I don't think Gnus is that bad once you spend some time setting it up. For groups with a ton of content where I mostly want to search, I found it was better to just download the whole group and index into notmuch. I could query 20 years of the Smalltalk USENET group or the Supercollider mailing list instantly.
Read again, I used slrnpull's cache. Mail was fast with Mu4e and Mairix. GNUS with slrn, not much. I have tons of articles from comp.* and some alt.* related groups. People loves to talk at comp.misc and comp.arch.
Also GNUS' caching it's really slow compared to slrn. Yes, I know, Elisp vs C, but even with native compilation it was excruciatingly slow. I've seen bytecoded TCL back in the day running really fast for these tasks.
WASM and the performance seems catastrophically bad (45ms to render a frame on an M4 laptop)? It would be much more impressive if Claude could optimize it into something that someone would actually want to play? Compare this to a random hit from Google, https://jsnes.org/ which has sound, much smaller payload, and runs really fast (<1ms to render a frame).
The cost of slop is >40X drop in performance? Pick any metric that you care about for your domain perhaps that's what you're going to lose and is the effort to recover that practical with current vibe-coding strategies?
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
- the terrible educational state of the school system?
- the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?
- they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets?
- they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?
I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).
I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.
Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?
We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
I agree its not always "racism", but ultimately the main reason is still largely the same. They don't think their kids should mingle with the "others". Its the exact same logic of black school segregation during Jim Crow.
Sometimes for good reason. Observe what happened to people who tried to approach Sentinel island. That may seem extreme, but it's not my point. It's is that cultures are different and some are detrimental to the people of some other culture's wellbeing.
I saw a study a while back - don't have the link handy - that while homeschooled kids of all ethnicities showed improved education outcomes compared to their public-school counterparts, African American kids improved the most. Not really surprising if they would otherwise be going to the worst schools!
On OS X you can achieve this with Keyb, Karabiner Elements, etc. It's also easy to do with a programmable keyboard with ZMK/QMK. I've set up my Kinesis 360 Pro this way, being symmetrical means I can access every key easily. Hardware support for sticky keys also helps quite a bit.
I don't see how anything about what's presented here that refutes such claims. This mostly confirms that LLM based approaches need some serious baby-sitting from experts and those experts can derive some value from them but generally with non-trivial levels of effort and non-LLM supported thinking.
It's not the "modern expert system", unless you're throwing away the existing definition of "expert system" entirely, and re-using the term-of-art to mean "system that has something to do with experts".
I don't know what the parent was referring to, but IMO "expert system" is one of the more accurate and insightful ways of describing LLMs.
An expert system is generically a system of declarative rules, capturing an expert's knowledge, that can be used to solve problems.
Traditionally expert systems are symbolic systems, representing the rules in a language such as Prolog, with these rules having been laboriously hand derived, but none of this seems core to the definition.
A pre-trained LLM can be considered as an expert system that captures the rules of auto-regressive language generation needed to predict the training data. These rules are represented by the weights of a transformer, and were learnt by SGD rather than hand coded, but so what?
Well, OK, perhaps not a declarative rule, more a procedural one (induction heads copying data around, and all that) given the mechanics of transformer layers, but does it really make a conceptual difference?
Would you quibble if an expert system was procedurally coded in C++ rather than in Prolog? "You see this pattern, do this".
Yes, it makes a conceptual difference. Expert systems make decisions according to an explicit, explicable world model consisting of a database of facts, which can be cleanly separated from the I/O subsystems. This does not describe a transformer-based generative language model. The mathematical approaches for bounding the behaviour of a language model are completely different to those involved in bounding the behaviour of an expert system. (And I do mean completely different: computer programs and formal logic are unified in fields like descriptive complexity theory, but I'm not aware of any way to sensibly unify mathematical models of expert systems and LLMs under the same umbrella – unless you cheat and say something like cybernetics.)
You could compile an expert system into C++, and I'd still call it an expert system (even if the declarative version was never written down), but most C++ programs are not expert systems. Heck, a lot of Prolog programs aren't! To the extent a C++ program representing GPT inference is an expert system, it's the trivial expert system with one fact.
Loading time is pretty rough, but it seems responsive enough after the initial load. Probably as fast or faster than downloading and installing GHC locally.
I would assume that in the near future one can preload, cache, update selected WASM packages. I also imagine that sooner than that we can preload open models in the browser to run the natively instead of only invoking third parties (e.g. window.ai in the DOM)
Blitz format is reasonably popular on KGS (once you get to a certain level) usually 10+0. Blitz is harder to find on Pandanet - but you can easily blitz on Fox.
Zero increment blitz go is a terrible idea IMX; people will just play nonsense moves after the game should be ended, and calling a moderator takes time. Go lacks the absolute nature of checkmate.
http://online-go.com has an interesting anti-stalling feature: If you pass several times it checks with KataGo. If KataGo is 99% sure you will win, either player can click a button to accept that result and end the game.
Yes! Recent personal hacks with advice interactively programmed with the help of Claude 4.1 chat session running in Emacs.
- popping the global mark to travel backwards to previous edit points would reuse the same Emacs window instead of using a window that is already showing the buffer. Fixed
- I would accidentally destroy my window configuration w/ C-x 1. Fixed, use advice to automatically save the window configuration into a register if I invoke the command to remove all other windows. Now I can easily recover if I make that mistake.
- I want to be able to select and then scroll any other open window w/o leaving the current one. Fixed
- A crazy one. I collect note w/ links or whatever for reading/watching later, these are marked w/ a timestamp. My notes file is not an agenda file, i.e. not filled with todos / tasks. I made a hack to temporarily include the current non-agenda org-mode buffer in the agenda list and then show inactive timestamps. Now I can scan a day/week/month for interesting notes I took. This doesn't interact at all with my real agenda.
- org-agenda opens items in weird places, use advice to fix it so that it always appears where I like.
- fix inf-clojure so that it uses dep.edn as project root over .git
I used IntelliJ happily for 10 years (I was a heavy Emacs user for 10 years before that). While it's true that some things are a little less convenient (I don't use LSP), knowing that I can tailor things exactly to my tastes is a serious breath of fresh air.
It used to be I mostly used IntelliJ for work/OSS and Emacs for org-mode. Now the situation is likely reversed. Emacs for work/OSS and IntelliJ only if I need step debugging/global refactoring.
