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jl6on Holes (1996-2025)

I see this as a broadening of the problem of how we assign identities and names to things. Clearly we can name the absence of things too, and in doing so perhaps eliminate their absence…

jl6on Burning Man death rates – A short lesson in statistics

Hey, we're just tryin' to have a good time, narc. Why do you want to destroy us? Don't commit your hate crimes here! Hate crime!

Simpsons called it 30 years ago.

jl6on PostmarketOS is rebranding as Nura

Was the original name some kind of nod to PostgreSQL?

jl6on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

And as a result it's very well emulated, making it very likely that Amiga code can still be run in 50 years' time.

jl6on Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it?

> How does someone write software that needs to run for ~50 years where the hardware will need to be replaced with non-equivalent, newer hardware?

Some ideas:

Write it in a popular language/ecosystem, stick rigidly to well-defined APIs, use commodity hardware, flatten out any malignant cleverness, maintain documentation on why every part does the thing it does, and make the source code readily available.

This is based on working with some very old systems, and each point above is the opposite of something that made life harder.

jl6on Factorio that you can touch

Which Monday?

jl6on Italian parliament votes for return to nuclear energy

I don’t know why commenters here are treating energy technologies as winner-takes-all. Solar is cheap and getting cheaper, and that’s fantastic news for everyone, but that doesn’t mean it suits every country, every niche, and every application. There are plenty of places that don’t have massive tracts of spare flat land, or the right latitude, or favorable weather. Even if nuclear isn’t ever the cheapest option, the world energy market is so huge and diverse that it still makes sense to have nuclear as an option.

jl6on Disney+: New user agreement allows ads before movies in all subscriptions

Kinda, but the back catalog has never been bigger or more valuable. There is good stuff from every era, and it only accumulates. What happens when the viewing mix is 10% new stuff, 90% classics?

jl6on Teen Social Media Bans Miss the Point

Maybe it’s because tech people are prone to binary thinking, but there seems to be the idea that if you can’t prevent a bad thing entirely, then you shouldn’t try to prevent it at all. Or maybe the other way around: if you can’t achieve a good thing completely, then why even bother trying?

jl6on If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious

> We call the iPhone a phone, but is it? I can call people from my laptop, my tablet, etc. I can watch videos and play music and write notes on my phone. Everything is everything, and nothing is what it is.

Fuzzy edges don't render the centers un-useful. Philosophical debates about the edges consume all the oxygen, but regardless of whether you think an iPhone is a phone or a computer or a television, it is definitely not a cricket bat. An inability to draw a sharp boundary doesn't mean classification has broken down, and it's nihilistic to conclude that real, meaningful distinctions cannot be drawn.

jl6on WangNet – 1.8 MB, zero-dependency Numberwang adjudication in 11 languages

Amazing, I passed by Mornington Crescent only yesterday!

jl6on The case against JPEG XL

The chart showing jxl-rs taking 1209ms to decode a 5456x3632 image in a single thread is a little damning, but is there an equivalent benchmark showing multithreaded decode performance? Clients tend to have an abundance of threads these days.

jl6on Show HN: Bodily Oddities

I used to feel mildly synaesthetic about day colours.

Saturday red, Sunday blue, Monday orange, Tuesday purple, Wednesday green, Thursday pink, Friday cyan.

Then I realised that was just the colour scheme used by the Radio Times.

jl6on Mind-altering drugs played key role in rise of Andean civilization

Context does matter though? There are plenty of substances which are legal for certified professionals to use in controlled settings that would be illegal for untrained amateurs to use for recreational purposes. Plutonium, for example.

jl6on Google will buy half the electricity from one of Finland's nuclear power plants

Guess it’s a good time to be in the power plant business.

jl6on On Really Trying (2009)

So where did it all go wrong, to end up with you posting comments like this?

jl6on My Feed, My Way

I don't think it's at all obvious that a regulation-based approach could produce better outcomes than a prohibition-based approach. No doubt prohibition causes much violence and misery, but prohibition was a response to other great harms, most famously the condition of opium addicts.

