pm3003 (u/pm3003) - Readit News

pm3003 commented on Cow vs. Water Buffalo Mozzarella (2011) itscheese.com/reviews/moz... · Posted by u/indigodaddy

FredPret · 24 days ago

Reading this, I thought some madman was milking a Cape water buffalo, which have been known to beat lions in 1-v-1 fights, and is only capable of one emotion: murder.

But turns out this milk is from the Asian water buffalo, which is even bigger than the African kind, but can be domesticated.

pm3003 · 23 days ago

"Italian" (and Egyptian) water buffaloes are not really bigger than regular cows. They are said to have come to the Middle East then to Italy through gifts from the Arabs or by Crusaders I believe.

pm3003 commented on Signal – An Ethical Replacement for WhatsApp greenstarsproject.org/202... · Posted by u/miles

leshokunin · 2 months ago

If I wanted to self host and offer my users something with encryption like Signal, what would be a good solution? Would love to enable accounts for everyone who has an account with us on supabase.

Any recommendations?

pm3003 · 2 months ago

Matrix comes to mind (Synapse server and whichever client you choose). It has good encryption and can be federated. Downside is that it gets heavy for old devices when you're in a lot of encrypted group chats.

XMPP is very efficient and delightfully simple to use and administrate. I never tried E2EC with it, but there are options on the clients, like OMEMO. It has limited federation.

The simplest server IMO is Openfire, but offers range from Lua-written Prosody to the extremely expensive Isode servers that can do complete federation, HF radio XMPP and probably coffee and pizzas too.

pm3003 commented on Ask HN: What projects do you donate to? · Posted by u/xeonmc

pm3003 · 3 months ago

a browser and a long-running podcast.

pm3003 commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

arvinsim · 3 months ago

It's ironic that the device that is supposed to facilitate reading(e readers) makes it so hard to read articles from the web.

pm3003 · 3 months ago

I feel like there should be an easy and common file transfer protocol, like a more straightforward bittorrent,FTP,MTP to exchange with these devices.

pm3003 commented on Mozilla to shut down Pocket and Fakespot support.mozilla.org/en-US... · Posted by u/phantomathkg

kimberli · 3 months ago

That's so unfortunate--I've also used Pocket for a decade+. I had the Omnivore app installed on my phone as a replacement for the other infinite feed scrolling apps.

I'm actually working on an open-source alternative at https://curi.ooo if you're interested in checking it out. It's a work in progress, but I'm building it primarily for my own use because I'm frustrated with all these services shutting down.

The Kobo integration you have is interesting too, wonder how I could support that use case...

pm3003 · 3 months ago

That's great! I've been looking for something for a while. Great features from my point of view:

- email newsletters, especially with offline mails (no remote images) since theya can go easily through workplace gateyways for those of us who work in secure areas. Didn't see yet if yours were.

- sync and integrate with everything, e-readers, nextcloud, browsers...

- PWA

Good luck!

pm3003 commented on The Awful German Language (1880) faculty.georgetown.edu/jo... · Posted by u/nalinidash

GuestFAUniverse · 3 months ago

The example with the rain is wrong. It's either the proper "wegen des Regens" (Genitiv), or the new idiom "wegen dem Regen" (Dativ). "wegen den Regen" means something slightly different (more like: "because of _multiple_ rainfalls")

There's a whole book by Bastian Sick (famous German author) named "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod." -- the title about the Dativ being the death of the Genetiv is playing with that idiom.

https://languagetool.org/insights/de/beitrag/dativ-genitiv-s... -- it's in German and discusses the (perceived) change of that idiom.

As much as I like Twain, the English language is one of the hardest European languages, when it comes to pronunciation (contrary to Italian, which sticks to a few simple rules). So, you're welcome, choose your poison.

pm3003 · 3 months ago

I just spent 10 minutes in the Grimm dictionary checking if there was ever a case where wegen would be followed by accusative....

