phantasmish

On, no issue here, no apology needed at all. I didn’t take it as any kind of dig, or even necessarily aimed at me (and if it was—still not offensive in any way). I’d almost edited my original comment right after posting because it occurred to me the tenseness might allow it to be interpreted as a complaint, and was just using your post as a jumping-off point to finally clarify that, is all.

I did miss exactly what you meant by “problem” in that passage, but get it now, so thanks for that.

I… super hesitate to wade into this, but:

1) It was way before it became prestigious.

And

2) An explanation of this needs to account for a great and rapid shift in favor of women, as far as proportion-of-practitioners, that was happening at exactly the same time as the opposite shift in programming, in both law and medicine.

I don’t know what the actual reason is but “it got prestigious so women got pushed out” makes no sense to me, based on the timeline of events in full context. It was very much not prestigious in the ‘80s and early ‘90s, certainly far less so than law and medicine at that time (still isn’t as prestigious as those, outside tech circles—you can see it in people’s faces. It’s high-paid but lower-“class” than those, to this day)

> Anyway,anyone who finds themselves with a problem with HN should try that out :)

To be clear, I wasn’t complaining. Just pointing it out. Aside from any more speculative benefit to YC for running the site, the site does run outright ads.

> It is not unfounded or irrational to be concerned.

I ran the numbers upon having kids. It is irrational.

It’s ad-supported. Any post with comments disabled is definitely an ad. Probably a lot of the others are, too.

Opt-in product catalogues are fine for that. Plenty.

Can’t edit, so self-reply: the legitimate current producer of this style appears to be called “timmee toys” and a search turns up a whole bunch of exactly the army men of that type, plus a ton of vehicles and such made from the same type of plastic that look familiar from decades past.

99% of social science or political topics and 50% of technical topics here do not… read as smart, and you’d be much better off spending the same time reading the first chapter of a relevant 101-level college textbook.

It’s a movement at 50[1].

[1] A. Guthrie, 1967

> [3] I always associated tabs with Opera, though.

Yeah as someone who picked up Firefox when it was Phoenix, it was “free Opera with a less-odd-feeling UI”. That was basically the initial (great!) sales pitch.

What got me installing it on any computer belonging to a person I would have to help support was the auto-pop-blocking and that it performed a ton better than IE/Netscape/Mozilla. Opera also performed better and I think it also blocked pop ups out of the box, but it wasn’t free (well, kinda, but the free edition… had ads).

The green army men of Toy Story and (for example) the Army Men video games were (searches) 1:35. The ones that were that shade of green (or a particular shade of tan—gotta have the other side) and in those poses with those exact sculpts, that every toy aisle or toy store had (in the ‘80s and ‘90s, in the US) even if they did also have others.

Yeah I think that might be a worse statement than the one daydreaming about eliminating their remaining market share by abandoning the only thing keeping anyone around. It’s a gross premise to operate from. And bullshit.

22mm is a lot smaller than the standard “green army men”.

As a kid I had a bunch in this scale in the ‘90s, purchased in bags of something like 50-100 pieces each from an Everything’s-a-Dollar.

They were among my favorite toys for a long while (and so cheap!). Certainly my favorite “army men”. So detailed, so specific. So many poses. Their size meant a modest living room could host grand, complicated battles. Just great. I’d never seen them for sale since, but I guess that’s because they’d have been in hobbyist shops, not the toy aisle, ordinarily.

For people not familiar with Japanese, finding any info about a Japanese-language game can be a pain. They may have a Japanese representation, an official romanized name, a community romanized name using a different system… plus may also go by an outright English-language name, in some circles, which may (or may not) overlap with the name of an English-language port (if it exists). Then consider that some games have pretty extreme and confusing name variants in various editions or on different platforms, and those may go by different names in different contexts.

You can see the same game go by three different names on a community forum, Wikipedia, and a catalogue of games + md5sums for a system (you might think the md5sum could act as a Rosetta Stone here… but less so than you’d think, especially in the specific context of an English speaker and Japanese games, as you sometimes need some specific, old, oddball and slightly-broken dump of a game to get the one a particular English patch requires… and god knows what name you’ll find that under, but probably not the same md5sum as a clean dump)

The only bright spot in this is that if you can find a Japanese game on Wikipedia the very first superscript-citation almost always lists the official Japanese title in Japanese script on hover. That’s a life saver. (Presumably all of this is easier if you know at least some Japanese)

Though after I posted my comment I realized they mean they’re switching to another existing system (which I think is already widely used in gaming circles? Not sure though) which isn’t so bad. At least it’s not another one being added to the mix.

Oh no.

This is going to make finding specific Japanese game roms even more annoying.

School quality’s largely in the same place. You’re not going to make much of a dent without fixing social support, the social safety net, healthcare, mental healthcare, and generally greatly improving stability for the economically bottom third or so of families.

In other words, the main problems with schools have little to do with schools. But they’re complicated and expensive problems with distant payoff, so we keep monkeying around with schools instead.

I’d go farther and guess that the tech job market would be even worse today without every company with at least 500 headcount (and many smaller than that), whether a tech company or not, putting money into “AI initiatives”.

I don’t think we’ve seen any amount of a net drop in tech jobs on account of LLMs (yet). I actually think they’re (spending on projects using them, that is) countering a drop that was going to happen anyway due to other factors (tightening credit being a huge one; business investment hesitation due to things like batshit crazy and chaotic handling of tariffs; consumer sentiment; et c)

Moreover: people’ve been crowing about LLM-enabled productivity for longer than it took a tiny team to conceive and build goddamn Doom. In a cave! With a box of scraps!

