Hacker News: theodric

New comment by theodric in "1940 Air Terminal Museum Begins Liquidation"

theodric — Fri, 22 May 2026 23:09:16 +0000

We don't need to provide one man with every computer made before 1975. The rest of us would also like to have a chance to play with them.

New comment by theodric in "Show HN: I reverse engineered Apple's video wallpapers"

theodric — Thu, 21 May 2026 19:43:23 +0000

There is no way this guy can be for real...

New comment by theodric in "The SGI Buyer's Guide (2003)"

theodric — Mon, 18 May 2026 16:28:51 +0000

I got an Indigo² when I was 16, so 1998, and it was my desktop through college. In 2009 I bought an O2, absolutely maxed it out (including the 600MHz RM7000 mod), and ran it next to my main work computer at the office until I left that company in 2018. I used it mainly for screensavers, IRC, xmms, and shelling out, although I did (ineffectually) mine Litecoin on it for a couple weeks back when that was a thing. I reckon it could still do all of that for me today. At one point it had racked up 4 uninterrupted years of uptime! Then they did power maintenance at the office and messed that up for me :(

New comment by theodric in "I Bought a “Junk” PSP From Japan"

theodric — Sat, 16 May 2026 08:42:43 +0000

I don't know if the author just writes like this, or if the text was put through ChatGPT, but it sets off my slop alarm: "Running a PSP the way Sony intended, but with a modern jailbreak in place, feels like the best of both worlds. You keep the original hardware, the original screen, the original ergonomics, but you reduce the friction. No UMD juggling. No region limitations. No locked-down firmware. Just drag, drop, and play."

Now, downvote away.

New comment by theodric in "Permacomputing Principles"

theodric — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:04:53 +0000

But everything is political, don't'cha know

New comment by theodric in "I switched from Mac to a Lenovo Chromebook"

theodric — Fri, 08 May 2026 19:02:22 +0000

I have one of those Morphius Chromebooks (ThinkPad Yoga C13, 16GB RAM + real SSD) and it's unusably slow in ChromeOS. I flashed the coreboot package and installed openSUSE, and now it's my primary machine and absolutely usable with 6+ hours battery life.

I don't understand how Google could screw up Gentoo so badly.

New comment by theodric in "Ti-84 Evo"

theodric — Sat, 02 May 2026 02:08:03 +0000

I chopped my TI-83 link cable in half and wired it to the parallel port, like this: http://www1.inf.tu-dresden.de/~aw4/ti85.html

and this: https://web.archive.org/web/19990117001444/http://www.geocit...

New comment by theodric in "Ti-84 Evo"

theodric — Sat, 02 May 2026 01:53:41 +0000

You're expected to use technology to break through the language barrier

New comment by theodric in "Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed"

theodric — Wed, 22 Apr 2026 07:53:24 +0000

An interesting point. So over the next ~60 years, the UK has committed itself to having to find a replacement for all the tax revenue that will be lost by eliminating tobacco products. Additionally, the number of people with longer lifespans will increase, necessitating more late-life care delivery through the NHS, which will also have to be funded.

Outcome: this will cost everyone a lot of money. Time to raise the retirement age to 80!

New comment by theodric in "Smoking ban for people born after 2008 in the UK agreed"

theodric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 23:36:50 +0000

Prohibition doesn't work because people want to modulate their consciousness, chemically force-relax, reduce inhibitions, etc. It didn't work before, and it won't in the future. The more things are forbidden, the more taboo and attractive they become.

This banal, smiling, petty authoritarianism sickens me. Bodily autonomy trumps "common good" arguments, and where it somehow doesn't, injustice abides. Society's job isn't to crush individualism in order to create the safest and most financially efficient outcome. Shall we throw everyone in prison for their safety and protection next, and control their diet to ensure maximum healthspan and potential for participation in the labor market?

Rather than banning anything, point out at an early age that cigarettes stink, get you addicted, cost money forever, and cause health problems. Point out that alcohol makes you fat and causes heart problems and cancer. The accept that each person has the right to make a decision for themselves about what risks they're willing to accept to achieve a desired outcome, and that they have to own those consequences.

