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kickahaon ChatGPT and Wolfram Is Insane

Ten years ago you could say to your iPhone, “Hey, Siri. What’s the ratio of the distance to the sun to the distance to the moon?” And it would tell you the answer and give a pop up with the parameters and calculations from Wolfram Alpha. Solidly reliable.

This was such a fun game in the car with little kids who didn’t know any better that (1) it’s magic I couldn’t have imagined ten years before and (2) it was nerdy as hell.

Today it will, at best, give you the “Here’s what I found on the web” uselessness. So frustrating.

kickahaon Master Emacs in one year

In my opinion, as of 2023, the best way to learn emacs the right way is through the textbook 'Mastering Emacs' by Mickey Petersen. Trust me, that book is well worth the price tag.

Strongly second this opinion!

Mickey Petersen simply has no equal in explaining Emacs. His book and blog posts are a model of effective teaching, starting from zero. Yet somehow gently ceomprehensive. Hard recommend.

kickahaon EA Leaders Were Repeatedly Warned About Sam Bankman-Fried Before FTX Collapsed

If you could see my face you would not read surprise on it.

kickahaon PCIe 4.0 Card Hosts 21M.2 SSDs: Up To 168TB, 31 GB/s

I’m so old I forget that old memories can be found again with Wikipedia and Google.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_D9060

https://www.commodore-info.com/brochure/item/commodore_d9060...

kickahaon PCIe 4.0 Card Hosts 21M.2 SSDs: Up To 168TB, 31 GB/s

Got a VIC-20 for my 13th birthday in 1983. The local TV shop sold Commodore hardware and hosted a BBS that my little nerd cronies and I connected to at 300 bps. All of us knew the owner who ran the store and mentored us and hired some of us when we got old enough. On one visit he took me back, behind an actual curtain, and showed me the BBS machine. If you know the 1541 Disk Drive, you know. Well this beast had a Commodore branded 5 MB hard disk connected to a C-64. In my memory it was 6” by 8” by 24” long, with an enormous power supply, and must have cost thousands of Reagan-first-term US dollars.

Two or three years later another mentor hired me to put a 33 MB hard disk into his IBM PC. Not a clone. My memory tells me it was a DOS imposed limit, those 33 MB: the biggest drive available. I managed to plug the connector in upside down and released the magic smoke. That was a many-hundreds-of-dollars mistake. (And a good lesson in patient mentoring.)

In 1991 I obtained a used 80 MB drive (half height!) to put into my own PC XT clone, via a local Usenet group. I set the volume name to $1_PER_MB because going under that threshold was so impressive.

Those are my reference points for storage.

kickahaon Use GNU Emacs

There are a million things to say here, and many have said them better than I can. But there's an important generational aspect to the discussion.

I learned Emacs in 1988 or so. Only a couple years before, I had traded my Commodore 64---on which I did real work, like writing term papers---for an IBM PC XT clone. WordPerfect. Hobbyist BBSer, but networking was in the future.

When I got to college, Unix and Emacs were a revelation. This is how it's supposed to work! And the background ASSUMPTION that you could understand everything, and control everything, was something nobody at the time would have questioned. With hindsight it turns out that understanding everything was a mirage and controlling everything was the gateway drug to possibly literal addictive behaviors, but that was the ethos.

I left CS after only a couple semesters, and my career has completely diverged from it. So it's a TOTAL FLUKE that today I can comprehend---god, the whole model! of a Lisp machine! of Lisp at all! For a young person starting with modern tools? Maybe we can agree that we all see the big chasm....

But I will never give it up.

kickahaon Internal review finds falsified data in Stanford President’s Alzheimer research

Boy. There’s a lot to say about this story.

But the most remarkable thing is the incredibly high quality of the journalism. Unbelievably thorough investigative reporting, outstanding exposition of highly technical items. From a college newspaper!

kickahaon Elon Musk reportedly had his own tweets prioritized out of jealousy

What a pitiable man.

kickahaon Ask HN: What is the best advice you got on any aspect of life?

“It’s just stuff.”

