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baruzon Helium Browser

In the 1990s Microsoft “invested” in Apple because Steve Jobs allowed them to save face by giving them the option to settle their part of Apple v San Francisco Canyon Co by calling part of it—$150 M—a stock purchase that only lasted a few years. I do not know how much the total cash settlement from Microsoft was, but industry rumors went up to $1B.

baruzon The Color of the Future: A history of blue

Or manganese blue?

baruzon The Last Vestal Virgin and the Fall of Rome

Aeneas is several generations removed from Rhea Silvia, as the founder of the ruling dynasty of Alba Longa whence Rhea Silvia emerged.

baruzon Show HN: Clearcam – Add AI object detection to your IP CCTV cameras

The author states elsewhere that the payments are for the use of their server, which can be reconfigured.

baruzon SQLite (with WAL) doesn't do `fsync` on each commit under default settings

Is there a performance hit for f_fullfsync?

baruzon The Missing Protocol: Let Me Know

https://xkcd.com/927/

You know which one.

baruzon Lists and Lists: Basics of Lisp through interactive fiction (1996)

I did the same thing, used setq and set ' before I did :r and saw the “define” verbiage.

> assumed to know the difference

:m for the manual and it’s under Comparisons

baruzon The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over

An earlier Gen X reporting in to agree with this eloquently-written comment. I only want to add that my Silent parents never tried to sell me on the Baby Boomer dream retirement, having been raised by Lost Generation parents still shell-shocked from the effects of the Great Depression. They taught me to save, invest, and, as immigrants, to always keep family in mind.

baruzon The Gen Xers Who Waited Their Turn to Be CEO Are Getting Passed Over

That was not Gen X saying that—we don’t say anything, like our Silent parents—we just sulk in our rooms playing grunge to relieve the overwhelming dread and to root out whatever ear-worms Clear Channel has been feeding us. Baby Boomers were the ones who put out the narrative of the avocado-toast eating Millenial, to which we just said, “Whatever.”

In case it was not made abundantly clear, that was stereotypical GenX sarcasm, but as a Gen Xer I cannot figure out how to write a sarcasm tag into this stupid machine.

baruzon Malicious compliance by booking an available meeting room

I wonder whether TFA author never saw it again because the fifty-minute bookers wised up and started booking the extra ten minutes or whether the ten-minute stand-up pirates finally got a talking-to.

baruzon Former Supreme Court justice David Souter has died

I remember that decision and am still indignant about it. Why should the government give private land to a different private party? If the government is going to take it for public use, I can see the reasoning, but using eminent domain to transfer to private owners is fraught.

baruzon ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

Huh. It was grayed out for me as well, but I have no recollection of having had to look up moles, Avogadro, or even chemistry-related topics in Wikipedia for at least several months.

baruzon How to start a school with your friends

> Who decides

Councils formed by the currently accredited schools decide.

> what right

The government started relying on these accrediting bodies with the GI Bill in 1952. They did not want the GIs to spend the money on bad educations.

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

> are employers really looking into

Didn’t yours? If they’re not body shops, companies will rely on the reputation of the school or pick out people from their own school. Unaccredited schools typically have poor reputations and usually churn out “graduates” who can’t attract the money to start businesses and hire people from those schools.

baruzon First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV

You probably got auto-spellchecked, but it’s “charism,” without the a.

baruzon Vatican Observatory

That is not a big leap as American evangelicals typically do not think of Catholics as Christians, full stop.

baruzon Greek Particles (1990)

“Are you the coming guy” in English sort of lapses into comedy that was absolutely not intended. or was it?

baruzon Greek Particles (1990)

You probably know this, but ancient Greek does not use auxiliary verbs to the extent that English does, as it uses inflection to encode tense, mode, and aspect information. The prosdokōmen could be interpreted as present indicative (“are we expecting?”), yes, but it could also be subjunctive deliberative, of which Smyth sez:

> 1805. Deliberative Subjunctive.—The deliberative subjunctive (present or aorist) is used in questions when the speaker asks what he is to do or say (negative μή).

> …

> N.—The subjunctive question does not refer to a future fact, but to what is, under the present circumstances, advantageous or proper to do or say.

So “should we expect?” or “are we (supposed) to expect?” are valid interpretations of προσδοκῶμεν.

