alexjplant
alexjplant on Hacker News
15-20 years ago the joke was that Ubuntu is a Zulu word that, roughly translated, means "I don't know how to configure Debian". Ubuntu was one of the first distros that allowed one to easily download proprietary WLAN drivers without dealing with the terminal, ndiswrapper, or compiling half-broken OSS implementations; for this reason it caught fire with those who wanted to try Linux but were otherwise unwilling to engage in such shenanigans. I tried it on a laptop around this time and was quite impressed. This reputation for "it just works" has carried them ever since even though other distros now do largely the same thing ( cheap, obscure, or recently-released hardware excepted).
I took the lazy Mint route with my most recent machine since I wanted to use it for light gaming with minimal fuss. I'm going to redo it with Nix sometime soon because the value prop simply isn't there and I'd like to try a declaratively-configured distro.
In a society as transactional as ours (contemporary US culture) one must ask themselves "cui bono?" a hundred times a day. I'd imagine that if the answer is "me" enough times the one develops blind spots such as this one.
On the flip side novels have been written about the lies people tell themselves when they get romantically entangled with obvious troublemakers. Those plots didn't come from nowhere...
> “I give my wife a lot of credit. She was, like, you should never apologize,” Langley said. “Sure, people make mistakes. I've made a lot of mistakes in the last nine years. I made a lot of mistakes this summer. But we do good work.”
So this guy admits he did things that he shouldn't have then contends that he shouldn't have to say sorry for them? Am I reading this right? Isn't the point of an apology to acknowledge the bad outcome and signal to aggrieved parties that the offender will try avoid repeating the negative behavior? If yes and this guy is refusing to do it then what does that say about his world view?
Two slices of bread in the toaster oven. Throw some sharp cheddar on one of them halfway through. Spread a thin layer of *mite on the other. Delicious. I threw some carmelized onions on there one time too and it was even better.
The *mite hate comes from people trying to spread it like Nutella because they think brown = chocolate. One must apply it like sunscreen or thermal paste. My last jar of Vegemite similarly glued itself irretrievably shut towards the end even with a quarter of its contents left. I treated it as a metaphor for existence and discarded it with spiritual indifference.
Much has been written about the health motivations for reduced alcohol consumption but my pet theory is that people (myself included) grew tired of the ridiculous marketing-driven booze culture that emerged in the 2010s. Bottles of unobtainable bourbon going for $500 on the secondhand market, "gluten free" vodka (which every distilled beverage innately is unless adulterated), 13% ABV quadruple-hopped blood orange turbo dank Cali IPA, ultra-peaty scotch that tastes like a bonfire, chocolate infused bourbon barrel-aged "Cabernet", canned vodka sodas infused with artificial flavoring and sold at a 400% markup...
Whatever happened to a nice cold beer at the end of a hot day outside or a nice glass of wine with dinner? Home distillation and fermentation are also hobbies unto themselves in the same spirit (pun intended) of old-fashioned enjoyment, no mega-conglomerate marketing required.
> Yes, this is a documentary about a person.
I respectfully disagree. It's post-postmodern performance art. It's like a box of Post cereal with a Post-It note on it nailed to a post in from of the lamppost at the corner of Meta's headquarters in the metaverse. It's a relentless onslaught of origami tesseracts made out of pages from a Baudrillard book that an NYU student used to roll a cigarette of imported European tobacco while they post on Xitter in all lowercase. It's pure never-been-stepped-on A24.
I'm glad I saw this film in theaters as the people laughing and shouting was part of this experience but I'll never watch it again, i.e. it was good but definitely not "fun". I agree with those who say that excising the final third would've made it tighter.
> brogrammers who judged you by whether you used vim or not
When I hear that term I usually think of people who brag about their job and sling copy-pasted untyped Python and JS from StackOverflow while being willfully ignorant of infrastructure, architecture, security, algorithmic efficiency, and anything else that makes maintainable software. Micro-dosing K and listening to too many Huberman podcasts are probably solid tells too. When I hear vim, however, I think about greybeards.
Did I miss the memo? There has been a non-zero amount of performative TUI obsession happening in the technical space for the past five or six years but I didn't think that using a fifty-year-old modal text editor was a shibboleth for being a brogrammer...
This is a riff on this [1] classic for those who forgot like I did.
Earlier this year I spent considerable time making a six-agent multi-LLM configuration in OpenCode with a Bifrost multi-model router before just switching to OpenSpec and GLM-5.3 and calling it a day.
[1] https://theonion.com/fuck-everything-were-doing-five-blades-...
The last time I had them (almost a decade ago) they were delicious. Reading that they've been so adulterated makes me sad :-(
They're also very chocolate-deficient and therefore not worth my time. Life is too short for anything vanilla, shortbread, or sugar cookie adjacent (which I recall Biscoff to be).
I understand that this is a blazing hot culinary take and might be the most controversial thing I've written on HN. Before downvoting please consider that this isn't elitism or opinion - everybody the world over deserves the joy of flavor in their confections instead of cloying bland sweetness. Embrace variety and live your life. Throw your Biscoff in the trash and buy some Tim Tams or Thin Mints.
The last dentist I went to had serious bro energy and insulted me to my face a few times. They lied about a treatment and tried to get me to pay for it on the last day of the month shortly before I actually got it done (presumably so that they could book the revenue and do something sheisty with their numbers). They have a 4.9 rating on all major review platforms so I can only imagine what shenanigans they pulled to achieve that.
