amyjess

I remember reading this article when it was first posted here five years ago, and I've been fascinated by Bank Python since. It actually reminds me of a number of systems I've come up with in my head but never told anyone about or wrote down in any way.

I'm sorry, but what? Why do cars need apps now?

I absolutely need a pure SDI workflow. I like browsing through files on disk by the double-clicking them, reading through them a bit, and then using Alt+F4. I tried that with Notepad++ once and I ended up with hundreds of files open in tabs because Notepad++ remembers everything you've ever opened even if you Alt+F4 the app.

I also like sometimes having multiple files open at once and drag the windows around my monitors as I need to and you can't do that in Notepad++.

Also Notepad++'s UI is bloated. There's just too much going on.

And please don't suggest I muck around in settings, I'm not interested in spending hours mucking around in a gigantic bloated settings dialog, I want something that Just Works™ with no configuration just like Win95 Notepad.

Edit: My specific use case here is for viewing files, not editing them. I use a different editor when I'm actually writing stuff but for browsing I just want old Notepad.

Are there any text editors for Windows that are feature-for-feature and bug-for-bug compatible with the Windows 95 build of Notepad?

I'm looking for a plain and simple text editor with no programmers' features—no line numbers, syntax highlighting, etc.—no tabs or MDI whatsoever. No, I'm not looking for something with "you can turn these off", just a complete reimplementation of Win95 Notepad made via black-box testing.

As somebody who has no problem whatsoever with weed, it smells like pus from a tooth infection to me.

I have had dental abscesses in the past that made my mouth taste like I was in a room full of cannabis smoke.

IMO Outemu blues are better than Cherry's. They're actually clickier.

“We are committed to operating like the world’s largest startup, and … that means removing layers.”

I learned a long time ago that behaving like a startup is not a good thing, and I've specifically oriented my career towards working at companies that don't even want to pretend to imitate startup culture. I'm very happy in enterprise-land.

IIRC demoscene is already recognized as UNESCO heritage in Finland and Germany, what are we going to do, go down the list of every country that ever produced more than a few demos?

Potentially, yes. Take a look at the following list and you'll see, for example, that 24 countries are listed for falconry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNESCO_Intangible_Cultural_Her...

H.264 may allow 2160p video, but the 4K UHD standard is more than just 2160p. For example, HDR is absolutely critical to 4K, and the only way to do that in H.264 is to use Hi10P which isn't supported by most devices.

In fact, I'd say HDR is more important than 2160p resolution in that I'd rather watch 1080p HDR video than 2160p SDR video.

KWord is a thing, and the only reason it's not still under active development is because enthusiasm for development dried up after the acrimonious KOffice/Calligra split. In fact, it was the only part of the KOffice suite that was allowed to keep its name after the split.

And there's also AbiWord, which is still under active development.

Or speaking of which, all the gazillion office suites with Office in the name.

I believe the term is "short order" for when you have dishes cooked to order.

I'd recommend going with Sony nowadays. The Xperia 10 series especially is a lot like a 4a.

My favorite video game company is a little Japanese outfit called Nihon Falcom. They've been around since 1981, have about 65 employees, release exactly one new game a year, and if you've played any of their games, you can tell they're all made on absolutely shoestring budgets. They have also never posted a loss and have an absolutely bonkers amount of cash on hand (enough to keep the company going for several years on their current budget IIRC).

They also make the best story-driven RPGs I've played in my life. And they specifically went the story-driven route because it's cheaper to hire good writers than it is to wow people with AAA graphics or a giant open world or whatever.

More video game companies should be like Falcom.

I think "breakdown" is the wrong word: he's always been this way. I think he may have Borderline Personality Disorder. The behavior Matt is engaging in here is called "emotional dysregulation", which is characteristic of BPD, and he has a long history of doing it whenever he faces even the slightest criticism.

In 2010, he attempted to get Ben Cook fired from his day job for writing an essay criticizing his dual role as head of both Automattic and the Wordpress Foundation. Over the last few years, he has waged a disproportionate war against queer users on Tumblr for lightly criticizing his leadership.

There was a fairly recent issue of the Fantastic Four about this as well.

