Telemakhos

In college I had a laptop with eight megabytes of RAM. It ran Windows 3.11, including a full office suite (Ami Pro, Lotus 123, etc) and web browsers, USENET readers, mIRC, all in 8MB. It also ran an html server and ftp server as background processes. Today it couldn’t even run the RSS reader in that list.

Nobody who has ever run a business or knows about how a business runs would think that any business "sits on piles of assets like dragons." Very little cash sits idle, usually for anticipated operational expenditures with a reserve for unanticipated expenditures; the rest is invested, loaned, spent on building the business, or returned to investors. If OpenAI is holding $25 billion in cash, it's because they anticipate spending that much in the near future, not because they're sleeping atop it in a mountain cave.

I found it interesting that two of the AI posters in the article have the three-pointed “no kings” crown, and one has a two-pointed version. The AI hallucinated icons from American partisan propaganda into an EU context in a country with a monarchy.

At $5MM farmers are affected. Land is expensive, and it takes a lot of land to farm. At $5k/acre, the old standard 1k acres farm is $5MM, and nowadays that’s probably not enough land to raise a family (only $65k profit), so you really need more land. Estate tax means the kids can’t inherit all the land.

Why isn’t daily driving a VM a good idea? Doesn’t Windows have a hypervisor now? Doesn’t Linux have KVM? It seems like modern OS design borrows a lot from the idea of virtual machines. Why not just go all the way?

Note that the uncles and grandparents are all old. When you get to a certain age, your eyes don't like to focus on small things like cameras. The elderly prefer tablets, and they want to be able to take pictures of their nieces and nephews and grandchildren.

Search engines (Google was funded by In-Q-Tel) aimed at searching and reading publicly accessible data. Then they moved to the "deep web" like email with Gmail, searching and reading less publicly accessible data.

Social media convinced people to publish on the web details of their personal life that they never would have voluntarily handed over to federal agents: political views, personal relationships, pictures of everywhere they've been, graphs of associates.

AI gets people to interactively divulge what they're working on and even to upload the files. It's the next step on a path from a past where intelligence agencies had to spy on people to a future where people pay for the privilege of volunteering everything to the intelligence agencies.

Lowes and Home Depot, two retailers of tools and home repair supplies, got Flock cameras for all their parking lots after a wave of organized thefts in multiple states. By tracking license plates, they were able to end several rings of thieves who had been stealing millions of dollars worth of goods.

You could do some awesome things with XML/XSL. My favorite was RSS feeds or OPML collections of RSS feeds (both flavors of XML) calling an XSL transformation when viewed in a web browser instead of mined by computers for data; same with TEI files, although that was a bit more arcane. The idea was that you'd have one data file for machine use and a way to present that data to humans as a web page.

But, as a stack, the XML/XSL/XPath/etc combination was weak because XSLT was hard to comprehend and never updated. No browser supports XSLT 2 or 3; they froze support with 1. XSLT 2 was 2007, a year before HTML 5 was a thing, yet it never got picked up by browsers. Javascript was just easier to understand than XSLT. Development of XHTML was also glacial, and people wanted new tags, especially for video.

Only a handful of the rebels are visibly religious. Most of the rebel leadership seems to consist of displaced aristocrats (senators, princesses) who no longer have elite positioning since the Empire took their jobs and started doing a better job of guaranteeing security and providing energy and resources.

Or hot tea. Along the same lines too, try the ultra-flat and crisp and dunkable Moravian cookies (specifically the spice or ginger flavors) or ginger-flavored Swedish thins.

Nobody's commented on your most important point: "city" does not equate to "community involvement." Suburban people statistically volunteer more and join groups more than rural or urban people, and rural people are more likely to meet in person with their groups than suburban or urban people [0].

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/09/28/how-urban...

I don’t understand the quality complaints. I’m actively looking for Chinese-branded products now because the quality is amazing. I’ve switched to Hongdian fountain pens, I recently bought an espresso maker stamped with an unpronounceable string of consonants, and I buy Chinese sportcoats that fit perfectly, have no label, and cost what I used to pay for clothes in the early 2000’s. Some clothing manufacturers on Amazon even email me for exact measurements, so I get a tailored fit straight from China. I get knockoff printer ink that lasts months longer than HP’s overpriced junk. The Chinese had quality issues twenty years ago, but today their products are top notch.

Every 65+ person I know has one of those alexa-speaker things. Nobody I know under 65 has one. I wonder if there's just some generational expectation for a fixed household object, like phones and televisions were for people in the twentieth century.

"Friction" and "life" are weird ways of spelling "dollar" and "pocket."

That seems to be the point: you leverage existing workstations on your corporate network and run compute batches at night while they're idle. You don't have to buy any extra servers for your low-priority AI workloads.

