kstrauser

Well, sure! But most westerns don’t give you that much insight into each person’s motivations and inner lives. And others tend to be more optimistic, with a common theme that truth and justice are destined to win out. Lonesome Dove’s freaking grim. The world seems out to get them, but it’s worse: the world just doesn’t care.

People who haven’t read it: Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer for a reason. It’s very good.

How come? I don't have enough experience with either to have a preference, but I'd love to hear the opinion of someone more familiar.

Just finished: "Lonesome Dove", by Larry McMurtry. From the name, I'd somehow assumed it was a romance novel. No, it's absolutely not. If it were released today, I think I'd describe it as "horsepunk": instead of cyberpunk's high tech low-lifes, it's basically horseback low-lifes. That's not entirely fair because there's a lot of moral strength in some of the characters, but they're all living on the brutal edges of a society where any random event might bring death, or worse.

Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.

[0]https://nebulaofbooks.com/books/null-cat-dev-null_/

Nothing you said was wrong, but I can’t imagine giving Meta the benefit of the doubt on, well, anything. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me 137 times…

It’s been a strict improvement on my computers, which isn’t to say that the author isn’t having problems, just that theirs (or mine!) isn’t the universal experience.

And they’ve finally fixed some annoying, long-endured audio bugs: https://weblog.rogueamoeba.com/2026/09/24/macos-27-fixes-mul...

The biology stuff seemed far-fetched but plausible-ish, which was kind of how I saw the physics bits: sure, that might work given infinite tensile strength metals.

And sociology / anthropology / linguistics? Eh, we can wedge some stuff in once the important parts are done.

I didn’t hate the book at all. It was otherwise fun to read. But man, those bits I mentioned really stuck in my head and I couldn’t un-see them once I started noticing. Like, imagine that literally every time you were in a bar or restaurant with TVs, at least one of them was showing a documentary of the American revolution. Wouldn’t that be odd? Well, apparently in 7000 AD people just can’t get enough of their own founding history lessons.

Hah, makes perfect sense. I have a handful of ancient Perl scripts I run for specific purposes every great once in a while. If I used them enough to actually need to maintain them, I’d probably port them to Python or something. I think we both ended up in the same place via the same route.

“…or prickly pear!”

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

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I jotted down these things that drove me nuts in Seveneves:

* Describes pykrete every time it’s mentioned, which is way too often.

* Say “light green arc” again.

* There’s always a TV tuned to the Epic.

* Spacers and Diggers speak the same language after 5,000 years of English-Russian hybridization?

* So much time spent explaining the different races, then absolutely nothing was done with it.

* Red vs blue space, then absolutely nothing was done with it.

* “Diggers” capitalized in first use, no lead-up.

* “Sonar Taxlaw”? Really? Her volume of the encyclopedia just happened to conveniently start with “sonar”?

* They just gave up on Mars sometime, I guess.

* Oh, look, a secret religion at the end because, why exactly?

* Diggers would not have been remotely like “rootstock” humans after evolving for 5,000 years in caves. Look how much we’ve changed since 3,000 BC.

I liked it, overall, but each of these yanked me out of my suspension of disbelief.

Ok, I’ve gotta hear this. For what? I haven’t touched rcs since we upgraded to cvs. Is it still unusually good at something today?

> Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh grass.

I don’t know, that goes a little above and beyond IMO. One typically doesn’t do science in a house-type setting, for many of the same reasons you don’t carpet a bathroom.

I took great joy in watching its downfall. It also only worked with debit cards, meaning you didn’t get the buyer protections you use from buying things on a credit card.

CurrentC was designed to collect all your transaction info so that its owners could analyze your buying habits. I’m delighted that not-CurrentC won that war.

(I personally use Apple Pay, but my understanding is that Google Pay has the same privacy advantages for end users. Both of them are light years ahead of the other boondoggle.)

For sure. I got a lot of mileage out of my TX81Z back in the day.

That's a strong contender.

I see your "HiString" and raise you a "Lately Bass": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXBssta3eD4

Kinda, but a CRT literally doesn’t have precise pixel targeting in the way an LCD does. Instead, you’re telling the electron gun to draw red for a little while, and it paints what it paints.

