors from the majority population, their default response is going to be to shame you, or shut you up, or make you go away. It doesn't matter what the behavior is, only that it deviates from the norm.

There have always been hippies, flamboyant gays, and other eccentric types who have found themselves the odd one out (hello there). But I would argue that their status in society is really determined by the relationships they have with others. If you build up a decent rapport with someone, they'll usually tolerate more of your aberrant behaviors, and might not mind them at all since said behaviors are coming from you specifically.

To tie this back into some of the previous posts, being gay is a quality but it's not a redeeming one, and it doesn't make up for a person's negative traits. There seems to be this expectation from very sheltered people that being the odd one out should afford them certain privileges, often related to some kind of victim status. In reality, people will just see you as weak and bully you for those perceived weaknesses.

Just my two cents as someone who eschews the LGBTBLAHBLAH+++ label for myself, since I don't want to be associated with a cult of corporate and pseudo-academic pandering that deprives me of my agency makes certain assumptions about my morals and politics.

Jokes and hyperbole aside, that's honestly not too bad. At least relative to most modern bloatware.

However, 10MB is still enough to run Windows 3.1 with room to spare for a program or two.

For comparison, XTerm uses around 2.5MB, and that's a relatively bloated and crufty piece of software.

Neat. Now I can run an interpreter in an interpreter to use text based programs like it's 1985, while also paying 2022 prices for the extra 32GB of RAM it needs.

>Imagine when they can limit the trade of crypto to people who have certain ideas. Or limit the percentage of your wealth you can spend on certain items (games, movies, ... food).

Do you think this can't be done already with credit cards?

>The more insidious problem that regular people come up against every day is devices that depend on cloud access.

That idea doesn't hold up in reality. Open source projects with open protocols allow users to host the server side tools at home. The fly by night behaviors you're describing are almost unique to closed source, proprietary solutions such as this home automation system, which is now bricked.

>Perhaps some sort of requirement to escrow cloud algorithms or whatever it would take to open source protocols.

Open protocols are not enough. That doesn't address the security problems that arise from unpatched firmware. Whether it's the OEM deciding to pull support or some 14 year old poking around stuff he doesn't own, or some kind of 2038 time bug, the result is the same. You can wind up with a brick at any time.

This all will continue until consumers grow a brain.

OpenBSD 7.1 still offers the macppc port. It was pretty fast on my later G4s.