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farnerup

42 karma · joined November 16, 2018

https://satsumasbloggen.com/farnerup/
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farnerup··on The Elusive Byzantine Empire (2019)
From reading Alf Henriksson's "Byzantinsk Historia", I gather that one problem with writing a history of Eastern Rome is that they wrote about war and politics and lots and lots about christian doctrine but precious little on other subjects, so we know all we care to know about various christian sects and which emperor assassinated which, but not much about art, science or daily life.

Being emperor wasn't something you did for your health, by the way. The book ends by saying that only 34 out of 107 emperors died of natural causes.

farnerup··on Blade Runner
One thing I really miss in 2049 is the soundtrack by Vangelis. The one in 2049 sounds like a primitive AI trying to sound like him, sometimes just alternating between two chords for what feels like forever.
farnerup··on The pneumatic tube mail system in New York City
Bank offices and cash is something I only see in old movies nowadays.
farnerup··on Choosing a Name for Your Computer (1990)
The best theme is to use brands of scotch.
farnerup··on “A Great Ox Stands on My Tongue”: The Pitfalls of Latin Translation
She wrote in Swedish though, not Finnish.
farnerup··on Show HN: Random Aerial Airport Views
This one is interesting: https://cdn.jetphotos.com/full/5/76042_1547934155.jpg Loudenvielle, French Pyrenees
farnerup··on So you've installed `fzf` – now what?
In debian:

  source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/completion.bash
  source /usr/share/doc/fzf/examples/key-bindings.bash
farnerup··on BASF to cut 2,600 jobs as energy crisis hits German industry
Yes, I too though BASF was synonymous with VHS and cassette tapes.
farnerup··on Maigret’s Jurisdiction
I read the first few novels. They are told in a matter-of-fact style, nothing very spectacular happens and Maigret is anything but charismatic. It sounds dry but the realism is very refreshing and must have been even more so at the time.
farnerup··on Show HN: Ractor – a Rust-based actor framework with clusters and supervisors
Is the "let it crash" philosophy a part of this or will a panic bring down the whole process?
farnerup··on SpaceX said to fire employees involved in letter rebuking Elon Musk
Do you have the right to kill your child? You have a moral resposibility as soon as you get other people involved.
farnerup··on Jinx: Embeddable scripting language for real-time applications
This is interesting. While languages like Python, Lisp and probably Lua can run on a microcontroller, they are never going to be completely trusted unless you have control over memory use. In Jinx it seems like you can/must define your own memory allocation function.
farnerup··on “I think the vast majority of developers still debug using print() statements”
This is also possible in common lisp.
farnerup··on Plain Text Calendar
Why not carry a tiny paper calendar in your back pocket? I do. It's great! Quick and always avaiable.

I used to use remind, but now it's mostly for birthday reminders. And work appointments require logging in to Outlook anyway.

farnerup··on Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
Years ago I wrote a PDF generator for Passepartout (http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout/) from reading the PDF book. I though it was a well designed format. It is a binary format though, for the sake of efficiency.
farnerup··on IKEA's restaurants were failing, then it turned to Swedish meatballs
In Sweden, my grandparents' generation didn't even consider garlic food. It was something you had to buy at the pharmacy.

The original Swedish meatballs were flavoured with allspice, but I think most people today think allspice has an old-fashioned taste.

farnerup··on Show HN: Fri – distraction-free writing in the terminal
I have released v1.1.0 with Hemingway mode now.
farnerup··on Show HN: Fri – distraction-free writing in the terminal
Hemingway mode is a good idea!

As for the man page, I don't want to recommend anyone to install files manually in /usr. The man page is there mostly in case anybody would want to package fri for a distribution.

farnerup··on Do I need to go to university?
From reading the title, I though this had something to do with golang being used in university classes. Is there a point to the custom of capitalizing most words in headings in English? It doesn't seem to improve legibility and you can normally tell it is a heading from the size and weight of the font.
farnerup··on B-Sides: Graham Greene’s “Stamboul Train”
Greene is brilliant as always, but I found it to be a very bleak novel. You feel sorry for all the characters, because they have low self-esteem and are powerless to control their own destinies.
farnerup··on Sputnik virophage
Oh no, a satellite virus! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Andromeda_Strain
farnerup··on The word “lox” hasn't changed in sound or meaning in 8k years
I think the joke was that Bond is such a gourmet that he is the only one in the room who knows that "LOX" means smoked salmon.
farnerup··on Number of babies born in Japan is the lowest since records began
Perhaps women choose not to start a family at all if it means the end of their careers?
farnerup··on Sweden’s Decades-Long Failure to Integrate
Well, interest rates have been very low for a long time, so renting money to buy an apartment was basically free. The politicians couldn't do much about that, but recently they introduced mandatory mortgage repayments. Not sure if it has had much of an impact though.

There are far too few rental apartments available, I guess because economic liberalism has dominated in Sweden in recent decades. Buying an apartment made far more economic sense anyway, If you had the means.