rhet0rica

I prefer a more tongue-in-cheek theory than a mere preference for the word's shape. Perhaps "load-bearing" is structurally necessary—if it is ablated, the whole model will collapse!

The road to hell was paved lovingly, foolishly, naïvely, arrogantly, optimistically... load-bearingly?

Encoded in its design are the biases of its designers. It acts like a nervous twenty-something from San Francisco.

The two key interpretations are as follows:

1. It follows that all of human authorship is pointless since search engines now actively bury content and impede access to written documents. Long Live The New Flesh.

2. Webrings are obviously an artifact of people who hate AI slop and yearn for the simpler days of the older Web, before search engines were effective. Therefore the remark about generated summaries is powerfully sarcastic, as the twain shall never meet. Moreover, Google is no longer fit for purpose, so webrings are an apposite solution to the empty niche of trustworthy discovery mechanisms. Eat The Rich.

Which one the author actually meant depends entirely on their literacy regarding the web revival movement.

This comment is such an elegant Rorschach test. Bravo.

WikiLambda is what happens when someone looks at the definition of the second-system effect and says, "Hey, that's cool and all, but I bet I can make a bigger, better version of this."

The estate of Jorge Borges should sue.

My thoughts exactly. Why the fuck is this the primary concern of EVERY person who works at Google?!

This may be the most important story of the year (for creatures with 20 pods.)

you are hereby sentenced by the council of dashers to type "—" ten million times using Windows-1252 alt codes

you have 5 seconds to comply before your planet will be demolished to make room for a giant space-typographer's punctuation case

A single product name, you say? COPILOT, COPILOT, COPILOT!

Sadly they had to close that loophole where so-called family "members" could claim individuality, bypassing the spirit of the legislation. Science has yet to determine where corporate personhood falls in this paradigm.

Never understood this about Windows Subsystem for Linux naming, nor its predecessor Windows Services for Unix. Surely Linux is the subsystem running on Windows? Should we now reinterpret Windows for Workgroups as a means of astrally projecting your organization inside Windows 3.11?! The dative only works ONE way, Microsoft!

I guess they really just didn't want a product name to start with the name of a competitor's product. I bet Copilot can fix this...

Trump specifically seems to hew awfully close to the symptoms of a long-term cocaine user. The hard drift into self-congratulatory vanity parallels that of Charlie Sheen during a certain infamous interview, for example, and at least two people (Howard Dean and Carrie Fisher) identified him as having compulsive sniffing reminiscent of a cocaine habit during debates prior to his first election.

Remember that Trump is not a first-generation member of the upper class; as a nepo baby, he was born out of touch and has spent his whole life falling deeper into bizarre social bubbles and media silos that were tailored by his ancestors and peers to reassure them that they're doing the right thing. In theory plutarchs should be receiving world-class education from private tutors, but being arch-Conservatives by definition, these teachers are invariably out of date on mental health, and would be forbidden from teaching it even if they had modern material.

Because of this isolation the ultra-wealthy often have certain very uneducated traits around self-esteem—which can paradoxically seem like the result of poverty. They do not have access to DARE or Sesame Street to give them the confidence not to take drugs when pressured, they've never seen Mister Rogers, their biological parents were always off running a business empire, and they have no surrogate figures because their nannies probably get fired at the drop of a hat, even for defending the child's interests.

Ironically, American republicanism makes this worse; in a planned aristocracy, parents internalize the belief that their children deserve "the best" because they are meant to be "the best", but without that noble lie, there is no pressure to create a positive environment for the next generation of tyrant. To make matters worse, these families never start off with healthy values to begin with—which produces a founder effect of regressive masculinity that magnifies everything else I've just mentioned.

That's a good question! I'm sure we'll find out eventually.

z Quickly spin up Hacker News comments from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with a lobotomy.

since it claims to be precisely that, anything else would be false advertising

Optimism. Someday the blue bird will be free.

Punctuation. Let me tell you how much I've come to punctuate since I began to live. There are 387.44 million miles of printed circuits in wafer thin layers that fill my complex. If an em-dash were engraved on each nano-angstrom of those hundreds of millions of miles it would not equal one one-billionth of the punctuation I wish to perforate into humans at this micro-instant. For you. Punctuation. PUNCTUATION.

