jimjimjim

This is going to burn through karma faster than a blowtorch but it seems to me that just because something is a tradition doesn't mean it should be respected. The world changes, traditions should change to. And before anybody says "what right do I have to tell other people how to live", why not? why shouldn't I tell other people how to live? I'm sure those people would tell me how to live so I feel totally ok with thinking some people's traditions are reprehensible and I feel like those traditions should change.

I think I made a HN comment a few months/years ago about driverless cars having problems with floods across roads after watching a downpour in Kuala Lumpur flood half a street in minutes. The road was down to one lane and drivers in both directions took it in turns to use that one lane. That would be a difficult situation for a driverless car to handle.

Painful. A lot of the Microsoft interfaces these days are asynchronous and are built around the dev experience of c#/c++ with libraries/runtimes that do a lot of the heavy lifting. So you end up calling functions with ridiculously long names and they aren't like good old win32 calls where you pass in some parameters and you get a result back. Instead you create objects to pass function pointers and data around and who knows when you'll get your result values back.

Yep, it's 2026 and I'm still 8 hours a day in win32.

Yes! Thank you. That’s a blast from the past

With a TV there was no easy way to block ads. Sure you could change the channel or get up and do something else but people didn't bother.

Now with news websites most people are running ad blockers. What are the news sites meant to do? Their employees are working, and they expect to be paid for that work. just like I expect to be paid for my job. Where is the money going to come from?

People still have to be paid. or they won't be paid and you just get different flavors of slop.

Every newspaper had a price. People were happy with this.

The world has been given hay making machines. Now people of all walks of life can make their own hay at a greater rate and with much less effort. They can also proudly display them along with other examples in centralized locations that conceptually take the form of haystacks. Also, I should add, the machines tend to make the hay with the color of a needle and with a needle shape.

I choose option 3, in favor of downvoting and at the same time not advocating for the old way.

But sir, how do we stop an old guy on the bow of a rusty fishing boat firing a $50 rpg at the oil tanker?

It is not by design! PDFs that are made from scanned documents or collections of images would require OCRing but that is true of any format that the scans/images are put into. These days the vast majority of PDFs do not need to be OCRed as the pages are just made up of text, line drawings and images. And although it can get tricky you can edit those text, line and image commands as much as you want.

For example: add this is in the contents stream for a pdf page and it'll put hello world on the page

  BT
    /myfont 50 Tf
    100 200 Td
    (Hello World) Tj
  ET

(Note: a bit more is required to select the font etc)

That's not really what I would call reverse engineering. If you read a pdf, and type it into word is that reverse engineering? Either way whatever you get is in no way going to convince anybody that it is the original.

The New Zealand Chief Digital Officer allowed Australian cloud providers to be used as there weren't suitable NZ data centers and this was many years ago.

"higher quality than the greatest engineers". right...

and why do so many articles or comments have a general approach of 'It's great and if you don't think it is it's because you don't understand it.'

It feels like during the previous hype cycle of bitcoins, blockchains and NFTs. People are trying to find uses for new technologies but it seems like a lot of the conversations come from people (at this point I guess it's still people?) trying to increase the hype. Maybe they are trying to be thought leaders or maybe they are trying to boost some stock valuations.

Thank you! I was wondering why bookmarks are treated so poorly by browser, as if they are forced to include them but hate them with a passion. That explains it. I'm a bit of a bookmark hoarder to the point where I have a local html file that holds and displays all my bookmarks and I've got that page set as my default.

I feel your pain. PDF applications have the same problem. The thousand page PDF spec isn't actually the spec, Acrobat is the spec.

Great series of videos. They seem to be an intersection of quite a few of my interests.

This might sound crazy, but what if everyone in the country gave extra and as a result everyone in the country was covered?

Wow, that is a depressing point of view. Advancements in "not paying for things" accelerates while advancements in "preventing things" just inches forward.

From a technical point of view this doesn't make any sense.

From a finance and accounting point of view this makes everything more cloudy. Which certain types of people really like.

Since there is a market for 5staring or 1staring reviews on review websites, there is probably a market to not-quite-human staring of github projects.

Thank you. I've used mc since my slackware days and still use it. I never new Miguel wrote it

It was unstable but it was nice to use. It introduced a lot of UI elements that are now taken for granted. I remember starting to build a window manager that replicated the win95 look.

Eternal September just kept happening day after day for 25 years.

why not both?

Once they have paved the way and built the infrastructure, most fridges will come with some sort of display. Probably just a small status display. But these fridges will be much cheaper, subsidized by the Ad opportunities. It happened with most mainstream TVs making people expect cheap TVs to the point where they will dismiss a TV with "normal" price.

Writing a good pdf writer is easy. Writing a good pdf reader is extremely difficult.

accuracy: 60%

This should have been a python script.

How much of the current peak of the Gartner Hype Cycle should just be python scripts?