Isn’t the sales pitch that they greatly expand accessibility and reduce cost of a variety of valuable work? Ok, so where’s the output? Where’s the fucking beef? Shit’s looking all-bun at the moment, unless you’re into running scams, astroturfing, spammy blogs, or want to make ELIZA your waifu.

I can confirm that they are not shy about pulling over people with regular plates that have just expired, however. They’re on top of that. N = 3, 100% enforcement within a month.

But long-expired temps are everywhere. So confusing. How?

I think the difference is fundamental to the engine and the gap will be hard to close, too (I mean, how long has it been and the gap remains?). WebKit-based ultralight browsers remain usable after you’ve cranked hardware specs down far enough that nothing based on Chrome or Firefox’s engines do. Resource use among the three engines seems to differ at some kind of low, basic architecture level.

Frequent risk of sudden violent murder. And, like, credible relatively-high risk, not the “well a person might be murdered at any time, too”. Like fictional humans in a slasher-movie universe.

The “pleasant lies” mostly involve pretending about meaning, and avoiding thinking about huge scales. That’s the lovecraftian bit. Large-scale reality dwarfs and overwhelms us. We eke out sanity by ignoring it, by even being able to forget about or never thoughtfully engage with it.

My point is just that I largely agree with the other poster on the “nature of nature” as it were, but still find insight in the quoted passages. I don’t think they demand we regard nature as particularly safe or easy, for them to work.

Do any of the big-four (counting Edge as its own thing) browsers not easily allow and facilitate ad blockers? Chrome and Safari definitely do, I assume Edge does too?

What a deeply weird thing to even bring up, under those circumstances. Why was that kind of a thing even kicking around in his head?

Multi-model or no, “AI in the browser” seems like one of those things destined to be eaten by “AI in the OS”, even more surely and to a greater degree than Dropbox was destined to be an OS feature. Having those same tools available system-wide covers the browser case while being far more useful and easier to use (because it’s one interface and set of behavior everywhere).

I regard the experience of most animals as being something like living in a slasher movie their entire lives, and Lovecraft’s work as coming closest to describing life writ large, stripped of pleasant lies.

… but I still think it’s a notable feature of humanity that we can escape much of that for long periods, yet always seem to invent problems for ourselves, can find trouble and discontent even when they don’t seek us out. A rabbit may contend with predators, with hunger, but it doesn’t seem they’ll drive themselves crazy with worry and want when sated and resting in their den. They deal with what’s in front of them, in rabbit-ways, and that’s that. What will they do today? Rabbit stuff. If they’re left to do rabbit stuff without external resistance, will they be content? Yeah. Tomorrow, will they be upset because they’re still going rabbit stuff? No.

I think it’s mostly an observation about unforced discontent, which is a notable (defining?) feature of human existence that’s apparently (at least) much rarer in the rest of nature. I doubt people much closer to nature, death, and killing than most modern OECD-state humans weren’t aware that animals suffer, nor that they must sometimes run to catch their food.

It might be worth interrogating the original language of the work, which I’ve not done. The translator may be depending on the reader’s cooperation here.

One way to read it: nature as a whole makes no effort. It wouldn’t even make sense to say that it does. Does a star make an effort? Yet nature encompasses all that happens.

Another interpretation may be connected to Luke 12:27 (yeah I had to look it up, I actually thought it was from Ecclesiastes, lol), which, paraphrased, is that flowers do not work to be beautiful—that’s just what they are. They can’t (be generous with the reading of “can’t”, if you would) be otherwise.

To expand: humans want what they are not, and that creates work, and stress, and so on. I want to be pretty like a flower. But I’m a person. So now I must spin cloth, and do a bunch of other work, to attain that want, or else suffer unmet desire. Animals and plants (perhaps) have wants (like: a rabbit may want food, or not to be killed and eaten) and pain and such, but don’t work in that sense. They just are what they are, and do what something like them does. This may fall apart in particular examples, but the broad poetic sense isn’t so bad.

(Yes you can nitpick this to death with stuff like “but maybe what humans are is animals that want very very much to be what they’re not, so that is their nature” but c’mon)

[edit] cf Vonnegut’s (serious? Joking? Half-joking?) suggestion in Galapagos that humans’ big brains are a curse that causes most of our trouble, and we’d be better off as something like smartish seals.

Yeah, you can visit the EU by… sailing a ways Northeast(ish) from Maine, until you’re just south of (a part of) Canada. And by going to the Caribbean. And South America.

Mostly France and the Netherlands.

I can just about guarantee it has nothing to do with targeting and a lot to do with making Venezuela unsure when strikes are about to start, both for security of the forces launching the eventual strikes (if any) and to harass/wear-down Venezuelan air defenses by keeping them very alert.

If our aircaft were flying transponders-on during all these exercises then suddenly went dark, it’d signal imminent attack. This keeps them guessing. Possibly we’re even playing around with having them on some of the time for some aircraft, and off at other times.

We don’t do that with AWACS and such near Russia because we’re not posturing that we may attack them any day now, and want to avoid both accidental and “accidental” encounters with Russian weapons by making them very visible. In this case, an accidental engagement by Venezuelan forces probably isn’t something US leadership would be sad about.

Yeah, exact same thing when I was reluctantly involved in a club’s leadership and organizing an on-campus event with food 20+ years ago. I think it was Sodexo in our case. Must be common.