mcepl (u/mcepl) - Readit News

mcepl commented on Ana Marie Cox on the Shaky Foundation of Substack as a Business newsletter.anamariecox.co... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

techpineapple · 25 days ago

Why is it that Substack can’t just be run as a 10-20 person small-medium sized business forever? If publishers want to go there for a basic product, and Substack can collect rent from them, what’s the problem?

mcepl · 25 days ago

You cannot give millions of USD to potential authors if you are tiny webserver-running small business. That’s what the article was all about.

mcepl commented on Jujutsu for busy devs maddie.wtf/posts/2025-07-... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

stouset · a month ago

For anyone who's debating whether or not jj is worth learning, I just want to highlight something. Whenever it comes up on Hacker News, there are generally two camps of people: those who haven't given it a shot yet and those who evangelize it.

You will be hard-pressed to find someone who stuck with it for a week and decided to go back to git. You will not find a lot of people who say they switched but just stayed out of inertia. Of course both of these do happen—nothing is perfect—but they are by far the exception. From my own personal anecadata, I have seen a 100% conversion rate from everyone who gave it a serious try.

I encourage you to let today be the day that you decide to try it out. It is far less effort to make the switch than you probably think it is: I was productive the same day I switched and within a week I had no remaining situations where I needed to fall back to git commands. You will quickly be more productive and you will find yourself amazed at how you ever got by without it.

mcepl · a month ago

yes, I haven’t managed for a week, but I tried to Jujutsu and gave up. It is too complicated for no visible gain. Plus, there is no infrastructure supporting it (in the end, you store the stuff in the crippled git repositories). `git commit --amend` and `git rebase --update-refs` together with few scripts (e.g., https://git.sr.ht/~mcepl/git-fixup) does the same, and I am still with true git.

mcepl commented on Matrix v1.15 matrix.org/blog/2025/06/2... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

Arathorn · 2 months ago

Element One should support MAS + EX in the next 2-3 weeks.

Mozilla's EMS hosting got migrated over yesterday (at last)

60% of the rest of EMS-hosted servers are also migrated already.

Sorry it didn't happen earlier, but all our focus has been on getting on-premise deployments for people like NATO & the UN working excellently, and the SaaS deployments have been lagging.

mcepl · 2 months ago

Yeah, we are just paying customers, who cares about us, right?

mcepl commented on I convinced HP's board to buy Palm and watched them kill it philmckinney.substack.com... · Posted by u/AndrewDucker

ghaff · 2 months ago

There were a bunch of other issues but, yes, the compiler was a big one from which a number of the other issues stemmed.

mcepl · 2 months ago

I don’t think it is that simple. Itanium was for years supported for example by RHEL (including GCC working of course, if anybody cared enough they could invest into optimising that), it is not like the whole fiasco happened in one moment. No, Itanium was genuinely a bad design, which never got fixed, because it apparently couldn’t be.

mcepl commented on The Tragedy of Google Books (2017) theatlantic.com/technolog... · Posted by u/lispybanana

mcepl · 10 months ago

> Copyright terms have been radically extended in this country largely to keep pace with Europe, where the standard has long been that copyrights last for the life of the author plus 50 years. But the European idea, “It’s based on natural law as opposed to positive law,” Lateef Mtima, a copyright scholar at Howard University Law School, said. “Their whole thought process is coming out of France and Hugo and those guys that like, you know, ‘My work is my enfant,’” he said, “and the state has absolutely no right to do anything with it—kind of a Lockean point of view.” As the world has flattened, copyright laws have converged, lest one country be at a disadvantage by freeing its intellectual products for exploitation by the others. And so the American idea of using copyright primarily as a vehicle, per the constitution, “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts,” not to protect authors, has eroded to the point where today we’ve locked up nearly every book published after 1923.

This is disingenuous: the article doesn’t mention that the biggest proponent of the prolonging of the copyright terms were Americans (e.g., Walt Disney Corp and Jack Valenti, see “Mickey Mouse Protection Act” for more) not Europeans.

mcepl commented on Amber: A code search and replace tool github.com/dalance/amber... · Posted by u/bpierre

mcepl · a year ago

https://github.com/BurntSushi/ripgrep ???

mcepl commented on Parseback: A pure-Lua introspection library for LuaJIT's FFI ctype objects github.com/javierguerragi... · Posted by u/todsacerdoti

sillysaurusx · a year ago

I’ve often felt great LuaJIT’s "just paste C declarations for FFI" was its greatest achievement. I tried to dig into the source code and port the C parser to Python, but it was beyond me at the time.

Still seems like a good idea that I hope someone will do.

mcepl · a year ago

https://eli.thegreenplace.net/2013/03/09/python-ffi-with-cty...

mcepl commented on Department of Justice says Boeing may be criminally liable in 737 MAX crashes usatoday.com/story/money/... · Posted by u/andsoitis

purple-leafy · a year ago

Narrator: A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one.

Business woman on plane: Are there a lot of these kinds of accidents?

Narrator: You wouldn't believe.

Business woman on plane: Which car company do you work for?

Narrator: A major one.

mcepl · a year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto#Fuel_system_fires,_...

mcepl commented on Pražský Orloj: Prague astronomical clock simulator. (2022) orloj.org/orloj/... · Posted by u/fanf2

Toutouxc · a year ago

Literally listened to it today in the car (I have a soft spot for Elán). Also, as someone who lives in Prague, I don’t really go anywhere near the clock. That’s tourist land. It doesn’t feel like home.

mcepl · a year ago

Lived for some time five minutes walking from the Clock, and so I can heartily appreciate the old Prague joke:

“Daddy, why they call it the tourist season, when we cannot shoot them?”

mcepl commented on The Good Soldier Švejk (2018) blogs.loc.gov/internation... · Posted by u/palmfacehn

nutrie · a year ago

In a nutshell, we did it to ourselves by excessively promoting the novel over the course of many decades.

Starting with the avant-garde movements of the 20's, through the communism era (Hasek was a socialist and a communist) to this day, we've been essentially saying Svejk characterizes the true nature of what it means to be a Czech. You literally hear school teachers tell their students a drunk devious simpleton is considered a role model.

The topic is quite complex, there's more history and politics involved, but I'm not going there.

Disclaimer: By no means am I criticizing the book or people who like it.

mcepl · a year ago

I am a Czech as well, and although I know exactly what you are talking about, I have found my own way towards Švejk lately. I am afraid (all of them awesome artists, but too much pushing the novel in the humour direction) Lada, Hrušínský, and Trnka are guilty a lot for the feeling which is prevalent now. Contrary to that, I was fascinated a lot by listening to M.C.Putna’s discussion of Švejk in https://www.mujrozhlas.cz/putnuv-jihocesky-literarni-mistopi... and by listening to the novel in audio, where he understands basically Švejk as “Kafka by other means”, and there is a lot to it.