sourcepluck

I've probably 10 more questions, but you've already shared generously in a couple of other comments. Thanks for that. I've bookmarked, and will investigate. Best of luck with it

I forgot

https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/penguin-t4-gnulinux-l...

Didn't re-read, of course

Wow, that's so very cool! Olimex are wonderful!

I'm waiting on "Code" by Petzold to arrive, which I'm hoping will scratch a similar itch, but this seems like a really great way to do it! The nand2tetris course seems so very great. Emulating it all in C sounds fun.

Oh wow, it's happening there! I've followed and starred and bookmarked and all that, and will be having a browse around a bit more closely when I get a moment. I think I'm roughly understanding what the group is about. I'll follow up, thanks!

Geez, where do I sign up?

Sounds great. Don't listen to the pseudo-realists who chase dreams of grandeur rather than doing something (at least semi-) useful or good with their lives.

Thank you, that's wonderful, I'll be sleuthing there and getting a feel for things. Cheers!

This may have been true at some point... in the 90s? I'm not sure if it actually was even true then. In any case, it isn't true today:

https://minifree.org/product/libreboot-t480/

https://pine64.org/devices/

https://puri.sm/products/librem-14/

https://www.raptorcs.com/TALOSII/

https://frame.work/ie/en/products/laptop16-diy-amd-7040

https://www.olimex.com/Products/DIY-Laptop/

https://shop.mntre.com/products/mnt-reform

Agree with the other responder, largely. I've been bothered a few times by Emacs locking up, but never enough to be actually upset about it. Bugs, I don't see it, it is very very solid for me, I can't remember the last time something didn't work as expected. Hmmm.

Still very Lem-curious, though!

Eww, an unclosed parenthesis. Horrid! The Lisp gods will not be happy. Excuse me, HN people!

The word "free" is being ruthlessly abused here, surely...

If I follow the link there, it costs 239E for a 5-day pass, where each of the 5 days must be used in a 1 month period. That's not "gratis", that's 47.8E per day the train is used?

Lol @ "office horror software". So apt.

Hmm, reading a bit more on the same article, i.e., this one here:

https://www.vegasmaster.com/gambling-tax-free-countries/

I see these relevant lines:

  > The laws concerning gambling tax around the world aren’t all black and white. In most cases, there is a sort of gray area which states that you will be taxed on winnings if gambling is your profession or your main source of income. However, if you gamble and win but you have a bigger source of income and don’t rely on professional gambling to pay the bills, you won’t be taxed.

  In other countries, like Kenya and Ireland, players aren’t taxed on their winnings, but bookies must pay a certain percentage of taxes on the total bets or winnings they record. In Ireland bookies must pay 1% on all bets placed through them, while in Kenya bookies have to pay 7.5% tax on all winnings they record.

I only learned yesterday after reading this article that, apparently, a good many countries have no taxes on gambling wins. The reasoning is - again, from my quick bit of reading, if someone in the know wants to correct me please do - that most people lose, and the government doesn't want to be liable to help all the people who lose heavily.

Which is great for the pros, I suppose. Here's a list of countries, which you'd have to check individually, after I searched "gambling tax free countries":

    Austria
    Australia
    Belgium
    Bulgaria
    Canada
    Czech Republic
    Denmark
    Finland
    Germany
    Hungary
    Italy
    Luxembourg
    Malta
    Romania
    Sweden
    United Kingdom

Betfair, or somewhere else, if I may ask?

Could you share the name of your former employer, or if you can't, could you share the name of similar employers?

I'm on a bit of a probability (gambling, sports betting, stats, etc) kick these days, and I'd be interested in reading more about people and companies doing this in practice. I'd been imagining there must be organised sports gamblers, but they don't seem to be overly searchable.

Does anyone have any links to political analysis of what's going on with chess.com, and its involvement in various scandals? I think your wager has something to it, in any case.

I think there'd be material there for an investigative journalist (if such a thing still exists to get out the old whiteboard and start figuring out connections and trying to piece together what might be going on behind the scenes. In any case, there's a lot of money involved.

I loved browsing the emacsconf videos this year, really nicely presented, and such cool stuff happening. Still have lots to watch, but so far in particular the infrastructural and UI type stuff seemed amazing, there's loads happening! Favourites included:

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/casual/ -- Charles Choi designing UIs for human beings rather than octopuses (this jibe is meant fondly, I am a happy octopus)

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/literate/ -- Howard Abram, literate programming

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/gypsum/ -- Emacs and emacs lisp clone in Guile

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/rust/ -- Rune, an experimental Emacs core in Rust

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/julia/ -- lovely talk about the synchronicity between Julia and Emacs

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/guile/ -- Robin Templeton relaunches Guile-Emacs!

https://emacsconf.org/2024/talks/mcclim/ -- eh, this talk accepted questions from lambdaMOO?