Pidgin also supported XMPP: it was a multi-protocol client. It was just a client, not a messaging system of its own. They'd abstracted the send/receive from the actual messages and built a bunch of backends that could handle pretty much any messaging protocol at the time.

ICQ was released 1996; Pidgin (as GAIM) was November 1998; Jabber was released in 1999. Those were good times.

I had AIM, ICQ, and a few others. Pidgin (originally GAIM) let you send and receive on all the services from one app, which was very handy.

There are already a bunch of prions generated in the body and hanging around neurons; the body can’t sort the invasive prions from the native ones that cause proteins to fold wrong.

In some alternative dimension Ternus decides to realize the full potential of the Mach kernel by embracing Hurd in place of XNU. Users are discouraged because the new system is not enough like GNU/Linux.

The effects are comically bad. I see the inspiration in scrolling effects that the New York Times put together, but the NYT was never dumb enough to obscure the copy text. Form follows function, and the function of a web page is to be read, not to obscure what is to be read with some stupid effect that's supposed to remind one (I suppose) of a volcano's cloud obscuring one's vision. At least "under construction" banners didn't obtrude upon the copy text.

It's a well-researched article that lays out evidence, not suspicions. It includes OpenAI's own investigation into accounts that were found generating op-eds for Iranian propaganda. It shows the route by which these op-eds entered into smaller publications, namely by a pacifist NGO in Oregon, and neither then NGO nor the publications saw them as propaganda, despite the origins of the op-eds.

Yes, that’s what sovereignty means: a sovereign state governs itself and is not governed by others. A sovereign state can agree to abide by certain rules or submit some disputes to another arbiter, but it does so consensually by treaty. The US never ratified a treaty establishing the authority of the ICC, so it has not consented to that diminution of sovereignty.

You as an individual are not sovereign, and when you come to the land over which the US is sovereign, you are subject to US law.

This is the most European thing I’ve read all week. Income is inflow of money, while rent is an expense. The avoidance of expense should not be considered income for tax purposes: it would discourage frugality.

It's not an old English measure, because Latin has "granum salis" (a grain of salt) in medical authors and Pliny. There's no indication that it was a measure; it was a cube or crystal of salt.

> work until 68 instead of 65

That’s the thing about pension schemes like American social security: they were originally set with a retirement age that matched mean mortality, so half of potential recipients would die before drawing on them. In other words, half of workers were not meant to retire, and the half that did would be protected by the contributions of all. Modern medicine completely changed those expectations, keeping the elderly alive twenty years longer and making twenty years of unproductive, publicly funded retirement an expectation and entitlement for everyone. It’s political suicide to discuss whether something should change about that.

Halloween has only been a major, marketed holiday for the millennials and later generations. As late as the beginning of the 1980s it was a kids’ holiday only for most of America. Spirit Halloween was founded in 1983; 80s horror films (like Halloween) helped build the holiday for adults.

Traditional ways of meeting a spouse don’t involve slutty costumes at once-a-year parties (Halloween is not a spouse-selection fertility festival), but family, church, and neighborhood connections that build over spans of time in 3d. Sometimes HN seems to miss slow, complex, physical-world interactions because of a focus on modeling transaction-like events or instants (like parties).

Someone who spends his day in emacs writing code and org-mode for work will have the muscle-memory and lisp knowledge to make emacs and org-mode as easy for him as WordPress is for you.

I've been subscribed to a mailing list for many years, of which perhaps half I actively participated in the mailing list. Almost the entire time I used alpine, a terminal mail client, hosted on a remote server, getting its mail from and sending it through gmail. A stupid setup, perhaps, but it was productive, and I wrote. Since giving up that setup (I wiped and repurposed the server) and trying to use gmail's web interface or Mac's mail application, I've been silent. So, I understand the author's desire for a setup that might seem arcane or byzantine: sometimes there's something about such a system that is comfortable and keeps you writing.

I think the parent poster was asking how consistent that is across geographic divides. I notice the same effect: I live part of the year in a city where public transport requires either a smartphone or tap-to-pay, and the rest of the year in a rural area where nobody assumes you're carrying a smartphone. It seems to me at least that urban areas are standardizing on requiring people to carry a smartphone for tickets, passes, even menus in some places; while this hasn't caught on in rural areas. I would bet that people in rural areas will regard Apple's event ticket maker as alien to their lives and a sign of some sort of urban folly. I wonder if there's a similar urban/rural division on users of Apple's Invites app.

Yeah, the precedent for the idea of a .gov dating service is Plato’s Republic along with comments in the Timaeus/Critias which make it clear that Plato envisioned a rigged service designed for eugenics. Central control over matchmaking is incentivized to eugenics.