Hacker News: LTom

New comment by LTom in "Language Support for Marginalia Search"

LTom — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 05:27:28 +0000

A quick question: are you looking for feedback on search results in other languages (as in, what I expect vs. what I get), or is it too early for that?

New comment by LTom in "Why Michael Moorcock Despises Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"

LTom — Sat, 13 Apr 2024 11:21:31 +0000

Monarchy never really works for long in Tolkien's works either. The history of the kings of Gondor is all strife and crises, and in Tolkien's abandoned sequel already 100 years later “the people of Gondor in times of peace, justice and prosperity, would become discontented and restless — while the dynasts descended from Aragorn would become just kings and governors — like Denethor or worse.” (Letter 256)

New comment by LTom in "Threads is blocking servers on the Fediverse. Here's how we unblocked ourselves."

LTom — Mon, 25 Dec 2023 15:26:16 +0000

I suppose it fits with the rest of this article being rather disingenuous. Alex Gleason, Spinster and Neenster are part of a controversial group that detractors call "trans-exclusionary radical feminism." For better or for worse (the details of this controversy are not necessarily relevant), instances of that nature (and pretty much anything that runs on Soapbox) are defederated by a lot of Fediverse servers, and it seems that Meta for one reason or another has joined those servers. Gleason is well aware of this controversy.

My best guess is that Meta hopes to make itself appear more palatable to mainstream Mastodon servers by also defederating.

New comment by LTom in "Building end-to-end security for Messenger"

LTom — Thu, 07 Dec 2023 11:29:42 +0000

Yes, that was explicitly stated in an interview[1] a while back. Quoting from the specific section:

> “Okay, well, WhatsApp — we have this very strong commitment to encryption. So if we’re going to interop, then we’re either going to make the others encrypted, or we’re going to have to decrypt WhatsApp.” And it’s like, “Alright, we’re not going to decrypt WhatsApp, so we’re going to go down the path of encrypting everything else,” which we’re making good progress on. But that basically has just meant completely rewriting Messenger and Instagram direct from scratch.

1: https://www.theverge.com/23889057/mark-zuckerberg-meta-ai-el...

New comment by LTom in "Reddark: Website to watch subreddits going dark"

LTom — Fri, 09 Jun 2023 12:18:55 +0000

I think they should be able to govern their instance as they wish, but it's odd that they don't understand that putting (for example) criticism of the Chinese communist party under a general anti-racism rule — without explicitly mentioning this — is rather confusing. It's certainly not what the average new user would understand as racism.

This specific ideological slant is also not clear from its description on the instance list[0], especially when compared to instances like Lemmygrad.

[0]https://join-lemmy.org/instances

New comment by LTom in "An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish"

LTom — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 09:34:25 +0000

There is an English version. It pops up when looking up subjects on https://www.thefreedictionary.com/, but I don't think there's a way to directly browse it (and I find the site in general rather cumbersome to use).

An example: https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Gosplan

New comment by LTom in "An old Encyclopaedia Britannica is a work to cherish"

LTom — Sun, 02 Oct 2022 09:31:22 +0000

I studied art history in university, and for some reason, when looking up a certain obscurer topic brought up during a lecture on architecture, the only online source mentioning at the time was the English edition of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. Nowadays other sources mention it, but at first glance the GSE still seems to be the only source actually describing it.

I wish there was a proper offline version of the GSE, since consulting it through https://www.thefreedictionary.com is rather cumbersome.

New comment by LTom in "Webster’s 1913 Dictionary for macOS"

LTom — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 09:30:42 +0000

I use GoldenDict on Linux.

Unfortunately, the Webster's 1913 dictionary I use with that software (downloaded from a link in Somers' blog post) lacks the markup of this Mac version. And while GoldenDict supports many dictionary file formats, Apple's isn't among them.

New comment by LTom in "Welcome to Libera Chat"

LTom — Thu, 20 May 2021 18:37:02 +0000

Splendid, this sounds exactly like what we need in our channel. Is there a specific project page/Github issue/… I can keep an eye on, so that I know when this functionality is deployed?

New comment by LTom in "The health-technology sector overlooks women and their bodies"

LTom — Tue, 07 Aug 2018 10:16:05 +0000

One of the reasons for period tracking is identifying changes to one's menstrual cycle, which may indicate health issues.[1] So even if periods normally were to only last up to 10 days, not allowing to track for a longer period would impede that goal. In fact, this is even one the vague reasons Fitbit mentioned when it launched this functionality. [2] The functionality feels like a bit of an afterthought.

[1] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/320758.php

[2] https://www.theverge.com/2018/3/13/17113096/fitbit-watch-per...

New comment by LTom in "Firefox removes RSS support"

LTom — Fri, 03 Aug 2018 21:49:40 +0000

Yeah, I usually preview a feed in Firefox before adding it to a proper RSS reader.

New comment by LTom in "Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)"

LTom — Tue, 11 Apr 2017 23:49:59 +0000

An ante-anti-library, perhaps?

New comment by LTom in "Google Talk Is Being Discontinued"

LTom — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 22:36:31 +0000

Yeah, there’s:

* Allo (text chat)

* Duo (video chat)

* Android Messages (SMS etc.)

(And Google Voice also does SMS iirc)

And of course Hangouts, which is able to do all of those currently, but is going to be split up into different business-oriented apps for some reason.

If Allo and Duo had just been another client for whatever protocol Hangouts uses these days, it wouldn’t have been so bad. But like it is now, I don’t feel like I can ‘rely’ on Google at all. Facebook Messenger has been a far more stable experience, even though I have some reservations about it.

New comment by LTom in "Google Talk Is Being Discontinued"

LTom — Fri, 24 Mar 2017 19:51:34 +0000

I’m getting really fed up with Google. Yet another time when they nudge me towards using a service, only to retire it a while later. A separate app for SMS again , just when I’m comfortable with centralizing it in Hangouts. And Allo and Hangouts aren’t compatible, right? Every time I jump on Google’s newest app bandwagon it seems to end up being another ephemeral thing.

New comment by LTom in "Mozilla Is Fighting for EU Copyright Law Reform"

LTom — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:29:00 +0000

>It’s illegal to share a picture of the Eiffel Tower light display at night. The display is copyrighted — and tourists don’t have the artists’ express permission.

Here in Belgium, freedom of panorama was recently introduced. This law was opposed by progressive parties, who cited the French situation as the ideal. I’m glad the law passed anyway, but this progressive stance against freedom of panorama worries me in the long run.

I hope Mozilla is successful, but I fear they may face strong opposition from those who should know better.

New comment by LTom in "The Macaroni in ‘Yankee Doodle’ Is Not What You Think"

LTom — Fri, 26 Aug 2016 17:13:26 +0000

No, I’m not American. :-p

New comment by LTom in "The Macaroni in ‘Yankee Doodle’ Is Not What You Think"

LTom — Thu, 25 Aug 2016 09:05:14 +0000

Likewise, though I was taught about Macaroni in a course on fashion history before I first even heard the Yankee Doodle song.