Hacker News Reader

runesofdoomon Web scraping for me, but not for thee

The problem with that sort "that's what amoral corporations do" reasoning is that corporations are permitted to exist because of the idea that they do contribute to the net public good. Once that idea is out the window, then there's no reason for society not to treat corporations as the hungry Lovecraftian nightmares they are and obliterate them with fire and steamship.

runesofdoomon Higashiyama Atsuki and the “between-legs effect”

I have read (though I can't cite a source at the moment) that what is sometimes taken as limits on talent/skill/material limits on medieval art was more often a stylistic choice.

runesofdoomon Tesla repossessed my car due to an extreme oversight on their end

Or maybe giant corporations failing to perform due diligence internally ought not be a cost that they get to impose on their customers without legal consequence.

runesofdoomon Navy in Middle-Earth

The saddest part for me is that the RoP could have done something very similar to what they did, while still staying true to the canon 2nd Age, and arguably telling a much better story. Instead we got sometinf that felt more like ham-handed generic 80s fantasy, coaplaying as Middle-earth.

From the moment it opened with elf-children acting like orcs, it was clear not only that she showrunners had missed the mark, but they lacked enough of Socrates "beginning of wisdom" that they couldn't even understand how they were missing it

runesofdoomon Amazon doesn't 'employ' drivers, but hired firms to prevent them from unionizing

We (Americans) have normalized, often explicitly legalized, quite a lot of corrupt behavior in various positions of power.[1] We then look at how comparatively little illegal corruption there is, and the official line is that everything is fine, nothing to see here.

1. Officials failing to accurately provide financial disclosures result in a consequence of having to fill it out again. Members of Congress can legally practice insider trading, and often do. And even when there's no revolving door, post-facto bribes in the form of cushy sinecures are accepted. Money as protected speech. Etc.

runesofdoomon Autoenshittification. How the computer killed capitalism. – by Cory Doctorow

No! *The "tech people" are not knights and never will be. The "knights" are upper management. The lords are the centimillionaires and up. The rest of us are slaves, peasants, maybe monks if we're "lucky".

runesofdoomon Trying to find some life on the Usenet (2020)

"From posts here and elsewhere, I have some idea what a 'life' might be, and how I might get one. But, what is this 'offline'?"

runesofdoomon Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

As Carl Sagan said, "They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

runesofdoomon Journalists should be skeptical of all sources including scientists

While he's certainly careful to hedge (much like the scientists he's critizcizing), Mr. Silver's argument boils down to, "I think four scientists published a technically correct but politicially motivated paper, so from now on journalists should consider peer-reviewed publications by reputable PhD's as the equivalent of Johnnie RedHat posting on Twitter".

runesofdoomon The many planned moon landings of 2023

I am not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that due to the expansion of the universe and the speed of light, the volume of space we will ever be able to access is finite, roughly that of the galactic supercluster we're in.

runesofdoomon Going Rogue

Curses can be addressed by: 1) blessing everything that matters before you start your ascension 2) carrying inventory in an oilskin sack (which will work fine while cursed, and protect items inside it from being cursed) 3) carrying holy water and/or scrolls of remove curse 4) knowing the remove curse spell 5) certain Artifacts and armor will reduce the effect of curses on your inventory 6) carrying a lot of lightweight junk as a curse "buffer" so that curses will have a lower chance of hitting something critical 7) wielding Magicbane, that blocks 95% of curses.

A lot of this is really just, as mentioned, time spent on planning and execution.

runesofdoomon Going Rogue

I played Nethack a lot during school. The only obstacles to ascending any character were my free time, patience, ability to stay focused, and occassionally the unfavorable early-game RNG.

runesofdoomon Windows Update Restored: Fix Windows update on Windows 95, 98, ME, 2000, and XP

A possibly illustrative example:

A year or three ago, my uncle (mid-50s, telco IT manager, started on a Commodore in the 80s) decided he'd try Mint instead of upgrading from Windows 7. He got it installed and running, and decided he wanted to burn an audio CD.

His install of Mint didn't come with any application to accomplish this. He got something recommended installed easily enough, but it only supported FLAC, not his MP3s. So he removed that and got some different CD burning software that did support his MP3s, but was set to Finnish by default. He got enough Finnish translated to get it changed to English, and then ran into some sort of driver/support issue for his particular CD burner.

