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Bad_Initialism

39 karma · joined November 30, 2025

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Bad_Initialism··on If you put Apple icons in reverse it looks like someone getting good at design
As the icons progress to the left, identification increasingly depends on colour and shape. Since there are a limited number of colours and shapes, they tend to get reused. This increasingly leads to mis-identification of icons.

This is particularly true for the visually impaired and some elderly and neuro-atypical people.

What matters in an icon is uniqueness. Only the skeuomorphic icons to the right can be unique enough for proper identification.

Trendiness of visual appearance has no place in the functionality of a complex machine. If you think it does, I submit the following for your consideration: you. are. a. monster.

Yes, I said that and I mean it. You followers of Jony Ive and his ilk are assholes. The rest of us don't give a shit about your design schools. We just want to be able to click on the right thing.

Hate me, but it's true.

Bad_Initialism··on A Calif. teen trusted ChatGPT's drug advice. He died from an overdose
The article contains no actual information. Complete waste of time.
Bad_Initialism··on Show HN: A creator-first native macOS app for local AI image generation
Requires MacOS 15 or later, so it won't run on my machine.

Does it really require MacOS 15, or have you just joined Apple in destroying the planet with relentless unnecessary upgrades and ignorantly set your requirements in XCode?

Bad_Initialism··on You Can Just Buy Far-UVC
Well, just use your USB spectrometer, of course.

...you do have a USB spectrometer, don't you?

I have mine in my bedside drawer. I use it almost as often as my multimeter.

Bad_Initialism··on SpaceX Lowering Orbits: 4,400 Satellites Moving Closer to Earth
I thought I was having a stroke while reading that, and then I realized it was just AI slop.
Bad_Initialism··on Creating a Terminal Emulator from Scratch
Not really from scratch if it uses the SDL2 library. I'd try it if I had the first clue how to resolve this dependency without obtaining a university degree in the subject. Or if the README gave the slightest hint about how to proceed.

It may not be the flex you think it is to leave the SDL2 part as an "exercise for the reader". I don't think it would really affect the size of the data hoard on github if everyone who used an obscure and difficult-to-install library as the basis of their project explained how to get it. Isn't gatekeeping fun and cool?

Bad_Initialism··on Training Your Own LLM on a MacBook in 10 Minutes
Can it do anything useful? From the prompts it looks like a learning exercise only that can generate nonsense for toddlers.

I get that it is a learning exercise, but I find learning exercises to be a complete waste of time if the end point isn't something useful.

Bad_Initialism··on Flakes – A keyboard-first, AI-powered native browser for macOS
Segfault at start on 14.7.7.
Bad_Initialism··on Star of Bethlehem might have been a comet described in an ancient Chinese text
Or, and follow me for a minute here, what if everything people tell each other without supporting evidence is just nonsense, particularly when it is self-aggrandizing and intended to control others by emotional manipulation?

What, and I'm just blue-skying this here, if we're a random occurrence consisting of locally decreased entropy evolved on a chaotic substrate?

Or maybe, and this is just a what-if, we're just stochastic phenomena telling ridiculous stories to each other in a doomed and nonsensical search for meaning?

I'm not saying that humanity is the stupidest thing that ever existed and called itself sentient, but maybe think about that possibility for just one second before tripping off into mushroom-level miracle stories.

Bad_Initialism··on Building a macOS app to know when my Mac is thermal throttling
It won't run on a MacBook Air M1 running Sonoma. Only Tahoe.

Come along with me! We'll destroy the planet so fast that we'll all be cinders before you know it.

All we have to do is gobble the marketing speak so fast and make everything shiny and new, and we'll all be dead before you can say "Greta Thunberg."

Come die with me for thin and for stylish. Kill the animals with me for "sleek".

Die. With. Me. Now! I made an app!

Bad_Initialism··on The VAT refund is one of the greatest legal scams ever perpetrated
How unfortunate that the first line of that article contains a racial slur. Does the race of the pickpocket make any difference?

You may not realize that the Romani were victimized by the NAZIs or that they have been vilified because their traditionally nomadic lifestyle conflicted with the bourgeois mores of the shopkeeper class, but in the age of the Internet it's not too hard to figure that out.

Let's keep the overt racism to a minimum, please.

Bad_Initialism··on Mitochondrial Protein COX7RP May Hold the Secret to Longevity
Once again, this is fantastic news for mice!
Bad_Initialism··on Why the fuel-switch story does not explain the AI171 crash
Summary: Since we cannot possibly accept the actions of the pilot in the context of our worldview, we must find some alternative, no matter how improbable.
Bad_Initialism··on HBM consumes around three times the wafer capacity of DDR5 per gigabyte
You can improve the effectiveness and professionalism of your communication by spelling out initialisms the first time you use them, like this: high-bandwidth memory (HBM).

After you have spelled it out, feel free to use the initialism as much as you like for brevity.

Bad_Initialism··on Ask HN: Why Do People Prefer YouTube Videos over Big-Budget Movies and TV Shows?
Because big-budget films and TV are increasingly fascist. They focus on the nuclear family as being qualitatively and quantitatively more important than anything else. Within that context, the plot inevitably seeks to establish the absolute uniqueness and superiority of the individual. Superhero stories are an extremely good fit for this narrative.

