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abrowne

2,669 karma · joined May 9, 2011

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abrowne··on The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
I am not seeing that on Firefox (beta/157) on Linux or Mac.
abrowne··on The mystery animal on an ancient god's head
I had to disable the body background-color with the web inspector to see any of the animal heads!
abrowne··on Fish bad, sugar good, and other medieval ideas about food
The Basques were whalers. They started from the coast, using watch towers. Once the Bay of Biscay was depleted they moved further and further into the Atlantic.

Whale meat was mediocre and didn't preserve well, and while whale bone (baleen) is useful enough, but the real target was whale oil, the best lubricant and fuel for lighting.

All of this is from The World the Plague Made: The Black Death and the Rise of Europe by James Belich. (Highly recommended (even to myself – I reread it within a year).

abrowne··on Google Messages has a weird bug that's sending old texts to random people
Do you want to use RCS?
abrowne··on The mechanics of the Nepali flash flood
Wildfire smoke will be the big question there. It's started to be bad for a week or two a year in Minneapolis, and is only worse the closer you are to the boreal forest.
abrowne··on Devices with GrapheneOS support should be available in 2027
Next gen of the Razr Ultra at least, according to another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363702
abrowne··on Western Sahara
And related to what happened in Ceuta recently. "The Moroccans orchestrated a similar cross-border influx in 2021 in retaliation for Spain’s allowing Western Sahara President Brahim Ghali, whose nation Morocco claims for itself, into the country for medical treatment." https://www.thenation.com/article/world/ceuta-spain-morocco-...
abrowne··on AI fuels more than half of cybercrime in Africa as scams surge – Interpol
Agreed. If they really want to get ahold of me they'll leave a voicemail.

But I feel like I have to answer when my son is at school/camp.

abrowne··on The AI Aesthetic
“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.

“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”

— Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises, https://standardebooks.org/ebooks/ernest-hemingway/the-sun-a...

abrowne··on Firefox 153.0 Beta
I prefer the Firefox PDF viewer personally, and now that it can do all this I uninstalled the default Ubuntu PDF reader recently. It made me think and I uninstalled the image viewer app too. For both I'd rather use Firefox.
abrowne··on It seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history
Was your bookshelf stained from sliding them out? Ours was all red on the bottom edge.
abrowne··on The Egg Bandits Made a Thousand Times the Fine They Just Paid for Price Fixing
All good deadpan deserves a downvote?
abrowne··on Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further
I think that's true, but energy efficiency is only one potential benefit of epaper displays, and not one that is a goal with this product.
abrowne··on Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further
> Touchscreens on your wrist suck so bad.

I don't mind myself, and especially in winter with mittens on I can – and often do – use my nose :-D

abrowne··on Modos Color Monitor Pushes E-Paper Displays Further
Bangle.js 2 (https://banglejs.com/) also has a transflective LCD. It's very fun product with a great community.

Bangle.js 3 is being discussed: https://github.com/orgs/espruino/discussions/7341

abrowne··on Boot Naked Linux
Or they meant 2010s?
abrowne··on Sam Bankman-Fried loses bid to appeal against fraud conviction in FTX case
Bankman won't be Fried
abrowne··on Europe's largest Copper Age tomb: children's bones show ancient health crisis
Source article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S187998172...
abrowne··on MacBook Neo Is So Popular That Apple Doubled Production
I agree with your comment generally, but note that Dell's $699 competitor they announced this week has has a slightly larger screen than the Neo with similar resolution and brightness but better color coverage.
abrowne··on What Is a Dickover?
I can't imagine browsing the web without user stylesheets. (I guess I can, but I don't want to.)
abrowne··on What Is a Dickover?
Any site I visit regularly gets a user stylesheet via Stylus that I use to hide anything like this.
abrowne··on Bttf is a command line datetime Swiss army knife
I know that if you want `fd` (https://github.com/sharkdp/fd) you need to `apt install fd-find` and which installs the binary `fdfind` (!).
abrowne··on Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash
Hearing this in the news reminded me of William Langewiesche's great piece in vanity fair about the cause: https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2014/10/air-france-...
abrowne··on Vivaldi 8.0
Sustainable means those sources of income will continue, not that they are positive for users.
abrowne··on Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets
There's plenty of legal gambling in Minnesota. To quote the Minnesota Legislative Reference Library it includes

"horse racing, a card club at Canterbury Park, Indian tribal casinos, charitable gambling, and a state lottery."

(https://www.lrl.mn.gov/guides/guides?issue=gambling)

abrowne··on Iran will impose fees on subsea internet cables in Strait of Hormuz
14-month old article headline, but hasn't aged a bit:

American Foreign Policy Is Being Run by the Dumbest Motherfuckers Alive

(Daniel W. Drezner https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/american-foreign-policy...)

abrowne··on I love Linux, but I can't quit Windows
Contrary anecdote: I've installed and used Linux, mainly Ubuntu desktop (GNOME) on a dozen or so computers in the last ten years, including several older MacBooks, a Surface Go for my son and an HP I special ordered without Windows. I come from a Mac background and use the terminal, but I've never need to do so to get them to work. Sure I've tweaked them, but only cosmetic things like locales and default fonts. For install and use I haven't done anything special. Old MacBooks need wi-fi drivers, which usually Ubuntu will find. Besides that everything has honestly just worked for me.
abrowne··on Safari and Firefox change how big sites render based on the domain
Ditto. The only thing I can remember of is Apple Maps. They used to allow only Windows or something? But they relented eventually.
abrowne··on MacBook Neo Deep Dive: Benchmarks, Wafer Economics, and the 8GB Gamble
If a {Dell, HP, Lenovo} firmware update fails leaving the computer bricked, can you use another {Dell, HP, Lenovo} to restore the firmware?

(Honest question: I'm a longtime Mac user, I use Macs at work and I can tell you the correct DFU port for each model. But my home computer for the last 6 years has been an HP EliteBook with Ubuntu.)

abrowne··on Googlebook
Cancelled presumably because instead they will move new Chromebooks to this Android OS.
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