henriquemaia

I've been training to naturally ignore AI mentions that I thought this entry was about some HN ui font change (Sans).

What a great thread!

Thank you and previous poster for sharing how to get that working.

What a great suggestion. I've followed your advice and it works. What a treat!

Thanks for sharing.

DK eats its own tail.

Stating it makes it so, as the one mentioning it self-DKs themselves. Doing so, DK has been proved.

The video in question does present a risk of death... to Windows.

(Nah, that wording is but a generic legalese sounding way of casting a huge net to get all sorts of fish.)

I'm like you and with you.

I've lived in several countries in 3 continents now, and the more I get to know different peoples, the more I feel we're all the same—albeit stuck in these almost kaleidoscopic ways of outwardly displaying the very same humanity.

Perhaps OP got fixated on the collective differences instead of seeing through them. Perhaps.

In a kind of personal plot twist way I'm happy with the outcome. I've now spent way less time here.

If before there was a bit of an attachment to checking what was going on on HN, now there's an overall meh. I still do visit out of habit, but when I do, I have this blasé attitude that quickly takes me away. Too much LLM this or that, AI everywhere.

HN being one of the last Social Media sites I've engaged with, it's good to finally let it go. Yay?

Have been using it for some years now. On Linux at least, it's easy to install and maintain.

The size of my snippets list is now a testament of its usefulness. On the appropriate context (an online meeting, for instance), it feels like a superpower.

Probably they misread you while arguing with their own ghosts. Your idea is perfectly reasonable and sound. It allows the lived experience to shape youngsters minds.

I use shopee and find the reviews fair. Like everything else, you have to learn how to take the most out of a limited system.

My experience so far has been good. Negative reviews seem fair, and give a good indication of what to expect (maybe I've lowered my expectations from the start).

Ladybird browser: https://ladybird.org/

I have the same relation with Kanata. I've grown so dependent on it that it's the first thing I have to set up on a new install.

Thanks to it, I'm using a Miryoku with Colemak-dh layout over a Razer Mechanical keyboard. I even removed the extra keys from it, which makes the keyboard a sight to see.¹

But Kanata is the real star in this show, making all the magic happen.

It's so flexible and configurable that through its blessings I've finally gone completely mouseless. I just keep my hands steady on the keyboard and my thoughts get converted to whatever action I need on screen. The humanities writer dream!

I have great respect for jtroo for creating this software. It's a perfect example of how well designed software allows to go beyond the seeming physical constraints imposed by hardware.

1. That's also why I need it so badly on a new install...

Thanks for the link. I wondered what that word meant.

From the article: Kopimashin, as in Copy Machine.

You might be right. From my experience, it depends. The edgier your exploration, the more that can happen.

It's important to note that not everyone abide by the same morals. And a narrowly constrained model may end up refusing genuine inquiries just because.

In any case, if anything, this is a small 'but'. OP's point is the gold nugget here. That is, LLMs allowing exploring subjects without the fear of being judged for one's natural curiosity.

That's a subtle, yet important point. Putting themselves out there is not easy for some. LLMs can take that pressure away.

The 'but' in that lies with how much freedom is given to the LLM. If constrained, its refusal to answer may become a somewhat triggering possibility.

Thanks. Good to know. I've been learning quarto for the past 3 weeks and I'm amazed how flexible it is. Knowing it'll support typst makes it even flexibler.

Thanks for the recommendation. I can read French, and that seems an interesting read.

However, there's already an English translation of that book. It's published under the ttitle _Civilization: How we All Became American_, and was translated by David Fernbach.

Anyway, thanks again for pointing out this book. I'll be looking into it thanks to your suggestion.

Such a big statement about someone who we know so little about.

But regardless of that, judging from the available works alone that is simply not true. Cases in point: Meno, the slave boy moment; the whole education project from the Republic.

Roland Barthes agrees. Check this essay he wrote in the 60s about wrestling.

https://archive.org/details/barthes-world-of-wrestling/mode/...

Once again, thanks for engaging.

I feel I'm getting entangled in a discussion I'm not really a part of. I'm not a prescriptivist, I don't really care that much about the direction most of the language takes. I know it's alive; it has its own ways; it will change continuously despite all the efforts some may put behind keeping it in this or that way.

My point was just that it's a bit sad how what was nothing more than a prejudice, and an very biased one, got 'normalized' without us even being aware of it now.

And yes, your point is pretty valid.

> But you can take comfort in the fact that nobody who uses that word in its current meaning is speaking ill of the Vandals as a people.

That being quite true, that also shows how we are not really paying attention how language has been shaped by ideologies/prejudices/biases. In a way, it's also comforting to know that despite the way ideologues/those with prejudice try to shape our minds, all that gets silenced in the long run. Language has a life of its own.

> Because despite the negative connentation the word now has, wouldn't erasing the word from our language be another step towards forgetting about the Vandals and their history?

Well, one thing's for sure: no Vandal will feel vandalized by the historical vandalism of calling someone a vandal. May they all rest in peace.

Once again, thanks a lot for engaging. Your comments have been insightful. I really appreciate that.

Thanks for your reply, really. Please check my reply here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34174433

That is, if you so wish. I replied only today because only today I had it more clear what I wanted to say. Thanks anyway!