That was one of the few recent times I've LOLed at a Hacker News article. Flawless.

Never thought I'd see the day when Microsoft is elite.

It doesn’t use an AI agent.

That sounds like an excellent idea if you primarily don't communicate with humans.

Conversely, I would not work for a CEO who would block me from doing my job duties. I'm hired to do a job. If I can't do that job, there's no point in being here. Other companies will pay me for my judgment.

If this happened in real life, I'd say "Joe," (because I'm on a first-name basis with the CEO and chat with him daily), "we had to block communications from Tom's company because they're pulling some bonkers stuff. You might let him know that he's pissing off customers right and left and needs to knock it off."

And yes, this is 100% the definition of spam. It's literally unsolicited commercial communication. Sending these mass instructions to flood the local IT admins is an enormous breech of trust.

Very true. I’ve started talking to older generations about their Socialism Security checks. “That’s different! The government taxes me and then… uses it… to support me when I’m not making money… Oh.”

Lots of people detest socialism until you show them how they’re already benefitting from it. I’m not even really pro-socialism, except in the simplified case where you have a number line with “capitalism” on one end, “communism” on the other, and “socialism” as the range in the middle. I definitely wouldn’t want to live on either end of that spectrum, and a mixed economy where private enterprise handles wants with a government handling needs for those who can’t do it on their own — i.e. socialism — is a reasonable alternative.

Check them out on other threads, too. I think he’s just a garden troll.

Counterpoint: don’t spam my users or I’ll cut off contact at the network level and block your app from running on our laptops.

It’s not cheapness. My kid couldn’t print her homework because I was low on cyan. It’s not that I don’t want to buy more ink, but that the thing I was printing only needed black. If it weren’t a color printer, the output would’ve been identical and it wouldn’t have needed cyan.

I looked at FileMaker a few years ago because it would’ve been a nice setup for a semi-technical acquaintance. And then I saw its pricing, and we went in a different direction.

Gambas was neat. I think we also looked at Kivy at the time, and I think there were a couple of other Python RAD systems that aimed to be similar to VFP in spirit, although not even slightly compatible.

Access is a whole package with form designers, widgets, scripting, etc. so that you can build an entire distributable app from it. SQLite's a brilliant little DB but it only covers a tiny portion of what Access does.

I kinda loathe access for any number of reasons, but appreciate the dev tools it put into the hands of non-developers. A great many people who'd be passive users on most systems were able to build apps to meet their business and requirements, and although Access was janky as hell, that's very, very cool. I think it's most spiritually similar to HyperCard on Mac: you wouldn't want to write a whole large app in it, and if you're an experienced developer there are any number of tools you'd rather write programs with. But if you weren't a traditional developer (e.g. an office worker or a student or a home computer enthusiast, etc.) it gave you a pleasant hand-holding process for making your ideas come to life. I respect that.

Hey, I got to mention this recently! One of my bizarre claims to fame was writing this little tool[0] a few employers back to convert Visual FoxPro database files to PostgreSQL as part of a migration. For a while we had to run it as a cron job so that people could to data entry in an old VFP app but others could run fast reports on our web app with a postgres backend. It wasn't pretty, but it worked great and helped us get off that ancient stack.

[0]https://github.com/kstrauser/pgdbf

Whenever I see an ad in Apple Maps, I leave a bad review for the advertiser, specifically giving them a thumbs-down in customer service. They are making the service worse for me, the customer. I can dream that this would become common practice such that these ads get the reputation of providing negative value to the companies who buy them.

They urgently need to rip the ads out of the App Store and news, too. One of my "favorite" App Store ads[0] was straight out of a "DARE" program. Nothing like browsing through the store looking for a fun new game to fidget with and stumbling across a PSA that fentanyl can kill you. And Gruber was right[1] about the awful, awful ads in News. It's common to see five articles in a row, each packed with multiple copies of the exact same dumb ad for a young, pretty, AI-looking woman wearing hearing aids.

[0]https://honeypot.net/2023/12/21/one-pill-can.html

[1]https://daringfireball.net/2026/07/ads_on_apple_news_suck