Hacker News: cwnyth

New comment by cwnyth in "Bring back crappy forums"

cwnyth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:31:12 +0000

LinuxForums has been going strong for decades. My account there dates to 2004.

New comment by cwnyth in "Bring back crappy forums"

cwnyth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:30:38 +0000

Even there, though, a lot of the forums are dead or decayed or have disappeared. It's not like it was even 10 years ago.

New comment by cwnyth in "Bring back crappy forums"

cwnyth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:16:15 +0000

Except that most people just go with best. Tons of new comments are shouted into the void, never to be heard by anyone except for a handful of the curious.

New comment by cwnyth in "Bring back crappy forums"

cwnyth — Thu, 02 Jul 2026 15:14:57 +0000

There is no reason to lump forums and IRC/Discord together here. If anything, the latter is closer to places like here or Reddit, where the discussions are ephemeral regardless of topicality, whereas with forums a single topic can go on for years.

New comment by cwnyth in "Looking Ahead to Postgres 19"

cwnyth — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:02:25 +0000

What's wrong with MariaDB?

New comment by cwnyth in "Linux for the Sega MegaDrive"

cwnyth — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:33:07 +0000

We Japanese importers also knew it as Pang.

New comment by cwnyth in "Linux for the Sega MegaDrive"

cwnyth — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 13:30:54 +0000

I still have two, a Trinitron and an RCE. For a while, you couldn't give these away.

I sadly had to part with a 52" projector TV that had s-video inputs. Classics games on that was a thing to behold.

New comment by cwnyth in "30-year sentence for transporting zines is a five-alarm fire for free speech"

cwnyth — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 04:14:09 +0000

I disagree. Time and time again, it's been shown that people are more moved by a single emotional instance, not the broader statistics. Not everyone has a mind for numbers or scale. What can actually inspire change in them if not a single representation of the problem? Classically, effective rhetoric needed pathos in addition to logos. There is no problem in zooming in on this one instance (especially if it's effective in fixing the larger problem).

New comment by cwnyth in "Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]"

cwnyth — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 05:48:10 +0000

Fair! Chronologically, at least, Diocletian's time is closer to us, though not technologically or population-wise. And by Diocletian's time, inflation was already out of control. If anything, the political stability that came with Diocletian's reforms actually helped bolster the economy, though it wouldn't last, as soon the center moved to Byzantium, leaving Rome (and Italy) to whither and die over the next century.

New comment by cwnyth in "Trade, merchants, and the lost cities of the Bronze Age (2019) [pdf]"

cwnyth — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 04:59:19 +0000

Everyone points to Ea-nasir, but that's a meme. Meanwhile, Diocletian outlawed price gouging and standardized prices across a variety of goods:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edict_on_Maximum_Prices

From Polanyi, Finley, and Weber to Austin and Malkin, we've come a long way in recognizing the sophistication of ancient economic thought.

New comment by cwnyth in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cwnyth — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 18:38:28 +0000

Yeah, this is the same in the US. If you tell them ahead of time, there's no issue in splitting the bill. I was doing that 20 years ago when I was a waiter at both higher-end and mid-range restaurants.

New comment by cwnyth in "The Doorman's Fallacy in action"

cwnyth — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 23:30:51 +0000

Europe is a continent. In all the countries I've been to in Europe, the service was indistinguishable from that in the US, where the bill is brought to the table and paid there. Can you be more specific as to what country's restaurants do people normally walk up to a register after eating?

New comment by cwnyth in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

cwnyth — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:19:03 +0000

The unfortunate part is the lack of anything else therein, not that it's Epicurean philosophy.

New comment by cwnyth in "An entire Herculaneum scroll has been read for the first time"

cwnyth — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 18:18:03 +0000

Not all machine learning is generative AI.

New comment by cwnyth in "How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly"

cwnyth — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:19:01 +0000

I think you are misconstruing what I said. I'm not talking about other cultures, I'm talking about the youth who turn in essays that mimic their texting style. I should know: I spent years grading their essays and helping them fashion a more professional writing style.

New comment by cwnyth in "How to Passive-Aggressively Shame People Who Use LLMs Selfishly"

cwnyth — Wed, 24 Jun 2026 01:05:27 +0000

A lot of obvious LLM speech is obvious, but please spare us academics and former academics who learned how to use an em- and en-dash properly. Proper writing in general is being derided by younger folks who are too uneducated to tell the difference. I recently had someone claim my company's website, which is virtually unchanged since 2020, was "obviously AI." Yeah, kid, except you can go on Internet Archive and see it before ChatGPT was dropped.

But it doesn't matter. It's just playing chess with pigeons at that point.

New comment by cwnyth in "How many of the 170k English words do you know?"

cwnyth — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 23:11:36 +0000

For anyone who wants to take a real scaled vocabulary test, you can't beat the one given with Johnson O'Connor's aptitude tests.

New comment by cwnyth in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

cwnyth — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:45:39 +0000

No one said for the laws to be disregarded!? Why are you lying about what people are saying? Does it feel good to win against your own imagination?

New comment by cwnyth in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

cwnyth — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:44:29 +0000

Did I say it was a jailable offense? You might want to actually read what people write instead of arguing with your imagination.

New comment by cwnyth in "US holds off blacklisting DeepSeek, more than 100 firms deemed security risks"

cwnyth — Fri, 19 Jun 2026 03:43:52 +0000

Yes, but public minds are not made up by edge cases. Surely a better example could be used rather than a divisive criminal.

Also, not sure how anyone except bad actors or sloppy readers could have gotten that I was defending the US here instead of criticizing using Kim Dotcom as an example in characterizing the US's actions.