medstrom

Dragon Age 2 wasn't 15 years ago... looks it up Oh, it was... What's happening...?

Ah, vBulletin. I confess I don't recall if there was any important difference to me. And looking on https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com, which I like, it seems to run a thing called XenForo? Anyway, the look-and-feel of all three are similar.

Attempt by who? Responsibility to do what? Not snark, just not following.

I keep thinking of phpBB.

I loved posting on phpBB forums back in the day. Checking in every so often to see if anyone had replied to my posts. Often recognizing the same people, but also a healthy flow of new people.

Oddly... there was no such thing as push notifications and yet you could reliably count on people to check back. I guess because people were not coming from a feed or Reddit-like aggregator, they'd entered the conversation more intentionally?

No, it's probably more that a given thread was one conversation, like a GitHub issue, not a tree of comments with nested branches. Linear forum threads are great like that, posting is like joining a group of people by the vending machine, you're now in the group because you interrupted everyone else when you chimed in with your two cents, but that also means you belong there now.

Oh, and even more relevant: upvotes have zero effect on what post gets seen first! So it's not a popularity contest for the most pithy one-liner that gets upvoted to the top. You can write long-form posts and people will see them and engage on a human level.

I guess you can boil this down to "the absence of an algorithm": nothing has attempted to optimize what to put in front of their eyeballs, and so they engage with your long-form post. But when we talk about "opting out of algorithms", remember it's not just ML/AI algorithms: even Reddit/HN style upvotes are already an algorithm! It's obviously powerful enough that it has quite an effect.

Not sure why modern alternatives to phpBB, like Discourse, feel so impersonal and boring. I rarely feel the urge to check back on a Discourse thread, but that may just be me.

> you can detect `curl | bash` server-side

Oh wow, ok. So if anything, manually do `curl` and `sh` separately?

Appreciated this storytelling, it exposes some real procedural knowledge about using the Internet Archive.

The prompt is the code :) The code is like a compiled binary. How long until we put the prompts in `src/` and the code in `bin/`, I wonder...

Consider your biases about the word "hobby". It's easy to average way more than 40 hours per week on a hobby, and to spend those hours with as much deadly seriousness as the hours at work. Especially if you don't work full-time or don't work at all.

But you can be a software dev even if you do not work in software dev. Plenty of those individuals in open source, for example.

I, too, appreciate the clarification in the term "write-only code".

Still, isn't the forecast for one hour from now more useful than literally now? You can see that through the window (and feel it on your face by opening the window).

I don't see that TFA claimed any cost savings. That is not the reason people go for e-paper.

TIL a built-in

   (zone &optional PGM)

   Inferred type: (function (&optional t) t)

   Zone out, completely.

That's not so dissimilar to my experience in 2025 with whatever USB drives I can scrounge up around the house!

The issue isn't really Android, it's the touchscreen and the way the UX is a regression from many analog single-purpose devices.

If you gonna have a single-purpose device - make it analog (or close to analog)!

Don't give it a perceptible boot-time and all the other flaws that come with general-purpose computing. Don't make the user have to "wake up the device", let alone have to visually confirm that it is woken-up, before they can switch to the next song.

I loved the buttons on the Galaxy Spica https://www.gsmarena.com/samsung_i5700_galaxy_spica-pictures...

Now that I think about it, going no-buttons might have been a driver towards larger screens. Having at least a few buttons seemed to make it much less necessary.

There is plenty more for a cardiologist to do even if they solve the most pressing current problems. Hard to run out of puzzles in biology.

> High LDL is correlated with the development of heart disease, but it does not cause heart disease.

You realize this sentence is an oxymoron?

Unless you meant to say "it does not cause the development of heart disease". I agree correlation is not causation.

> tell the AI to write in the style of a HN commenter, or whatever.

This might turn out to be one of those tricks like Ctrl+C Ctrl+V that surprisingly few people discover.

...ChatGPT? Such an odd take, to point at weather being variable.

This is a coastal city at a fairly run-of-the-mill latitude, people build functional bike networks in much worse.

A discussion is held between people who don't (initially) believe each other. Nothing odd about it.

Not clear in your example if you have a to-dont list, or just decide "don't" in the moment.

You mean... an aha list?

There are tan-thru clothes, if you want to be serious about it.

The 2 y/o example isn't very good, I can only imagine that they'd perceive last year as pretty recent, compared to how I perceive last year.

Damn, the 80s felt that recent?

Self-updating too!

Plus, in my experience when I make a separate user manual... a lot fewer people read it.

If it seems odd, maybe it's not what they're doing.