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svth

119 karma · joined February 14, 2019

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svth··on Beware Management Consultants
As an Icelander, I've often thought about starting a chain of anal dildo stores and calling them "United Kingdom" just to get back at those fuckers.
svth··on DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
doubleclick.net, about 20 years ago.
svth··on Make ZIP files smaller with ZIP Shrinker
I just work around it with a .gitkeep file.
svth··on Seven countries now generate nearly all their electricity from renewables (2024)
Geothermal is fantastic for heating. Speaking as an Icelander, we have so much hot water in Reykjavík that we even use the residue to keep our pavements clear of ice in winter. Pipes under the sidewalks carry exiting geothermally heated water from nearby houses. It's great technology and has served us well.
svth··on Everyone in Seattle hates AI
What's wrong with wahn-der-fyoo-gull?
svth··on WinObjC – The Windows Bridge for iOS
If I recall correctly, iTunes was a Carbon application. They ported parts of the Carbon APIs to get it running on Windows.
svth··on Why is this hard?
"There are clever, hardworking, stupid, and lazy officers. Usually two characteristics are combined. Some are clever and hardworking; their place is the General Staff. The next ones are stupid and lazy; they make up 90 percent of every army and are suited to routine duties. Anyone who is both clever and lazy is qualified for the highest leadership duties, because he possesses the mental clarity and strength of nerve necessary for difficult decisions. One must beware of anyone who is both stupid and hardworking; he must not be entrusted with any responsibility because he will always only cause damage." -- Kurt von Hammerstein
svth··on Show HN: Whippy Term - GUI terminal for embedded development (Linux and Windows)
Why no macOS support?
svth··on Moving away from US cloud services
Britain is not in the EU.
svth··on The "Bird and Baby" grows up: inside the new Eagle and Child
End of an era. Used to go there in the 90s. Now everything belongs to shitty, worthless Silicon Valley adventurers.
svth··on Useful built-in macOS command-line utilities
There's also afplay - Audio File Play (plays an audio file to the default audio output). Can play all audio formats supported by CoreAudio.
svth··on macOS Sequoia is available today
Use iTerm2
svth··on The demise of the mildly dynamic website (2022)
Thank you for that lengthy diatribe, which I heartily agree with. It's really all about separation of concerns.
svth··on Ask HN: How many of you Apple developers still use Objective C?
Yes. I maintain some open source Mac apps in my spare time (and even develop new ones from time to time) using Objective-C. I've known and used this programming language for 20 years, and don't really see the point of investing in Swift given the way the Apple ecosystem has developed.
svth··on Show HN: Super fast/cheap text-to-speech API
English-language only text-to-speech.
svth··on The Icelandic Saga Database
I'd say we have quite a vibrant startup ecosystem given the size of the country.
svth··on Sloth – A Mac app that shows all open files, directories, sockets, etc.
Sloth author here. To clarify, Sloth does not run with or require root privileges. However, it allows you to (optionally) run lsof itself with root privileges via Apple's Authorization framework. The application is Developer ID signed, but not notarized by Apple (which is a PITA). I guess it's "unaudited", but the source code is right there for anyone to view, analyze and build from scratch.

Also, I'd be curious to know what "blocks of code copy-pasted from stackoverflow" you found. As far as I know, I wrote all of Sloth myself, starting 19 years ago. As for references to "Mac OS X" in code comments, that seems rather pedantic given that this is very old code and Apple keeps changing the name of their operating system: Mac OS X -> OS X -> macOS.

That being said, thank you for identifying the appcast deployment script, which shouldn't have been in version control to begin with.

svth··on Show HN: Socketify.py: Http/Https and WebSockets servers for PyPy3 and Python3
I've been using PyPy and psycopg2cffi in production for the last 5-6 years or so without any issues.

https://pypi.org/project/psycopg2cffi/

svth··on VALL-E: Microsoft’s new zero-shot text-to-speech model
No. Have you?
svth··on Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you–and almost everyone else
Dr. Strangelove : It would not be difficult, Mein Führer! Nuclear reactors could - heh, I'm sorry, Mr. President - nuclear reactors could provide power almost indefinitely. Greenhouses could maintain plant life. Animals could raised and slaughtered. A quick survey would have to be made of all the available mine sites in the country. But, I would guess, that a dwelling space for several 100,000 of our people could easily be provided.

President Merkin Muffley : Well, I would hate to have to decide who stays up and who goes down.

