prometheus76

I'll add a little context. I mentioned that it was 30 years ago. My personal computer at the time was a 486DX-50 with 16 MB of RAM, and the mainframe we were tied to had maybe 2 GB of Ram? For 200+ users to share. It's easy to forget how far hardware has developed since then.

Well, this was over 30 years ago that I was sitting in that class, and the resources the emacs required vs vi was definitely part of the discussion. We were working in a shared environment on a solaris system, and if the whole class fired up emacs for a class session, the effects were definitely experienced by all the users on the system at the time.

The part the author shared about the huge overhead cost of firing up emacs, especially in a multi-user environment (I learned about emacs vs vi holy war back on a multi-user Solaris environment), our Unix professor strongly encouraged us to learn vi. He said "vi is part of every standard Unix install, so when you ssh into a box, you'll always have your editor and it won't steal all the CPU from the other users when you fire it up."

Feels monumental to see that come to an end decades later.

I am working on a clock app that keeps time the Roman Empire way (every day has twelve hours that start at sunrise and end at sunset, so the duration of each hour changes slightly each day), so this library would be extremely helpful. Thank you!

Relatedly, I have recently started walking and talking, and I just use lightweight gamer headphones that have a mic. I just record it with a generic voice recorder app, then I use a local instantiation of whisper to transcribe it when I get home. I throw the transcript and the recording into a database and then I can search the whole thing, or have AI look for interesting patterns in my thoughts.

All you need to do is read the other comments on this very page and you will see that there are very strict cultural and political norms here too, but for some reason they are invisible as such to those who hold them. They consider their views to be "common knowledge" and "what any reasonable person believes" because they, too, live in curated bubbles.

Any comment that challenges mainstream science, materialism/physicalism, and leftist politics gets downvoted into oblivion here because HN is definitely not a haven for people who "pride themselves on intellectually challenging material."

TL;DR: It's an echo chamber here, too, but most people who hold the worldview that is enforced here often cannot see their own presuppositions, nor do they see that their views are political in nature.

Interesting that the author didn't mention anything about stem cell injections. Those have been in vogue among the elite for decades (millennia?).

I was under the impression that the injunction against playing cards was because of their proximity to tarot/occult practices. Mormons had the same injunction against playing cards until the 80s, when the teaching was no longer promulgated. Speaking as a former Mormon...

The government is the majority of people. So the government very well can be against 49% of the people and it would still fit your definition.

If 100 people were about to embark on a journey on a ship, what makes you think 51 of them know who should run the ship if none of them have ever even been on a ship?

Liberal democracy is rooted in Christian ethics. It does not make sense to a Muslim culture or the Chinese culture.

Another impact on solar adoption in the United States is that many home insurance companies are refusing to pay on claims against roof damage from poor installs. And there are a lot of poor installs, which has led to this problem. So now the homeowners are taking all of the risk on a solar install that already has an 8-10 year ROI.

Those diseases are back because of rampant immigration. People from other countries bring them here. It has nothing to do with "obscurantist beliefs", whatever those might be.

> prior to the widespread deployment of malicious microphones, were adequate authentication for many purposes

Can you elaborate on this? I don't understand the context for malicious microphones and how that affects secure passwords.

They fired most of the UI/UX team soon after Steve Jobs died.

They farm you for attention, not electricity. Attention (engagement time) is how they quantify "quality" so that it can be gamed with an algorithm.

If you have access to ethanol-free fuel, that basically eliminates gasoline "going bad". It's the ethanol that degenerates over time.

"However, animals like us do not experience salt desire as a powerful, controlling drive as we do with oxygen, food and water." (from the article).

I disagree with that, especially when I was young. I would crave salt. I would lick my hand and sprinkle salt on it, then lick the salt off. I would break chunks off the salt lick block we had for our horses. I would lick the homemade play-doh my mom would make because it tasted like salt.

There's no substantiation for the claim in the article that we lack a salt craving. Apparently, the author hasn't, but I know a lot of people that do.