(where "fairly recent" means part of Ryan North's excellent run)

you need something like actual malice--specific knowledge of falsity

IANAL, but as I understand it the definition of malice also includes "reckless disregard for the truth". I'm sure a good lawyer can argue that not having human lawyers review, investigate, and confirm computer-generated abuse reports before sending them to outsiders constitutes a reckless disregard for the truth.

Ultimately, I am going to quote one of my favorite writers [0] and say that I am not afraid of a life that ends.

I don't want to be a brain in a jar. Or in a computer either. I enjoy experiencing physical sensations and interacting with the world in meatspace. And if I can't enjoy either, then just let me die.

And I apply this to not just brain preservation, but any attempt to artificially prolong the quantity of my life at the expense of the quality of my life. I do not want to spend my last years in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and unable to move. That was how my dad died, and even then he was lucky enough his partner (who he had discussed this with before and who had the authority to make the decision) eventually agreed to switch him to palliative care in his final hours. Similarly, I have seen what chemotherapy does to people, and I have long since decided that if I ever get cancer, I will refuse chemo and let myself die. I am also having a living will drawn up that includes a DNR order, multiple scenarios where doctors will be ordered to pull the plug, and a prohibition against anyone amputating any of my limbs or sensory organs even if it's necessary to save my life.

I will make sure I die with my autonomy and my dignity intact.

[0] Al Ewing. He writes comics. Read his stuff, he's good.

On a more serious note, given that a triple-digit number of employees have taken buyouts over Matt's behavior, it must really suck to be one of the employees who now has to do other people's jobs in addition to their own.

If I worked for Automattic, I'd take a buyout even if I didn't object to Matt's behavior, just because I know how much it always sucks to be one of the employees stuck at a company after a walkout or a layoff.

God, I used to read Anandtech religiously in the '00s. So sad to see them closing shop, even though I understand why.

Of course, that assumes the AI won't just hallucinate and give you false information. Which is a major problem with current LLMs.

marketing overtook technological improvement in product development

I would say another key change is things just becoming less modular over time.

Like, the chipset used to be a major factor in choosing your motherboard, but it just doesn't matter anymore. Third-party chipsets are no longer a thing, and there's little difference between first-party chipsets anymore because every CPU has a full integrated northbridge now.

And honestly, today's PCs are powerful enough that there's no point in even bothering to make optimal choices. You could pick mediocre parts for all your stuff and still end up with a beast. It's not like the P4 or Athlon XP days where you'd feel it if you picked a bleh motherboard or something.

Not GP, but I just got a Sony Xperia 10 VI, and I'm loving it so far.

So this is more political than I usually care to get here, and I'm only talking about this because I think I can get something intellectually interesting about it (and dang, if you're listening, let me know if I should dial it down and I'll drop it right away), but I do have some observations on American politics before and since 9/11:

- There was a lot of horrible, awful stuff in the '90s that kinda got memory holed because people focus now on modern issues like 9/11, the financial crisis, the rise of the alt-right, covid, etc. But in the '90s you still had the hate crimes against Rodney King and and Matthew Shepard, the LA riots, David Duke becoming a GOP gubernatorial candidate, Pat Buchanan's speech at the 1992 RNC, the back half of one of the worst crime waves in our history (which petered out in the mid '90s, largely thanks to the end of leaded gasoline in cars), deeply rooted homophobia that pervaded every aspect of culture, etc. Post-9/11 America had its problems, with hate crimes against Sikhs because they were mistaken for Muslims (plus hate crimes against actual Muslims) and a general attitude of "you're either with us or you're against us", but it's not like the '90s was free of any of that ugliness either.

- Politically, post-9/11 America almost felt like a breather because it was the one and only time neocons had total control of the GOP and shut the paleocons out of the levers of power, and it's my observation that neocons are far more amenable to modern American ways of life than paleocons. The Bush era was the only time in my life I thought about Republicans, "they're trying to do what they think is best for the country, it's just that I think they're completely wrong about what actually is best". And with the modern GOP... you can see with Trump and his supporters doing anti-American things like threatening to pull out of NATO and withholding medical aid to blue states just because they didn't vote for him that he and his closest followers have a fundamental sense of contempt for the American way of life and America's role in the world, which isn't something I could ever say about the Bush-era GOP. In fact, neocon foreign policy was basically "the American way of life is so good, we should export it to the rest of the world by force". That's not the modern GOP.

