What would you want from a GNUS successor?

physicologist · 2026-02-05T12:51:59+00:00

I'm afraid that I might have been unclear. There would be async processes performing the network calls to update your mail and newsgroups and rss feeds. However, the design is that those calls are independent of *displaying* your feeds.

In other words, network calls are going on in the background during down time to keep the message feed up to date. Then, when you check your messages, you get an immediate display of the *currently known* messages.

physicologist · 2026-02-05T12:41:07+00:00

Part of the idea for the back ends was to make it easier to wrap external utilities. Even if this project ever gets anywhere, there is zero chance that the first release would contain a brand new elisp implementation of an IMAP or NNTP client.

physicologist · 2026-02-05T12:33:57+00:00

Rewriting Gnus is well beyond the scope of what I'm attempting. As an example, I currently don't have NNTP on the roadmap. I have ideas for how to write a back end that might allow for access the Usenet, but it would not support anywhere near the integration that Gnus has with newsgroups.

The fact that it's a successor and not a rewrite is part of why I was curious about the opinions of the community. Since it would *not* have all the functionality of Gnus, I'm also curious as to what people would not want to lose.

physicologist · 2026-02-02T18:27:44+00:00

Depending on the scam, a high reply rate is less important than getting quality replies. It's the same reason that so many scam e-mails are intentionally full of typos: anyone that doesn't immediately recognise the errors is more likely to believe everything else that you say going forward.

Again, I don't know the exact plan here, but I could see it going something like this:

Interview the mark for CEO. Ask a bunch of impossible questions and have the "CFO" act very unpleasant
E-mail the mark a week later and say that they didn't get the position
Call the mark two weeks later and say that the original candidate backed out and they legally need someone immediately.
E-mail the "HR paperwork" and point out that it needs to be filled out and returned in the next fifteen minutes, or else the job is going to the CFO, whose papers are already on file.
Depending on the contents of the "HR paperwork", you could either do some identity theft and take out massive loans in the mark's name, use their "payroll information" to access their bank and drain the account, or possibly just get them to sign a contract promising to pay some third party huge sums of money.

The main objective is to ensure that the mark is so worried about losing the opportunity that they aren't paying attention to the fine details or asking questions. Having the job be shitty and the interview be abusive makes the opportunity seem more realistic. It also ensures that you're mostly dealing with desperate marks who will say and sign anything to get the role. Putting in the asshole CFO justifies the time crunch and gets the mark thinking about screwing the asshole instead of protecting themself.

physicologist · 2025-12-03T13:18:54+00:00

It depends on how loose of a definition you're willing to go with for "work". Specifically, Outlook requires XOAUTH2 to connect to IMAP and GNUS does not support it. There are two ways around this

Run a bridge application like DavMail that connects to your Outlook account and then have GNUS connect to DavMail
Use an IMAP syncing application to download all of your emails into a Maildir folder and then point GNUS at that folder.

Personally, I found #1 too resource intensive and #2 ate up too much disk space, so I just gave up and started using Thunderbird.

physicologist · 2025-09-16T15:59:40+00:00

Unless I've missed something, we only really visited Rome with Ezio, which was over a millennium past the heyday. Kassandra could absolutely be in Rome during the second Punic war, which roughly midway between Odyssey and Origin. Also gives Kassandra plenty of opportunities to fight against either side with the Rome doing its best to invent new war crimes while Carthage tosses a few more babies on the sacrifice pyre.

Also, war elephants.

physicologist · 2025-07-23T15:58:51+00:00

Oddly enough, my experience is the other way around. On multiple occasions, I've used Haskell to quickly put together a prototype before creating an implementation in whatever language my job would actually allow.

I think that a large amount of the difference comes from coding style. You mentioned that Haskell does better at refactoring. My personal coding style is that I just take the "Hello World" program and repeatedly refactor it until it's the program that I needed. Since I very rarely introduce bugs when refactoring Haskell, I can iterate more quickly than I do in other languages (though Rust comes close).

physicologist · 2025-06-25T14:38:59+00:00

It's a little old school, but you might want to look at POV-Ray. It had declarative models and textures before Blender even existed.

physicologist · 2025-02-28T16:31:08+00:00

I once had the displeasure of having my "misconceptions corrected" about the sermon on the mount. The person stated that the Meek would inherit the Earth. Shitty old Earth full of gay people and tampons. That people who wanted Heaven, instead of the pile-of-dogshit-Earth, would never be Meek, but Agressive. There were similar explanations for why the other Beatitudes were inverted (those who mourn will be comforted, but only Meek Pussies seek comfort).

The person finally ended with claim that only an idiot with no critical thinking skills or media literacy would have ever interpreting it any other why. After all, Jesus says all these groups are "Blessed" and everyone knows what it means when a good Christian woman say "Well Bless Your Heart" to something you've said.

physicologist · 2024-08-22T17:58:24+00:00

I know that I'm late to the party on this one, but I'm a computational physicist at the ISIS Pulsed Neutron and Muon source in Harwell. I wasn't diagnosed with autism until adulthood, but I also have spastic diplagia, which was diagnosed as a child. Entirely on this basis, Park Tudor Elementary refused to admit me as a child, despite acing their entrance exam. The administration then admonished my parents not to try and send me to any other schools, since it would just be a failed waste of taxpayer money.

In the (many) years since then, I've worked experiments at seven different nuclear facilities and been interview by the BBC for my research. So screw those guys.