I just switched providers and pray that I have a better experience with this new one.
I know somebody that works in HVAC. Two or three years ago they asked me about exposing the web-based controls for a meat processor's refrigeration system to the internet for remote administration. I advised them not to because it was an old janky-looking turd that hadn't been updated in something like a decade and suggested enlisting an IT person to stick a cheap OpenWRT router with Tailscale in front to protect it. Of course there was no money to do this so they asked what would happen if they did it anyway. The first thing I thought of was a disgruntled former employee turning the system off to spoil six figures of inventory and stink up the building. They paused for a moment and said "hmm... yeah, it sounds bad when you say it like that".
I've no idea what they ended up doing after that.
I only really got into Marathon several years ago and played Doom/Doom 2 not too long afterwards. IMHO there is a serious case to be made that Marathon is superior on every axis (music/sound excepted) but I absolutely understand why Doom had greater mass appeal. They're both a lot of fun but for me Marathon 2 is tops (and there are a LOT of homages to the series in later Bungie games - the 343 Guilty Spark escort level in Halo: CE is basically a redux of the alien ship crawl waiting-for-doors bullet hell level from Durandal).
I still have yet to finish Duke 3D. Next time I'm in between jobs I'll hit it up.
I'm in my mid-30s and read it when I was in middle school because I bought a beat up copy for $.50 at a used book sale. I was assigned "Animal Farm" a year or two later (which I didn't enjoy nearly as much because of a personal aversion to parables) but never "1984". This always struck me as odd.
Because "1984" is one of those books that people pretend to have read so that they can use the word "Orwellian" to talk about surveillance they personally don't like while excusing the sort that's convenient or economically expedient for them.
(For what it's worth I haven't read ~half of the books on my shelf. "Simulacra and Simulation" is mocking me from across the room)
Media companies sell ads. Advertisers pay by impressions. Slopulist clickbait drives impressions.
At this point the term "AI" has been so diluted that it doesn't refer to generative image models or LLMs or traditional machine learning so much as it acts as a memetic sonic screwdriver, i.e. whatever journalists, pundits, founders, etc. need it to be. You can see how each party is wielding it in this specific instance quite clearly.
I have a Twitch account that I can't log into due. They'll send me an e-mail with my username in it but won't send me the password reset e-mail. Their support will acknowledge that I clearly have access to the inbox and will refuse to help or do anything for me to recover my account. They are beyond worthless.
Takes 11 seconds to load on Firefox on Linux with 3G-level throttling enabled in Dev Tools.
This. The Beatles happened upon the right things at the right time and therefore cemented their place in the zeitgeist as the progenitors of a lot of stuff that they themselves probably wouldn't even take credit for. Taking psychedelic rock as an example: "Pet Sounds" predates "Sergeant Pepper's" but only one of these albums gets the graphic t-shirt and VH1/NPR/Rolling Stone retrospective treatment. This happens all the time and is largely a product of critics coalescing on narratives simple enough for them and their audience to reason about. It's easier to say, for instance, that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal because their name sounds a lot spookier than "Sir Lord Baltimore" or "Blue Cheer", not because they actually did it.
NAM is groundbreaking and very useful. Unfortunately the people most annoyingly hyping it on gear forums are the usual crop of bedroom "tone hunters" who cosplay as musicians on the internet by pontificating about their pet gear preferences and suffering from degenerate GAS. They want a free Kemper because they're afraid of pressing buttons on a modeler and don't have the executive function to simply ignore the advanced parameters in an amp simulator ("I spend more time tweaking than I do playing!").
Regardless of the discourse around it I'd love a small, affordable NAM pedal that I could use as an emergency backup for my Fractal. I've entered my old man phase of playing and only use one amp setting because I roll back my volume for cleans; a profile of my SLO patch would be mint.
I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.
I had to look this up [1]:
> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."
Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.
[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6
California spends an insane amount on combating homelessness with nothing to show for it. This is a difficult problem to solve for sure; I'm not an expert in this field and would be speaking out of turn were I to suggest preferable alternatives. Suffice it to say that billions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet doing whatever is being done right now.
These aren't preferences so much as they are facts. I am very much not messing around. You can tell how serious I am by how I equated the decline of western civilization to a lack of sandwich vegetables.
Yes there is. There are a lot people have no idea what makes a good sandwich. They will happily put turkey, Miracle Whip, and two Kraft singles on 11-grain honey wheat Wonderbread and go about their day fully convinced that they made something delicious and healthy.
The fact that >50% of Italian sub shops default to not putting onions on their torpedoes is a testament to how far we've fallen as a culture.
> And when things go south, you blame AI?
This seems to work well enough for people who deploy cloud instances without redundancy to us-east-1 then blame AWS when there's an outage. I say this somewhat unironically because if one pushes the "move fast and break things" slider all the way to the right then they're necessarily assuming that type of risk. Of course some people will try to have their cake and eat it too [1] as regards velocity and quality but that's a separate discussion.
[1] I've never understood this idiom because if one isn't in possession of their cake before eating it then they're eating stolen cake which is a decidedly anti-social activity and orthogonal to the point of the saying. It should be "eat their cake and keep it too" or something.
benheck built a luggable computer into an MGD beer case around the early 00s as well. The build log and pictures seem to be lost to time but I recall it having a flip-open disc door that was cut out of the side of it. I didn't appreciate the humor as a kid but having had a beer or two in my day it's a lot funnier in retrospect.