My first college roommate made this completely off handed comment not too long after we moved in together. We were still strangers. I must have been anxious over some of my dumb crap, god knows what prompted it. But in that one moment everything changed for me, it really did. I had only been moved out of my hoarding parents’ house for a few days and that one remark snapped me out of it forever.

kickahaon Water Structure and Science

Yeah! I was all Wow! Everything is here! So comprehensive! I’ll use this in class!

And then it turns out, at the bottom, to be homeopathy apologia. I hasten to add, in apparent good faith.

https://water.lsbu.ac.uk/water/memory_of_water.html

It’s hard to describe the acute physical subjective percept that I experience in my gut when I read (apparently? superficially?) evenhanded consideration of published data that flatly contradict an entire paradigm.

kickahaon Ask HN: What was the best software that you used during 2022?

Came here to say, “Still Emacs.” Yes, I am an enthusiast (read “ideologue” if you like). But hear me out. I grew up on it in the 80s and 90s—I came to rely on it even before Org came along.

I am able to make it do anything I want, to make little extensions for every little need all the time. Truly evergreen.

kickahaon Ask HN: Which books have made you a better thinker and problem solver?

The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking by Burger and Starbird.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691156668/th...

Defies categorization, difficult to summarize. A tutorial for effective and fulfilling learning, grappling with challenging intellectual problems, and for cultivating creativity.

It’s easy to read it superficially. The authors recommend reading it three times through. I read it again with first semester college students every fall. In actual fact, returning to it always reveals more insights (at least for me).

Most students roll their eyes and miss the value. But every year students come back and tell me that it changed the way they think when they got to college.

I’ve gotten some colleagues hooked on it too.

kickahaon R49081 Is Prime

I understood that reference!

EDIT: the reference

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Nine_Billion_Names_of_Go...

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Hugely helpful. Thank you.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Wow, thanks. This is a good and useful perspective. I shall endeavor to make my VPS a source of nutrition rather than a source of affection. :-)

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Yes! THANK YOU! I am so grateful for all the replies, but this may ultimately be among the most useful.

If I could go back and reframe my question, it would be “Which FM should I R?” :-)

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Extremely helpful. Thanks for the tips!

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Thank you for compiling this list.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Really good advice. I still have flashes of “Ohhhh righhhhhht it’s a VIRTUAL machine---I can...” make a snapshot, clone it and test new stuff, etc. etc. etc. I’ll be happy when it fully sinks in.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Wow. “The system fundamentally fails us AGAIN RAWR” is a hot take that I almost always go to eagerly, but I am vibing SO HARD on hitting the front page of HN (!!!?) and getting the community help glow, that for the moment I’m gonna let it go. :-)

Also, thanks for all the helpful tips.

At this point there is so much for me to go on that I am trying to think how I can put it all together and share it.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

SUPER helpful. Very grateful!

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

This is definitely a direction I will explore.

> in cities and other areas that actually have competitive markets for ISP

Ho, ho. Out my window I just LITERALLY saw a bald eagle swoop down on a tumbleweed.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Helpful. Thank you.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Hm. In my experience, the Synology apps (client and server both) are ghastly. And I'm snobby about non-free software.

Better not to cut off my nose to spite my face, though, right? I suppose a non-Apple but closed/proprietary solution is a step in the right direction...?

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

That's two votes for that book, so I'll take a look. Thank you!

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

> That "last mile" of connectivity is fraught with challenges of dealing with your internet provider and all sorts of other things. It can be a headache, and it's very particular to your situation, and your provider.

> If you start "self hosting" on a cloud based instance, all that you learn in doing so will carry over to when you finally are able to move everything to a machine in house.

This has been my suspicion all along! Yes, my goal is to learn the basics before I pull the Pi out of the drawer.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Fair enough. But I just want a place to put dotfiles that I can share between machines. If I had more complex needs than that, I would probably not have had to ask this question!

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

Great to know! Thank you.

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

I know enough to know who Kernighan, Ritchie, and Stroustrup are.

I know enough to know why this (sincere, and appreciated!) answer is being downvoted. :-)

(I encountered these gentlemen in the 1980s. Before I changed my major.)

kickahaon Ask HN: How can a total beginner start with self-hosting?

I've got a 2012 or so Pi in a drawer...! Maybe I can play around with it.