Hacker News Reader

AStonesThrowon Solar Storms Are Pushing Elon Musk's Satellites Back to Earth

People of Earth and of every inhabited planet hate Elon with the hate of a thousand suns, and therefore, the Sun itself has become anti-Elon, and is generating anti-Elonic particles.

On Friday we detected an Elonal Musk Ejection from the Sun that should be selectively interacting with anything in Outer Space that is connected to Elon. Elonic forces are stronger than gravity and stronger than the Weak Force. Anything that Elon built will be rendered into nonfunctional wokesauce by these catastrophic chthonic left-quark forces.

AStonesThrowon Why we can't have nice private TLD DNSSEC

I'd be interested to know how you traced this. I dove into the rabbit hole, and used ssllabs.com for a client browser check. I compared the client with the server to note that the server, very strict in its protocols, accepts only TLS v1.3 (check) and only a single CHACHA cipher (check) so I could not see why they were not connecting. Now I do see that Chrome only does ecdh secp384r1 or 256, but that was fine print, and I did not understand its importance.

An attempt to fetch the blog URL with http: also failed with a 404.

Anyway, I did find the blog article, dated May 2022, on the Wayback Machine, in two old snapshots, and attempting to take a snapshot today failed. The W3C Validator was able to fetch and parse anyway.

There was no particular indication of browser compatibility in the blog post. But a very opinionated piece on DNSSEC indeed.

AStonesThrowon JD Vance has changed his name multiple times over the years

Speaking as someone who has made up myriad "screen names" and email addresses and forum usernames, and someone who has struggled with the validity of his own given name, I considered why it is called a "given name" and how arrogant it may be to unilaterally make one up instead. These are commonly known as "assumed names" or "aliases".

I decided that not only was it futile, after a lifetime of going by one name, to convince people to call me something else, or know me by another name, but it is also arrogant to try and manipulate those names which have been given to me by people who love me. And furthermore, how insulting and appalling it was, for me to say that I didn't like the name I was given, in fact being baptized with that name, would be a repudiation of not only my parents, but my mother church and her authority to accept the name which my parents proposed at that time.

AStonesThrowon Cholesterol treatment can cut levels by 69% after one dose

Artificially cutting high cholesterol levels is like killing the astronauts to solve a CO2 buildup.

AStonesThrowon I Made ChatGPT Believe in God (Seriously) [video]

Alright, well, is it reproducible? He seemed to be engaging it in a Socratic method. You couldn't just read a one-sided script to an LLM without thinking on your feet in this regard. He was able to lay significant groundwork through a few separate premises and then bring the threads together.

I expected to hear ChatGPT confabulating and becoming lost in misinformation, or shutting down the thread with "But I'm only an LLM, I can't ..."

And the advert seemed quite specific or scripted. How do you elicit such specific ad copy from an LLM that has a mind of its own?

And a 25-minute video is a lot of tokens. I don't understand how the context buffer works, but does it represent a single long session where ChatGPT retains the entire conversation? The smartphone clock seems to indicate parts were edited out?

AStonesThrowon The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine

Well, now we can own more clothes! And we can wash them more often! And rather than specialist washerwomen, everyone can/must use the laundry-room robots!

AStonesThrowon I Made ChatGPT Believe in God (Seriously) [video]

You know how all the channels and pages with (official) in their titles are usually not?

Well I pressed "Play" and began to wonder if the ChatGPT voice and dialogue were faked. My mind numbed as she snappily fielded all questions with direct answers. As she smoothly broke into a sponsored advert at the 7-minute mark, my suspicions of fakery were confirmed.

Does TTS or voice synthesis take in audible breaths? Gemini and Bing don't seem to.

Good joke mate!

AStonesThrowon Of course the Apple Network Server can be hacked into running Doom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doom_ports

AStonesThrowon Why does it matter if AI is sentient or not?

I've never had to ask a giraffe for my money back, and I am unaware of any sloths actually working at the DMV, nor dolphins evaluating my job applications.

AStonesThrowon Oxfordshire clock still keeping village on time after 500 years

Microsoft has faced this issue with Windows licensing. I would say that it was noticeable with Windows XP.

If Windows was licensed to a particular hardware computer, how would you define that computer? Being a common practice to upgrade RAM, disks, PCI cards, and even CPUs, and Windows could enumerate every component on each boot, how much different would a computer need to be, before the Windows license is invalid?

And people were tripped up by this, after replacing their motherboard. Windows had a threshold of changes where it would balk and demand reactivation.