What is better, from your experience?

I'm a happy Emacs user, but think having more options is great, and I've delved into some Common Lisp and certainly am eager to learn more. So I'm thrilled to see Lem continue to be developed.

Great to see Netflix being derided, I instantly feel soothed.

One other curious and quite insufferable thing which exists now is when a show/movie/game will give an unmistakeable and unsubtle nod to some other bit of media or information, either from the show/movie/game itself, or some other show/movie/game/cultural artefact.

And the learned and informed modern-media-gooner who is "in-the-know" will go: "aaaaaaha!" and "oooooh, clever!"

How has this happened? How is it considered so substantive and sophisticated for a show to make surface-level nods to other media? Please, someone explain this phenomenon to me.

I think Rick and Morty do a good job ridiculing this trope, but it doesn't seem to have been effective at slowing the tide. When a movie or a rap song alludes to something outside of itself or makes a meta-comment about itself, or breaks the fourth wall in some way, people are titillated beyond belief, I find.

What exactly is tickling them so hard?

THE WIZARD WENT WEST THROUGH THE DOOR AND INTO THE GARDEN

Now you're really on to something - someone give this person some VC money, please!

Couldn't disagree more about Arcane, I thought it was the usual pedestrian writing and mish-mash of tired tropes we've come to expect from mainstream productions.

A friend was pushing me to give it a try, a friend who likes Marvel, and the Miles Morales spiderman film, who plays League, who was excited by Baldur's Gate, etc etc. I tried to say "no, there is no chance of me enjoying that, it'll be the usual drivel", but they insisted it was really good.

And I watched, against my better judgment, saying to myself: "come on now, give it a serious try, be open-minded". To no avail!

I recall the scene where they'd the punk or alternative or "underground" live music in the bar in the underworld place, in the 3rd or 4th episode, and that being the final straw for me. A viler and more disharmonious appropriation of dissident culture I've never had the displeasure of sitting through.

A company wants to do action x.

"If x leads to legal issue y, how much could it cost us?"

"If x leads to reputational issue z, how much could it cost us?"

-- that's my guess for the two things that matter when a company considers an action. Aside from, of course, how much money or resources the action would bring to the table in the first place, which is the primary concern (legally, culturally, etc).

People who work in this and related and indeed any industry - am I off the mark? If so, how? Look forward to any clarifications or updates to this heuristic I'm proposing.

Yes, yes, yes and yes.

I hadn't explicitly said to myself that even for a modern company OpenAI maybe has a particularly fond relationship with this Orwellian use of language to mean its opposite. I wonder if we could go so far as to say it's a defining feature of the company (and our age).

  > Reductio ad Hitlerum (Latin for "reduction to Hitler"), also known as playing the Nazi card, is an attempt to invalidate someone else's argument on the basis that the same idea was promoted or practised by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party.

I can't tell if you're being serious, or joking, or what. In any case, there's the actual definition, and I don't see how it applies whatsoever. I was not disagreeing with you in the first place? Perhaps there's simply a misunderstanding.

reduction ad hitlerum =/= "mentioning hitler in any way"

Yes, thank you for asking

The opposite of the fantasy football subreddit is probably moreso someone making minor specific side-points about language use and expecting others to read carefully, i.e. me in my initial comment, rather than the person misinterpreting them and making sarcastic remarks. Who, in actual fact, is probably more closely mimicking the behaviour of such subreddits.

It was an amusing remark though nonetheless, out of all of them it's the one that gave me a chuckle.

I responded to the general responses just above anyway, if you're interested.

I didn't mean to poke fun, but I can see now that it triggered some pretty hard responses.

I should have attempted to be clearer - I specifically only meant to question the "fun" part. I didn't mean to suggest it's not a "good" fact, or a good "random" fact. Sure, it'd be great in a discussion as you describe.

Trying to think of some analogy to illustrate my point - imagine watching a movie, and someone says: "fun fact, actor xyz is also in movie abc." I, personally, would think: where's the fun part of this fact?

Fun facts need some oomph! Some surprising bit to them, something you wouldn't have seen coming. "Actor xyz showed up unannounced at my cousin's wedding for reason abc", would be a "fun fact".

Or you're listening to a Björk album with a friend, and half-way through he says: "oh, actually, fun fact, I once played on stage with Björk during a festival in Iceland", and he proceeds to launch into a few anecdotes.

Here, the fact was: "someone who wrote a seminal paper in AI is working in an AI company". I, personally, said to myself: oh, right. What's the surprise?

Apparently that was seen by some as an uncouth and uncultured reaction (not you though, you were very polite, hence my responding here). Oops.