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macartainon The human brain is two separate organs, study finds

Combined with Iain McGilchrist's ideas[0] about the different roles of the hemispheres, this could get complex..

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_and_His_Emissary

macartainon The turbulent AI era is here

It wasn't even industrialisation - it was agriculture. Do people really like cities? I am not so sure - certainly many do, but many also hanker for the village and there are a bunch of interesting theories about us working well at 'village scale' (I could be easily convinced that no-one hankers for the suburbs..) I think if the economic opportunities were not so heavily weighted towards cities we would see much reduced urbanisation.

macartainon Radiation damage to Hubble has been 4.3 years out of phase with the Solar cycle

thought it was onboarding day at Black Mesa all over again for a few minutes there..

macartainon PostgreSQL for Everything

https://patroni.readthedocs.io/

But I sure wish it was 'core' and we didn't have to worry about it potentially going away, becoming de-supported..

macartainon Diátaxis

So its now 404'ing?

macartainon An Uncomplicated Man – A review of The Odyssey, directed by Christopher Nolan

I have to steal part of the discussion at the Guardian for this - I have read neither translation but this is illuminating and unhelpfully makes me want to read both:

Compare the opening lines:

Fagles:

  Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns
  driven time and again off course, once he had plundered
  the hallowed heights of Troy.

Wilson:
Tell me about a complicated man. Muse, tell me how he wandered and was lost when he had wrecked the holy town of Troy,
The Wilson translation is TOO distilled/simplified for me. It reads something like Hemingway or a hard-boiled noir detective story.

The Fagles translation is much more lyrical without being overly pompous or florid, and the McKellen audio version (which is the way the story was first told, right?) is delightful. Reading along as McKellen tells the story is a joy.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2026/jul/16/a-voyage-of-di...

macartainon Eight Newly Produced MQ-9 Reaper Drones Destroyed in Iranian Strike

"It's honestly perplexing how major powers seem incapable of learning from history."

I think you mean it is perplexing how the leaders of certain major powers seem incapable of learning from history. It seems clear the relevant advice has been available. And yes, I also suspect arrogance but the list of problematic personality traits that apply to the current situation have been exhaustively detailed all over the place...

macartainon Ancient Roman Board Game

fair enough, but what else have the Romans done for us?

macartainon What Columbus used instead of the North Star

Can we just have a new little flag for "AI Shite"?

macartainon Uber, Lyft drivers in Massachusetts form first US ride-share union

this is genius... and call shop stewards 'agents'... and call the act of unionising an org "agentifying a node flock"...

macartainon The seed oil panic is hurting my cardiac patients

100% - have always loved Mr Pollan's pithy summary. I also like Alan Goldhamer's (I am paraphrasing): "There are two types of cardiologist; vegans, and the ones who haven't studied the data yet."

macartainon How are folks affordably self-training in AI?

Good shout - particularly for learning, I assume, rather than getting the most productive reply from a SOTA model.

macartainon How are folks affordably self-training in AI?

I accept you have to invest in your skills occasionally, but there are so many providers to choose from. Anyway, thanks a lot for the suggestions - I am now looking into these.

macartainon Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected

Much appreciated - living in the UK, I have heard of Doggerland and should have expected there would be plenty of similar areas worldwide - this is interesting stuff.

macartainon US Government releases first batch of UAP documents and videos

Use that internet thing to pop them on a 'website' and we can all take a look, no?

macartainon Snowball Earth may hide a far stranger climate cycle than anyone expected

It's increasingly accepted that a large portion of human history is 100M underwater on the continental shelves, estuaries, and other coastal areas where humans would have liked to live.

Any references for that? Genuine question.

macartainon Any Open Source projects in need of documentation writer?

I came here to say something like "This is a joke, right?" Not to be snarky, but because I just assume everyone throws the Inevitable Looming Tool at docs, especially where resource is scarce.. but this point has already come up and I suppose there is some truth in the idea that folks detect AI and are often put off by it - but while I think that's true in creative/blog pieces, is it really true in formal docs? For me that is in the same column as cancer cures, gene comprehension, room temperature fusion wrangling etc. - the 'lets-get-AI-onto-it-pronto' column...

Anyway, my vapid observations aside, I have a couple of related questions:

- I too would be willing, even keen, to contribute to good documentation of FOSS projects that need it and that I am interested in - a huge barrier to me is that a person needs sufficient understanding to really contribute, don't they? To the point that you pretty much need to get into the code quite deeply or else endlessly pester committers to explain how it works? OK, I am generalising, but it seems valid in the main. A while ago, I observed on a relevant list that the libvirt documentation of how to take qemu snapshots was amazingly fragmented, inconsistent and out of date and this led to comments that I should step up and produce some PRs - but my whole point was that this sh1t is hard to understand without very good docs! I would barely know where to start and I would be very hesitant about making definitive statements...

