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LocutusOfBorges

208 karma · joined March 20, 2015

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LocutusOfBorges··on Ask HN: Alternatives to The Economist?
Seconding this.

I cancelled my subscription quite a few years ago in light of the low quality of analysis in the UK section of the paper - it felt like tabloid journalism aimed at people who thought too highly of their class status and level of education to deign to read a real tabloid, yet essentially at the same level of insight, peppered with a few affected rhetorical flourishes conveying an aesthetic of educated sophistication.

It’s very much a newspaper designed to give people without the time or inclination to develop a substantial understanding of an issue a quite superficial overview, packaged alongside an opinion that can be regurgitated as required to give the impression that one has a respectable understanding of the matter in question (at the very least, outside some of its more detailed feature articles).

…Even in light of that, the rapidity of the decline in its coverage of LGBT+ human rights has been extraordinary, even by UK standards. The fact that prominent editorial staff at the newspaper (Helen Joyce, for one) are extremely prominent anti-transgender activists probably has something to do with it - but the sheer venom of its coverage really took me aback when I started following its current turn. The issue certainly isn’t specific to it, given the broader anti-trans/LGBT+ turn in the UK press as a whole, but the Economist stands out as one of the worst for it.

LocutusOfBorges··on Scholar identifies alarming trends among US men
> women are highly encouraged to leave their men, get abortions, etc.

Why is this a bad thing?

People should be free to live their lives as they choose.

LocutusOfBorges··on Exiting the Vampire Castle (2013)
For the sake of a counterpoint to this essay, which widely derided at its time of publication - this is an example of the contemporary backlash it received. I’d urge anyone taken by Fisher’s essay to consider giving it a read.

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/opendemocracyuk/all-hail-va...

A more detailed critique is available here, if the above is too light on specifics:

https://nothingiseverlost.wordpress.com/2013/11/23/vampires-...

Nine years later, Mark Fisher is in the grave, and his proposed great voice of the working class Russell Brand is hawking crank nonsense like anti-vaccine conspiracies [1] and the use of Ivermectin as a treatment for Covid-19 [2].

I think it can be quite comfortably said that the essay hasn’t aged as well as some would like to imagine.

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34zd9/russell-brand-ivermec...

[2] https://www.bigissue.com/culture/russell-brand-interview-loo...

LocutusOfBorges··on A Tribute to the Windows 3.1 “Hot Dog Stand” Color Scheme (2005)
It’s a situation where developers joylessly insist that a user’s preferences and control over the interface of the computer they use for hours each day aren’t a worthwhile thing to consider in application development, leading to efforts like the slow de-prioritisation and extinguishing of user-set theme support in GNOME.

Enormous shame, really - there’s real value in customisation support.

LocutusOfBorges··on Can't you just right click?
The XPS line had some of the worst speakers I’ve ever heard on a laptop up until the 2020 revision- and some of the worst build quality issues I’ve ever experienced with a laptop.

My 2019 XPS 15 went through eight at-home repair visits after hardware failures within four months. Can honestly say I’ve never used a less reliable machine- and every unit I’ve ever touched has had some of the worst coil wine issues I’ve ever encountered in any computer.

“Very similar” doesn’t really count for much.

LocutusOfBorges··on Lessons from the failure of General Magic
For anyone less than enthused by that webpage's anti-HN redirect to a photograph of a testicle in an egg cup, here's an archive link:

https://web.archive.org/web/20180322163944/https://www.jwz.o...

LocutusOfBorges··on Big fish are found deep not because of age, climate, or prey, but because of us
Given the sheer inefficiency of animal agriculture, this argument doesn't hold up to even passing scrutiny.

For every 100 calories of grain fed to cattle in industrial (meat) factory farms, the result's equivalent to ~30 calories.

Those "inefficient" fields you cite wouldn't need to be cultivated at all if we didn't pour two thirds of the food fields produce into fuelling the livestock industry. Not everywhere outright requires cultivation.

Most of the meat on your plate will come from a factory farm, for the sake of maximising efficiency of food production. The idyllic picture of animals roaming freely across pastures doesn't really map to the reality of modern affordable meat production[1].

