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TimTheTinker

Re:Astra can read and write weights to improve Qwen on Monday November 02, 2026 @03:37PM (#50343363)
Is HN now against western capitalism? I'm confused...

That comment may have been overly preachy, tone deaf[0], and out of place, but it doesn't seem wrong, per se. Or am I missing something?

[0] e.g. elections themselves are so prone to manipulation (exhibit a: Dominion voting machines), previously trusted institutions now lack integrity, the insane power of well-funded NGO networks, etc.

Re:Infinite Mac: BeOS on Saturday October 31, 2026 @08:45AM (#50315682)
Second this - System 7.5.3 has by far the most backward and forward compatibility of any classic era Macintosh OS.

It's also available for both 68k and PPC architectures. And the PPC version can run 68k software (it internally emulates a 68020)

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Thursday October 29, 2026 @02:16PM (#50293541)
> Is it a rhetorical statement from your part?

I'm just hoping to clarify how I think Christian evangelism (or indeed any sharing of a worldview) is best received -- a desire to know and follow the truth, because it's the truth, regardless of consequences.

> If it can't be proven (or at least observed), then by definition, it is a belief, not a truth.

If you believe Socrates and Alexander the Great existed, do you say those are "truths"?

The evidence for those people is, relatively speaking, scant compared to the evidence for Jesus - his recorded words, death, and resurrection.

Historical events aren't something one can "prove" in any scientific or mathematical sense. We believe what we believe about history based on strong consilience in informed observation of artifacts. By design, Christianity supplies just 1 empirical foundation upon which everything else is built: the evidence for the resurrection of Jesus.

Re:Software may be getting worse, but it used to be horrible on Tuesday October 27, 2026 @02:26PM (#50263604)
> Most UIs should operate using only one thread

on the contrary, native app UIs should at minimum separate the UI thread from background work, if only to keep UI controls responsive.

The UI thread may spend most of its time asleep, but it has to be available to instantly respond to user input (or events/signals from the OS)

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:57PM (#50251639)
I'm just saying from the viewpoint of people in Islam (or in Islamic nations)... the tradeoffs look a lot different from that perspective.

Almost nothing in common with a 17th century French philosopher in Christian Europe

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:42PM (#50251433)
I agree Pascal's wager is generally weak. But I think the strongest reason it's weak is because people in other worldviews, particularly Islam, have a tremendous amount to lose if they convert to Christianity but it turns out Islam is true.
Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:27PM (#50251242)
That may be true, but embodied human life and history provides a base set of axioms by which to evaluate further axioms -- starting with the 5 senses.

So yeah, Christianity has some axioms, but it doesn't ask people to merely accept them on faith; that's a mischaracterization. The invitation is to consider (a) how good the evidence really is for your current worldview, and then (b) how good is the evidence for Christianity's truth claims.

Pascal goes one further and suggests considering what you have to gain and lose either way -- which may have been helpful for some when the alternative was mere atheism or unbelief in Christianity, but I disagree that it's helpful in all cases. People coming from Islam have a tremendous amount to lose, including their family, community, livelihood, reputation, and the risk of being condemned eternally by Allah for committing shirk in embracing Christianity, if Islam is true.

I think a better question to ask, whatever someone's background, is "do you want to know the truth, even if it turns out you don't believe it now, and are you willing to follow it no matter what the cost?"

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @05:18PM (#50251130)
> you can't do this with made up bullshit

Are you saying the case for Scientology can't fail when considering its internal consistency and correspondence to reality?

I would think its positive case isn't that strong... it's more like an attack chain with an arbitrary payload (including money extraction) for minds with certain vulnerabilities than a coherent set of truth claims (let alone truth claims with at least some evidence in favor).

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @04:10PM (#50250183)
> It assumes that there are only two possibilities: no god, or the god of the New Testament.

I don't think so. It isn't concerned with giving any description or shape to the negative case, just an invitation to consider a particular positive case.

There are positive cases for other gospels and worldviews... there's nothing wrong with invitations to engage with one or another.

As science has shown, the truth is best discerned by considering each theory individually (and continually) against evidence. Not "dark matter sounds cool, I think that's true, not MOND" but rather considering each individually for internal consistency and against observation and predictiveness.

"It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is, it does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is — if it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong." --Richard Feynman

Re:A Man from the Future: Why Johnny Can't Stop Abstracting on Monday October 26, 2026 @03:18PM (#50249461)
> What if there's a god, but he punishes humans for believing he exists, just for fun? Where's your wager now?

That's the equivalent of Russell's teapot - an imagined, unfalsifiable proposition.

But Pascal's wager was anchored to specific attested propositions: specifically, the gospel of Jesus (repent of sin and call to him, he's paid for it and will save you from judgment and eternal separation from God if you do) rooted in the historical events of his verbal claim to be the son of God, followed by his death and resurrection, witnessed by many. You may agree or disagree, but what you are affirming or denying is at least concrete and specific.

According to MOND theorists, a dwarf galaxy like DF9 doesn't prove dark matter, since it's sitting in the gravitational field of a big neighboring galaxy (NGC 1052) and thus its boost is suppressed. They call this the "external field effect".

https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.13961

Re:Tesla Roadster on Friday October 16, 2026 @05:09PM (#50124760)
Americans, French, and Russians seem to be like powerful engines, rockets, race cars, etc. more than other western nations
Re:Wayland desktop for Linux with skeuomorphic design on Thursday October 15, 2026 @11:06PM (#50113502)
A lack of information density... I felt like I could glean more from the above-the-fold Yahoo.com site in 2001 than any site today.