AStonesThrowon Why we can't have nice private TLD DNSSEC

Ironically, Chrome treats me to:

  ERR_SSL_VERSION_OR_CIPHER_MISMATCH

So the privacy of egbert.net is especially ensured?

AStonesThrowon The Rise of the Japanese Toilet

The protocol or scheme is the "http" or "https" keyword. The colon is a separator. The "//" introduces the "authority component" or host.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL#Syntax

Whatever the user is "throwing at you" if it doesn't have these things in the front, it is not a "URL". It is not even a "protocol-relative URL".

AStonesThrowon I am concerned about the future. Are you?

I think you misspelled "Congress with bipartisan support" there

AStonesThrowon Is every memecoin just a scam?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinocchio#Literary_analysis

The structure of the story of Pinocchio follows that of the folktales of peasants who venture out into the world but are naïvely unprepared for what they find and get into ridiculous situations.[11] At the time of the writing of the book, this was a serious problem, arising partly from the industrialization of Italy, which led to a growing need for reliable labor in the cities; the problem was exacerbated by similar, more or less simultaneous, demands for labor in the industrialization of other countries. One major effect was the emigration of much of the Italian peasantry to cities and foreign countries such as the United States.

AStonesThrowon Using lots of little tools to aggressively reject the bots

Chris Siebenmann has shared many thoughts about crawlers, aka spiders.

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/?search=spider

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/?search=crawlers

It's interesting how in 2005 he was advocating for playing nicely, because yes, search engines were hypothetically driving traffic to sites they crawled. And there don't seem to be a lot of complaints about performance hits. Though typically, his comments and observations are restricted to his blog's corner of his department.

AStonesThrowon Webb telescope helps refine Hubble constant

That is not a fact; there are stars that are moving closer to us, and the Andromeda Galaxy is expected to "collide" with the Milky Way at some future point.

AStonesThrowon I Switched to UTC and Never Looked Back

Many years ago I committed to setting everything to 24hr clocks. Even when I still had a standalone digital alarm clock that plugged into the wall; in fact that was the impetus to change.

Because it was very easy to miss a little "PM" pip in the corner, when reading or setting the time; and setting an alarm depended on getting the pip correct, so eliminating the pip for me meant eliminating ambiguity in the digits.

It's been a fairly successful transition, although sometimes I look at "16:15" and think it's 6pm so the "mentally subtracting 12" needs practice. And there are still special snowflake UI widgets that ignore my i18n settings, and constrain how I enter or specify a time.

AStonesThrowon Oxfordshire clock still keeping village on time after 500 years

Forsooth! "Palimpsest of Horological Technology" shall heretofore be the moniker by which I dub a rag-tag band of madrigal performers, and/or the Macguffin from Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny!

Growing up in San Diego, we often visited Presidio Park, site of the San Diego Mission, or was it?

It was only 17 years ago when I managed to untangle the relationship between the Mission de Alcala in the valley and the Presidio on the hill.

I told my friend from Spain that we could go visit, and she exclaimed "a prison? why visit a prison?"

And one or more buildings of the Presidio has been completely rebuilt, as replicas, as a museum and tourist attraction. And everyone told me the grass mounds outside were burial sites or something.

But as a child I didn't get it; the building just looked like an old mission from the photographs and they had nice exhibits about what life was like tending crops and winepresses. Also, there is an observation point on the third floor, where you can see the Pacific Ocean and all of Mission Valley.

AStonesThrowon Show HN: AI Peer Reviewer – Multiagent System for Scientific Manuscript Analysis

The only thing worse than an LLM for making stuff up and giving fake numbers is an LLM "Detector". They are so full of false positives and false negatives and bogus percentages, as to be actively harmful to human trust and academic integrity. And how do you follow up, to verify or falsify their results?

AStonesThrowon Unhappy Meals (2007)

Pringles also contain corn, rice, and wheat.

https://www.pringles.com/en-us/products/pringles-the-origina...

Lay's Classic contain only potatoes, currently with a grab-bag of oils:

https://www.pepsicoproductfacts.com/Home/Product?formula=LBS...

The most "basic" mass-produced snack food award goes to: Fritos!

https://www.pepsicoproductfacts.com/Home/product?formula=LBS...

(US formulations only. Your gas station may vary.)

AStonesThrowon The Gmail app will now create AI summaries

Gmail has no desktop app, though it has mobile apps.

The web or PWA Gmail has more features and settings than any third-party desktop app would offer when using IMAP or POP. Gmail is a custom-designed first-party app. If you read mail from Google through Outlook or Thunderbird, it will have lowest-common-denominator features through the lens of a different vendor's structure.

