SilasX

4 ms·

1.
by SilasX 5d ago
Again, they do it even when those prerequisites don’t hold. And your second sentence is agreeing that it’s a different usage than the normal definiteness.
2.
by SilasX 6d ago
That's not how definiteness works otherwise -- it's always for a case where the other party would know which one you mean. This "selecting out of possible other choices" protocol is not a thing.
3.
by SilasX 6d ago
Third time: I'm not imposing some kind of prescriptivism, and I know that it's common. You're not bringing in any new information here. I'm saying it deviates from the usual pattern of using "the" when the noun
4.
by SilasX 6d ago
You don’t have to apologize, I don’t like it either.
5.
by SilasX 6d ago
>When you're talking to people you live with it is true that they know which store you are going to. But again, people use this even when I have no reason to know which store they went to. I’m not necessarily saying they should stop
6.
by SilasX 6d ago
I avoid making exceptions to the rule, but in the vernacular, people definitely break from it! You'll see e.g. "an historic event", usually justified because the first syllable is weak and close enough to being vowel-started.
7.
by SilasX 6d ago
Well, on that note: the construction “I went to the store” has always felt wrong to me as a native speaker. People say it even when that store lacks definiteness in context (ie the listener has no reason to know which one you mean). At the
8.
by SilasX 7d ago
I’d say it’s more about confronting the ways in which art is just posturing, hype, and status games, and what it’s like to find out you’re in an “Emperor’s New Clothes” situation.
9.
by SilasX 7d ago
Earlier HN discussions about it (both got flagged): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48158110 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48134400
10.
by SilasX 9d ago
Sure, but you generally those are separate conversations in which you don't need to appeal to the duality of encryption and authentication or apply the analogy to the latter.
11.
by SilasX 9d ago
Yeah, that always bothered me about the terminology. My fix would be to call it a lock -- everyone understands that you can share those and it doesn't make them any easier to open.
12.
by SilasX 11d ago
So you agree it's a problem, but still characterized the situation as "all is good" in your first comment. I would not call that good, and I would be have used different words to characterize/trivialize this situation.
13.
by SilasX 13d ago
Hm I've seen keyboards where INS didn't appear to do anything, but that was because you had to press a different button to activate the set of keys that includes INS, and you might have been looking at a case of that.
14.
by SilasX 19d ago
Reminds me of another story about older scripts being hard to read: I found a paperback with Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England[1]. In the intro, it explains how they made the deliberate decision to render them as pixel-f
15.
by SilasX 19d ago
Heh, I have a variant of Hanlon's Razor: Never attribute, to bigotry, that which can be explained by misanthropy. That is, don't assume that bad behavior is because of someone's membership in a particular demographic, when it
16.
by SilasX 28d ago
This has been a source of tremendous frustration for me. I was really happy to discover c. 2009 that you could get browser extensions that let you do anything on a website (like clicking links) from the keyboard. But increasingly, they&#x27
17.
by SilasX 28d ago
Similar, when you get an advantage and a disadvantage at the same time, I've proposed "bonalty": bonus + penalty.
18.
by SilasX 1mo ago
No, I used it by the standard meaning. The fact that you prefer doesn't make it not a breaking change, or a good idea in general. Notepad addresses a specific use case (dumb text editor). If you have a different use case, there are oth
19.
by SilasX 1mo ago
"Breaking change" is a pretty common term, especially here, so I don't get the confusion about what it means. It means an interface-breaking change, so that the same input produces a different output, and is generally to be a
20.
by SilasX 1mo ago
Even Notepad isn’t a dumb app anymore! They made breaking changes after 40 years so it has autocorrect, rich text, and Copilot. If I wanted all of that, I would have used a different app!
21.
by SilasX 1mo ago
Meter does matter to me, and I do enjoy music. Just the every-other-syllable stress with natural stresses in iambic pentameter doesn't resonate. In the lightning talk, I contrast IP with ska music, which I like, and which is characteri
22.
by SilasX 1mo ago
Thank you for recognizing the situation I was in! (Nit: "to be or not to be" is probably a bad example of something that depends on iambic for memorability.) Also, when I tried rewriting that soliloquy for modern ears, it didn&#x2
23.
by SilasX 1mo ago
Again, it was taught[1]. The fact that (speaking it with) one meter sounds particularly pleasant (to some people), and that this is a big part of its appeal (to those who like it) was not taught. IOW, it's the difference between &q
24.
by SilasX 1mo ago
Rant: I missed lot of Shakespeare appreciation when they somehow failed to teach that (other) people actually like how iambic pentameter sounds, and this is critical to enjoying it. Nothing about how Shakespeare is voiced has ever regis
25.
by SilasX 1mo ago
OpenAI released a feature that lets you tweak ChatGPT output to sound more human and like yourself and correct inaccuracies: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2026/04/open-ai-strikes-ba...
26.
by SilasX 1mo ago
It's not malicious compliance when the very governing authorities for this in the EU do the same thing.
27.
by SilasX 1mo ago
They also could have used those payments to build up an endowment that makes them not dependent on others.
28.
by SilasX 2mo ago
I wasn't saying that this invalidates the objection. I was (very clearly) asking them to lead by example. Regardless of the legal structure, the non-profit should still be calling the shots, and should still be vetoing efforts like the
29.
by SilasX 2mo ago
Mozilla is leveling this criticism? How about leading by example? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15940144 Thanks to altairprime for mentioning it first: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49137765
30.
by SilasX 3mo ago
I'm a little bothered by the reddit discussion, which dismisses the concern because it was tested on a machine with "only" 32 GB RAM, and normalizes letting apps get bloated: https://old.reddit.com/r/pcma

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