HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

DocTomoe

1,950 karma · joined February 27, 2015

submissionscomments
DocTomoe··on Finland investigate Google over destruction of 250k trees
Actually, that's exactly how forestry departments think of forest: how many (harvestable) volume units of wood grows per time unit. No cute, parental firefighting bear needed: Smokey doesn't like wildfires because burnt wood can't be sold.
DocTomoe··on Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027
That only is a problem if you don't separate the 'time number' from the observed local time.

You could easily have a 'multiple calendar days during one solarday' situation. In fact, many countries already do this for their TV programming, in which a show might screen on "Thursday at 23:55 until 03:15".

For common things, you could just refer to as 'tomorrow morning'. If you need more precision, you can fall back to .beats. "School starts @740" Incidentally, that's exactly why I liked .beats: no false associations.

DocTomoe··on Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
And then there are European countries that just use a combination. Germany has 'Ärmelkanal' (literally: sleeve channel). If you can't make everyone happy, make everyone angry.
DocTomoe··on How Google determines the names for bodies of water in Google Earth (2008)
I'm in Germany, it shows me the real name, and the clownshow name. It does the same for Lake Ontario.

When I VPN to other countries, it does the same.

Not sure where you got your wisdom from.

DocTomoe··on MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display and Touch
I'm seconding this. I am on my M2, and the lack of the touch bar is one of the reasons I am holding off on upgrading it. The keyboard goes the path of all apple keyboards, but right now I prefer it to no touchbar.
DocTomoe··on Cuba is skipping its November 1, 2026 clock change and staying on DST until 2027
IT matters when you have an economic zone in which some have 9am being 'basically mid-day', while the others have '9am being 'oh, the sun just went up'.

This traditionally has been solved in two ways:

1. do the split and accept that you will have costs associated with different time zones and sleep/wake cycles in your population (e.g.: USA / Soviet Russia)

2. don't do the split, and have the cost by putting a time/light adjustment burden on the population (e.g.: PRC, European Union)

My preferred solution would be to abandon all time zones and use something like UTC, or yet better: .beat / Biel Mean Time [1], which does not come with a 'oh, 12 means midday' penalty.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

DocTomoe··on Richest 0.1% (8M) produce more carbon pollution than 3.5B
Virtually no-one owns a private jet because it just doesn't make sense to do so unless you basically live in one. A lot more people timeshare/charter one. Which I am perfectly fine with. People need to go places, and public air travel has been made consistently unpleasant, regardless of the flight class.
DocTomoe··on Anthropic trained Claude on illegally obtained Stanford professors' books
That dictionary.com entry clearly describes a hyperbolic use of the term, especially when it comes to 'poorly remunerated'
DocTomoe··on In the wake of Tippett Studios’ closure, a digital archive appears online
Also, physical media.

I'd expect these kinds of things to wane now that we do anything in a cloud and data's gone the moment the credit card says nyet.

DocTomoe··on Nearly 200 people under observation after Irkutsk lab worker dies from plague
Thus 'avoid close contact with prairie dogs'. The 'medieval rat/flea'-connection was a problem because rats and humans lived in close vicinity to each others. In colorado, that goes prairie dog->flea->other prarie dog, you'll find them on the animal, in the burrow, and on the carcass, but a flea doesn't hop 5 miles towards from through the desert.
DocTomoe··on NASA asked several former SR-71A staffers to help secret restart
I'd wager a plane in a museum is stripped down internally and nothing more than a shell, while a plane on an actively protected military installation is more likely to be complete (or more complete), thus easier restorable.
DocTomoe··on PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
Curious, considering the European Parliament does not have subponea powers. Do you have a name, or a case?
DocTomoe··on PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry
> surely your MEP will be receptive to your grievances, yeah

I've yet to find a country - anywhere in the world - where a member of parliament is receptive to anything that's not the party line to begin with without copious amounts of money involved.

DocTomoe··on German advocacy group lodges criminal complaint over Meta AI glasses
The GDPR does not apply to private citizens.
DocTomoe··on Residential Proxies Are a National Security Threat
After decades of watching people use these three words, I've come to the conclusion that 'national security threat' is a right-wing dog-whistle for 'we have no actual proof, but we dislike it, so let's ban it'.

They are basically 'won't someone please think of the children?', but with higher stakes.

DocTomoe··on Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
Pictures on a menu implies that the menu rarely changes - menu creation is expensive and slow - and has standard offerings. This then means that food is likely to be less fresh, less seasonal, and more likely to be precooked in large batches and frozen/reheated. In short, it is a red flag for systemic cooking rather than artisinal cooking.

You find that most higher-class restaurants have a one-page menu, with a soup of the day, 4-7 dishes, and maybe a dessert, with the menu being written once a day and clear about what you get.

