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fifticon··on Ask HN: What are you reading?
I too am on DCC; I wonder why I like it, but I do. Strangely, one of the things it reminds me of, is the Malazan-Book-of-the-fallen series, in spite of how different they are. I was/have been on the 'book that wouldnt burn' series; I still have to read the final third book. Ironically, I have not yet finished that series because I dread it; the author is a little too good at writing truly loathable antagonists, and at the same time reading him, you have learned he cares little for plot armor ('if he dies, he dies', sigh.) Other than that, Piranesi by Susanne Clarke; I have also gotten her earlier book, but not gotten far into it yet.

DCC is strangely hypocritical - a massive commercial success where we the readers revel-wallow in the graphic suffering of the fictive protagonists/victims, and author & co are making truckloads of profits, precisely on the kinds of sheenanigans the books on the surface critisize :-). It is also a bit ironic, that the books/Carl critisize fascism, while at the same time, Carl is on a kind of one-man fascist/tyrant purging the existing elite, with summary and graphic executions. Sigh :-)

fifticon··on What I did at Recurse Center
It is even worse, we had decent answers for some of the stuff back in the 40s, 50s and 60s (e.g. Dijkstra's work on concurrency, before there even were computers to run them on.) Someone will reply to my comment with Lovelace or Babbage or Pascal :-/
fifticon··on Record-High 89% in U.S. Say Government Corruption Widespread
The worse part is whatever competent hoodlums will arrive after him, to enjoy the gates he has crashed
fifticon··on What 2000 Buried Underpants Revealed About Where Soil Is Most Alive
I know HN is not that kind of site, but I have a hard time suppressing the knowledge that "step 3 is profit", and now we arguably know what step 2 is.
fifticon··on Iceland votes on whether to restart talks on joining EU
switzerland is not currently at risk of a US invasion
fifticon··on Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo
this is another data point in my "year of the linux desktop"; linux is slowly becoming a decent option, not so much because of linux improving leaps and bounds, so much as what happens on the windows side collapsing on its own. 10 years ago, I was used to that windows "of course" would have drivers available for stuff.
fifticon··on Worse on Purpose – How Corporate Greed Killed Product Quality – Worse on Purpose
It makes sense to ask WHY this is hard. People can disagree endlessly on why. But a big part is, that antitrust/monopoly legislation has been almost completely dismantled and detoothed within the last 35 years, starting back with Reagan, and accelerating through the 90's when Clinton was at the wheel. The tiny bit that is still left, is only enforced either when parties fail to pay the bribe, or are bribed to enforce it, by other actors. Once you allow markets to consolidate into a single monolith, any new competitors will only be allowed to live, until they become big enough for the established incumbent to notice and then squish, with their unlimited access to resources. There is little incentive to start a competing business, if you know the trajectory is "IF SUCCESS THEN SQUISH".
fifticon··on Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file
I'm not sure you can blame the GNOME people for not trying. Personally, I feel like they are actively trying to make it worse, ie they are not passive. Their approach to file system dialogs (open file/folder, save file), was what got me to finally realize, that I must necessarily prefer KDE, because I must necessarily prefer anything that is not GNOME. Now if I could only figure out how to stop KDE from opening file dialogs ALWAYS BEHIND ALL OTHER WINDOWS, that would be even better, but you can't have it all..

One day, when I die, and go to heaven or hell, when I arrive, my first question to the ones receiving me, will be "Finally, tell me - is there ANY possible way to navigate upwards to the parent folder, in GNOME?"

fifticon··on Windows UI evolution: Clicking an unassociated file
I concur, I would say evolution is more like "adaption" than improvement.
fifticon··on Stop Ruining It
This reminds me of trying to use File Explorer in Windows 11. I wish I could turn all their electron-app "improvements" off, to make it useful again, like it once was.. Case in point: Explorer now has tabs. I don't need tabs, I need a single tab, and a window title bar so I can drag the damn thing around. And.. my single tab, now tries to show the folder name, truncated to a few useless characters, so I now have tabs called "C:\folder\sub1\...", while the rest of the row is EMPTY SPACE (which I, admittedly can still use to drag the window around; thank you for that, but it will probably be filled with ADS come next month.)

"Oh, but you can just see the folder name in the address bar in the next row instead then!"

NO I CAN'T. Because they electron-css-screwed that up too.. It now shows a bunch of toolbar buttons <- -> ^ , then a computer screen??, then >, then [...] Then they truncate the file path to only show parts of it, starting the rest with ... Is it because we are out of space? I don't know, every part of the folder path has been separated with [ > ] (because / or \ was obviously the worst idea ever.) Then, to the right of it all, we get a big [Search log ] edit field, followed by a spyglass. So, I get two broken displays of the actual folder path, and a lot of 'candy' I did not ask for. Why does the search tool need so much space, before I am using it at all? What does it need, apart from maybe the single spyglass icon? Instead, the actual path that my object by necessity ALWAYS will have, has been chopped up to unrecognisability.