I really want to thank you for your reply. You took the time to point me to what you think is the right direction, i.e., the current meaning of the word.

However, I know I didn't mention this before, but my point was more subtle, even to me at the time as I was not totally aware on why I even bothered to point out the origin of the word.

Today, looking at your reply, I had it more clear. Here we have an article telling us about a terrible thing, that is, the destruction of an unrecoverable piece of history. And in that same article, the writer engages in a language that is just the result of a prejudice against an old group of people, namely the Vandals.

Why are the Vandals vandals? Because they destroyed parts of the Roman empire. So the Romans and their ways stand for what is considered correct, civilized, the apex of civilization, while all other peoples including the Vandals are not. The Vandals vandalize in the sense that they go against the established order.

But hidden in this assumption is the very idea that Romans acted differently from the Vandals. That they, when they imposed themselves on others, were somewhat more polished, more sophisticated. They were not. They vandalized, or should I say _romanized_, the Vandals and all other peoples around them.

So by using this language, even when we are not thinking about it, we end up perpetuating these hidden assumptions. The same could be said about using other words, but this word in particular made me feel this way when I read the article.

Anyway, thanks again for your comment. If I wasn't aware of the new meaning of the word, your comment would definitely improve my understanding. Unfortunately, I was just too obscure to really get my point across at the time.

. Growing up in Portugal, and learning about the Vandals in school, gave me a kind of feeling of relating more closely to that group. Partly because of this, they are not just historic trivia. I feel somewhat connected to them, though this may not be a real biological connection. I hope you get the gist of it.

I know this is the article's title, and that this may sound as a tangent, but whoever destroyed the cave drawings were definitely not Vandals:

> The Vandals were a Germanic people who first inhabited what is now southern Poland. They established Vandal kingdoms on the Iberian Peninsula, Mediterranean islands, and North Africa in the fifth century.

Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vandals

Thank you for sharing such a beautiful strategy to make what is now a common occurrence into something so meaningful.

It's like opening up to so many possibilities, even to creativity, as you can start imagining the all possible threads that create those amazing stop-inducing plots. Thank you!

It's a free video conference service.

https://meet.jit.si/

I read your comment and, though I understand the sentiment, sometimes even feeling the same myself, I don't quite agree with it.

Just think: who would be interviewed in the 40s from the previous century? Just a few, highly selected individuals. So what you have is a very biased sample.

Compare that to what we have today, and the noise is obviously much, much stronger. We are almost drowning in information, everyone can virtually host their own show, and so on and so forth.

But once you weed out the noise, and select the gems, they're still there, still shining. Our time is just that, our time. We are different, for sure, but not less qualified language wise.

Probably because it sounds different, even foreign. If that was their language reality, they'd be out praising other way of speaking -- perhaps contemporary simplicity. You know, the greener grass is always where you're not.

To everyone who feels sad by these news, my condolences. I respect your pain.

However, I have to confess that to whenever I hear that someone aged 90+ (80+, even) died, I don't really feel sad. Actually, I feel an urge to praise this person's achievements, as I'm aware we are all mortals, and death is unavoidable.

I prefer to rejoice in how much this person has witnessed throughout her life, how she had enough health to keep her wits until the end, how she could raise children, grandchildren, and even know her great-grandchildren.

What else can we humans aspire? Living forever is out of question. As soon as we are born, we are bound to die. So it's a pretty good life to be able to reach a good age, knowing that all our dear ones are set for life, raising families of their own, and living their lives the way that is best suited for them.

This is not just theory. I felt this when my grandfather died, aged 95, when my grandmother died aged 96, and when other people I knew died old enough for their deaths not really come as a surprise.

Many times I've found myself in situations like 'yak shaving'. To do this I first have to do that, and to do that I have to do some other thing, thus falling into a never ending stream of tasks that make me lose focus of my original goal. It seems to me something very common while performing unexpectedly complex jobs.

My point however is not to discuss this. What bothers me, and only a little, is the label chosen to describe situations such as these. Why 'yak shaving' and not something else?

I mean, the Ren & Stimpy connection is meaningful for the author, and that's ok. But if every time I want to refer to it I have to explain why it's named as such, or even explain who Ren & Stimpy are, maybe I'll be better served by some other, perhaps more appropriate label.

Calling it 'Going down the rabbit hole' is no doubt better, at least to me, but not completely. This expression captures a different mood, namely that of finding ever more connections in an endless stream that does not necessarily make me forget my original goal. For instance, while writing a paper, many times I find myself going down the rabbit hole, ending up with these monstrous footnotes that try to record how deep that rabbit hole goes. But when that is done, I go back to the main topic and move on.

So what could I call it other than 'yak shaving' or 'going down the rabbit hole'? I'm open to suggestions.

Though I understand, and in a way agree with your point—that human changes to the environment are as natural as that of beavers—, I think one important difference is the scale of those changes.

Ours are not as natural in the sense that we no longer rely on our inborn capacities to produce those changes.

Yes, in a way we are like beavers in our engineering. But we are insanely overpowered beavers. The scope of our changes puts us in a class of our own.

So if we call changing the environment by one's own means only 'natural', and massively changing it by compounded means 'artificial', we are not natural, not as beavers. Ours is artificial.

So contrary to what you said, that distinction makes at least some sense.