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AlanYx

2,547 karma · joined August 8, 2019

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AlanYx··on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25
Most of the soul ideas that eventually made their way into Judaism (and many years later becoming heavily influential in sects like the one founded by Baal Shem Tov) originally came from diaspora Hellenic Jews who were familiar with Platonism. There was about a half century+ lag before these ideas diffused. That is, they existed but were not yet mainstream.
AlanYx··on Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026
Antigravity CLI was only announced yesterday, so pretty much no one realizes it's different from Antigravity IDE yet, but I agree with your overall point. This kind of branding is toxic for individual product awareness. I'm not sure what drives the thinking behind it; Microsoft does it too (Copilot, etc.).
AlanYx··on Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical Magnifica humanitas to be published May 25
>he claims that the concept of "soul" is something that the wasn't really present in the Jewish worldview of Jesus' time

That's a broadly accepted take among religious historians, although it's off by a half century, roughly, if you include the Jewish diaspora. Philo of Alexandria did begin to integrate Jewish scripture with Greek philosophy on the soul during his lifetime.

AlanYx··on Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
C3P is not staffed by parents who have lost their kids.

I've had some professional interactions with one person who works for the org, and she came across in a very negative way. I don't want to use pejoratives, and perhaps it's understandable that people who spend so much time on this issue become emotionally invested in it to an unhealthy level, but people so emotionally charged are not well-positioned to craft balanced, rights-respecting digital policy.

AlanYx··on Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
I'm in the middle. I have some sympathy for the Canadian intelligence community's perspective here; in recent years, much intelligence potentially preventing major criminal public safety incidents has had to come through five eyes partners because the legal situation for domestic collection has become unworkable. CSIS refers to the situation as "going dark", which is an unfortunate US terminological import.

That being said, C-22 goes way beyond what would be halfway reasonable to solve the main issues in a fair and rights-respecting way, and I have absolutely no sympathy for the reasoning and goals imported from the UK's Online Safety Act.

AlanYx··on Canada’s Bill C-22 Is a Repackaged Version of Last Year’s Surveillance Nightmare
It's a confluence of two things: (i) Canada's government policy community tends to be heavily influenced by legislative trends in the UK/Aus/NZ; this particular one is almost a direct import from the UK's ill-advised Online Safety Act, though worse in some ways, and (ii) a series of Canadian Supreme Court decisions, most notably 2024's Bykovets, which the security intelligence apparatus in Canada feels has totally hamstrung data collection.

Both (i) and (ii) have led the government to this dark place, thinking they're doing good.

AlanYx··on BYD overtakes Tesla and Kia as the best-selling EV brand in key overseas markets
It's not yet easy to buy BYD vehicles in Canada either. The first quota of 49,000 vehicles was only recently announced, and that's to be shared across all Chinese vendors.
AlanYx··on Apple CMF (Color-Matching Functions) 2026
Unfortunately CIE standards like the JTC22 (D8/D1) work here tend not to be released for free. Eventually the mathematical curves should be adopted by open source implementations. Hopefully this isn't encumbered by patents.
AlanYx··on Apple CMF (Color-Matching Functions) 2026
Does anyone have link to a deeper technical dive on the limitations of CIE 1931 that Apple CMF tries to address? The CIE's JTC22 (D8/D1): Optimized Colour Matching Functions for Display Colour Consistency documents seem to be behind an access wall.

From what I gather, it's an attempt to address the problem of observer metamerism, but I'm curious to know how closely it's tethered to D65.

AlanYx··on Norway Set to Become Latest Country to Ban Social Media for Under 16s
New York's definition is one of the most detailed. The Australian definition on the other hand probably includes Hacker News because it includes both "a logged-in feature" and "endless feed" and the fact that posts move off the home page probably falls under "time-limited features". Perhaps some legal interpretation will find that paging is not legally "endless feed", but I could see it going either way. The definition basically is written so that blogs with comment sections aren't included, but with quite an expansive scope otherwise.
AlanYx··on DeepSeek v4
In the US, yes, but Huawei has been gaining ground selling its SuperPod/Ascend turnkey solutions internationally, with some major recent wins in Thailand, Brazil, Egypt and Morocco.
AlanYx··on Quantum computing bombshells that are not April Fools
No. They're a decent playground for prototyping hybrid algorithms but even that is limited. No one has yet published a hybrid algorithm on a rentable QC provider that has better benchmark performance than a modern CPU/GPU implementation.
AlanYx··on MacBook Neo
It's the Adobe suite of tools that's more of a concern performance-wise on 8GB Macs.
AlanYx··on Dan Simmons, author of Hyperion, has died
>there are cross shaped parasites that grant eternal life

Without giving away any spoilers to the books, the parasites are only that on the surface. If anything, the books present a wary picture of religion, especially the last two Endymion books, but also a wary picture of technology.

AlanYx··on New books aren't worth reading?
I'm somewhat sympathetic to the conclusion, but from a different perspective. One of the interesting things I've found about literature is that it's hard to fully appreciate the nuances in the decade it's written.

It's a bit like nose blindness; you don't appreciate the subtle way that your house smells until you've been away from it for a while. Books have a similar "smell" in the sense that it becomes easier to see what aspects are tethered to a particular era and what aspects are more universal when some time has passed. Even "fun" works like Snow Crash have aspects of this; there are parts of the book that stand out as pretty timeless and others that feel early 90s-west coast ways of viewing the world and people. When I read it for the first time years ago, none of that really stood out.