Deep down, we all know that having a family is exactly as great a biological accomplishment as taking a nice shit in the morning. Dad came; mom squeezed one out. Lampreys and slugs do basically the same thing just as successfully. It's not special. We are not special. Movies and TV push the lie that we are, and we recognize the lie and we have begun to resent it and to be unable to suspend our disbelief.

Youtube is enormously better because it discards the lie. It's just some dude earnestly trying to figure out why a plane crashed or how to run Doom on a smart toilet. It's refreshing because it's real. It's interesting because it's real and it doesn't alienate us by spending all its time trying to shove the big lie down our throats.

Bad_Initialism··on Mystery Drones, Or Maybe UFOs, Over Sweetwater County Are 'The New Normal'
We got an entire article without a single video or photo of the "drones"? Great journalism there, Cowboy State Daily.

The core problem here is that too many Americans believe that their imaginary sky friend is going to take them to heaven when they die in a mass shooting, and therefore their critical thinking skills have atrophied below zero, meaning that they are not just incapable of analyzing a situation to find the truth, they are actively fantasizing the situation.

This is a nonsense article. It is either written by someone with a toddler's understanding of the world or someone who is over it and writing for the money.

If you entertain, without evidence, the notion that Bigfoot, UFOs, malevolant drones, ghosts, clairvoyance or any of the other human slop we foist upon ourselves and each other exist, you are simply a broken organism. You need to check your brain, because it's not working properly.

Bad_Initialism··on Five Algorithms Walk into a CTF (Only One Walks Out)
Not only the title, but the entire article, and every reference that pops up in a search, fails to explain the initialism "CTF".

This is pure gatekeeping by immature little boys in a treehouse labelled "NGA".

If we had awards for bad initialisms, this one would be in the running for the top spot. I'm still not entirely sure what it means.

Bad_Initialism··on Karen Wetterhahn
The problem with the Karen Wetterhahn story is that we have no evidence to back up the exposure. Sure, months after the alleged event we have high mercury levels. But we only have Karen's recollection of a single tiny exposure through gloves months before. Colleagues said she was careful in the lab, but that would be limited to what they saw.

The mercury levels were so high that it would be nice to have levels from before the event and some that were taken immediately after.

We will never have that information. Was Karen as careful as we have been told? Unknown. Was it really just a single exposure? Unknown.

Maybe she annoyed someone who, like Putin, found an effective way of erasing a rival, or just someone they didn't like. Pretty much all students and staff would have had access to the Dimethyl Mercury in the NMR lab. How hard would it be to put a tiny drop in Karen's drink? Not hard at all.

In the meantime, Karen Wetterhahn has become the scary legend of the NMR set and we have changed standards, changed gloves, and many other things as a result.

But is it true?

Bad_Initialism··on Ask HN: Thought-Provoking Books
I thought, "That sounds like an interesting book." And then I read the precis on Wikipedia.

Humans. Everything has to be a fucking competition. Turned me right off reading it. This is one of the (many) things I hate about humans. Along with ideas that go in to the brain and get stuck there and have to be defended to the death without the brain ever having thought critically about them even once.

Why gatekeep? Why compete about things that don't need to be a competition? Why let yourself be brainwashed about a philosophy or a company or a person?

Humans. Yech. Barf. I hate humans. They make me sick.

Bad_Initialism··on Epic celebrates "the end of the Apple Tax" after court win in iOS payments case
Tim Cook has been absolutely fantastic for Apple shareholders and absolutely awful for anyone else, particularly the customers.

The walled garden has to end. There is no excuse for making people pay a premium price for an iPad Pro that can't run a third party web browser or do software development in any meaningful way.

Outside of a very narrow use case, the iPad product range is useless, despite the endless rantings of the brainwashed fanboys. Source: used to be one. Left the ecosystem when they started treating the RFCs like toilet paper.

Bad_Initialism··on CRISPR fungus: Protein-packed, sustainable, and tastes like meat
The association is undiminshed by their web server being down. Uh oh.
Bad_Initialism··on Australia begins enforcing world-first teen social media ban
To all the parents defending this: you are responsible for your children and what they do.

Passing laws that affect all of us because you are too lazy and ineffectual to raise your children properly is unacceptable.

Bad_Initialism··on Clinically Meaningful Survival Benefit for Patients with Cell Lung Cancer
Oh, no! Not Cell Lung Cancer!

Oh, No. It's Not-Small Cell lung cancer.

Ya missed a bit. Title doesn't make the slightest amount of sense without it.

Bad_Initialism··on Building a Copying GC for the Plush Programming Language
You can make your communication more professional by spelling out initialisms the first time you use them and then following them with the initialism in brackets. Like this: garbage collector (GC). After that, you may use the initialism freely.

Sincerely, your bad initialism GC.

Bad_Initialism··on Search tool that only returns content created before ChatGPT's public release
How about a search engine that only returns what you searched for, and not a million other unrelated things that it hopes you might like to buy?

This goes for you, too, website search.

Bad_Initialism··on Show HN: Cloud-agnostic SIEM that uses a natural language query layer
Oh, SIEM, we are all family.

This is a bad initialism and you should feel bad.

Bad_Initialism··on EWD 1094 – The undeserved status of the pigeon-hole principle (1991)
I read the article, but I couldn't find anything about Engine Warning Displays or pigeons. Bad initialism. Shame on you.