Now you may consider it a superior advantage if the Gemini AI isn't available, but probably won't be able to create custom filters without the PWA.

AStonesThrowon Gemini will now automatically summarize your long emails unless you opt out

This article has given me the impetus to go around and shut off all the "Smart" features and integrations that I accepted in the past.

Lately, Gemini became like Clippy, and I've been blocked by modal dialogs that tell me I've got Free Trials of Gemini in ALl Products. And Gmail was filling with nags to "clean up this message" or expand it or do starry magic on it if I'd only click the keyboard shortcut they're indicating.

This will remove some of the enhancements I appreciated, like event invites in Gmail that show up in Calendar. But I also knew that those were Smart Features, and Assistant/Gemini have been underpinning them.

A couple of days ago, there was another modal dialog that sadly informed me that my free trial was ending. Every day I stared at that Gemini star in my Gmail and wish it would stop taking up UI space and how I could make Clippy ("Glippy"?) go away.

Saturday Night Live, 2015: https://youtu.be/EpWbTogEEhg?si=01fyKCh_AUKoGgGY

AStonesThrowon 'Welcome In.' The Two-Word Greeting That's Taking Over and Driving Shoppers Nuts

I was surprised that this was a grammar treatise. I hear it often in a variety of businesses, too, but haven't been particularly annoyed at the phrasing. In fact a native Russian speaker using it, sounded like perfectly normal English. And I'm not much of a German speaker, yet.

It seems like a "customer CAPTCHA". "Prove to us that you are not a thief!" Some stores have Greeters stationed at the front. Sometimes, it's just someone at the counter, even if they are helping someone else, will be distracted to welcome people who are breezing into the front door. It's not always an overture to an interaction.

The standard waitress line is, "What can I get started for ya?"

It's interesting that they say the phrases are not imposed by Corporate. It was beginning to seem like something standardized. Just traded around by peers in the biz?

As for "pinning pieces of flair", I've seen everything from a single button advertising "Ask Me About ____" from the company, or one of the emo kids who attached 4 dozen attachments to their backpack and jacket in high school, and now there's a blur of color on her chest larger than the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I will glance at her nametag and then try not to interpret each individual 1/2" button that surely represents her deeply-held beliefs and signals her identity to her coworkers.

AStonesThrowon Chaos on German autobahns as Google Maps wrongly says they are closed

iPhones only. For a brief, shining moment, there was an Android-free Autobahn. Express lanes to the Apple Store.

AStonesThrowon Notes on Tunisia

The "silly familia's basilica" is in good company: there are 1,881 minor basilicas. That is relative to the 4 major ones, which are all in Rome.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilicas_in_the_Catholic_Chur...

St. Paul Outside-the-Walls was completed in 1840! Almost yesterday! However, re-consecration and construction continued after that. Interestingly, it seems that an automatic fire-detection and suppression system had been installed in the 19th century.

AStonesThrowon Notes on Tunisia

I don't know what threshold to aim for here -- by the way, neither of those two minor basilicas are cathedrals -- but let's navigate a few Wikipedia categories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:20th-century_Roman_Ca...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_the_National_Shrin... (consecrated 1920; dedicated 1959; minor basilica 1990)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cathedral_of_Our_Lady_of_the_A... (1998-2002)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Cathedral_of_the_Russian_... (2018-2020)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Resurrection_Cathedral (Japanese Orthodox; consecrated 1929)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Mary%27s_Cathedral,_Tokyo (1964)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Theresa%27s_Cathedral,_Cha... (2008)

As for Italy? Get a load of this "crown jewel": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_Church (2003)

AStonesThrowon RFK Jr's 'Maha' report found to contain citations to nonexistent studies

مها

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_(name)

How cute, the script even looks like a little flower on its side, with a bent stem?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maha_bint_Mishari_Al_Saud

महा (mahā) 'great'

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharaja

Etc.

AStonesThrowon U.S. Woman Dies from Mad Cow-Like Brain Disease That Lay Dormant for 50 Years

Why mine for Bitcoin, when you can fold some prions at home?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folding@home

AStonesThrowon Player Piano Rolls

A CD and MP3s consist of recorded performances. A player piano roll contains the instructions for a performance, basically a transcription of sheet music, or a recording of someone performing a work. (Didn't read court findings for scope.)

Works (sheet music and lyrics) and recordings (committing it to media or storage) and performances can be distinctly copyrighted and separately licensed. But a CD track represents all 3 of those put together through “sweat of the brow”, usually by multiple parties.