Dr. Strangelove : Well, that would not be necessary, Mr. President. It could easily be accomplished with a computer. And a computer could be set and programmed to accept factors of youth, health, sexual fertility, intelligence and a cross-section of necessary skills. Of course, it would be vital that top government and military men be included to foster and impart the required principles of leadership and tradition. Heil! Actually, they would breed prodigiously, yeah? There would be much time and little to do. With a proper breeding techniques and a ratio of, say, ten females to each male, I would guess that they could interact their way back to the present gross national product within, say, 20 years.

svth··on The Fate of Rome
This is a very good and important point. As our technology becomes more complex and our global structures more essential, the system surely must tend towards ever greater fragility. Just like software, really.
svth··on Average home prices in New Zealand reaches 8.8 times average household income
> Average annual household income here is 610000 NOK (~64500 USD).

Norway's GDP per capita is about USD70.000. Surely you're using GDP per capita, or average individual income, not household income? I have a very hard time believing that Norwegian average household income is just over half that of New Zealand.

svth··on Web3 is centralized and inefficient
Russia is not a third world country. Rather, it is a second world country.
svth··on I think US college education is nearer to collapsing than it appears
Edward Gibbon on his time at Oxford:

"To the university of Oxford I acknowledge no obligation; and she will as cheerfully renounce me for a son, as I am willing to disclaim her for a mother. I spent fourteen months at Magdalen College; they proved the fourteen months the most idle and unprofitable of my whole life...

In the university of Oxford, the greater part of the public professors have for these many years given up altogether even the pretence of teaching.

As a gentleman commoner, I was admitted to the society of the fellows, and fondly expected that some questions of literature would be the amusing and instructive topics of their discourse. Their conversation stagnated in a round of college business, Tory politics, personal anecdotes, and private scandal...The names of Wenman and Dashwood were more frequently pronounced, than those of Cicero and Chrysostom."

svth··on Google Search Is Dying
Have you tried using TinEye.com for reverse image search?
svth··on ScummVM 2.5 “Twenty years ago today”
µTorrent was available as a native macOS app for a long time. They dropped support in macOS Catalina. Apparently going 64-bit was too hard. Now they just offer some shitty web client.
svth··on The Best of Scribblers: Edward Gibbon (2015)
Such a wonderful writer, probably the finest English stylist of the 18th century. You can pick a passage at random from Decline and Fall and it'll be something masterful, e.g.

"As the happiness of a future life is the great object of religion, we may hear without surprise or scandal that the introduction, or at least the abuse of Christianity, had some influence on the decline and fall of the Roman empire. The clergy successfully preached the doctrines of patience and pusillanimity; the active virtues of society were discouraged; and the last remains of military spirit were buried in the cloister: a large portion of public and private wealth was consecrated to the specious demands of charity and devotion; and the soldiers' pay was lavished on the useless multitudes of both sexes who could only plead the merits of abstinence and chastity. Faith, zeal, curiosity, and more earthly passions of malice and ambition, kindled the flame of theological discord; the church, and even the state, were distracted by religious factions, whose conflicts were sometimes bloody and always implacable; the attention of the emperors was diverted from camps to synods; the Roman world was oppressed by a new species of tyranny; and the persecuted sects became the secret enemies of their country. Yet party-spirit, however pernicious or absurd, is a principle of union as well as of dissension. The bishops, from eighteen hundred pulpits, inculcated the duty of passive obedience to a lawful and orthodox sovereign; their frequent assemblies and perpetual correspondence maintained the communion of distant churches; and the benevolent temper of the Gospel was strengthened, though confirmed, by the spiritual alliance of the Catholics. The sacred indolence of the monks was devoutly embraced by a servile and effeminate age; but if superstition had not afforded a decent retreat, the same vices would have tempted the unworthy Romans to desert, from baser motives, the standard of the republic. Religious precepts are easily obeyed which indulge and sanctify the natural inclinations of their votaries; but the pure and genuine influence of Christianity may be traced in its beneficial, though imperfect, effects on the barbarian proselytes of the North. If the decline of the Roman empire was hastened by the conversion of Constantine, his victorious religion broke the violence of the fall, and mollified the ferocious temper of the conquerors."

svth··on Old electric cars are a raw material of the future
HAMLET Not where he eats, but where he is eaten: a certain convocation of politic worms are e'en at him. Your worm is your only emperor for diet: we fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots: your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service, two dishes, but to one table: that's the end.

KING CLAUDIUS Alas, alas!

HAMLET A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm.

KING CLAUDIUS What dost you mean by this?

HAMLET Nothing but to show you how a king may go a progress through the guts of a beggar.

svth··on DNA sequencing of Viking skeletons reveals they weren’t all Scandinavian
Heimskringla was written by Snorri Sturluson, who was not Norwegian but an Icelander.
svth··on AudioMass – free, open source, web-based Audio and Waveform editor
Don't knock Audacity, though. Fantastically useful piece of software.
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