Hacker News: tolciho

New comment by tolciho in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

tolciho — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:46:14 +0000

Note the use of 'may'; the details of the car-hell vary. Perhaps the I-90 pollution instead spills into the lake and then bioaccumultes into larger organisms, Bon Appétit! My anecdote was a bit southwesterly of the I-5 bridge where there was, besides the horrific noise pollution, definitely a greyish black soot to clean off everything. A fine result of rolling a natural one and automatically failing the skill check for "copy the autobahn", probably.

As to why some beings need to be whisked hither and yon with such haste, and thus spend quite a bit of time (and energy) trying to be somewhere, anywhere else, well, are they hungry ghosts? Or maybe they min/maxed for wizard and ended up with only three points in wisdom?

New comment by tolciho in "The Future of Email"

tolciho — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 15:15:26 +0000

(The RFC also allows for (recursive (comments, so there's probably a middle ground between insanely overengineered specifications and a )))regex( someone found on a PHP forum somewhere (and yes this post is a valid email address (assuming there is a local regex account (or alias)))

New comment by tolciho in "Solar generates more energy in US than coal for first time"

tolciho — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:36:07 +0000

> have little black particles all over it. Nobody likes that, no matter what the President says.

Should you live near one of those big noisy "freeway" things you may note the little black particles over everything in the surroundings but nobody likes to tear down the interstate.

New comment by tolciho in "Let's Encrypt bans certificate usage in any US sanctioned territory [pdf]"

tolciho — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 01:35:33 +0000

I wore the rsa-dolphin t-shirt all over the place and nobody batted an eye back then, but a dolphin made up of ASCII characters is quite a bit less obvious than the one you linked.

OpenBSD being based in Canada ships strong crypto, but has had a sometimes troubled relationship with certain regimes.

https://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#34

New comment by tolciho in "Stop the Apple Music app from launching"

tolciho — Mon, 08 Jun 2026 19:19:32 +0000

But why isn't there an easy option to turn the "feature" off? Why the kluges and workarounds for Apple going downhill (Microsoftean is indeed a good term here) for a while now? Same story for the nasty notifiction system, the annoying finder "spacebar may preview some random file hopefully without too many security vulns" (the low contrast design whereby you think Firefox is in foreground but it's actually the Finder is another bad design element that contributes to mixing up what the active app is), etc etc etc

New comment by tolciho in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:19:47 +0000

Why would "money" be necessary?

https://acoup.blog/2025/01/03/collections-coinage-and-the-ty...

New comment by tolciho in "Pre-Modern Armies for Worldbuilders, Part I: Why They Fight"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 16:05:11 +0000

Japanese militarism was a thing recently, so the kids got eveything but the batleth.

New comment by tolciho in "Did Claude increase bugs in rsync?"

tolciho — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 04:38:50 +0000

OpenBSD used to have sqlite in base, but the code churn rate was too high to review. This was well before the recent LLM craze, so a human (perhaps not a normal one, though) already sufficies to generate too many changes for others to check for errors.

New comment by tolciho in "Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'"

tolciho — Tue, 26 May 2026 15:18:49 +0000

Or the management all read the same article in PC Magazine and lo! the next day did orders come down to implement said article, regardless. Waterworld, rowing the Valdez. Some years of this usually results in some number of half-baked or half-implemented systems scattered about production, and who knows which if any are actually used, or how much stink there will be to shutdown something unpatchable. Like why are there two wiki engines, sharepoint, three different database servers, …

New comment by tolciho in "Toxic chemical leak at a manufacturing facility in Orange County"

tolciho — Sun, 24 May 2026 04:36:46 +0000

Wrapping metal around it sounds like one of those mythbusters episodes where they did not get as much shrapnel as they wanted.

New comment by tolciho in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

tolciho — Sat, 23 May 2026 13:27:23 +0000

There is also a distinction between "has a bus system" and "the bus system is actually usuable". Say you want to take the bus to jury duty, but calculate that you would need to wake up at something like three in the morning to catch the so-and-so to downtown, and then another bus out to where the jury place is (trip time: multiple hours, assuming all goes well), in addition to the usual playing Frogger across a stroad or two, or even more walking to maybe find legal road crossing facilities for humans, assuming they exist. And that was in a city with a relatively good (for America) bus system.

New comment by tolciho in "Why Japanese companies do so many different things"

tolciho — Sat, 23 May 2026 04:00:46 +0000

There has been some internal stife in Japan, such as the Taira and Minamoto clans having a bit of a falling out, or that time when the Tokugawa somehow ended up on top, or tussles over the Meiji restoration. And also the "opening up undeveloped land" thing that was maybe not so benficial to the Ainu, and others.