It reeks of KPI and bonus performance reviews, "we must improve the round shape of the wheel, to get our bonus and not be downsized".

fifticon··on Debunking the CIA's “magic” heartbeat sensor [video]
or bombings
fifticon··on I bought Friendster for $30k – Here's what I'm doing with it
hmm, I have no iphone.
fifticon··on US special forces soldier arrested after allegedly winning $400k on Maduro raid
Apparently he did not belong to the social class who are allowed to do this.
fifticon··on How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
I don't really think you like it, but maybe you will like this.
fifticon··on How to be anti-social – a guide to incoherent and isolating social experiences
May the bridges I burn light the hills I die on.
fifticon··on Denmark was reportedly preparing for full-scale war with the US over Greenland
They will not go back to anything resembling the old normal :-/. Trump & his cronies have obliterated the Overton Window so hard you cannot even tell which side of the house the window used to be in. The successors for Trump will be worse, because they will not be senile old men who sabotage themselves, and the checks-and-balances against this millenia-old crap have now been pretty well dismantled :-/. We are entering an age where US will behave like a weird sort of Russia#2, run by oligarchs. In a way it was of course always run (or influenced) by oligarchs, but nothing like the scale we are going to see from now on. But.. look at the history of US, the last hundred or so years, and how they behaved south of Mexico (I am not particularly calling out US here, of course Europe has also been bad).
fifticon··on What happens when US economic data becomes unreliable
the comment section for this post is a shit show, most of the main comments have been downvoted to gray-land.
fifticon··on Why can't you tune your guitar? (2019)
did they mention that you can cheat this when e.g. singing, by changing pitch dynamically to fit the chords you are working with? In theory, a synthesizer or sound card could do the same. Of course, this could have other undesirable side effects.

Maybe this was implied by the "just tuning"?

fifticon··on My spicy take on vibe coding for PMs
I am glad this essay was on the right side of the fence, otherwise I would have written it myself in response.. Our company is currently one of countless, where we just had a "get with the program" meeting with our PMs, where they showcased stuff they had added to our enterprise system in hours and days, and told us that they expected us to start delivering with the same tools techniques and speed.. Meanwhile, my team had spent that same working day before that meeting, trying to figure out why our production databases were suddenly getting hammered; it turned out some system was suddenly calling an expensive query endpoint 10k (10.000) times each hour, during business hours. Guess 3 times whose vibe-coding adventures were responsible for those 10k calls :-/.

Other than that, I noticed during the meeting, that their vibe-coded demo added module to our enterprise system only dealt with happy-path of the data updates, but would leave debris in our database for all the edge cases. Happy times. But heck yeah, let's just ram it straight into production. I wonder who will take care of adding support/clean up for the edge cases.

fifticon··on The beauty and terror of modding Windows
file sizes in explorer is my pet peeve, it should be a builtin. When I am coding and making small projects, I want to see the bytes. I hate that everything is shown as "1 or 2 k". and it is a hazzle to get access to and install of the mods that show bytes column. It should just be an extra column available by default 'Byte Size'.
fifticon··on FreeCAD
fusion 360 is exactly "free" for that reason, to make people reason like you do. They do not want a blender moment.
fifticon··on Thinking hard burns almost no calories but destroys your next workout
Usually, I can easily tell bad AI slop, because it is just that - sloppy - the bullet points, the 'delving' and all that. But how can you tell this article was also AI-tainted? On a second skim, I can sort of sense some of it - the bulletpoint-enthusiasm, the idiosyncratic segues (?) that link sections/paragraphs of the text. But it didn't trigger for me immediately, or cause me concern..?

I'm worrying that soon, I will have to hunt for non-AI essays by them just being worse written/more 'crude' and not as eloquently written as an AI would do :-/ Basically, seeking out "authentic human slop".

fifticon··on Arm wants a bigger slice of the chip business
traditionally, the chip goes on the shoulder, not the arm.
fifticon··on Text classification with Python 3.14's ZSTD module
It really should have been called Pi-thon, though.
fifticon··on Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)
Though I did not follow the idea of chunkier fruit in those travel milkshakes, isn't that what clogs the straw, which is not ideal for a 1-hand treat.
fifticon··on Clay Christensen's Milkshake Marketing (2011)
It is a bit sad that people have to be taught this; I am presuming the product people are a kind of humans too. But when I see their outputs, maybe this Christensen guy is right.

I tried to adjust the background image on microsoft Teams video calls this morning; the UI I had to use or rather figure out, to achieve that, was a major depression. (1) the settings menus in teams are well hidden, for reasons unclear to me(). (2) but the _actual_ settings you need are hidden unless you START a meeting call. (3) but, the _actual_ settings are a long chain of ".. but are you sure you REALLY want to see the ACTUAL settings?", where you must continue to click 'more settings', 'advanced settings', 'full actual settings' (I am paraphrasing.)

() I suspect what they are though.. Something about dumbing the UI down to the level where the people in charge of teams can understand them, plus some kind of fear of UI designs where any given screen or view contains more than 1 or 2 elements (the second element being "show further settings").

We are dumbing down UI to the level of people with no hands, no eyes, no brains, which I presume is the target audience. I must have mah minimalism.

fifticon··on Porsche sold more electrified cars in Europe in 2025 than pure gas-powered cars
Well, currently US _are_ ICE enthusiasts, lamentable as that may be.
fifticon··on Ask HN: What did you find out or explore today?
currently learning 3d "solid" design with blender for 3dprinter. I am aware blender is not the fit a cad app would be (), but it 'works' if you are careful what you do (I am not). This morning I had to clean the poor 3dprinter of a spaghetti-gone-wrong accident, because my hubris-3d-design submitted last night was not as clever as I naively thought. () the advantage of using blender is that, as a byproduct I will eventually have learned blender..
fifticon··on Why have death rates from accidental falls tripled?
It is weird that the graphed increase grows steadily at presumably the same rate - there is no spike or bump or curve. I wonder if that indicates anything. Disregarding the shape of the graph, I would have guessed at a change in reporting instead. The steadily rising curve almost looks like something being gradually employed. At some point, the curve ought to change direction, if not before, then after the last person has fallen over.
fifticon··on JRR Tolkien reads from The Hobbit for 30 Minutes (1952)
same, I do it whenever I oil the trebuchets.
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