- After the 2008 financial crisis, neocons were thoroughly discredited, and paleocons had a resurgence, taking back the GOP by creating first the Tea Party and the then Trump movement. The biggest difference between the Tea Party and Trump is that the Tea Party's behavior was purely confined to the sphere of politics.

- I think the first big low-trust moment in politics was Joe Wilson shouting "You lie!" at Obama on the floor of Congress in 2009. Say what you will about Obama's politics, but not only is Wilson's line disgustingly crass, but it's a kind of crassness that none of us had previously seen on the floor of Congress in our lifetimes. I think the last time we saw that kind of boorish behavior in Congress was the 19th century. Similarly, we had the GOP's accelerated use of the filibuster. Before the Obama Administration, the filibuster was primarily a "break glass in case of emergency" button, but GOP senators during the Obama Administration used it in place of a no vote, effectively forcing the Senate to have a 60% supermajority to pass anything. You can find a number of graphs and charts showing how sudden and drastic this rise in the use of the filibuster was [0] [1] [2] [3] (I found most of these by doing a Google Image Search for use of the filibuster in congress over time btw). This is indeed not normal behavior. Similarly, GOP senators refusing to confirm Merrick Garland for SCOTUS just because it was an election year and they hoped Trump could appoint Scalia's successor is also low-trust behavior. Nothing about this is doing anything to help America or Americans, it's purely so they can wield even more power for themselves and lock their enemies out of power. In the past, you would only see a political party moving in lockstep to block a major nominee if the nominee had political stances that were just plain beyond the pale or if they were found to have had a criminal background, not as a matter of course just because they want their own party to fill the position instead. Merrick Garland is no left-wing ideologue, he's a milquetoast centrist who, as attorney general, hasn't prosecuted Trump and the like nearly as hard as he should have.

- But everything in that above bullet point was something you would only see if you paid any attention to politics. Outside the sphere of politics, things were still normal until 2015.

- When Trump came along, his behavior intersected with the concepts of guilt and shame in a way that proved incredibly destructive to society. The words are not synonyms: guilt is what you feel when you violate your own standards, and shame is what you feel when you violate society's. A bad actor can absolve the public of shame by behaving shamelessly and not facing any consequences for it. Tale as old as time, to see people behaving badly in public, getting away with it, and spawning more people doing the same. But Trump went farther, and he absolved the public of guilt, too. He didn't just perform bad acts in public, he presented them as a virtue. He told them that any hatred they hold in their hearts is A-OK, that there's nothing wrong with resenting other people. When Hillary Clinton confronted him in the 2016 debates about potentially cheating on his taxes, he said "That's because I'm smart." And time and time again, when Trump would do something awful, he would extol the virtues of his own behavior. His behavior was to enrich himself, destroy his enemies, act with fear and hatred towards minority groups, and turn against his closest allies the moment they stopped being useful to him. And he told the public that this is morally correct, that everything he has done is the right thing to do. And that eventually wore away society's guilt and created a legion of people whose entire moral code consists of "enrich yourself, destroy your enemies, fear and hate minorities, and throw your loved ones away once you no longer have use for them". And any society whose moral code is that is by definition a low-trust society.

- In a society with a healthy level of guilt, it wouldn't be unheard of for somebody to have a bigoted thought only for them to feel guilty, chastise themselves over it, and never act on it. Like maybe someone reads a news article about somebody being killed by a member of a minority group, they may think "those people are all murderers, they don't belong here" and immediately the guilt kicks in and they realize this knee-jerk thought is wrong, that you can't hold an entire ethnicity or race responsible for one individual doing something evil, and they move on and get the racism out of their head. But in a world where Trump has worn away society's guilt, that doesn't happen. No, the leading candidate for a major party's presidential nomination instead says that Mexico is sending murderers and rapists across our border and we need to stop them by any means necessary, and then when that very same man wins not only the GOP nomination but also the presidency, the next time they have a knee-jerk reaction to reading a piece of news about a murder that happened to be committed by someone of Mexican descent, they're going to think "The president was right, they really are all murderers and rapists!" and not feel an ounce of guilt and never examine their behavior or change their ways.