At that point, he did the free upgrade to Windows 10 and then burned his CD in less total time than he'd spent not burning a CD via Mint.

runesofdoomon Customers don't want chat bots

I think the idea is that the item isn't scratched. They're just claiming it is to try and get a refund/credit.

runesofdoomon The Deep Sea (2019)

Maxim 43: "If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky."[1]

[1]From Schlock Mercenary's "Seventy Maxims of Maximially Effective Mercenaries".

https://www.ovalkwiki.com/index.php/The_Seventy_Maxims_of_Ma...

runesofdoomon Debris found came from missing Titan sub, says friend of passengers

It appears to me that for all the rushing about (which was appropriate and neccessary if there were any surviors or surface debris to be found at all) the somewhat grim reality is:

1) hydrophones heard it implode at the same time it lost contact

2) it took until early 6/22 to get a deep-diving ROV on site

3) once the ROV got to the bottom, it swiftly found the debris from the implosion as expected

runesofdoomon Reddit CEO Says Mods Too Powerful, Plans to Weaken After Blackout

And the same message would still be sent to every user who cares: whatever value you see here is worthless to us, the owners. You have no stake, and we value your experience only as a source of wealth extraction. A lot of users probably don't care. Others probably think that's a fine and proper thing. For myself, it's a reminder and a warning.

The reminder is that Reddit is a Cthulhu-esque machine and cannot be trusted. Reddit and myself were always ships whose courses had happened to align, I have been warned that they are changing course to one I will not like.

That's all fair enough, but far from admirable. But my takeaway is that the net value of Reddit, to me, is going to be negative for the forseeable future, so my own best course is to block it completely. Others can make their own choices.

runesofdoomon ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

Only he doesn't make as much money as his employers expected. Star Wars Episode IX should have made Avengers Endame box office, and it barely cracked a billion. Yes, a billion is a ton of money, but I'll bet Disney had projections and Rise of Skywalker fell short. His resume certainly looks pretty slim post-Star Wars.

runesofdoomon ‘The Force has left Lucasfilm’: how Disney can salvage its $4B investment

You want the showrunners for Rings of Power instead? Amazon went for the best mix of young, talented and well-rexommended they could find, and they blew it.

runesofdoomon Jeff Bezos announces $3.4B NASA contract to land astronauts on lunar surface

To stay on brand for Bezos, will be an exact copy of the SpaceX lander made in China?

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

All the fired employees Musk didn't treat as he was obligated to. From the former CEO [1], to the rank and file [2], down to the contracted out janitors [3].

1.https://www.google.com/amp/s/fortune.com/2023/04/11/twitter-...

2.https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/musks-twitt...

3.https://www.kqed.org/news/11935439/fired-twitter-janitors-de...

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

It's a lot easier to gamble with your future when failure means a comfortable life of freedom, than when it means poverty and destitution.

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

It's going to collapse when the lawsuits from the former employees (from the C-suite down to janitors) catch up, and when the fines from the FCC and EU hit.

That could be 3 months or 18, but it's going to happen unless there's a complete about face at Twitter.

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

Perhaps his parents owned two emerald mines, making his judgement twice as good as Elon's?

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

Doing one thing and saying you're doing something else is an astonishingly effective tactic.

runesofdoomon Linda Yaccarino is the new CEO of Twitter

My best guess is that he wants to raze it to the ground and salt the earth on which it once stood so that nothing can grow there again. Not just destroy it, but destroy it so thoroughly and comprehensively that it cannot be rebuilt.

runesofdoomon Dashcam footage shows driverless cars clogging San Francisco

>8 hours (4+4) spent in commuting, driving or not, is an entire life. This isn't a realistic concern, but something pulled out of a cyberpunk novel.

To paraphrase a certain fictional pirate captain, "You'd best start believing in cyberpunk dystopias... you're in one!"

runesofdoomon Disney begins laying off 7k employees

>If there was a better way to do things companies would be doing it.

Only if it involved short-term profit for those making the decisions on how to do it. Which is the problem in the first place.

runesofdoomon Greenland ice sheet is close to a melting point of no return

From, Yes, Minister,

"Stage 1: We say nothing is going to happen.

Stage 2: We say something may be about to happen, but we should do nothing about it.

Stage 3: We say maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do.

Stage 4: We say maybe there was something, but it's too late now."

runesofdoomon Genes reveal striking diversity within similar ice age cultures

The isolated mammoth population on Wrangel Island in the Arctic lasted until ~2000BC. [1] They died out before humans arrived at their island, possibly driven extinct by 'genomic meltdown'.[2]

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S027737911...

[2]https://www.science.org/content/article/last-lonely-woolly-m...