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mike978on Federal judge orders Texas to air condition all prisons by the end of 2029

Society as a whole is not wholly responsible. Some people are taught and some are just bad - bad brains, bad choices, bad intents. I've never had to teach a toddler what to do when another child takes their toy. Somethings are just innate. Some can be helped and should be, others cannot. Taking away an individual's responsibility removes dignity and gets in the way of healing. We don't have to give into the fallacy of choosing one or the other - both society and the individual can be responsible for their actions.

But yes, we have been devaluing human life and dignity, or if you prefer the Image of God, across all of society. The conditions of these prisons should not exist even if this is purely punitive, which I do not believe it should be. Victims deserve justice, but criminals deserve the right to pay the price and come out "clean". We should want to make society whole, to bring them back into the fold as full members, but too often we don't want to pay the cost.

mike978on Mushroom hunting with LLMs: what can go wrong?

They look like the Asian Paddy Straw Mushrooms, so people used to collecting those, being new to the area and not knowing about the Death Cap run afoul of it. The San Francisco Chronicle often has stories about this after it rains.

mike978on Cows can use sophisticated tools

They are very curious and seem to like trombones... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYD42BXbjFg

mike978on Cows can use sophisticated tools

They already have the "Happy Cow Brush" :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Kynijqps4

or a more manual version https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h2O7Z7cJB-w

mike978on Mosquitoes discovered in Iceland for the first time

Pretty much - although after living with it for 4 year I can report it's often worse. =) The local bookstore gave a discount for the first bite of the season if you lived long enough to collect.

mike978on Mosquitoes discovered in Iceland for the first time

Yeah, they can, I was just commenting on the physical experience as to which insects would keep me away from the northern latitudes.

mike978on Mosquitoes discovered in Iceland for the first time

In my experience Black flies[1] and no-see-ums[2] are far worse (not counting mosquitoes born disease). It's like a massive angry cloud of micro horseflies that intend to dismember you bite by bite.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_fly [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceratopogonidae

mike978on A 12,000-year-old obelisk with a human face was found in Karahan Tepe

or petrified Minecraft villagers

mike978on Ishkur's Guide to Electronic Music

The file linked on https://www.mixcloud.com/Ishkur/the-longplay-15/ is giving a 404, but can be found here:

https://web.archive.org/web/20240226032906/http://ishkur.com...

mike978on California is nearly out of license plate numbers. Here's what the DMV is doing

I look forward to the scavenger hunt for the bizarro version of my plate. Thought that will be down the road a bit...

mike978on Block Diffusion: Interpolating between autoregressive and diffusion models

https://m-arriola.com/bd3lms/

https://github.com/kuleshov-group/bd3lms

mike978on Spark-TTS: Text-2-Speech Model Single-Stream Decoupled Tokens [pdf]

https://github.com/SparkAudio/Spark-TTS

https://spark-tts.github.io/

mike978on Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps

While I agree that many of us are headed from different parts of the city or countryside, if we are Christians or seekers we are all headed to the same destination. So while our satnav path may look different, there are inevitably similar experiences along the way from which we can learn. Beyond that if you are a Christian you believe the Word will apply to all of those situations. Those who study the word can therefore offer insight. I believe this also includes truths like the trinity. So in those sense I would say no it's no purely internal. That being said yes, faith is head knowledge acting in anticipation from the heart as a relationship between you and God.

"It's a fundamental rule found everywhere - there is a softer voice within that will speak to of it but you have to ask it to tell you and then have ears to hear it." But without experience and until you learn to discern the softer voice you must test it against scripture, to know whose it is.

mike978on Silver amulet is the oldest evidence of Christianity north of the Alps

For those curious about the trinity what it is and why it is important to Christian faith I highly recommend Delighting in the Trinity by Michael Reeves [1]

"...what kind of God could outstrip the attractions of all other things? Could any unitary, single-person god do so? Hardly, or at least not for long. Single-person gods must, by definition, have spent eternity in absolute solitude. Before creation, having no other persons with whom they could commune, they must have been entirely alone.

Love for others, then, cannot go very deep in them if they can go for eternity without it. And so, not being essentially loving, such gods are inevitably less than lovely. They may demand our worship, but they cannot win our hearts. They must be served with gritted teeth.

How wonderfully different it is with the triune God. In John 17:24, Jesus speaks of how the Father loved Him even before the creation of the world. That is the triune, living God: a Father, whose very being has eternally been about loving His Son, pouring out the Spirit of love and life on Him. Here is a God who is love, who is so full of life and blessing that for eternity He has been overflowing with it..."

[1] https://www.unionpublishing.org/resource/delighting-in-the-t...

mike978on The ambiguous witness of Dietrich Bonhoeffer (2014)

I would suggest the book Jesus and the Powers[1] by NT Wright and Michael F Bird if you have interest in the topic.

Basically they prefer nonviolence, but leave the door open to other options when confronting abusive governments in extreme situations where nonviolence has failed to produce change. They say the choice to use violence should not be easy. It should be done only for the public good not for one group of people and its use should be scaled to the nature of the evil being resisted.

[1] https://zondervanacademic.com/jesus-and-the-powers

mike978on Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

I'll do audiobooks while I do the grocery shopping or drive. And some of the books are kind of cheating as there are always a few graphic novels or 90 or 150 page books. But even as a parent I can find some time by cutting down screen time.

Also even though I enjoy reading a lot, I find more isn't always better, but I've been trying to survey some topics - fascism, Christian Nationalism, etc. If I really want to get something out of what I'm reading or if it is a complex topic I have to slow down.

mike978on Ask HN: What were the best books you read this year?

A couple of my favorites from this year, I read a lot (50 to 100 a year)

Fiction:

- What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver

- Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky

- A Man with One of Those Faces by Caimh Mcdonnell

- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

- A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine

- Antimatter Blues by Edward Ashton

- Where the Body Was by Ed Brubaker and Sean Philips

Nonfiction:

- Exiles by Preston Sprinkle

- Jesus and the Powers by N. T. Wright & Michael F. Bird

- With All Its Teeth by Joshua S. Porter

- In Praise of Shadows by Junichiro Tanizaki

- A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz

Copenhagen(play) by Michael Frayn done by BBC Radio, not really a book, but it's great. https://archive.org/details/michael-frayn-copenhagen

mike978on It's legal for police to use deception in interrogations. Some want that to end

occasionally when it was told "down".

mike978on Cat Is Listening to You

One of my cats is named Cricket, if I talk about feeding crickets to a lizard she looks at me and talks back even though I used different intonation.

If anyone says our other cat's name he gets a look of oh no they noticed me and runs away.

mike978on Cat Is Listening to You

I agree and then some. My cats know food, lunch, treat, toy, mouse(which is both a toy and the name of one of the cats), no, out(both outside and please leave the room), go home, up(get up on the bed or my lap), off(get off the dang counter/table for the 1 millionth time). They multiple name for themselves and the name of the other cats. They know that when I whistle I'm calling them.

Now if only they would do as well as hear more often...The Siamese talks back when I use words she doesn't want to hear and sometimes curses me.

mike978on Just want simple TLS for your .internal network?

How does this compare with smallstep step-ca certificates?

https://github.com/smallstep/certificates

mike978on American Ornithological Society changing the names of birds named after people

The bird formerly known as prince... the same way Pluto is still a planet.

mike978on Ollama releases Python and JavaScript Libraries

I have a 11th gen intel cpu with 64gb ram and I can run most of big models slowly... so it's partly what you can put up with.