How are you defining civil wars such that America has had "plenty" of them? Could you list a few?

New comment by tolciho in "College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos"

tolciho — Wed, 20 May 2026 15:39:59 +0000

"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington

So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.

New comment by tolciho in "OpenBSD 7.9"

tolciho — Tue, 19 May 2026 21:03:55 +0000

Easy to install and upgrade, sane defaults, good documentation, lack of waffleburgers of complexity, so I'm not sure why anyone wouldn't run OpenBSD in the first place. Granted I put Windows in the unusable bin and it's been there for decades now and sounds like it is getting worse, what passes for Mac OS X these days is not so good given that you have to disable some security thing to properly kill the annoying and disruptive notification system, among other annoyances still being fueded with, and I gave up on Linux after trying to support that waffleburger in production for a year or two.

New comment by tolciho in "What Were Ancient Greco-Roman Curse Tablets?"

tolciho — Sat, 16 May 2026 19:41:47 +0000

Probably not, given that "Statistical Inquiries into the Efficacy of Prayer" by Francis Galton in 1872 found that, spoilers, royalty does not live longer despite the presumably millions of subjects praying for their health and longevity. From this we might go out on a limb and guess that a negative prayer for external results fares no better than a positive prayer for external results. It may, however, be prudent not to mention such failures to the CEO when they want you to recite the corporate mission statement from memory.

Another question might be why it took until 1872 to run the numbers, unless there's a clay tablet somewhere that documents similar results.

New comment by tolciho in "I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers"

tolciho — Sat, 02 May 2026 12:00:50 +0000

Many clients also do not support getservent(3) or portmap or DNS SRV records or NIS or LDAP or ActiveDirectory so one might wonder why there are so many half-baked, failed, or overy complicated attempts at solving whatever the problem is here even before "AI has entered the chat".

New comment by tolciho in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

tolciho — Sat, 02 May 2026 11:43:48 +0000

If a few moonbeam hippies (as claimed with so much evidence) can send love rays and scuttle the nuclear industry, or a few of Orwell's pigs can do much the same, then the nuclear industry is quite weak and that will need to be priced in by the market. "And it would have worked if not for you meddling kids!", or the Scooby-Doo argument as to why nuclear has had too many White Elephants. I mean if some Russian plutocrats whilst the Soviets were doing the Gorbachev can cause nuclear White Elephants worldwide, wow! That's really bad! Those not completely given over to the paranoid style in politics (where some outgroup is the bane of whatever) may wish to consider how much of the nuclear industry failures are own goals caused by hubris, incompetence, delusional thinking, or the corrupting influence of Mammon, things often not present in places more capable of running a tight ship.

Nuclear one may recall was "the obvious next thing" so was where anyone who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) went, just as hypersonic planes were "the obvious next thing" so everyone at Boeing who was somebody (or had delusions thereof) were on the A-team for hypersonics. And where else do Angel investors rush in where fools fear to tread?

New comment by tolciho in "AI uses less water than the public thinks"

tolciho — Sat, 02 May 2026 04:04:38 +0000

Short answer: it's complicated. A somewhat longer answer: "Cadillac Desert". Marc Reisner. 1986.

New comment by tolciho in "I Got Sick of Remembering Port Numbers"

tolciho — Fri, 01 May 2026 14:13:36 +0000

Various services have existed, such as portmap(8), though NFS and similar services have often suffered from the "too complicated to debug" problem where devops (then sysadmins) would try turning the system off and then back on again in the hopes of resolving the issue du jour. You might get lucky and determine that node number three (of many) was cursed and leave it switched off for the Season of Mammon, more commonly known as Christmas, and to retire it quietly, later. Hypothetically.

Generally host and port mapping gets shoved somewhere into the configuration management layer and hopefully does not become too complicated (or have too many security holes) as this could vary from "configuration files and a few scripts" to database and services layers that few can debug, especially not a sysadmin at 3 AM in the morning running on an hour of bad sleep. Hypothetically.

New comment by tolciho in "Belgium stops decommissioning nuclear power plants"

tolciho — Fri, 01 May 2026 13:58:36 +0000

Well, the marketing brocure said "too cheap too meter" but the result is often a White Elephant. Please explain how the nuclear folks missed the "too cheap to meter" target on account of some external shills. That is: how does one ensure that the next round of nuclear will not White Elepant like many of the previous rounds did? Besides the taxpayers taking it on the chin, as they usually do.