Note Japan has not embraced the so-called "clean" UI design aesthetic. Check out any Japanese website and it looks like US web sites in 1999, but even more so. I wouldn't mind me some of that.

wrong link?

Video title is "AI Shader Insanity!"

Re:PS5 Jailbreaks Are Escalating at an Unprecedented Pace on Wednesday October 07, 2026 @11:00AM (#49993795)
In the last 2 weeks I:

- reverse-engineered a Mac App Store app, modernized its UI, and added support for Apple Silicon. It took about 90 minutes running in the background.

- created faithful macOS ports of ~7 classic 68k Macintosh games; most are now written in Swift, with MacToolbox routines reimplemented (one exception: MS Flight Simulator 1.02 worked better as a plain C (and SDL2) app, since it has a hand-authored bytecode interpreter in 68k assembly and draws the entire UI itself)

All it takes is a goal with nearly 100% specificity

Re:I Switched to Brave Browser on Monday September 28, 2026 @01:02PM (#49881047)
> a 2008 donation of $1,000 to California Proposition 8

The woke/cancel culture crowd (none of whom knew him personally) went after him with a vengeance in 2014, but there were LGBT and LGBT-allied co-workers of his at the time who were aghast at the outrage. Here are three examples I could find online just now [0][1][2]

[0] https://subfictional.com/on-brendan-eich-as-ceo-of-mozilla/

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20150202162458/http://words.tofu...

[2] https://medium.com/@__davidflanagan/for-the-record-7645a4bf8...

Re:13 Months Sober (2025) on Monday September 28, 2026 @12:53PM (#49880940)
I think this ought to be the goal with any important (but well-defined & bounded) venture in life: own it so thoroughly that it becomes routine, uninteresting, assumed, and boring.

When it has become boring, it no longer consumes brainspace, freeing you to pursue further goals. It effectively has become part of the platform upon which you implement the specifics of your life.

Why is this better than running Windows 98 on a guest VM (non-emulated) on modern x86 hardware?

Surely a modern hypervisor should be able to emulate a retro Voodoo 3D card.

Re:What Sun got wrong on Monday September 21, 2026 @06:49PM (#49794492)
And not overcommitting memory.

But Illumos is a real modern viable option over Linux (and *racle Solaris) for server hardware.

Hi author :wave:

I'm confused - could you explain how the board/flag animation relates to Bend's compile time checking? Is it actually a direct demonstration of Bend running a check?

Re:The CSS Zen Garden dream shipped on Wednesday September 16, 2026 @10:57AM (#49728036)
I think a collection of basic utility classes (w-100, m-2-t) and layout components (<Flex dir="row" gap="2">, etc.) are equivalent ideas, and they are nice for quickly setting up a one-off layout that's very readable. But Tailwind turns this practical idea into a religion that locks projects in to using it and harms readability.

Human readability is a very useful proxy for good modularity and separation of concerns (and modularity increases scalability and reusability). Since LLMs take the whole thing in at once, they are terrible at module boundaries. (They also suck at theory of mind, and their comments reflect it, but I digress.)

Re:The CSS Zen Garden dream shipped on Tuesday September 15, 2026 @02:23PM (#49716639)
This is really great work, but I think a lot of folks on HN don't look kindly on the CSS Zen Garden or that era of CSS. They think the markup/stylesheet separation of concerns was a terrible idea, an idea that Tailwind exists to fix. (I think they're wrong, that separation of concerns is good, Tailwind is a hack, and get off my lawn while you're at it.)

The point is - now the modern vanilla web platform really can support first-class CSS-styled app components, from design systems, in production. This is really cool!

HTML and CSS were originally designed as document-oriented languages for digital document display; think MS Word or PDF with cross-document hyperlinks, and not an app SDK. The idea was simply "style your web site's titles, headings, paragraphs, footers, etc. in just one place; change it there and the whole site will update". That's the dream that CSS Zen Garden was meant to showcase. Interactivity and web apps came later, and CSS has taken a very long time to catch up.

But catch up it has, and I'll be glad when frontend web development sheds Tailwind and React in favor of the updated vanilla web platform; and I won't complain if we use super light web component libraries like Lit[0]).

[0] https://lit.dev

No conflicts of interest, and I'm not diminishing the impact of the research, just questioning how much it supports your statement.
It's clear that nicotine binds to those receptors, but exactly how that plays out is far more complex in practice, depending on a whole host of variables.

- Presence or absence of other nicotinic agonists, inverse agonists, and antagonists, and relative concentrations of each

- Effects vary wildly with nicotine concentration levels in plasma/interstitial fluid, as if it's an entirely different drug depending on how much is present

- etc.

You're drawing a direct line from one agonist the paper only mentions once to a psychological effect that the paper doesn't even describe. You may or may not be right, but this paper is at best a citation for a separate study to test your hypothesis.

> nicotine receptors make meaningless behavior meaningful as if you expend effort on it

*nicotinic receptors, which are activated by acetylcholine. But I only saw nicotine mentioned once in the paper, and in the titles of two citations.

To me, it seems like a big stretch to say that nicotine "makes meaningless behavior meaningful" - could you explain how that's supported by the paper's data?

And nicotine, don't forget that. Smokers built the modern world (and then developed lung cancer for their troubles).
drugs have been making people feel good (and messing with their sense of motivation to behave responsibly) regardless of society's state
Re:Stop making swap partitions–use swap files instead on Friday September 11, 2026 @04:25PM (#49664856)
Illumos also doesn't overcommit, if you want the more modern OS descended from Solaris.

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