DocTomoe··on Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns
Most people I encounter who complain about AI use it as a shorthand for 'anything I don't like or disagree with'. When asked why they think something was created using genAI, they cannot point out reasons.
DocTomoe··on The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel
Good, so we can agree that the minor hassle for the minority to get a slightly slower immigration line at the airport does not outweigh privacy rights for the majority.

BTW: Where, and when, those wars started is a splendid way for historians to spend an afternoon discussing.

The point is that after 1945, the US never stopped fighting wars all over the world, using euphemisms sometimes, sometimes slogans, but it always was war.

DocTomoe··on The EU is about to sell our most sensitive data to the US for visa-free travel
With the major distinction being that a lot of Europeans have absolutely no intention of ever visiting the United States, a country with a history of sometimes more, sometimes less hostility and aggressive intelligence agencies.

If you want to visit a hellhole, go through the hassle. But don't hand out all of our data just because you want to do joyrides.

DocTomoe··on Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
The UK is a silly place[1] and has been pretty Orwellian for a long time. It is not a sensible idea to extrapolate their approach to a post-eu situation in the current member states.

As for burning down the house ... as it apparently seems to be the only legal route to stop the flies, alas, I'm willing to pay that price.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Npo0cmp-VY

DocTomoe··on Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament
Nothing is brought to the Commission that local governments do not secretly want, but publically rage against because the voters are against it.

When Brussles then decides, 'there's nothing we can do, it's an EU thing' ... and a moustache-twirl.

The only thing that can stop this is to completely dismantle the EU. Which means, unfortunately, voting for people any good person should rightfully despise.

DocTomoe··on Espionage Against the European Parliament
Network effects are real. It is hard to convince people to move over to your platform if the selling argument is 'not quite there yet, but we got you covered on the minilib front, plus it's less usable because of our weird interpretation of our own data protection laws'.
DocTomoe··on Bring back crappy forums
> BIFF WAS REAL.

Of course BIFF [1] was real - and he kept respawning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BIFF_(Usenet)

DocTomoe··on Bring back crappy forums
A few thoughts.

First, many people back then did not have permanently-online systems. You loaded the new stuff, went off-line, read, answer maybe, and uploaded your answers.

That gave you some time for meaningful answers (and - if you went the flamewar route - be smarter about flaming. Some got an almost baroque way of hiding flames in meaningfully-sounding sentences, which was, at least, funny).

I loved the aspect of doing the filtering on my end - not by an admin who decided what or what not I was allowed to read based on their own political leanings. Everyone had a freedom of speech, and I had the freedom to listen.

Can kill files be implemented today? Sure they could - we already have a pre-filtering by the algorithm curating what we see - I get very few hobby horsing stuff in my feed, because that's just not what interests me. This is analogous to the olden days, where the group, and the entry barrier acted as a pre-filter.

In my part of the usenet, real names were considered 'good manners'. That changed how people talked to each others. Of course, no-one could check if you were really called Klaas Hinkelman - but xXxStoneFakker666xXx was promptly laughed away - or landed in the kill file. plonk.

Another aspect that I really liked - and kept until today, was quoting inline, picking out individual questions of what could be a long article, and going into detail, like this:

    > [question or observation about an aspect]

    [answer to said question or observation]
And there was no upvote / downvote system, no karma, nothing like that. This removed the incentive to be 'popular', it was enough to be interesting, or just 'more correct'. It was perfectly ok to share a link to your private homepage, or take information there. Because no-one 'owned' an usenet group, there was no walled garden.

It is my strong belief that what killed the internet was not the September that never ended™, but vote gamification.

DocTomoe··on Bring back crappy forums
The generation before that (yours truly) still remembers the usenet glory days, and the liberal use of the kill file [1].

[1] https://www.catb.org/jargon/html/K/kill-file.html

DocTomoe··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
Both of these are meant for operating a home/private network.

.self seems to be geared towards a 'accessible from the everyday net' kind of approach.

DocTomoe··on .self: A new top-level domain designed to support self-hosting
Please leave states out of this. The State™ is not your friend, and we don't need a future, even more criminal government to have access to the shutdown button of even more of our identity.

Note that I did not single out an individual coutnry. All governments always stride towards autocracy.

DocTomoe··on Apple raises prices of MacBooks, iPads
Has Apple ever lowered the price of a product line?

This is just the new normal.

DocTomoe··on Identity verification on Claude
As a relatively enthusiastic OpenAI user ...

what did you do to trigger a verification process?

DocTomoe··on Has AI already killed self-help nonfiction books?
None of Ferris' books is younger than 10 years. Used copies are plentiful, hardly a library who has not been touched.

At some time, the market has been satisfied.

Page 1 of 34Next →