Interestingly, they tend to say wegen comes from "von wegen" with the meaning of "by ways of" making genitive more evident.

pm3003 commented on Our narrative prison aeon.co/essays/why-does-e... · Posted by u/anarbadalov

hinkley · 3 months ago

In children’s movies the antagonist/monster is often meant as a metaphor for the child’s lack of autonomy in an ambivalent world that they do not fully understand.

And then you have My Neighbor Totoro, where all the monsters are friends, and the bad guy is just chronic illness, children who have let their imaginations run wild and fear the worst, a sibling getting lost, and at the end basically nothing happens which is the best news considering. There is no metaphor for human struggle, it’s just human struggle.

While some of his movies like Castle In the Sky, Mononoke and Nausicaä follow a modified Hollywood bad guy arc (in Castle half the bad guys practically become chosen family, in Spirited Away they become allies), a lot don’t. Up on Poppy Hill is essentially two teenagers in love discovering to their horror that they are first cousins, despair, and then discover that one of them was adopted.

But in all of them is the self-rescuing princess. The child either has to save themselves or at least demand the help that they are rightfully entitled to.

I got to introduce some kids to Ghibli right as Disney started distributing them. If you’ve seen Lasseter’s introduction to Spirited Away that’s where we were at that time - I’m telling you a secret that should not be a secret. And they in turn “forced” their friends to watch them in the same way my generation forced people to watch The Princess Bride; like it was a moral imperative to postpone other plans and rectify this egregious oversight in their education.

pm3003 · 3 months ago

To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).

pm3003 commented on Fandom sells gaming media brand Giant Bomb to long-term staff about.fandom.com/news/fan... · Posted by u/minimaxir

jaoane · 4 months ago

The best thing Fandom could do for the community is close forever. Talk about a cancerous website. People like to talk shit about Pinterest, but Fandom is tremendously worse, since its SEO efforts drown actually useful websites.

pm3003 · 4 months ago

https://icarly.fandom.com/wiki/Seddie

pm3003 commented on Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire acoup.blog/2025/05/02/col... · Posted by u/StefanBatory

antisthenes · 4 months ago

> Your average conscripted peasant during the middle ages would be arriving as part of their lord’s retinue.

Most peasants during the Middle ages did not fight at all, except in revolts and uprisings, usually with terrible outcomes.

If they were taken along for the (military campaign) ride by their feudal lord, it is most likely they would have avoided the battlefield altogether, providing auxiliary services, e.g. setting up camp, feeding the horses, cooking, tending to their liege, etc.

Conscription was not really a thing until the mid-Renaissance (roughly), and the vast majority of battles in the Middle ages was fought by nobility, ranging from lower class to dukes and lords.

pm3003 · 4 months ago

Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).

Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.

pm3003 commented on Why Archers Didn't Volley Fire acoup.blog/2025/05/02/col... · Posted by u/StefanBatory

jjk166 · 4 months ago

What the author does not really discuss here is the discipline of troops. While some armies were highly disciplined and would not be deterred by a hail of arrows with a single digit probability of being killed or disabled, I imagine it would be a pretty big deterrent for your average conscripted peasant. These are people who likely have no formal training, very little personal stake in the outcome of the battle, and the crappiest protection. Even with modern firearms, most shots fired are not killing enemy combatants, they are suppressing fire that pin down professional soldiers, making it difficult to complete their objectives, and certainly slowing them down. Maybe the smart play when faced with a barrage of arrows is to close the distance as quickly as possible and jump on the archers, but again if you are just some guy who has never so much as seen a battle before, I imagine it would be next to impossible to fight the instinct to try and hunker down behind some cover. Throw in the fact that archers can't maintain a high rate of fire for long, and the archers are almost certainly either armed for melee combat, or defended by soldiers who are, and it makes some real sense to try and get the enemy to waste shots while you are at long range, and conversely for the archers to hold their fire and wait until the enemy gets closer. There would also undoubtedly be a large variety in strategy depending on who you're fighting.

For the Persians, for example, who were mostly fighting various disorganized tribes, it makes a lot of sense that they would find a lot of success with a large archer force. It also makes sense when the Persians came up against comparatively disciplined and well armored Greeks that they would be able to close the gap with minimal casualties.

pm3003 · 4 months ago

There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.

Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.