- And then you have covid, when certain elements of the GOP turned stopping a deadly disease into a partisan, political issue. The GOP told them there was nothing wrong with refusing to do anything to help curb the spread of a highly contagious disease with a 1-2% IFR and even that there was nothing wrong with refusing to get vaccinated after vaccines become available and actually make it possible to go back to a pre-2020 way of life. That the base of an entire major political party decided they were A-OK with covid running out of control had impacts outside the political sphere. Because if they're willing to kill their fellow Americans with a plague, they're also going to be plenty willing to take any number of other hostile actions against their fellow Americans. And those who aren't Trumpers are going to respond in kind: i.e., if the GOP is willing to straight-up kill us in droves, we need to treat any whiff of Trumpiness in somebody's behavior as a personal, existential threat to our lives and take steps to protect ourselves.

- And that's where we are now. I can personally say that since Trump took the national stage and especially since covid, I have hard cut multiple people out of my life including some who used to be good friends just because they made it explicit that they were A-OK with Trump, and I can no longer see their politics and their attitude to society as anything other than a personal threat to me, when before 2016 I had a very large circle of friends of all different political viewpoints and never cut anyone out of my life over it. Simply put, if they're going to act like low-trust people, I'm not going to trust them with any part of my life.

[0] https://stevesnotes.substack.com/p/reforming-the-filibuster

[1] https://www.americanprogress.org/article/impact-filibuster-f...

[2] https://www.vox.com/2015/5/27/18089312/myths-about-the-filib...

[3] https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2021/03... (This one is interesting because you can see how Democrats responded by also increasing their use of the filibuster to match, once they lost the Senate in 2014. You can see how polarization from one side begets polarization from the other.)

(Again, dang, let me know if this is too political for this site, and I won't pursue this subject any further. I figured there was value in intellectually exploring how political events have knock-on effects that reshape our culture in fundamental ways and providing elaboration and explanation on my thesis that the last 9 years have seen the US transform from a high-trust to a low-trust society.)

Yeah, I think Brexit at least is part of that same phenomenon. It can all be summarized as British voters saying "Screw all these other people, we're looking out for ourselves!" and then crashing their own economy out of sheer spite.

I've noticed after the last several years that we're starting to turn from a high-trust society into a low-trust one.

Without spending too much time digressing on politics, it's my observation that Trump + covid are the main correlations. It started in 2015 when Trump declared his candidacy, picked up speed when he took office in 2017, and then hit full throttle when covid came to the US in 2020.

And I'm afraid we've hit several points of no return, and there's no going back for decades.

I'm going to guess the poster was banned for something a while back. When you're banned on HN, you aren't locked out of posting, but everything you post appears as dead by default and requires someone to vouch it.

dang has talked about this before, but there are a number of users who were rightfully banned, go on to post nothing but healthy, constructive comments that almost always get vouched, and then immediately turn abusive again when they're unbanned. So the current moderation philosophy is to leave them banned and let users vouch their comments, which works out better for everyone.

When I was a kid, I remember being super fascinated by the Power Rangers game on Sega CD and played what little of it I could on the demo consoles at Blockbuster and other places.

I had all the other major consoles at the time except the Sega CD so I never got to own it at home, but the idea of playing through an actual episode of Power Rangers while pressing buttons that correspond to the actions taken by the actual characters just felt so cool. All the other Power Rangers games were either fighting games or belt-scroll beat-'em-ups, but this one let me play through an actual episode!

...and then I emulated it as an adult and realized it was just a pile of QTEs with no real game and that the video quality was abject dogshit. But the beat-'em-ups still hold up, to the point where they're making a new one now.

When I was a kid in the '90s, I looked forward to every issue of CD-ROM Today because it always came with a disc that was loaded with games, software demos, icon packs, and more.

I had so much fun with those discs, even fired up Basilisk II and tracked down the ISOs a few years ago to recapture some of that joy.

A better analogy would be to buy a '60s sports car that predates nearly all modern safety tech at auction for $$$$$$ instead of just buying a 2024 Corolla with modern safety features.

declares URIs an outdated term for URLs

The term I would use is "a distinction without a difference", but they're not entirely wrong.