- As for improving doc structure - and this is a serious consideration as soon as you sit down to think about this stuff - I came across and adopted the https://diataxis.fr/ framework a few years ago.. I have to say the uptake among my co-workers has been dismal. Can anyone suggest doc frameworks or approaches that are more motivating, have less friction, whatever?

macartainon As US missiles leave South Korea, the Philippines asks: are we next?

much appreciated!

macartainon As US missiles leave South Korea, the Philippines asks: are we next?

Oh hey - the TLA/milspeak guy (gal?). I wouldn't wish more typing upon you but I would love if you could do a bit more 'longhand' so I could have a better grasp of some of the stuff you say - genuinely not being snarky, you seem to have great and informed insights! Thanks!

macartainon Rendezvous with Rama

I have been lusting after a decent visual interpretation of Ringworld ever since I read it decades ago... I was thrilled to hear Halo was set on a ringworld and - because I am diehard Nintendo guy - had to go to a mate's house to see it on his XBox.. I spent ages wandering about looking up, but it wasn't quite what I was after and hey, given the era, the graphics were not up to much. I am still amazed it has not been well done in a film or game or VR to this date - at least afaik, i am open to suggestions. (One of the most visually plausible habitats in film imho was in Elysium and I always feel this film has been a little overlooked. The parallels with the modern world's refugee issues are overstated but I thought incredibly compelling.)

macartainon Rendezvous with Rama

For genuine, believable oddness - although the SF pigeonhole seems restrictive - I would recommend the utterly unique M. John Harrison, specifically the later Kefahuchi Tract trilogy. The much earlier Centauri Device pops up on lots of lists but although it is entertaining and original, is not in the same league. Definitely more in common with the Strugatsky brothers than Clarke - humans fixated on commerce and sex, much more than technology.. quantuum weirdness bleeding into the occult... a galaxy-wide, neon-lit rust-belt. If there is anyone else doing anything remotely like him then I am all ears - sadly, I have read it all! I also felt that Tchaikovsky's ideas are striking and well thought-out, but I did not encounter any people in his books. Peter Watt definitely interesting but often unnecessarily hard to parse, I thought? Must revisit Reynolds - only tried one many years ago...

macartainon Talking to LLMs has improved my thinking

It's not that you weren't thinking. It's that you weren't thinking /right/...?

macartainon Show HN: Customizable OSINT dashboard to monitor the situation

Interesting.. Minor point: it would be good to know what each of the default panels is? not entirely clear to me?

Intrigued by spiderfoot, but seeing that the last release - from that repo anyway - was in 2022, I assume the action has moved elsewhere, given that this is a very quickly changing field - anyone know?

Both of these make me realise how out of date my copy of Bazzell's OSINT Techniques is..

macartainon We're learning more about what Vitamin D does

whereas i heard it was POHM (Prisoner of Her Majesty) stencilled on clothing and articles of folks who had been "transported"..

macartainon What you can get for the price of a Netflix subscription

I find the free version of plex - once I config out all their own streaming junk - is perfectly good.. (and it runs acceptably on my ancient synology) Are there any compelling reasons for me to look in to jellyfin?

macartainon My favorite cult sci-fi and fantasy books you may not have heard of before

Checks out - for a while there, the future seemed appealing.. right now, I would guess most folks would prefer to escape into the past.

macartainon I audited 47 failed startups' codebases

you think?!? doesn't read like it at all to me...

macartainon Show HN: I built a simple ambient sound app with no ads or subscriptions

Meh.. Needs ios18.. But thank you - I salute the effort!

macartainon 10k pushups and other silly exercise quests that changed my life

Agree this is very inspiring - I suspect many folks out there might respond to a simple approach like this. I have fallen off several wagons in this regard, Convict Conditioning and the Busy Dad Routine most recently - generally because, although fun and encouraging initially, they are just too much faff from an administrative perspective!

I am up for this! One question: do you accrue push-ups during the day in a 'greasing the groove' type approach and then stick in the total at end of day? Or more of a session? Just curious what was successful for you...

macartainon Indefinite Backpack Travel

Great thought. Hereafter-based hosting. Why shouldn't you be in control of your data after the Rapture? That's going to be a big dollar...