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president_zippy

565 karma · joined September 22, 2025

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president_zippy··on Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes
I foresee a busy year for potato flour and MRE processing plants.

... And those little boxes of instant au gratin.

president_zippy··on U.S. life expectancy hits all-time high
"One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic."

I suppose rooting for people to die doesn't sound barbarous, so long as you're not rooting for anyone in particular to die.

president_zippy··on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
I didn't misunderstand anything. Your little "network effect", as you have so pretentiously worded it assumes teenagers are only getting on social media for their classmates, not for all the other users on a social media site. You also assume a little government-made dumpster-tier firewall written by peons making $70k like "WebWasher" is going to stop them. It didn't stop me from opening up goatse, meatspin, or 2G1C, so your argument carries no water.

All they need is one classmate similar to most of us here on this site. Someone in their high school who will show them how to use a proxy or a VPN not for cred, not for reward, but just because "fuck it, why not?"

president_zippy··on Berlin: Record harvest sparks mass giveaway of free potatoes
My grandfather was a farmer in the 70s-80s, and he used futures on about 50% of his crop every year. Just enough to make sure a bad year can't wipe out the farm.
president_zippy··on Finland looks to introduce Australia-style ban on social media
Enforcement of that law is going to be a certifiable joke. My Chinese classmates back in undergrad in the early 2010s used to use a VPN to access their Facebook accounts when they went home for break. Like anyone else around here in their 30s, I didn't have much trouble bypassing "WebWasher" or its ilk in the 00s either. I have a better proposal to get kids off social media, hear me out:

In order to make a teenager stop doing something, all you need to do is show them videos of someone their parents' age doing it. Juxtapose a bunch of 40-somethings doing cringy little "TikTok dances" alongside people young enough to be their classmates, and they'll stop. Make another TikTok Cringe Compilation, but this time add more clips from middle-aged TikTok users.

My proposal might be insufficiently sophisticated and too actionable for the members of this community who think themselves to be righteous members of an enlightened class and who seek only to complain about current events to self-affirm their superiority. Nonetheless, I insist that anyone who will listen gives the following proposal consideration for the future of our children, whose FICA taxes shall pay for our retirements.

president_zippy··on An Elizabethan mansion's secrets for staying warm
The big about textiles (curtains and bed fabric) functioning as insulation gave me flashbacks to my dad repeatedly complaining over the past decade about a couple small boxes of my stuff taking up space he "needs" in his 700 sqft attic.

I told him, "What's the big deal? It's free insulation during brutal north Texas summers. It's as good as vermiculite insulation minus the asbestos contamination!"

I only put about as much rigor into this as reddit PC builders making untested "gut calls" about thermodynamics, and I was mostly just being a smartass, but it's nice to see I had the same idea as English nobility who comfortably survived winters before the invention of HVAC as we know it.

Nice to see some proof I'm not completely full of crap.

president_zippy··on ‘ELITE’: The Palantir app ICE uses to find neighborhoods to raid
The kind of vice-signaling Palantir employees do on this board is more pathetic than the guy who peaked in high school bragging about the time he woke up hungover in a pool of his own vomit.

"No really, I do consequential stuff! See, I met CCP premiers and shit, I supply analytics to help North Koreans assassins kill exiles living in the US! Trust me bro"

I've trolled so many Palantir employees since my freshman year in undergrad that if even 1% of their claims about their power and connections held any water, I would have been audited by the IRS at least once in my life and a "clerical error" would have happened with my car title leading to a weekend in jail for stealing my own car.

I only know 2 Palantir employees in real life, and they are both at least as lame as you would expect someone who says their uncle works for Nintendo to be.

One of them is married to a furry who cheated on him before they got married and supports "consensual love between adults and children", and the other displayed all the outward signs of an incel. The former looks like the old "Carl the Cuck" meme guy (Drew Pickles haircut and Frank Grimes glasses), and the latter told me some copypasta-tier story about how he was friends with "Chinese Princesses". I wish I had my screen caps of this conversation back in 2014, but I deleted Facebook a decade ago. It was bombastic compared to even the Navy Seal copypasta.

If I had to sum it all up, imagine a sysadmin for the Worcester, MA police department pretending to be Lex Luthor on HN for clout.

president_zippy··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
But alas, FreeBSD does support OCI container images! It supports Podman and has an OCI-compliant runtime:

https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...

However, I still can't pinpoint what the value proposition is compared to using jails. Is there anybody around here able and willing to shed some light? I know I didn't use Cunningham's Law to start the conversation like a clever netizen but maybe, just this once, a good faith response to a good faith question is possible.

president_zippy··on Tell HN: Merry Christmas
Color me confused, but what do containers add to FreeBSD beyond jails? Jails have their own IP addresses and root filesystem, plus they use the host OS's version of libc and OpenSSL/LibreSSL and all the other core utils.

Is it the convenience utilities for building and running container images?

president_zippy··on FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement
It's Chevron DEFERENCE; not DEFENSE.