As to your point concerning the meadows/monocultures comparison- a global food production system less wasteful than that which exists presently, in which we wouldn't be pouring mountains of perfectly edible food into fuelling meat production, would substantially reduce the area of land required for continual cultivation. Modern diets in the western world area astoundingly inefficient- even reducing the amount of meat consumed would help matters considerably[2].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_vqIGTKuQE

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/agricultural-land-by-global-diets

LocutusOfBorges··on Steam store to sell VR porn video games
Yes, unfortunately. "The Independent" isn't a newspaper anymore- the print version was shut down in 2016, and most of the staff were laid off.

The "i" has replaced it in print (highbrow tabloid)- independent.co.uk has been reduced to a website that drives traffic towards itself largely through clickbait/tabloid-style reporting.

It's still on a different level to dreck like the Daily Mail, but it's long since slipped from its old status as a respected broadsheet.

LocutusOfBorges··on Slack client for the terminal
Eul seems like it might fit that requirement:

https://eul.im/

LocutusOfBorges··on Google AMP Is a Threat to the Open Web
This is particularly noticable on iOS- AMP pages break iOS' standard page scrolling ballistics, for some reason. It makes them feel non-native in a particularly egregious way.
LocutusOfBorges··on Progressive web apps are coming to iOS 11.3: Cupertino, we have a problem
Storage space isn't generally the bottleneck on older devices- it's the CPU/RAM. On that count, native apps are usually overwhelmingly preferable.

If these catch on a big way, it'll be catastrophic for more underpowered devices. Modern web pages are already starting to get acutely uncomfortable to use on older iPhones, let alone older Android devices- we aren't yet at the point where performance levels are high enough that we can slap the equivalent of an electron wrapper on everything, smirk at users' devices' vanishing battery life and call it a day.

LocutusOfBorges··on JS Paint – A web-based MS Paint remake
For what it's worth, Irfanview's generally a better solution for quick cropping:

http://www.irfanview.com

LocutusOfBorges··on AIM will be discontinued today
Telegram Desktop comes pretty close to this ideal.
LocutusOfBorges··on Enter 'petro': Venezuela to launch oil-backed cryptocurrency
Livingstone was Mayor of London- not Lord Mayor.

The Lord Mayor's a completely different, ceremonial role. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Mayor_of_London

LocutusOfBorges··on Maintaining an Independent Browser Is Expensive
Things like no swipe down to refresh

This is the thing that made me switch to it from Chrome. Something as experience-breaking as refreshing the page isn't something that the user should encounter just through energetic scrolling.

LocutusOfBorges··on Can the new Firefox Quantum regain its web browser market share?
Banking on web apps to save Firefox won't work out while the browser continues to not support CSS styling of scrollbars. It's so fundamental to so many modern web apps- and a major part of why they tend to feel slightly worse on Firefox.

The bug's 17 years old now.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=77790

LocutusOfBorges··on Can the new Firefox Quantum regain its web browser market share?
Mozilla gave extension authors multiple years of notice. I don't see what else they could have done, realistically speaking.
LocutusOfBorges··on Extensions in Firefox 58
I don't expect an Electron-style system to ever arise around Firefox while the engine continues to not support custom skinned scrollbars.

They've become such a fundamental element of modern web apps- that so many of them just fall over and break on Firefox is alarming.

LocutusOfBorges··on IRC necromancy
Discord, overwhelmingly.

Every IRC community I used to be a part of even a year ago has made the jump. It's just more convenient for all concerned- the only holdouts are people clinging to their CLIs and people objecting for ideological reasons.

I wish it hadn't come to this, but IRC's just stagnated for too long. The barrier to entry's too high, using it on mobile devices is a chore, the feature set's extremely limited, etc. Had IRCv3 managed to get off the ground and made some strides towards creating a modern user experience maybe two years ago, Discord wouldn't have had such a vulnerable market open for it to stroll in and snatch up.

Discord provides seamless cloud message logging, mobile notifications, intuitive clients, a huge ecosystem of easy-to-use bots, and integration with games that just works without the user having to set anything up. Even non-gaming-related communities have been switching to it for convenience's sake.

LocutusOfBorges··on Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem
As far as I'm aware, the user you're thinking of is JMC4789- they do some fantastic writeups.

They've recently started a side blog (http://emucross.com/), as well.

If you're curious, their reddit submission history (https://www.reddit.com/user/JMC4789/submitted/) has a bunch of interesting stuff.

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