Same thing applies to film though. Ignoring pacing, My Dinner with Andre is IMHO way more fascinating to watch today than it was 45 years ago, because what's wheat and what's chaff is clearer in retrospect.

AlanYx··on I let ChatGPT analyze a decade of my Apple Watch data, then I called my doctor
In this case the article's guess is probably accurate. Apple did change how they measure RHR in WatchOS 11.2. If the author was using an Apple Watch that doesn't support 11.2 and then switched to one that does, a swing was very likely.
AlanYx··on LED lighting undermines visual performance unless supplemented by wider spectra
That's the interesting thing about this study. A lot of people here are speculating around explanations connected to metamerism, but the control (Figs 7 and 9) partly rules that out.
AlanYx··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
In the Christmas Special, the kids come to see Charlie Brown as right and are fairly vocal about this ("he's not a blockhead after all", etc.). It is somewhat tethered to the religious elements voiced by Linus, which gives the turnaround to Charlie's perspective a kind of cultural weight, i.e., the audience is intended to understand the kids as wrong in some kind of fundamental way. It's not as simple as "the magic of Christmas".

In the Halloween Special, the kids don't do the same for Linus, apart from Lucy who pulls him out of the cold and tucks him into bed.

The dynamic between Lucy and Charlie is a lot deeper than her cynical kicking the ball trick. Schultz uses their interactions (the psychiatry booth, him keeping her on the baseball team even though she's consistently terrible) to reinforce an overall theme that optimism is better than pessimism. Occasionally he directly peels back the layers behind Lucy's crabbiness like when Charlie's in the hospital.

AlanYx··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
I'm not sure I understand the Burroughs example as relevant to the UK, but another good illustration is Thomas Hardy. His books sold well but were never seen as consistent with the UK cultural mainstream, and the reaction to Jude the Obscure in 1895 stopped him from writing novels entirely. Yet post-WWI he came to be seen/adopted as a mainstream cultural icon.
AlanYx··on We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports
A lot of the stuff written on "izzat" is questionable or wrong, but it is true that India has a collective concept of saving face. This can be an adjustment even if you're used to the East Asian concept of saving face.
AlanYx··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
The enduring success of the Charlie Brown Christmas Special (despite its hokey Coca-Cola sponsored origins) strongly runs counter to this idea. The other kids in the special are outright mean to Charlie, but at the end no one identifies with the other kids' perspective, nor do they themselves.

Part of the reason the Halloween Special never gained the same cultural relevance/popularity is probably because it doesn't have the same progression. The other kids are mean to Linus and he persists despite it all, but ultimately it ends with no resolution to the mocking.

AlanYx··on Douglas Adams on the English–American cultural divide over "heroes"
The phenomenon Adams is talking about here is largely a post-WW1 phenomenon in UK culture, related to the post-WW1 malaise. His best examples are post-WW1 (Paul Pennyfeather, Tony Last, and the book by Stephen Pile). The others arguably don't really fit (e.g., the core delight in Gulliver is the reader thinking they are smarter than Gulliver; the reader doesn't identify with him). It's not exactly a new observation... one of the motivations both Tolkien and CS Lewis had for strong characters like Aragorn was to present examples falling outside this cultural drift.
AlanYx··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
Interesting, thanks! Apparently it requires a German eID-enabled ID card (or compatible EU ID) and doesn't include transactions involving real estate, but still it's progress.
AlanYx··on EU–INC – A new pan-European legal entity
I'm surprised that Germany never relaxed the in-person notarization requirements during COVID. A lot of jurisdictions around the world did change their rules to allow remote notarization.
AlanYx··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
That same paragraph also describes ways in which it can be accomplished other than chemical etching ("...chemical etching, laser ablation, mechanical removal of material, mechanical pre-treatment followed by etching, lithography in combination with etching, and combinations thereof.").

There are also paragraphs describing applying "a plurality of inorganic dielectric layers".

Like most patents, it's hard to understand what has actually gone into production here. Could be done in a variety of ways consistent with the patent. The inorganic coatings are mentioned in claim 1, so the actual new aspect is probably the combination of etching and specific coatings.

AlanYx··on Notes on Apple's Nano Texture (2025)
Rainbow isn't really the right term. It's more of a sparkling effect. Apple actually uses the term "sparkle" for this characteristic in their patent for the display treatment (see para 0073). They also mention that different diffractive layers can be used to minimize the effect, so it is possible that the issue is worse on some devices than others.
AlanYx··on Confer – End to end encrypted AI chat
It is true that nVidia GPU-CC TEE is not secure against decapsulation attacks, but there is a lot of effort to minimize the attack surface. This recent paper gives a pretty good overview of the security architecture: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.02770
AlanYx··on Apple Creator Studio
That's probably a clue that maintaining Photomator is not on Apple's long-term roadmap. I imagine they'll merge some features into Photos and eventually discontinue it.
AlanYx··on The struggle of resizing windows on macOS Tahoe
There's also the problem that not every window in Tahoe has the same corner radius. Some people thought this was laziness/lack of polish or a bug, but Alan Dye confirmed on a podcast that it was intentional.

So then they're left with a conundrum: do they adjust the 19x19 region on a per-window basis, depending on the per-window corner radius, or do they stick with one standard drag region? Probably it should be the former, but that comes with its own set of issues.

AlanYx··on Six-decade math puzzle solved by Korean mathematician
>What could be simpler than that?

At risk of being tongue-in-cheek, a monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?

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