Don't want to pay for smokers' lung cancer treatment? Then only fund palliative care for smoking-related cancers. Man enough to smoke a pack a day, man enough to buy smokers' insurance. There, now we can live free.

New comment by theodric in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

theodric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 22:22:05 +0000

If you have kimchi fermenting on your body, please see a doctor.

New comment by theodric in "MNT Reform is an open hardware laptop, designed and assembled in Germany"

theodric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 20:58:49 +0000

You're paying for significant ground-up R&D and manufacturing costs that only marginally benefit from any economies of scale. (It's also an incredibly fucking robust machine!) This is not a MacBook Neo competitor. I think if it more as a product for the person who is bored of their quad core-swapped, nitrocaster-modded, corebooted ThinkPad X230, and wants a new, weirder toy laptop to hack around on.

New comment by theodric in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

theodric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:17:13 +0000

So does fungus. I'd prefer to avoid both.

New comment by theodric in "John Ternus to become Apple CEO"

theodric — Tue, 21 Apr 2026 07:16:36 +0000

Bodge wires in shipped products beg to differ!

New comment by theodric in "Mozilla Thunderbolt"

theodric — Thu, 16 Apr 2026 17:00:56 +0000

I will eat the RAM penalty to resist the Chromium hegemon. Grateful to have any alternative!

New comment by theodric in "CRISPR takes important step toward silencing Down syndrome’s extra chromosome"

theodric — Wed, 15 Apr 2026 18:27:04 +0000

All of the arguments in this thread seem to be treating this research's outcome as deleting a person, and applying a corresponding moral judgement thereto. But it is not! I personally find that choosing to not have a child with Down Syndrome by engineering away the possibility in advance is no worse than choosing not to have a child at all, and better than aborting a viable but affected fetus, because no life is ended. I am not a murderer for choosing not to have any child at all because I feel that my genes should not be imposed on another generation, and I am not a Nazi for saying that if I had a child, I would take any available humane steps to ensure it received the best subset of genetic material from the set available to it. I would, in fact, argue that leaving the creation of a whole person who will have to experience life for 80 years to a series of genetic coin flips is morally reprehensible. Just because we've always done it that way doesn't make it desirable or humane. I welcome this development.

New comment by theodric in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

theodric — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 16:34:56 +0000

Raised and addressed in an earlier post on an earlier article on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47736298#47737600

New comment by theodric in "The Seasons Are Wrong"

theodric — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 16:50:19 +0000

Interesting.

I find that Japanese Sekki line up almost perfectly in North Co. Cork https://smallseasons.guide/

New comment by theodric in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

theodric — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 12:59:14 +0000

I...guess. But if you're drinking enough that you exceed the safe threshold for methanol consumption through its marginal presence in the distillate, while somehow managing to tolerate the ethanol, I think you've got another more pressing issue to address.

In practice the distillate actually has less undesirable crap in it than the source wine, since one typically only keeps a part of the run from the still ("hearts") and disposes of the rest.

New comment by theodric in "US appeals court declares 158-year-old home distilling ban unconstitutional"

theodric — Sun, 12 Apr 2026 09:22:19 +0000

The common knowledge about methanol being a huge risk is wildly overstated in reality, and likely continues in part because it benefits the government for people to believe strongly in the danger and continue to purchase taxed liquor. Distillation does not create new chemicals: there is methanol in your bottle of wine, and distilling that wine into brandy does not change the ratio, it only removes (primarily) water. Common distilling practice is to dispose of the highest concentrations of the most volatile components (acetaldehyde, higher alcohols). Low levels of methanol remain present in a gradient throughout the distilled product. Methanol production in fermentation is not a significant risk if you're not fermenting woody materials, and its production can be mitigated through the use of pectic enzyme. Methanol IS a risk if you're starting with cheap, untaxed denatured alcohol (ethanol+methanol+bitterants+other crap) as your input, rather than the unadulterated output of a sugar fermentation, and that is mainly what gave rise to the popular methanol folklore.

That said, don't break the law, folks. It's not worth going to prison for tax evasion over a jug of shine. You can get just as tipsy off a couple glasses of fermented supermarket apple juice, and it's legal and cheaper to boot.