Tor3 (u/Tor3) - Readit News

Tor3 commented on Nokia N900 Necromancy yaky.dev/2025-12-11-nokia... · Posted by u/yaky

sollewitt · 3 days ago

The N900 was my peak “mobile computing is awesome” device.

I went to see District 9 in the cinema in Helsinki. Uh oh, the alien parts are only subtitled in Finnish and Swedish and my Finnish is not up to that.

I installed a BitTorrent client, found the release on Pirate Bay, successfully torrented just the subtitle file, and used an editor to read the subtitles for scenes with a lot of alien.

The N9 had much better UI, but there was something of the cyberpunk “deck” idea in that thing, it was great.

Tor3 · 3 days ago

My N900 (Made in Finland, an early one) was great. I would have used it still if it wasn't for the fact that after 3G disappeared it was useless. The battery could be replaced (as others have mentioned), so it was perfectly fine still. Mechanically it was as good as new as well.

As it was basically like Debian Linux inside I could do what I usually do - write hobby projects and run it on the N900. I had my minicomputer emulator running. Nice to see my old favourite minicomputer editor on my N900.

Tor3 commented on UK House of Lords attempting to ban use of VPNs by anyone under 16 alecmuffett.com/article/1... · Posted by u/nvarsj

richwater · 3 days ago

EU countries seem to be obsessed with infringing upon their citizens privacy

Tor3 · 3 days ago

EU? Brexit, remember?

When that's said, there are forces in the EU as well which try stunts like this, kind of, but in the EU there are at least lots of countries and lots of opposing voices. In the UK the situation is different.

Tor3 commented on How the Brain Parses Language quantamagazine.org/the-po... · Posted by u/mylifeandtimes

vkazanov · 3 days ago

Computer languages are much simpler than human languages, and they also operate in similar kind of logical ways. I definitely remember how hard was to go from pascal to C to Cpp to Python to prolog to haskell to SQL... until at some point nothing was new.

Tor3 · 3 days ago

To me, working with a computer language involves specific thinking, constructing stuff in my mind. But human language is nothing of the sort, though it's possible to kind of do the same if I sit down and try to polish a written sentence. But talking in, and understanding a conversation is as far from this as I can imagine. And the learning process is so extremely different.

Tor3 commented on Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri reuters.com/world/us/rubi... · Posted by u/italophil

notachatbot123 · 4 days ago

I love how emphasize is given to accessibility for older adults, such as the orange man. But I guess he gets his printouts with few words and big fonts anyways.

Tor3 · 4 days ago

The way he writes indicates that he has very little experience with reading in the first place. Weird wording, strange capitalization and punctiation, etc.

Tor3 commented on How the Brain Parses Language quantamagazine.org/the-po... · Posted by u/mylifeandtimes

alfanick · 4 days ago

Anecdotal data, based on a sample of 1 (aka me). I'm originally Polish, but I would say my mother tongue is English. I also learned Latin as a kid/teen. Then learning any other languages is much easier, I also learned German and some Swiss German dialects. I can also do Spanish, Italian, French, Dutch, Czech, some Serbo-Croation. I think being Polish makes learning languages easy - as we have a lot of creations in Polish that do not translate easily to other languages. I think in my case it's the same part of brain that processes both human language and computer language. My brain can do another fun party trick: I never learned cyrillic, but I can read it just fine, my brain does like pattern matching and statistical analysis when reading cyrillic.

I also learned to think in hmm "concepts", and then apply a language of my choice to express them. It's a fun skill to have :) Obviously works of Chomsky are great, especially exploring if language evolves mind or is the other way around, does mind evolve language? [let's skip his rather controversial political views lately].

Tor3 · 4 days ago

I speak several languages too, though definitely not as many as you do. I'm also in the process of learning a completely new one, at an advanced age relative to when I last learned a new one (I was in my thirties then). To me, my brain most definitely doesn't process human language the way it handles computer language. It's about as different as it can get. The latter is "learning", the former is "burn patterns into the brain", and learning a language can take years, at least at this age. Computer languages? Those can be picked up in as little as a weekend, and getting proficient isn't a multi-year or decade long process. It feels totally different for me (I've been learning new computer languages at the same time as I've been trying to get up to speed with a new human language).

Tor3 commented on Booting Linux in QEMU and Writing PID 1 in Go to Illustrate Kernel as Program serversfor.dev/linux-insi... · Posted by u/birdculture

mrbluecoat · 4 days ago

> If you ever wondered what this name means: vmlinuz: vm for virtual memory, linux, and z indicating compression

Thank you. I have always wondered that.

Tor3 · 4 days ago

In the early days when the kernel was small (I used to build kernels and copy them to floppy disks, and boot Linux from there) the kernel was called 'vmlinux', and when compression was added after the kernel started to get bigger it became 'vmlinuz'. It was still possible to boot from 'vmlinux', and it may be possible today as well, for all I know.

Tor3 commented on The closer we look at time, the stranger it gets sciencefocus.com/science/... · Posted by u/philbo

tacker2000 · 6 days ago

Also see the twin paradox, which is related to this and equally fascinating.

If one twin stays on earth and the other makes an intergalactic trip (with the speed of light), upon return, the one on earth will have aged much more than the one on the trip.

Tor3 · 6 days ago

The paradox isn't actually when the twin is returning, the paradox is seen during the trip away from earth. Both are observing each other through telescopes, and both can see the clock on the wall in each other's home (a house, or for the twin, his space ship. Which has got a big window). And both can observe that the other twin's clock is moving at a slower pace than their own clock. And that's the paradox.

(p.s. the spacefaring twin doesn't have to move at the speed of light, and indeed cannot, it's enough to move at a "relativistic" speed, i.e. fast enough that this is actually measurable. With today's clock that doesn't have to be very fast actually)

Tor3 commented on CJEU has made it effectively impossible to run a user-generated platform legally techdirt.com/2025/12/04/e... · Posted by u/alsetmusic

orwin · 10 days ago

> It's not limited to ads

Are you sure? We might have a different reading then, I felt it was obvious it was because it was an ad. And even more, an ad display through an algorithm, I.E it wouldn't apply to Craigslist or platform that display user-generated ads in chronological order.

Tor3 · 10 days ago

The _source_ of it was an ad. The _fix_ is not limited to ads.

Tor3 commented on CJEU has made it effectively impossible to run a user-generated platform legally techdirt.com/2025/12/04/e... · Posted by u/alsetmusic

Tor3 · 10 days ago

Sigh. "..that personal data processed must be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date. "

How do they think a hosting provider can check if personal data is accurate? Maybe if privacy didn't exist and everybody could be scrutinized.. but the ruling refers to the GDPR to justify this, and the GDPR is about _protecting_ privacy. So, what is it?

And for everything else.. is the material sensitive or not? How can anyone know, in advance?

I suggest every web site host simply forward all and every input to an EU Court address, and let them handle it. They're the ones suggesting that hosts should make sure that personal data on someone is "accurate", they're the ones demanding that the data should not be "sensitive", so they can as well be responsible for vetting the data.

But they're all crazy anyway, as they demand that a website must block anyone from copying the content.. so how, at the same time, can you even have a website? A website which people can watch?

If the ruling was about collecting data which isn't for displaying, i.e. what a net shop does (address, credit card number), then this would be understandable. But provisions for that already exists, instead they use this (GDPR) as a tool to extend this to user-created content. It's not limited to ads, and ads do need something done. Something totally different from this.