HN user

exprez135

98 karma
Posts1
Comments23
View on HN

Only in recent years have I appreciated how familiarity with such material so enriches my experience of other, later literature. To use this example, the title of C.S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces and its eponymous sentence (paraphrased):

How can we know the gods face to face, till we have faces?

I recently had this idea about email servers. In addition to configuring my IMAP clients to normally fetch mail manually or more infrequently, I set up one mail server that “closes” from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. my time.

During that time, it returns a temporary error `450 4.3.2 We're sorry! The mail room is closed from 7 p.m. till 7 a.m. [Time Zone]. Email servers automatically retry, so your mail should be delivered in a few hours.` Depending on their mail provider and the time of evening, some will never see an error, while others will eventually receive the standard “Delayed Mail: no need to retry” message in their own inboxes.

I see it as accomplishing three things: first, it tests email servers to see if they properly handle temporary delivery errors by retrying; second, it prevents me from checking my email after hours, or rather, leaves me overnight with only the email I got during the day, perhaps encouraging better habits; and third, it could provide an opportunity for others to consider assumptions about always-on digital services.

The problem you describe seems to be one targeted by the TerraPower project in Wyoming. It plans to operate at 100% capacity at all times (345 MWe), but makes itself more akin to other renewables by incorporating energy storage into its design. It is supposed to be able to increase capacity to 150% (500 MWe), allowing it to respond to energy scarcity. But it can also respond to energy abundance by storing excess production in molten salt storage tanks.

It's especially interesting to contrast this rise in the brutality, violence, and realistic physicality of western Christianity's art with traditional Byzantine iconography. My first thought goes to Myshkin in Dostoevsky's The Idiot. Seeing an image of the dead Christ from Holbein [1]:

"At that painting!" the prince suddenly cried out, under the impression of an unexpected thought. "At that painting! A man could even lose his faith from that painting!" "Lose it he does," Rogozhin suddenly agreed unexpectedly. They had already reached the front door. "What?" the prince suddenly stopped. […]

By contrast, I once read or heard somewhere that in Byzantine depictions of the crucifixion, one cannot really know if it is the cross that holds up Christ's body or He who holds up the cross.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Body_of_the_Dead_Christ_in...

At last, a goodbye to Python 2. Otherwise, I'm excited to see the increased support for desktop use of Alpine with each release. This time, a new setup script is included to help set up a desktop environment automatically. For some reason, it's very satisfying to boot such a small distribution on a big screen.

Though the free calls come at the cost of a 55-inch revolving advertisement outside my door and around every corner. I wish very often for the "humble" option to return.

After the article was written, the Supreme Court of Indiana did end up ruling in favor of the car owner. From the ruling [1]:

To find a fair probability of unauthorized control here, we would need to conclude that Hoosiers don’t have the authority to remove unknown, unmarked objects from their personal vehicles.

In this case, however, there was no obvious indication that the device was put there by the police.

[1] https://law.justia.com/cases/indiana/supreme-court/2020/19s-...

Maybe not in today's form, but a world without copyright would be a different world, perhaps one in which people would work for free software because it's what they believe in. It would represent a fundamental shift in how the public viewed knowledge, sharing, and openness.