Hacker News: jquinby

New comment by jquinby in "The Vatican's Website in Latin"

jquinby — Thu, 07 May 2026 01:49:47 +0000

There is an AI working group in one of the dicasteries that has produced two excellent publications:

Encountering Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/91230-encountering-art...)

Reclaiming Human Agency in the Age of Artificial Intelligence (https://jmt.scholasticahq.com/article/154545-reclaiming-huma...)

New comment by jquinby in "Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies"

jquinby — Mon, 23 Feb 2026 17:17:11 +0000

When I was in formation a couple of years ago, I showed our homiletics instructor a ChatGPT-generated homily for our assigned text. He read through it and put his head on the desk. Then he handed it back to me and said it was as good as good as anything you'd hear from the ambo that Sunday.

By this, he meant that it was ok-but-not-great, and there's a lot of weak preaching out there. And your point is dead on: the text and the assembly are the primary considerations. I preach on the same readings to 4 different masses, but the 4:30 Saturday Vigil folks are a different group than the 11:30 Sunday Morning crowd, so the message is tuned accordingly. Different emphases, different touchstones, differing exhortations, etc.

New comment by jquinby in "Try the Mosquito Bucket of Death"

jquinby — Wed, 30 Jul 2025 16:15:16 +0000

That’d be Guinea fowl, but all you’ve done is created a new problem unless you have a large area for them to range and a high tolerance for bird guano.

New comment by jquinby in "Software-Defined Radio for Engineers (2018) [pdf]"

jquinby — Mon, 10 Mar 2025 20:49:57 +0000

I use an RSPdx in my shack and it’s one of my all time favorite pieces of hardware.

New comment by jquinby in "Who's Afraid of Tom Wolfe?"

jquinby — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 22:53:40 +0000

Can confirm. Grew up in suburban Atlanta during the period depicted, including getting caught in the first big Freaknic blowout he describes. It’s so dead-on it made me homesick.

New comment by jquinby in "LibreOffice 400M Downloads, and Counting"

jquinby — Thu, 30 Jan 2025 14:57:38 +0000

I used it exclusively for my graduate theology studies - all my papers, presentations, and so on. Along with Zotero, I had everything I needed.

Just for fun, I did a few papers in LaTex, but I ran into a minor footnote formatting issue that I couldn't fix, so I didn't use it for my closure projects. LibreOffice was fine.

New comment by jquinby in "Bram Moolenaar has died"

jquinby — Sat, 05 Aug 2023 13:45:54 +0000

:wq!

Eternal rest grant unto him. May perpetual light shine upon him.

New comment by jquinby in "FCC reaffirms $3M fine for marketing unauthorized drone transmitters"

jquinby — Thu, 01 Jul 2021 22:52:27 +0000

Also an Extra. I actually delayed renewal this year, but then re-upped when I remembered that I'd been using the callsign@arrl.org email forwarded for a bunch of stuff and shelling out for one more year was easier than hunting down all the places I'd used it. I'll probably address that soon and let it go for good after this year.

New comment by jquinby in "Clayton Christensen has died"

jquinby — Fri, 24 Jan 2020 19:28:53 +0000

I don't do a ton of business reading, but Christensen's stuff was top-notch and always on the short-list of recommendations I'd make to others.

New comment by jquinby in "Amateur Radio"

jquinby — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 21:45:20 +0000

With a handheld radio and a Technician License, you can get on the air via local repeaters, work the VHF/UHF satellites, tinker with APRS (using something like this: http://www.mobilinkd.com/).

$500 will get you a good HF rig, but as another comment mentioned, you'll need to factor in the cost of a DC power supply, some decent coaxial cable and something to use for an antenna. Antennas can be dirt-cheap - just wire cut to length and lofted however you can.

/r/hamradio is a solid online resource. There's a semi-official IRC channel too.

New comment by jquinby in "Amateur Radio"

jquinby — Tue, 17 Dec 2019 19:22:23 +0000

Don't forget low-cost SDR dongles - great for introducing digital signal analysis, satellite communications (wxsat, etc), ADSB aircraft tracking, HAB, and other ham-adjacent topics. This sort of thing was unimaginably expensive when I was first getting interested in radio. The first WinRadios I saw advertised in hobbyist magazines were, what, $700 or more?

New comment by jquinby in "Smart TVs like Samsung, LG and Roku are tracking everything"

jquinby — Thu, 28 Nov 2019 22:17:31 +0000

There is indeed such a list: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Perflyst/PiHoleBlocklist/m...

New comment by jquinby in "Ask HN: How was life for a regular dev during the dot com burst?"

jquinby — Tue, 22 Oct 2019 15:06:58 +0000

Man alive I lived on that site during those years. If you don't remember or if it was before your time: people anonymously posted internal emails, layoff notices, and so on. Some of them (the Cerner "tick-tock" email comes to mind - though it looks like it appeared on a Yahoo board first) were legendary. And the FC forums...oofah.

New comment by jquinby in "Attempto Controlled English"

jquinby — Thu, 12 Sep 2019 14:42:07 +0000

Indeed, Ecclesial Latin is still the official language of the Catholic Church, inasmuch as documents like papal encyclicals are published in Latin first before translation to other languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecclesiastical_Latin#Current_u...

New comment by jquinby in "Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?"

jquinby — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 18:22:21 +0000

Pi3 runs piaware (aircraft tracking via rtl-sdr), pivpn, and pi-hole. Another Pi Zero runs an RF hotspot for ham radio stuff.

New comment by jquinby in "A Field Guide to Power Transmission Lines"

jquinby — Tue, 11 Jun 2019 16:38:55 +0000

Nicely explained in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quABfe4Ev3s

New comment by jquinby in "Should Failing Phish Tests Be a Fireable Offense?"

jquinby — Wed, 29 May 2019 18:50:48 +0000

What about an email from someone you know (coworker, relative) via a spoofed or compromised account?

New comment by jquinby in "The Life of a Cherry Drying Pilot (2009)"

jquinby — Mon, 29 Apr 2019 13:36:29 +0000

...in Rust!

New comment by jquinby in "10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (2012)"

jquinby — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 14:12:08 +0000

Nice. This brings back some great memories. I used to do a similar one-liner that alternated between white and black blocks, which created crossword-puzzle-like patterns. I'd sit across the room and squint at the display, hoping to see some sort of emergent pattern.

New comment by jquinby in "Can fake names create bias in interviewing?"

jquinby — Thu, 07 Mar 2019 20:56:33 +0000

I have to confess I dug into the comments before I realized this wasn't St. Credzero and having made a mental note go to look him up.