Everyone who replied completely missed my point, despite how simply and clearly I worded it. You're doing a masterful job illustrating it.

Everyone around here thinks that just because you don't need a college degree to become a software engineer or found an eventual multibillion dollar software company, that the same must generalize to every other profession, including biotech, law, and even medicine. Every technocrat is under the same delusion as Bill Gates that succeeding in their software qualifies them to do anything, despite the face that most people around here cannot even change their own spark plug or replace a flat tire.

I have an opinion on Chevron deference: letting party in a lawsuit interpret the laws and regulations concerning their own case is asinine. However, I don't pretend to know whether or not it can or should hold up in court based on stare decisis or any particular legal tradition.

More importantly, I don't operate under some delusion that other people would benefit from hearing my opinion on matters outside my own education or vocation.

"A fool uttereth all his mind: but a wise man keepeth it in till afterwards." -Proverbs 29:11

president_zippy··on FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement
I didn't defend jack fuckin shit. All I did was point out that nobody arguing for or against this case on HN has anything to say worth reading about it.
president_zippy··on FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement
You're as qualified to opine on legal matters as is a software engineer who works in biotech to opine on medicine. That is to say, a lot less than you think.

You're not Antonin Scalia, you didn't earn it- have some humility.

president_zippy··on FCC chair suggests agency isn't independent, word cut from mission statement
The number of software engineers in this thread who think they are legal scholars is a sight to behold. It reminds me of all the bad legal advice on Stack Overflow, Quora, and Leddit.
president_zippy··on Is Mozilla trying hard to kill itself?
I wonder where killing adblockers on Firefox will leave LibreWolf...
president_zippy··on Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
He's still going, but he's not as "angry" as he was circa 2006-2011.

He did that deleted episode on Custer's Revenge, and then he went back and made it even funnier by censoring it.

ORIGINAL: https://cinemassacre.com/atari-porn-angry-video-game-nerd-av...

CENSORED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tvdIQFoaSr4

president_zippy··on Carrier Landing in Top Gun for the NES
You gotta point people to the original episode, it's classic certifiably unhinged AVGN.

"What a shitload of fuck! This game chews turds! This game sucks your balls off and spits them up your ass!"

https://youtu.be/ofM11nPzFo0

president_zippy··on Super Mario 64 for the PS1
That "expansion pak" RDRAM upgrade was designed to give the N64DD enough buffer space so devs could continue using about 4MB of RAM for everything else, so I can't imagine how expensive the N64 would have been if they had to ship it with 8MB of RDRAM to maintain the same standard of visual quality and a 2X CD-ROM drive.

Then again, the good games would have been $50 instead of $70, and there would have been a lot more developers willing to pay $0.20 per unit to ship games than $20 per unit for the common 12MB and 16MB ROM chips.

However, I don't know if Ocarina of Time or Majora's Mask would have worked as well without that ability to load entire scenes in < 500ms. Diddy Kong Racing and Indiana Jones & The Infernal Machine relied on the ability to stream data from the cartridge in real time to smoothly transition between scenes/areas. DKR only used it in the overworld AFAIK, but it was still impressive.

Not saying you're wrong, just that I'm glad things turned out the way they did because Ocarina and Majora's Mask likely could not have been done on a Saturn or PS1 beefed up with the N64's GPU.

I could be wrong, and some experienced romhackers could conjure up enough clever optimizations to make a faithful PS1 port of Ocarina of Time that doesn't have noticeable load times, but it would have been the result of years of research with no deadline pressure. I admit I'm just speculating, but not in a presumptuous and baseless way.

president_zippy··on Super Mario 64 for the PS1
The whole thing about the texture cache being the worst design decision in the N64 just gets parroted so much, but nobody can cogently explain which corner should have been cut instead to fit the budget.
president_zippy··on Migrating Dillo from GitHub
I freely admit I am out of my depth and have nothing educational to add on the subject. I have but four things to add on this subject:

1. Oh! It's "d.i.l.l.o."! I misread that as something else.

2. After reading many comments in this thread, I must admit I am stupefied at the sheer amount of stuff that can go into merely setting up and maintaining a version control system for a project.

3. I have cited every one of the same problems OP enumerates as my argument for switching new projects over to self-hosted fossil. It also helps a good bit with #2 above when you're a small organization and you're the sole software engineer, sysadmin, and tier >1 support. It's a much simpler VCS that's closer to using perforce in my experience. YMMV, but it's the kind of VCS that doesn't qualify as a skill on a resume.

4. I also find GH deploy keys frustrating because I can't use the same key for multiple repositories. I have 3 separate applications that each run on 4 machines in my cluster, and I have to configure 12 separate deploy keys on GitHub and in my ~/.ssh/config file.

president_zippy··on YouTube Removes Windows 11 Bypass Tutorials, Claims 'Risk of Physical Harm'
We really need some antitrust enforcement right about now.

When second and fourth largest companies by market cap find it in their financial best interest to collaborate with each other, we have a problem.

