Hacker News: BirAdam

New comment by BirAdam in "A third way of using Linux"

BirAdam — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 21:57:40 +0000

Isn’t that what resolution aware ttys and screen accomplish?

New comment by BirAdam in "Apple and a Hacker's Future"

BirAdam — Mon, 05 Oct 2026 11:23:39 +0000

Well, you don't even really need symlinks. You can just adjust the order of locations in $PATH

New comment by BirAdam in "You are no longer invited to dinner"

BirAdam — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 12:46:47 +0000

As an introvert who grew up in a radically extroverted household, forcing oneself to be an extrovert all the time can be psychologically damaging over time.

It's also a source of chronic fatigue.

New comment by BirAdam in "12,000-year-old Göbeklitepe burials explain scattered bones"

BirAdam — Tue, 29 Sep 2026 11:52:24 +0000

Currently, while not a majority of cultures buried people under their homes, it was common enough.

Çatalhöyük

Non-royal Sumer and Babylon

Poorer Mayans (from what can be found, there's much of the ancient Maya unexplored)

The LoWiili culture and some other West African cultures

The Tikopia until the arrival of Christianity

Some neolithic sites in Europe, but not believed to have been too common there

New comment by BirAdam in "I am done with this shit"

BirAdam — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 11:15:23 +0000

The difference is that some companies expect people to push back on dumb stuff.

New comment by BirAdam in "What Sun got wrong"

BirAdam — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:56:31 +0000

Yeah, 1993 is when things really took off. First SLS, then Slackware, and using Slackware as the build environment: Debian.

You also had SuSE, which really started as German-localized Slackware.

New comment by BirAdam in "What Sun got wrong"

BirAdam — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 17:54:06 +0000

IaC is really just declarative shell scripts. It's a different language, but it's often just kicked off by some bash in a git action.

Once you have git and actions, I don't think that the language really matters all that much.

New comment by BirAdam in "Leaving Linux"

BirAdam — Tue, 15 Sep 2026 18:15:54 +0000

Yeah, when CentOS got eaten, moved to AlmaLinux. No complaints. It works. I also use Slackware. Nice and boring. Compared to macOS on my MacStudio… exceedingly boring and stable.

New comment by BirAdam in "IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:51:52 +0000

https://archive.org/details/mrpibbthe3dinteractivegame

New comment by BirAdam in "I think I hate the internet"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:50:18 +0000

It isn't so much that lead, asbestos, and radium were cheaper, but more that the risk assessment from lenders and insurers made it nearly impossible to use any known hazardous material in any way whatever within a residential building.

New comment by BirAdam in "Nike exits the S&P 100 after 18 years and a $200B market-cap wipeout"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:38:53 +0000

I had the same experience with a pair of Nike Zoomfly Air. Bought in 2020, and they'd fallen apart by 2024 with extremely light use thanks to COVID and WfH. It was quite disappointing given the cost, and they had been quite comfortable shoes. Lately, I wear Brooks.

New comment by BirAdam in "Who Aligns the Aligners?"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:25:32 +0000

The US government is only the longest continuous democracy only if one believes that the US is still a democracy. I've read some decent arguments that the US stopped being a democracy with the McKinley administration, and others that the US ceased to be a functional democracy during the Second World War. In both cases, the claim was that the USA became an imperial oligarchy.

It is questionable whether any democracy truly exists at this point as I've seen no nation where the will of the people is typically manifested in the actions of the state.

New comment by BirAdam in "Who Aligns the Aligners?"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:20:14 +0000

This is quite illustrative. Warnings of a nuclear apocalypse were extremely widespread, known, and feared. The consequences were, indeed, so well known that the world was saved from the worst possible outcomes in the past by regular enlisted men and women who realized that not all instrument readings should be trusted due to the potential cost of acting on such readings alone. Given the Turkey Illusion, we would be wrong to trust the status quo in either the nuclear scenario or the AI scenario.

New comment by BirAdam in "Who Aligns the Aligners?"

BirAdam — Mon, 14 Sep 2026 12:14:26 +0000

This isn't a new question: quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

In general, the way things work in the USA is that megacorporations write the regulatory frameworks for their own industries. These regulations are typically burdensome enough to be shouldered by the megacorporations while crushing the smaller players in the given market(s). The AI companies are now advocating for this very arrangement. They will likely get they want, and with that they will gain legal shielding for bad behavior just like Dupont, Monsanto, and so many others.

New comment by BirAdam in "IKEA made a mod for Skyrim [video]"

BirAdam — Sat, 12 Sep 2026 15:48:45 +0000

There was also the Mr Pibb game.

New comment by BirAdam in "I think I hate the internet"

BirAdam — Thu, 10 Sep 2026 11:29:18 +0000

I am old enough to remember the world before the web rather clearly. There are tradeoffs, but on balance, I do believe the world is better now than it was.

There has been a massive disintermediation of information, it's cheaper and easier to start and run a business, it's cheaper and easier to do accounting and taxes, it's cheaper and easier to find the exact products for which one is searching, and communication is cheaper and easier.

In general, more people have more ability, greater abundance, and a higher quality of life. Are there downsides, absolutely. There are tradeoffs for every advancement. Housing is unaffordable for many, but it is also no longer laden with lead, asbestos, or radium. For the internet, while it has been used to create addictive usage patterns, surveillance, and radicalization, it has also fostered the creation of communities, life saving interventions, cost reductions that have meaningful impacts on daily human lives, and far better optimized supply chains.

New comment by BirAdam in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

BirAdam — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:18:01 +0000

Buddhists and Catholics also hold interfaith dialogues.

New comment by BirAdam in "The two Christian saints who are the Buddha"

BirAdam — Wed, 09 Sep 2026 00:11:59 +0000

If by “America” you mean Meso and South America, sure. The USA, however, was Protestant, not Catholic.

New comment by BirAdam in "Government Rails Site Hit Hours After CVE Patch"

BirAdam — Sat, 05 Sep 2026 13:46:03 +0000

There are so many CVEs related to upload… and basic user/group/file permissions and proper rules within the web proxy could mitigate them.

It reeks of people just writing stuff and tossing it up thinking that they’ve crafted something so great they needn’t worry. Get a good platform team.

New comment by BirAdam in "Xanadu was waiting for agents"

BirAdam — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 01:59:27 +0000

You’ll hear/read many people opining that it actually wasn’t a good idea.

I counter that it’s a great idea for many things. The problem is that something good enough and far cheaper is already all over the Earth: the web.

Just like Hurd and Minix might have technical merit that’d make them “better” than Linux, Linux is good enough and already here.