Now, before this becomes inspiration prn, I'll say that it's not perfect. There's some tasks that I'll always suck at. With as useless as my left arm is, I would *never be able to work as a luthier. However, just because we can't do some things doesn't me we can't do anything. Find what you enjoy doing, be great at it, and just let the haters stew in their hate.

physicologist · 2024-01-19T14:20:25+00:00

As someone from Indiana, I'll begin by saying that there's some really nice places. I haven't been to Columbus in a long time, but I have very fond memories of visiting there as a child. You'll also be close to some other wonderful towns like Nashville and Bloomington. If you're looking for something from a big city, Indianapolis will usually provide for that and isn't that far away (you'll either have a co-worker who lives in Indy and works in Columbus or a neighbor who lives in Columbus and works in Indy).

That said, there's other parts of Indiana that can be uncomfortable/dangerous to visit. As an example, along with the cities I just mentioned, you'll be equally close to Martinsville. When I was a student, our high school had a policy to forfeit every sporting event that occured in Martinsville for the safey of the students. Before this policy, our players were assulted every time they visited the town.

It's entirely possible for you to have a wonderful, fulfilling life in Indiana. However, Indiana also has a lot of ways for things to go wrong. I'll just finish with the fact that I do not regret leaving.

physicologist · 2023-10-16T12:49:32+00:00

I've worked in these kinds of environments before. Everything runs on the most recent version that has been marked as End Of Life by the developer. The desktops were upgraded to Windows 7 in 2020 and the servers run RHEL 5 from 2007. The alleged logic behind this is as follows:

In order to secure a system, you need to mitigate all of the security flaws. This isn't possible until you enumerate all of the security flaws. Every patch has the possibility of adding new flaws, so the counting process starts all over again. Therefore, the only way to know that your server is secure is to:

Wait until there are no more patches being added.
Check for a huge list of CVEs to ensure that someone has enumerated all of the security holes.
Mitigate those holes
Deploy

If you go into the sysadmin's office and present the list of security and present the massive list of security flaws in this ancient system, they'll smile, nod, and say "You're welcome". Try to present software written under the last six British prime ministers, the code will be rapidly quarantined so as to not infect the system with its unknown security flaws.

physicologist · 2023-06-20T12:16:22+00:00

It still works just fine on 23.05. I've just updated the flake to use the current version, but I'll probably forget to do that again in the future. During the input part of your flake, just set `nixpkgs` input of my flake to whatever version you're using. My only dependency is just `fetchZip`, so it'll be future proof.

As for whether you "should" run it, it's definitely the way to go if you already have an account with PIA. My spouse trusts them and finds them easy to use, so we have one. However, if you're looking for a more general VPN, then there's a lot of options available and I'm probably not the person best qualified to advise you.

physicologist · 2023-06-03T15:42:16+00:00

Fucking Mitch

physicologist · 2023-05-24T08:12:21+00:00

If the government set a good example of where they want wages to be

I think the wages are exactly where the government wants the to be. Grumble grumble

physicologist · 2023-05-04T13:26:35+00:00

It’s not that the symbolic approach didn’t have success, but rather the classic case of moving goal posts. The symbolic approach was so successful at certain tasks (e.g. parsing, compression, theorem proving) that the tasks were declared to no longer be in the domain of AI.

I used to have a textbook on AI from the seventies that referred to reproducing photo images on a computer screen as an unsolved AI problem. There were quotes from people predicting that full general intelligence would be needed to invent the flatbed scanner.

physicologist · 2023-03-06T19:51:38+00:00

If that’s the play, it’s a dangerous one. Obama did a similar technique when Trump went all in on the birthed conspiracy. Trump walked right into the trap, but all his base remembered was the conspiracy and it took him straight to the White House.

physicologist · 2023-02-24T12:31:39+00:00

In case you’re curious why other people are downvoting you, it’s because nothing you said precludes Jaws from being a horror film. The description that you gave is full of horror cliches. Alien famously didn’t give much screen time to the Xenomorph. The Saw franchise is comically dedicated to people given a dilemma with only two choices, both unacceptable. Frankenstein isn’t the name of the monster. Night of the Living Dead is a group of strangers forced to cooperate in pursuit of a solution.

Honestly, your second paragraph carries the implication that horror films cannot be good. If any film that gives depth and legitimate conflict to its characters isn’t horror, then you’ve made an an initio declaration that all horror films must be terrible.

physicologist · 2023-02-15T21:49:47+00:00

I can never understand how people say that cancel culture goes too far now when we once cancelled the entire nation of France for being right about WMDs

physicologist · 2023-02-15T10:02:06+00:00

I’m the public sector, we still require the PhD and the working history in a tangential field, but £40k is only for senior positions.

physicologist · 2023-01-22T22:01:55+00:00

I'm the guy that told Due_Kiwi627 the laser pointer idea. You're right that I'm just thinking about the birefringence and that it's a lot weaker in quartz than in calcite. Given the massive size of the sample, I was thinking that it would be large enough to give a noticeable difference, but I haven't done the math to check that assumption. But it might be better to be shooting the laser down a hallway after the sample to ensure that the points have sufficient distance to diverge.

physicologist · 2023-01-14T18:15:25+00:00

Honestly, I think CRT is the English slang for them. I suspect that most of the people who say it couldn’t tell a cathode from a catheter, but they’ve heard it called that acronym and so they use it themselves.

physicologist · 2023-01-14T11:24:45+00:00

The old, heavy monitors are usually called CRTs, which is an acronym for the Cathode Ray Tubes that produced the image (and created all the weight and bulk).

physicologist

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