Having an alter-ego is one thing, but I strongly suspect that he had at least one sock puppet here during the drama with HN [0]
* a brand new account suddenly appears, defending Marcan's behavior (the only comment/post ever of this account) with a very similar writing style
* Marcan immediately "notices" the new comment while doing "random search" (how ? he claims he doesn't browse HN, and even posted a screenshot of news.ycombinator.com being routed to 0.0.0.0 to block his own access to it the day before)
* Marcan highlights the comment in question on his media account [1], praising them "at least [this commenter] gets it"
Only circumstantial stuff, but sure smells very fishy to me.
Along with many others here, your network programming guide helped me so much back in the early days of my education and career. So thanks for that too…
> AI made your homework? Guess what, the homework is a proxy for your talent, and it didn't make your talent.
Well, no. Homework is an aid to learning and LLM output is a shortcut for doing the thinking and typing yourself.
Copy and pasting some ChatGPT slop into your GCSE CS assignment (as I caught my 14yo doing last night…) isn’t learning (he hadn’t even read it) - it’s just chucking some text that might be passable at the examiner to see if you can get away with it.
Likewise, recruitment is a numbers game for under qualified applicants. Using the same shortcuts to increase the number of jobs you apply for will ultimately “pay off” but you’re only getting a short term advantage. You still haven’t really got the chops to do the job.
Kind of related to your point… I remember my maternal Grandmother was looking after me one day and I’d either missed or skipped my earlier vaccination appointment in school (which, I think was a BCG or booster, it was in the early 1990s). She was raised by her maternal Grandmother after her mother died from TB when she was 2 years old. Her father died of… something infectious when she was teenager
(the oral history is obviously a bit sketchy, but she used to tell me her father also caught TB - cholera maybe ? - when he was removing bodies from the flooded Balham tube station in 1940 - https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/75th-anniversary-of-the...)
Well, I got quite the scolding about missing my jabs and a stern lecture about how many awful diseases have been cured because of vaccination. I could never forget how emotional she was about it.
To people born in the early 20th century, seeing the effects first hand of the vaccination programmes of the mid 20th century (not to mention antibiotics) must have seemed miraculous. I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.
> I think we’ve lived without these diseases for so long that some people (stupid, selfish people) simply think they don’t exist or pose a threat any more.
This is true beyond just vaccines. All too often hardships are forgotten, history is just old pictures and stories, and people who are too far disconnected from those real events and don't learn from history will just walk the same path, leading to the same hardships.
They all think that the world is better today so they're smarter or better than the old generations, that the world evolved so they're intrinsically prepared, so the pains of the past can't harm them. Ironically they're ignoring all the lessons and the tools that made the world better and are needed to keep it like that, and instead think things are better because they just are.
They'll skip any vaccines or support extremist regimes because they think the modern world is just immune to this, it's intrinsically and permanently "fixed". We have freedoms or don't get sick because we "just" have freedoms and don't get sick.
Having close family spending a lifetime paralyzed by the polio virus before a vaccine was widely available, or spending some of my life in the cold embrace of dictatorship really drove the point home for me about learning the lessons of history.
I think it was just some small anti-culture (like healing stones or whatever. Same people initially) that got dragged into the with us or against us political landscape of the US.
An 18 year old lad from my village, who had just started a job programming, bought a drug from an online “pharmacy” and it turned out to be spiked with a synthetic opioid (N-pyrrolidino-etonitazene) and he died in his sleep at home, alone.
On your point about spiked products - it’s clearly a problem for online illegal drugs as well as those bought on the street.
The problem is, you don’t get to leave a bad review if you’re dead.
I don’t the comparison with a sports car is particular fair.
I regularly drive both a 2011 Prius and a 2023 BMW X1 “mild hybrid”, I’ve also test driven an iX1 electric and X3 “real” hybrid recently (all practical family cars).
In order of increasing accelerator-input-to-actually-moving (at low speed) delay:
iX1 electric (best)
Prius
X3 hybrid
X1 mild hybrid (worst, dangerously bad)
That is to say, every time I get into the 14 year old Prius I think “wow this is nippy” after having driven the 2 year old X1, which we’ve nicknamed “the lag wagon”.
Toyota really nailed the driving ergonomics of the gen2 Prius, given the constraints. Yes, it’s a slow to accelerate at high speeds, but it’s still really nice drive around town.
not even in the cycling community… At least 15 years ago getting your kid a balance bike in our circle of normal definitely-not-HN-reader friends was the done thing.
Graduation from a balance bike to a slightly larger bike-with-pedals-removed worked great for both my boys. They could pedal and ride a decent distance before they were out of nappies.
I’ve been supporting Hector since week 1 of the Asahi project and I think it’s a shame he’s thrown in the towel but I can understand why.
I don’t know enough about kernel development to have an opinion about about the Kernel policy of “no aliases” for contributions.
I certainly don’t care that some people think it’s weird for a man to have a female alter ego.
Maybe those things matter to you.
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