Rather than rehash the arguments for and against, I would ask a meta-question: if the matter really were so clear, then why, over the last ~200 years, did every country introduce a prohibition-based stance, and why has no country switched to tax-and-regulate?

jl6on My Feed, My Way

"tax and regulate" isn't immune from second-order effects either. Set the tax high enough and you'll get smuggling gangs with all the same tendencies.

jl6on No constitutional right to clean water, federal court finds

At the risk of an analogy, this is like finding that the Linux kernel provides no guarantee that a process won’t contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities. While buffer overflows are bad, and it would be a good idea to try to prevent them, enforcing against them at the kernel level would be a far-reaching prospect with many consequences, intended and unintended.

The judge is opining that other layers of protection are available.

jl6on The many mysteries and lessons of the Bayeux tapestry

Low stakes conspiracy: the high-security operation to move the tapestry to London was actually cover for the simultaneous movement of gold from European nations as part of their recent hedge against US counterparty risk.

jl6on Welcome to the Porcelain Insulator Collector's World of Mud

No disrespect to Arnold Rimmer, but that telegraph pole society has got nothing on the insulator folk.

jl6on Welcome to the Porcelain Insulator Collector's World of Mud

Well I can’t say I understand the appeal of collecting insulators, but I’m completely in love with the idea that there are people who enjoy such a niche hobby with such intensity, and apparently have been enjoying it for decades, and have societies and conventions and everything. Unbelievable. This is what the internet is for.

jl6on .name Termination

I can only assume somebody was asleep on the job when this scheme was approved, because the outcome is in direct contradiction to ICANN’s mission statement:

> Its enduring mission is to ensure the stable, secure operation of the Internet's unique identifier systems.

https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/about-icann

Arbitrary termination of service is not stability.

Enabling name hijacking is not security.

The answer cannot be a rival name scheme based on decentralization or crypto or whatever. Those are never going to help normal non-wizard users. The answer has to be to make the regulators do their job.

jl6on Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)

I think “medium” is a key enabler for being able to sustain a regular schedule of reactor building. It’s way easier to raise $3bn every 3 years than $30bn every 30 years.

jl6on Forgotten History of Small Nuclear Reactors (2015)

Feels like there is a "too small" range where fixed costs make a reactor design uneconomic, and perhaps a "too big" range where they cost so much that they are rare strategic investments without the benefit of a production line.

Is there a happy medium? Some of the modern SMR proposals aren't all that small. There's a 470MW Rolls Royce unit, for example.

jl6on Firefox intent to ship: JPEG XL

Great outcome, and I hope the weight of mainstream browser support will spur camera and phone manufacturers to emit native JXLs from their devices.

jl6on Beware Management Consultants

Not sure about high espionage, but information laundering is the right phrase for how it usually works: consultants cut across organizational boundaries, gathering useful information from the people who know what's actually going on (the rank-and-file employees) and packaging it for CxOs in a way that allows them to present an opportunity as their own idea, or a risk as not their fault. Nice, safe, clean information.

jl6on Deus Ex creator Warren Spector is retiring from game development

It’s just gone past the halfway point between the date Deus Ex was released, and the date it was set. That puts it on target, because it feels like about half the plot has come true. It was a prototype for a much larger system.

jl6on Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't

Can I get this, but for geology?

jl6on IMAX vs. IMAX 70mm: The difference between these two cinema formats

Passionate hobbyists are often a great source of technical information, and usually more objective than industry sources. The thing to watch out for is people who have become so absorbed by their hobby, they start to put great subjective weight on distinctions that would be without difference to a "normal" person. Audio gear, gourmet food, fine wine, running shoes... It's XKCD 915 all the way down. I also recommend Penn & Teller: Bullshit! S03E12 ("The Best") on this subject.

Good for the hobbyists, if it enhances their enjoyment, but if you're a casual, microscopic variations are going to be dwarfed by other factors.