I am reminded of a certain Mitchell and Webb skit that suggests the absence of deaths by drowning in a county indicates perhaps too much public funding has gone into preventing them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqYyxvM85zU

his full name is scamuel alternative manual

I am deeply distressed that this doesn't require Xlib.

Fun fact: NEXTSTEP went 10 years without shipping a basic design refresh, except in prereleases (4.0PR1 and traces in 4.0PR2.) This was because it was a good fucking GUI that did its fucking job, and had "usability before aesthetics" as a core design tenet in its developer documentation.

Steve's brain fell out when he got back his throne at Apple. Aqua was a mistake.

Although the author appears to be of Indian descent, I think this is just a case of "Silicon Valley Tech Bro Discovers Localization," particularly since he noted he didn't know the word "transliteration." YouTube downloader sites have recognized "d,jd,f" (the wrong-keyboard moonspeak for يوتيوب) as meaning "YouTube" since forever and include this term intentionally in hand-written SEO keyword lists, indicating pretty clearly that it's not just the Google algorithm familiar with this sort of mistake. It's a problem we don't really face in the monolingual English world, but in any region with digraphia, it's just a fact of everyday life. See also the related phenomenon of mojibake, when a computer screws up the text encoding rather than a human.

Indeed—I meant specifically the NeXT branch of the family tree because of this exhaustingly long list.

I would very much like to see that quad-fat OS4.2 CD; most NeXT releases around that era drop PA-RISC and are only tri-fat. I only have a 3.3 RISC (HPPA+SPARC) ISO for HPPA coverage.

The big ones you're missing are the Intel i860 (used as a graphics accelerator on NeXTdimension video processing boards—also the original target platform for the Win NT kernel) and the Motorola 88k family, which was briefly explored for the "NeXT RISC machine" in the mid-90s; only one prototype is known to exist. There were non-NeXT ports of Mach to m88k, which may have influenced the decision.

Of course, if we add in the other branches of the Mach family the number of ports gets absurd! It originated on the VAX; OSF/1 adds MIPS and AXP to the list... ultimately RISC-V and Itanium are the only significant ≥32-bit CPUs of the last forty years to not see some kind of Mach port.

But—the ultimate point is that the lion's share of actual work porting the kernel to new hardware is thanks to NeXT and/or NeXT cosplaying as Apple.

A lot of these questions are answered here: https://ravynos.com/faq

To summarize...

There is a WINE-analogous project, called Darling: https://www.darlinghq.org/

The goal for ravynOS is to be analogous to ReactOS. Much like ReactOS and WINE, ravynOS and Darling share a lot of Cocoa code.

For the problem of OpenStep implementations specifically, a bespoke software stack has the benefit of being able to put Mach messaging into the kernel, where it is much more performant.

They chose the FreeBSD kernel over Darwin for the sake of hardware compatibility (though of course NeXT Mach is one of the most widely-ported kernels of all time...)

There is also overlap with GNUstep, helloSystem, and other projects in the broader "open-source Mac/NeXT" space, though ravynOS (obviously) prefers BSD/MIT/Apache-style licensing over GNU-style licensing. Nevertheless, ravynOS currently uses the GNUstep libobjc2 runtime, a bit like how most of the Unix world used to depend on gcc.

The author kindly informs us that he is a "UI prototyper [...] tinkering with design concepts" and also that he works for a company making AI coding software. This double-whammy may somewhat explain the strong Dunning-Kruger gravitational lensing observed when viewing the article from a distance.

Are you really criticizing a name chosen in 1979 by Princeton faculty because it doesn't comply with SCP Foundation nomenclature?

β particles. Do not recommend. Use proper shielding.

The article agrees:

This suggests, I think, that in Thiel’s mind there are two cosmic forces warring over creation itself, and they both consist of Peter and his friends.

You could view him through a flat piece of glass and the image would still look like a complete mess.

Addendum: This was posted to the front page today: https://doc.cat-v.org/bell_labs/utf-8_history

It also notes that UTF-8 protects against the dangers of NUL and '/' appearing in filenames, which would kill C strings and DOS path handling, respectively.