TechTakes

If you're against unrestricted genAI then you're also transphobic

What. Wait has anyone claimed this? Because that's absurd.

I suspect it'll land somewhere above "halitosis" but below "wearing black socks with crocs"

Do you actually need to share your bookmarks? I found that bookmarks in Firefox and an RSS reader hosted on my nextcloud are enough for personal use.

Oh no, what happened to that dude? He seemed fairly sane from his blog.

I honestly just use browser bookmarks. That’s always been enough for me. Firefox can sync them too, so that takes care of backups as well.

For anything that needs special attention, I create a todo item with the link in org-mode.

first comment is a masterpiece.

DHH: today I will RP as a high schooler writing an essay for software class about a program you should use

full disclosure: I use vim and honestly I don’t even know why anymore. Maybe it’s because I had a brief, trivial interaction with Bram Moolenaar (RIP king) in which he closed a bug that I opened by mistake, and I imprinted on him for some reason.

Man the Pistol unicode mess has always given me mixed feelings

Apple indeed lead the design change, but they did it unilaterally without the input of Unicode. So the standard is still saying that the character represents a pistol, and all the fonts are ignoring that to have it a squirt gun instead, so as to be compatible with a specific Apple font rather than compatible with unicode.

~~It might have been a mistake for Unicode to introduce Pistol in the first place (I wonder how it was chosen, can't look that up right now),~~ Pistol apparently came from Softbank, so Unicode was probably including it for compatibility with existing encodings.

IMO it would have been technologically more sound for UI designers to hide it in a UI or font designers to omit it entirely, than to replace it with another graphic with significantly different meaning. Emojipedia demonstrated the potential for confusion with this cheeky text message example.

Of course by this point we're stuck with water gun so Twitter is just needlessly adding to the mess and Unicode should give up and redefine or add errata to the symbol.

'make it look more badass'

I'm so tired of that man. I'm rethinking my idea that capitalism is good and this is meritocracy in action.

E: also just annoyed he went with an 1911, and not something like a Mateba, or the Chiappa Rhino which look futuristic but are real (the barrel is aligned to the bottom cylinder not the top), and fits into the previous patterns of revolver icons.

E: more on I'm so tired of that man

convenience xcancel link

fucking Mozilla really is going all in on this whole “you can’t trust AI, except when we and our business partners do it” openwashing thing completely unaware of how it looks, huh? like, they’ve pushed AI so hard and violated so much community trust in the process that I can’t imagine this is doing anything but costing them their remaining donors.

Also means we're likely to have a better jumping on point to explain these people to those who aren't already here. Hope he does one on Yud and friends in the not too distant future.

what we are best at here at HN

It’s always bootlicking with this crowd jfc

technical aspect seems to be for now that israeli secret services intercepted and sabotaged thousands of pagers to be distributed for hezbollah operatives, then blew them up all at once. it does look like small, reportedly less than 20g each explosive charge, but orange site accepted truth is that it was haxxorz blowing up lithium batteries. israelis already did exactly this thing but with phone in targeted assassination, and actual volume of such bomb would be tiny (about 10ml)

“best at”, they say? I shall have to update my priors

If you want decentralized systems you have to take the good with the bad. It’s part of the game

I wonder if these people are at all familiar with the stages of grief

I'm mildly surprised at Krugman, since I never got a particularly racist vibe from him. (This is 100% an invitation to be corrected.) Annoyed that 1) I recognise so many names and 2) so many of the people involved are still influential.

Interested in why Johnathan Marks is there though. He's been pretty anti-scientific racism if memory serves. I think he's even complained about how white supremacists stole the term human biodiversity. Now, I'm curious about the deep history of this group. Marks published his book in 1995 and this is a list from 1999, so was the transformation of the term into a racist euphemism already complete by then? Or is this discussion group more towards the beginning.

Similarly, curious how out some of these people were at the time. E.g. I know that Harpending was seen as a pretty respectable anthropologist up until recently, despite his virulent racism. But I've never been able to figure out how much his earlier racism was covert vs. how much 1970s anthropology accepted racism vs. how much this reflects his personal connections with key people in the early field of hunter-gatherer studies.

Oh also, super amused that Pinker and MacDonald are in the group at the same time, since I'm pretty sure Pinker denounced MacDonald for anti-Semitism in quite harsh language (which I haven't seen mirrored when it comes to anti-black racism). MacDonald's another weird one. He defended Irving when Irving was trying to silence Lipstadt, but in Evan's account, while he disagrees with MacDonald, he doesn't emphasise that MacDonald is a raging anti-Semite and white supremacist. So, once again, interested in how covert vs. overt MacDonald was at the time.