internet_points

ouf :( maybe original link should be changed to https://www.drcathicks.com/ ?

The author Cat Hicks also co-hosts https://www.changetechnically.fyi/ which has some interesting episodes, e.g. https://www.changetechnically.fyi/2396236/episodes/17541876-...

In https://mastodon.social/@grimalkina/116743715688970777 she gives a concise explanation of the minimal groups paradigm where "People assigned to arbitrary groups immediately form strong allegiances, even though they haven’t been given any other psychologically meaningful cues about their group"

how much storage and how much do you pay Hetzner?

Now I'm trying to imagine a staircase with a non-integer number of steps

Quite a lot of my searches for practical advice (building, maintenance, event planning, shopping etc. etc) have the best hits from forums that on the face of it rarely seem relevant, e.g. forums for bmx bikers or moms etc. Old-school forums with real humans sharing real experiences.

nah, the thlh stack (tailwind+htmx+lucid+haskell) is much more unpronouncable https://github.com/monadicsystems/haskell-htmx-examples

And Illich (where the term "tool" is quite broad, including anything from a knife to a highway system):

Tools foster conviviality to the extent to which they can be easily used, by anybody, as often or as seldom as desired, for the accomplishment of a purpose chosen by the user. The use of such tools by one person does not restrain another from using them equally. They do not require previous certification of the user. Their existence does not impose any obligation to use them. They allow the user to express his meaning in action.

Industrial tools deny this possibility to those who use them and they allow their designers to determine the meaning and expectations of others. Most tools today cannot be used in a convivial fashion.

Good intentions, but these days there's an even bigger threat:

https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/115840278905803451

https://mastodon.social/@sundogplanets/116796122687129600

https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/03/31/starlink-spra...

memory prices coming down

Are they?

I suspect AI labs are buying stuff not just for their own use, but to make local use too expensive to be an option :-( And they can always make the "best" frontier model even bigger (though only fractionally better) so it's always out of reach of local use, while consumer laptops have nearly the same amount of memory they had a decade ago.

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(It's mentioned as an idea in the bottom part of the htmx.org essay)

I stress to them that I admire the heroism of their generation in resisting these temptations.

(I think older generations would do well to recognize this fact.)

That is so, so much better than the default mode of blaming kids for getting addicted to the systems their older generations developed.

https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html is another interesting perspective

Today it is a ruin, but one that remains unmistakably alive.

wat? why is it still alive? the paragraph just ended like that, no further explanation? I get the feeling I should not trust these words. (Looking at the pre-2023 articles by the same writer, they are in a very different writing style. Sigh.)

That "ABOVE: aerial view of fortified structure of Sharba" picture though is amazing. Like it was swallowed by the sand, or it's an outgrowth, a welt being covered by a skin of sand.

And https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat (foggaras) is intriguing.

but not Haskell, guess they gave up on picking a string type =P

ddg says "BASB" could mean "building a second brain", so I guess it's about note-taking

In my experience, waiters tend to be quite good at splitting bills. I feel like many of them remember what people had, maybe they get good mental maps of seating or person <-> meal type just like taxi drivers used to get good mental maps of London before GPS.

(And printed menus tend to have allergy info too, just like online menus sometimes don't.)

Just like wolves selected for survival the humans who treated them well and eventually humans evolved to produce oxytocin on petting wolves =P

OTOH I now have a lot more sympathy for my cpu's, I should give them some slack

I think you'd get your point across better if you avoid consulting AI to improve your style, may lead to less distracting threads like this.

could've guessed staying away from xdisp.c was a good idea, cf. the "Buttery Smooth Emacs"[0] post:

Keep in mind that Emacs xdisp.c tries to support five different toolkits (including two different major versions of GTK) with #ifdefs. There is no runtime abstraction. We define three or four different versions of each damn function. It’s a nightmare.

[0] https://gist.github.com/ghosty141/c93f21d6cd476417d4a9814eb7...

Alternatively, I might have been even more sick if I didn't take vitamin D!

Yeah I took vitamin D all through my kids' nursery years, every morning, had strong belief in it.

I still was sick all the time. That combination of not enough sleep (kids crying in the night etc.), work stress and insane amount of viruses from nursery is killer.

Legally obtaining a book for reading it yourself is different from legally obtaining a book for copying and republishing/reselling. If I buy a book for $5 at a sale I can read it myself or even sell it for $10 on craigslist, but I can't scan it and make a million copies and sell each of those.

Politicians these days are expected to have harder and harder skin. I've seen lots of stories in the news lately of (in particular young) politicians from scandinavia who dropped out of politics due to harassment, anonymous threats etc. And even more people who never get into politics, because of hearing about such stories. I sure as hell would not get into politics today.

I fear for what our political system will look like when only those who have become completely numb to such threats remain. What kinds people are they, those who can live with hundreds of daily hate messages and death threats, doxing of oneself and family members, having to live with security guards and secret addresses? What are we losing by allowing this kind of "freedom of speech"?

If your morals consist of eye-for-an-eye retribution, then maybe his actions make sense. But I do not believe that that gives us a better society.

If you stop using horses other places, you don't need to move around hay, so you need even fewer horses.

(If the world generally uses less fossil fuels, the demand for shipping goes down as well, since much of shipping is just shuffling around fossil fuels.)

There's also a bit of east/west rivalry going on. Politicians and newspapers based in the east deride it, those in the west cheer it on. (Compared to the yearly budget the per-year cost doesn't seem like a big deal, but I don't know enough to have a strong opinion.)

For those saying it's not MLM, it's not not MLM: https://replit.com/refer

Of course it's all within legal limits (or at least pre-legal, as the AI people call it[0]), but it smells like MLM. They'll stretch it as far as they can until there is push-back.

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20260515043739/https://www.revsw...

Same here! I was so annoyed that it didn't come with an auto-powerdown function. Did they really expect people to remember to turn them off "when they plan not to use it for a few days" (I mean who plans not to use something)

Put their own email in there, ceo@that-dumb-company.com

It has me through my open source contributions, but interestingly it claims the same regardless of what I use as a given name, as long as I keep the (fairly unique) surname. So my whole extended family are open source contributors.

Weell, it's not completely untyped, but it is runtime type-checked. There's stuff like `(if (integerp foo)` and `(defcustom ... :type '(choice (const tag "abs" abs) 'integer))`

And then there are more ambitious projects like the static analyzer and language server https://github.com/emacs-elsa/Elsa I haven't tried Elsa yet since it seems to require setting up a package manager like Eask (I don't really understand why I have to install a package manager to run a language server, especially when they support four emacs-specific package managers?) and the docs were very light on whether eglot is supported or just lsp-mode.