In healthy markets, two companies that harvest and sell data as a major source of revenue would want to pull an Auric Goldfinger and disrupt one another's data collection practices to decrease the supply and increase the price of ad-relevant data.

president_zippy··on GLP-1 therapeutics: Their emerging role in alcohol and substance use disorders
Maybe this explains why another company just entered into a bidding war with Pfizer to acquire Metsera (MTSR).

Thank God, because my $60 strike call options just turned from a $55k loss to a $180k gain overnight. I shoulda read the CVRs BEFORE buying calls, but I was so blinded by the prospect of easy M&A arbitrage gains I couldn't risk missing out by taking 30 minutes to read the terms of the acquisition.

Glad I have the chance to quit while I'm ahead! Last time I ever fuck around with options trading!

president_zippy··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
You're more worried about some hypothetical apocalyptic scenario where lawful firearm owners suddenly lose their minds and fall into mass-psychosis than you are about existing known violent criminals committing more violent crimes.

I can guarantee you that those "backwards" wheat farmers from Salina, KS with $10k worth of hunting rifles and shotguns just don't think about people like you on a daily basis. Their minds are on the wind, rain, beetles, and grain futures, not "how can we launch a successful invasion against Somerville, MA?".

Frankly, I'm a lot more worried about my Greek classmate being assaulted by a "Free Palestine" moron who can't tell the difference between the flags for Israel and Greece:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14004125/TikTok-Gre...

As for mob violence in general, I'm just not worried about complete strangers wanting to risk their lives in a firefight to kill me. The kind of people who are attracted to angry mobs are not the kind of people volunteering to drive the Waffen SS out of Eindhoven or chase the Japanese out of the Philippines.

Likewise, the people violently assaulting Jewish pre-med students in America are there because the IDF in Gaza scare them.

If the kind of people you most fear and hate wanted war, they could just stop growing your food and let you starve to death.

Not trying to belittle you, so much as reassure that if Trump supporters really wanted to hurt you, they would have done it already in 2015.

president_zippy··on Cheese Crystals (2019)
Thanks for catching my typo, I hope more people discover their cheese. I love every variety of their cheese, but the Merlot and Tennessee Whiskey cheeses are on another level.
president_zippy··on Cheese Crystals (2019)
Hard calcium-lactate crystals are an intentional feature of Belvitano cheese. They add a great texture and add tanginess to parmesan-esque taste.
president_zippy··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
I used to be a competitive marksman through JROTC, and the FUD around firearms is so overblown compared to the fear most people should have while driving their car or doing certain jobs.

A chem lab staffed only by trained professionals is still a lot more dangerous than an indoor range in a red state. A firearm in Cletus' hands is a lot safer than a beaker of sulfuric acid in anybody's hands, let alone piranha solution.

And all of that is nothing compared to the danger of being on a road with other cars, many of which are operated by people who simply do not give a f***.

president_zippy··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
Your friend sounds like a good guy. Hopefully you're with him when you're out in public, and some sicko goes postal or some bum with a drug addiction starts waving a knife at you.
president_zippy··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
I like my 2nd, 4th, and 5th amendment rights.

I don't want to live in a world where cops can stop people for speeding and use it as probable cause to search my car.

I also don't want to live in an environment where when I'm seconds away from danger, my only protection is minutes away.

Warren v. DC also clearly established that police departments cannot be held civilly liable for even gross negligence of duty.

"You can all go to hell. I'm going to Texas."

-Davy Crockett

president_zippy··on 10M people watched a YouTuber shim a lock; the lock company sued him – bad idea
People from "hick, redneck, working class" areas don't say "hick, redneck, working class".

They might say "hick" if they're from rural northern New England, the upper midwest, rural Canada, or Cascadia, usually with self-deprecating facetiousness. Most of these people are smart enough to do whatever they want in life, but just choose to live by their standard of normalcy and just like their friendly small towns best.

If they are from the lower midwest or south, they will sure as hell just say "redneck", and most take it as a compliment even though many of them deep down are just compensating because they don't have any other options.

But nobody calls themselves "working class". Not in the rust belt, not in the rural midwest, and not in the south. That's more of a politician's word, and a condescending slur from the white collar crowd that usually ends in a broken jaw.

president_zippy··on Trump pardons convicted Binance founder
Despite abuses of it, there are still too many reasons to need it, like when President Franklin Pierce pardoned an abolitionist for harboring fugitive slaves, or when George Washington pardoned Revolutionary War vets involved in the Whiskey Rebellion.

Better yet, there are a ton of cases since the 1980s prosecutors exploiting technicalities and mandatory minimum sentencing laws to get nonviolent drug offenders imprisoned for 10+ years on simple possession (not to to sell drugs, not PWID, just possession).

president_zippy··on Apple loses UK App Store monopoly case, penalty might near $2B
You mean Circuit Court judge Robert Bork's "consumer welfare" standard?

He's the genius behind that.

The same Robert Bork whose SCOTUS nomination got held up by the Senate in a deluge of fire and fury, only for Antonin Scalia to get the job and make the same kind of rulings much more articulately.

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