aeturnum (u/aeturnum)

aeturnum commented on Why are 38 percent of Stanford students saying they're disabled? reason.com/2025/12/04/why... · Posted by u/delichon

jph00 · 10 days ago

Amongst groups for extremely gifted kids I’ve seen, well over half are neurodivergent. It’s a well understood issue in gifted kids psychology. When these kids are accommodated appropriately they ace their classes, and when not, they fail out entirely, even at the most basic levels of education.

So the statistics mentioned in the article are not necessarily inconsistent with what we’d expect, since Stanford is a highly selective school that’s by definition going to be picking gifted kids over less gifted ones, and from that group will pick those that were accommodated appropriately.

(There could also be cheating - I don’t know either way. I’m just commenting on the premise of the article. One person in it claims the kids aren’t really disabled because they don’t have wheelchairs. Hopefully it’s fairly obvious that this claim is totally illogical. Such an obviously unreasonable claim on a website called “Reason” makes me wonder what they are actually trying to achieve there.)

aeturnum · 10 days ago

It is interesting to consider that disability may enable much higher academic performance as long as people get the proper accommodations. After all, wouldn't it be interesting if people we think of as disabled can - under the correct conditions - be more productive than 'able' people. An individuals' capability is generally pretty circumstantial and I think we should be open to asking questions about how optimal our current social structure is for productivity and capacity going forward. We may need to imagine new ways of living and structuring work and society to reach even higher levels of productivity.

aeturnum commented on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language" robbyonrails.com/articles... · Posted by u/robbyrussell

pizlonator · 13 days ago

> "Ruby doesn't work forever"

Where does the response even address this?

All I know is that Ruby code I wrote 10ish years ago is still going strong, for example a whole compiler https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/tree/main/Source/JavaScript...

aeturnum · 13 days ago

Here's some places I noticed it:

> critics love the Twitter example. But look closer. Ruby carried them further than most companies will ever reach. They outgrew their shoes. That’s not an indictment… that’s success.

> I’ve never seen a team fail because they chose Ruby. I have seen them fail because they chose complexity. Because they chose indecision.

> GitHub held the world’s source code together for years using Ruby.

There are many examples of companies that used Ruby at one point very successfully but moved on from it once it no longer fit their situation. This isn't a critique of Ruby! But it is agreeing that Ruby can be outgrown and that, if you are looking to start with a language your usecase probably won't ever outgrow, Ruby might not be the best choice.

aeturnum commented on Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language" robbyonrails.com/articles... · Posted by u/robbyrussell

aeturnum · 13 days ago

This is a weird response to a weird article. The original article doesn't define its terms and, as Robby points out, that makes it hard to critique. If a language is only "serious" if it can scale infinitely for all use cases then sure Ruby isn't serious - most languages aren't.

That said - this response and the critique seem to basically agree. The critique can be summed up as "Ruby doesn't work forever" (and so it should never be used) and this is saying "Ruby doesn't work forever" (which is fine). I could almost understand this post as saying: 'Ruby isn't serious and that's not a problem for anyone who uses it.'

I will say that I found it funny that the original article attacked Ruby for being all the way down at "18th place" (This is inaccurate - it's 14th in 2024) on the SO dev survey - while talking up Scala which is 9 places further down on the survey[1].

[1] https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2024/technology#most-popular...

aeturnum commented on Molly: An Improved Signal App molly.im/... · Posted by u/dtj1123

analogpixel · 15 days ago

weird, I have never been pwned via email which has been updated 0 times in the last 20 years. I guess Signal is just so poorly made it needs to be constantly re-written every 2 weeks.

aeturnum · 15 days ago

Email has been updated many times in the last 20 years. All of the major sender authentication protocols (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) were created and deployed over the last 20 years. Email is also famously insecure and lacking a standard way of managing encryption - so the reason you never see updates is because the features signal is changing do not exist in email at all.

aeturnum commented on OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 ft.com/content/23e54a28-6... · Posted by u/akira_067

rco8786 · 18 days ago

> Amazon will fight for its life to stop this.

Why? Amazon advertises heavily on Google search, why wouldn't they do the same with OAI?

aeturnum · 17 days ago

Because amazon doesn't have a web search service but they do have a product recommendation service? Even if they do pay OpenAI they would certainly be competing with their own service and keeping prices down via that. OpenAI needs Amazon (or some other fulfillment company) to deliver products. Amazon does not need OpenAI - they can build their own recommendation engine or work with another.

aeturnum commented on Homeschooling hits record numbers reason.com/2025/11/19/hom... · Posted by u/bilsbie

hereme888 · 23 days ago

The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.

Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.

Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.

So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...

* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.

aeturnum · 22 days ago

> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.

Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.

> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?

I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.

Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.

aeturnum commented on CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns apnews.com/article/immigr... · Posted by u/jjwiseman

mikem170 · 23 days ago

> we can all take in whatever is happening in public

People have the right to take in what is in public, but maybe cameras should not?

This could apply to everyone in public spaces. No video, audio or surveillance without obtaining permission. Better blur anything you share, or you might get busted. The least we could do is restrict corporations from possessing such data.

Similar to what Germany does with doorbell cameras, making it illegal to film anything outside of your property, like a public sidewalk or the neighbors house. It is my understanding that people there will confront someone taking pictures of them without their consent.

aeturnum · 23 days ago

I dunno - I think there are uses of surveillance in pursuit of enforcing laws that I don't think are harmful. Like...maybe you can record the public and pass it on to the police when there's a specific request for a time and place that a crime was allegedly committed? Like - if an organization has a legitimate interest in what happened there you can pass on your recording. But you can't just sell it to some random data broker, because they don't have a specific reason to want a recording of that place at that time.

aeturnum commented on CBP is monitoring US drivers and detaining those with suspicious travel patterns apnews.com/article/immigr... · Posted by u/jjwiseman

crazygringo · 24 days ago

I'm curious what you think the solution is?

Taking a photograph of a car with its license plate is legal. As is selling a photo you've taken, whether it has a license plate or not.

Therefore taking millions of photos in public of cars, and turning their license plate numbers into a database is legal, as is selling that information. It's all data gained in public.

Obviously it's now scary that you're being tracked. But what is the solution? We certainly don't want to outlaw taking photos in public. Is it the mass aggregation of already-public data that should be made illegal? What adverse consequences might that have, e.g. journalists compiling public data to prove governmental corruption?

aeturnum · 23 days ago

I think we have a mass re-assessment coming for how we think about data collected in public spaces. The realities of mass surveillance and mass data correlation come to very different outcomes than they did when we established our current rules about what is allowed in public spaces.

I don't really know what a better system looks like - but I suspect it has to do with the step where the info is provided to a third party. We can all exist in public and we can all take in whatever is happening in public - but it's not clear that passing that observation on to a third party who wasn't in public is an important freedom. Obviously this cuts both ways and we need to think carefully about preserving citizens rights to observe and report on the behavior of authorities (though also you could argue that reporting on people doing their jobs in the public space is different than reporting on private citizens).

aeturnum commented on Zed is our office zed.dev/blog/zed-is-our-o... · Posted by u/sagacity

verdverm · a month ago

I really really don't want comms or multiplayer tools in my IDE.

Don't bring the attention economy to my cave of solitude, it's where I go to escape all that noise

aeturnum · a month ago

It's not something I am excited about, but it is something I want my IDE to do well if I must engage with it. Other remote pair programming experiences are even worse and I appreciate Zed's capability in the area even if it's not what I prefer.

A lot of my IDE choices are about extensibility and flexibility more than perfection for my preferred coding approach. After all, until I only work for myself I need to be ready to accommodate the needs of others as part of my job.

aeturnum commented on A modern 35mm film scanner for home soke.engineering/... · Posted by u/QiuChuck

stringsandchars · a month ago

Disappointed to see that the first reactions on HN are so dismissive.

I'm both amazed and really pleased to see anyone attempting to launch a totally new scanner in 2025, and genuinely hoping the actual scans are really made at the resolution and color-depth claimed in the text: too many recent scanners are simply upscaled, lower bit-depth devices marketed with exaggerated specs.

I also have a Nikon Coolscan 9000, so I'm not immediately in the market for this. But I don't expect the Coolscan to last forever, and the Firewire connections on the machine are already abandoned by Apple, who chose not to support the cables in their latest Operating System - so eventually I won't be able to connect it to a new computer.

aeturnum · a month ago

The open source aspect seems worthy of attention if nothing else. Even if this is a middle-of-the-road scanner - the community being able to customize, improve and support it would be incredible. Especially considering your scanner is considered one of the best despite being over 20 years old.