> "Take these words of mine…"

As a sibling comment mentions, this is interpreted (eg, Zerwick and Grosvenor on gLuke) as an idiom, but from Aramaic (I don’t know enough about Semitic languages to say) akin to “before your very eyes” in English.

baruzon Greek Particles (1990)

Not modern. Outsiders coming into the language (even for modern Greeks—the diglossia TFA mentions between spoken and written language in English existed for 1500+ years in Greek) find particles difficult to grasp, and the dictionary definitions do not really convey all the senses that the particles mean, like mathematics teaches from natural definitions of numbers progressing to Dedekind cuts. You know _Portuguese irregular verbs_, by Alexander McCall Smith, the comic novel where Dr. Professor von Igelfeld rests his reputation on a magisterial volume on the (strangely enough) Portuguese irregular verbs? Denniston’s _The Greek particles_ ultimately spans almost 700 pages after posthumous revisions (1960?). Page after page on individual particles. I think TFA satirizes that drive to squeeze every bit of meaning from the particles.

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

baruzon Greek Particles (1990)

I assume you’re joking, but θεωρίᾱ does mean a “looking at” or “a beholding” or “contemplation” from the verb θεωρέω, “to look at” or “observe.” Aristotle liked to use it for speculation or “theorizing” in the mental sense, but apparently that was due to Pythagoras’s influence.

Checked my Bolchazy-Carducci reprint of Crosby and Schaeffer, and they do indeed immediately gloss θεωρίᾱ as “review.”

baruzon Greek Particles (1990)

Lest anyone take this article at face value, please note that it was published in _Speculative Grammarian_, “the premier scholarly journal featuring research in the neglected field of satirical linguistics.”

The range of meanings for the Greek entautha, gar, and de are all well-understood.

baruzon The Ancient Art of Color

Quick note: the article states that some tellings of the myth behind the dye say that Hercules did it. Actually, that was (probably) a case of interpretatio graeca, in which the Greeks identified Heracles with the Canaanite Melqart, “King of the City,” and then the Romans did their own interpretatio romana.

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

baruzon The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR Is Dead

If your parents are anything like mine, they probably put them away for safekeeping in a place prone to flooding, mold, and mildew.

baruzon The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR Is Dead

I nowhere wrote that TFA said _Magic_ was their first thing; I merely expanded on matters TFA only mentioned in passing.

baruzon The CRPG Renaissance, Part 3: TSR Is Dead

Peter Adkinson’s fondness for _Dungeons and dragons_ and his Internet savvy was mentioned but not really expanded upon. In fact the first product that Wizards of the Coast produced was not _Magic: the gathering_ but a supplement for role-playing games, _The primal order_, rules for playing deities and demigods. He had done the TSR rules but wanted the broadest base possible, so he solicited advice from Usenet’s rec.games.frp.* hierarchy (and rec.games.rpg?) for conversion to other systems. I made suggestions for GURPS.

baruzon First glimpse inside burnt scroll after 2k years

They said that the work was a Greek Epicurean work, but described it as finding fulfillment in the pleasures of life. The Greek Epicureans were of the opinion that avoiding pain and suffering was the object of ethical philosophy, which is not the same thing, at all.

baruzon The Siren Song of Little Languages

It’s an issue with all metaphorical language. You want to compare it with one thing (irresistibility of the call, as TFA) and some non-zero percentage of your audience makes a different association (lured to their doom, as your interpretation).

baruzon Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going

Does this not imply that /u/bell-cot had been a graduate student in mathematics?

> If I could give my many-decades-ago younger self some advice for math grad school

baruzon Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going

> no house of cards

As I understand TFA, from a formalist’s perspective, this is not necessarily the case. People were building on swathes of mathematics that seem proven and make intuitive sense, but needed formal buttressing.

> _actually experts_ at a deep and rigorous technical field

Seeing as the person you’re addressing was a mathematics graduate student, I’m sure they know this.

baruzon Fermat's Last Theorem – how it’s going

This is the the talk by Dr de Frutos—Fernandez that Dr Buzzard mentions at the end: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QCRLwC5JQw0

baruzon C64 Basic Tutorial: Using String Manipulation to Write a Text Adventure

Your link to the Usborne books is dead—this works:

https://usborne.com/us/books/computer-and-coding-books