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akkartikon Ask HN: What are you reading?

Tell me more about the abridgements. Which one now, which one next?

akkartikon Ask HN: What are you reading?

That's the one I mean! Can never remember the names of the books/series, hence the gesture.

akkartikon Ask HN: What are you reading?

Lots of scifi and fantasy.

The Works of Vermin. Exceptionally well written. Not an ounce of flab anywhere.

The Carryx series, 2 books so far. Best villains ever.

Tainted Cup and sequel. Sherlock Holmes meets Godzilla.

Goblin Emperor

The Prophet (Gibran)

Los Alamos (Kanon)

Hyperion (reread)

Finally, a shout out to the best book I read in 2025: Terra Ignota. Yes, the whole series.

akkartikon Necker, 1832: "An optical phænomenon on viewing a figure of a geometrical solid"

I had to shorten the title to fit it, but there's so much here and the Necker cube is just a final addendum. This is what publishing was intended to be like!

akkartikon If a Tesla Cybercab fleet were profitable, Tesla wouldn't sell you one

Headfaked by Moravec's Paradox.

akkartikon Nitter has more working instances than before the takedowns

A key design decision was you only need to replace the domain in the URL. So you need only replace it back. It's not like archive.is where I need to also save the original.

akkartikon Poisson Disk Sampling

Still one of the most satisfying debug UIs I ever came up with.

https://akkartik.name/post/2023-11-04-devlog

akkartikon Waterfox 6.7.0 – Supernova

Existing user who had no complaints before, but I have one now: it has started dumping a Waterfox directory in my home directory.

Tried yet again to use their default search engine. Got a captcha which requires me to enable js on a 3rd party site. Noped out again.

akkartikon The Origin of Consciousness (2008)

How far down the tree of life does this theory consider to be conscious?

akkartikon Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals

"In 2017, Dyatlov and Long Jin from Tsinghua University in Beijing used the one-dimensional fractal uncertainty principle to prove that you can never trap a wave on a hyperbolic surface; it will always spread out until it touches every corner. To do so, they imagined a region on the surface that a wave never enters, even after having infinite time to spread out. When they removed all the trajectories that entered that region, what remained was the same sort of fractal dust that appeared in the pinball example. Since the fractal uncertainty principle forbids a wave from being trapped on a fractal, no such region can exist — the wave must spread everywhere."

As a non-mathematician this is a wonderfully evocative summary. I'm curious if mathematicians find it a reasonable characterization of the proof.

akkartikon I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union

You're confusing the current implementation with future potential of this technology.

akkartikon I've yet to see any"My AI went rogue and caused us to recognise a workers union

Like Mr. Incredible at the insurance company.

akkartikon Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS

Interesting! My biggest reaction is I don't use Emacs. Is Emacs a requirement? You're right that Org adds features but it also shrinks the pool of people who will try this.

akkartikon Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS

https://indieweb.org/twtxt

akkartikon I regret migrating to Codeberg

Well, my lens tends to be geopolitical rather than economic. Privacy isn't some axiomatic metric for me. I just decide if someone is an ally and I am willing to put up with the cost of their action. With Anubis I don't see it being suborned yet by non-allies like big companies. But I'm definitely watching for that.

akkartikon I regret migrating to Codeberg

Yeah, every day brings choices. I tend to allow a first party js from every small site, and that covers Anubis and the even more egregious use case of Mastodon instances. Needing 100KB of Js to display 140 chars :eyeroll:

I still haven't allowed Cloudflare, though. That is bounce or incognito.

akkartikon I regret migrating to Codeberg

Absolutely. I have no complaint with their actual change to the terms of service. I've had an account with them for years, and I stopped hosting new repos there a year or two ago, because I got mixed signals about precisely what kinds of projects they want to host. I don't need a host, plenty of fish in the sea. But I also think the world is better for having them in it and being hardened against enshittification, and I don't want to see them constantly struggling to stay up under assault from LLM crawlers. I wish them well.

I am constantly ill-choosing words I didn't mean, it's not such a big deal.

akkartikon I regret migrating to Codeberg

I still use NoScript. I actually started in 2018. I will turn on 1 or 2 js sites for a respectable looking page, but blank screens and captchas are a good signal to bounce, or occasionally to use an incognito window which enables all JS.

As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.

akkartikon Men That Don't Fit In (1911)

Show me a successful "steady, quiet, plodding" person from the outside, and I'll show you someone who "doesn't know how to rest" and continually makes "fresh mistakes" on the inside.

akkartikon Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

Hmm, now I'm wondering if paste should save the clipboard contents before so undo can restore them.

But no. Your text editor is a cottage surrounded by an outdoors it doesn't control. It makes no more sense to try to take charge of the clipboard than of a flock of geese flying overhead. What if someone or some other app pasted something in between? Paste is an arrow shot, a message in a bottle.

akkartikon The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency

Yeah I've seen both approaches. Either teams do their own QA or we have a dedicated function. Depends on the domain to some extent. Both can work. But I don't hear people saying stupid shit anymore like "QA is a cost center". When we have it, everyone understands the value.

akkartikon The drivers behind software delivery inefficiency

"Stop blaming QA.."

What year is it?! Does anyone still blame QA?! If so, please consult the calendar and enter the 21st century!

akkartikon Sony deletes more movies from the accounts of people who ‘bought’ them

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A... outlaws circumvention of DRM.

akkartikon Success may not matter if you aren't doing what you love

Thank you for not using AI! Good article, +1.

akkartikon A road to Lisp: Why Lisp

You mixed up Light and Dark. Creator-knows-best bondage-and-discipline is the Dark side. Trusting people with power is the Light side.

akkartikon Magicbookshelf.org – a spoiler-aware companion for public domain classics

This sounds like what I use search for when reading an ebook..

akkartikon Show HN: DRM-Free Books

The uncertainty is part of the problem. Funny that even authors are not sure :)

I can't tell on https://www.amazon.com/Immortal-Remains-Lee-Hauser-ebook/dp/... that it's DRM-free. Amazon loses money in the small this way, but probably considers it more important to train people to not care.

akkartikon No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

Might they be made partially of meat?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cyborg_Manifesto

akkartikon No-One Escapes the Permanent Underclass

I wonder if the author has ever played Diplomacy. You have to fight the perennial sense that you have nothing and can be replaced. All your opponents have to do is band together against you. A similar generalization to OP would say everyone loses. And it would be wrong. This post shows the dangers of over-generalization more than anything else. The state isn't just about war. Each person in the line of dominoes the author has set up doesn't just care about what the author thinks they care about. In particular, people have agency and can run cartoon thought experiments like this and react to them. Billionaires won't just sit around and not develop military power, for one. We already have billionaires owning satellites in large numbers and creating geopolitical consequences. You better believe they have cards to play. And hopefully so does everyone else.

I have no idea what that looks like, because if I did I wouldn't be here commenting on HN :D But I suspect some people will play their cards well and get some luck, and come out on top, just like some people have always done.

akkartikon Rare medieval bookmark exceeds expectations at auction

Including the cover of another book.