I would contend that empiricism is inadequate to discern what is real and what is true. Much of human experience and what is meaningful to being a person is not measurable nor quantifiable.

The act of curating facts itself is required to communicate anything because there are an infinite number of facts. You have to include some and exclude others, and you arrange them in a hierarchy of value that matches your sensibilities. This is necessary in order to perceive the world at all, because there are too many facts and most of them need to be filtered. Everyone does this by necessity. Your entire perceptual system and senses are undergirded by this framework.

There is no such thing as "objective" because it would include all things, which means it could not be perceived by anyone.

Ah yes. People who think like you and agree with you are rational, not prone to fear, disgust outrage, or protectiveness. But people who disagree with you are obviously irrational and can't be reasoned with. You are "educated" and they are "fear-mongers".

I agree with your view completely. I see the current use cases for AI to be very similar to the practices of augury during the Roman Empire. I keep two little chicken figurines on my desk as a reference to augury[1] and its similarity to AI. The emperor brings a question to the augurs. The augurs watch the birds (source of pseudo-randomness), go through rituals, and give back an answer as to whether the emperor should go to war, for example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augur

I didn't say anything about emergency medicaid being illegal. What I did was present evidence that illegal immigrants do, indeed, use Medicaid funds in the form of emergency care, and I presume those are the records that are now being reviewed by ICE. Your original claim was that illegal immigrants don't get Medicaid, but you neglected to consider emergency medicaid funds.

Couple of notes: Medicaid DOES cover emergency services for undocumented immigrants, to the tune of 16.2 billion dollars during the Biden administration. (Reference: https://budget.house.gov/imo/media/doc/cbo_on_medicaid_for_i...)

Just because it's illegal doesn't mean it isn't happening. From a May 25, 2025 article on the official CMS website: "The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced today increased federal oversight to stop states from misusing federal Medicaid dollars to cover health care for individuals who are in the country illegally. Under federal law, federal Medicaid funding is generally only available for emergency medical services for noncitizens with unsatisfactory immigration status who would otherwise be Medicaid-eligible, but some states have pushed the boundaries, putting taxpayers on the hook for benefits that are not allowed."

From this article: https://www.cms.gov/newsroom/press-releases/cms-increasing-o...

They have a pamphlet available one more click away from the link you shared that gives detailed information on how undocumented immigrants can get free/reduced-cost health care, and what all of their options are: https://www.wahealthplanfinder.org/content/dam/wahbe-assets/...

TheDraw was a cornerstone of my teenage years. I would log into different BBSs just to see their ANSI welcome screens, then I would try and re-create them to learn the art. It was a unique form of animation and I was hoping you had figured out how to get TheDraw working.

I also later used ANSI to make my own cool command line prompts in DOS and later, Linux.

You can also use a plastic bottle or even a paper drinking cup.

I'm not sure that's the mechanism at work because I have boiled eggs using plastic cups and also waxed paper cups many times. I don't think any water is boiling through. The cup itself is staying at 100C, which is below its ignition point.

My daughter is just getting into photography, and I was hoping your guide would share more of how to set the exposure for moon shots (which can be tricky and unintuitive for beginners). You might want to add some examples and what your settings were, as well as how you derived those settings.

Oh man. This makes me want to throw my phone against the nearest brick wall sometimes. The UI is loading, I reach for the button I want to hit, but it moves and a different button takes its place because the app/page is still loading, or worse, an ad has taken the place of the button.

This also happens where sometimes the hotbar has three buttons, and sometimes four, and the worst apps are when buttons switch ordinal positions depending on if there are three or four buttons in there.

It feels very strange to get so agitated by these small behaviors, but here we are.

I don't know exactly what you mean by "support the Pope", but your simple binary division between "Roman Catholic or Protestant" ignores a lot of the historical tensions between the Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church. There's also the whole issue with the Oriental Orthodox Church, which went into schism after the Fourth Ecumenical Council, which was LONG before the Great Schism in 1054. How do they fit into your categorization?

You might find it interesting to study more details about the history of Christianity. It's not so simple as "Love Pope or Reject Pope."