In the same vein was an incident where an improperly localized phone in Turkey caused a sent message to arrive with different characters, with very different meaning, and the fallout was two deaths [1], discussed here [2]
Precisely why I built https://freetofile.com (it’s a simple static site with React for internationalization that automatically renders in Spanish, Chinese, Haitian Creole, or English depending on browser settings). It’s shocking and depressing how many low income people don’t know they don’t need to spend $100-200 to file their taxes.
I want to blanket my area (well the whole country really but baby steps…) in signs with the URL during tax season. I really do loathe the entire industry at this point due to their gross practices around free filing. Some offer “free” online filing but deceptively upsell until they squeeze some money out of the customer. So I want to make any little push back I can against these companies.
Joanna's (Qubes OS Founder) blog [1] is a gold mine when it comes to hardware-software boundary security. Especially "State considered harmful" [2] and "x86 considered harmful" [3] papers are eye-openers.
I'm equal parts amused and bewildered that this author with so many interesting thoughts has managed not to see what pretty much every other serious reader of Lord of the Rings has pointed out over decades - the entire story is about a weak and almost completely unknown set of people who were "chosen" only by the most inexplicable series of events anyone could imagine - who through no inherent power of their own manage to save the world by nothing more or less than the choice to be kind to a pitiful (though clearly treacherous) creature... and who then go right back home where they belong, dismissing any notion of chosenness beyond the ordinary sort where everyone is chosen to do what is good for their neighbors.
the Hobbits pursued not greatness or destiny, but took the only path toward life available to them and then returned to let the rest of the world get on with living.
>I also gave up on progressives and now have two pairs: readers and drivers.
Yes, both progressives and high-index lenses suffer from the same problems: smaller field-of-vision and higher distortion of peripheral vision
If I sit with my eyes 36 inches away from a 30-inch screen...
With a single-vision lens, without my head moving at all, my eyes can move within their sockets to see the bottom corner of screen showing the date & time, and to the top corner showing the [x] button to close windows. Single-vision lenses have edge-to-edge clarity.
With progressives or high-index lenses, it requires rotating & tilting my head to put those corner locations directly in my central field of vision. Imagine a horse with blinkers[1]. The edges of those lenses are blurrier so you have to move your head to move the lens' center spot toward the item of interest for maximum sharpness.
Maximum field-of-vision is the optimal ergonomics of looking at multiple windows of text on a 30" monitor. Yes, high-index lenses are thinner and more fashionable but I don't need that when concentrating on programming code and reading web pages.
>You cannot depend on optometrists+opticians to make the right choice for you. You need to educate yourself on the available choices.
That's why I bought my own set of trial lenses[2]. I can methodically optimize my computer distance vision without exhausting the patience of my optometrist repeatedly asking, "which is better? 1? or 2? (again) 1? or 2?". I then go to Zenni and order the exact diopters I need. (I'm not going to buy a glaucoma tester so I'll still go to the eye doctor for that.)
I end up with 3 separate pairs of single-purpose glasses: 1 for reading books ~12 inches, 1 for computer distance ~36 inches, and 1 for driving 20+ feet. Swapping out glasses for each purpose is inconvenient but the larger field-of-vision makes it worth the hassle.
That's reminds me when I was in South East Asia a few years back and wanted to do some time lapse or series photography with my Sony Alpha a7ii. A camera that I had paid close to 2k€ for (just body, no glass).
It required an app to be installed on the camera that was paid-for. Which in term required the camera to be connected to a WiFi.
Imagine discovering this while on a trip in the jungle or the desert or whatever ...
It was a one time purchase (I think around 10€) but it was still a complete wtf.
You had to purchase the app through the camera's app store. You read right.
Ofc this failed as my CC was declined because I live in Germany and the transaction got marked as suspicious, coming from SEA.
So I had to go to town and hunt down a wifi USB dongle so I could turn my laptop into a WiFi hotspot for the camera, while using the VPN masking the built-in WiFi to be connected to a German IP.
You had to enter the CC details through the camera's on-screen keyboard that was operated with the joystick on the camera's body. It took me a good ten minutes.
If you like this, there is a whole book full of visual proofs [1]. See also wikipedia [2].
A few years ago I re-drew a bunch of these in latex with my PhD advisor and another colleague [3]. We planned to print them as posters and hang them for a Pi day event that unfortunately never happened because the pandemic broke out.
No extra tooling, no symlinks, files are tracked on a version control system, you can use different branches for different computers, you can replicate you configuration easily on new installation.
I built an English-speaking website that helps immigrants settle in Berlin.[0] It has been my full time job for a while. Most English speakers know about it, but it's nearly invisible to Germans, who would also benefit from the content and tools I have worked on.
I'm currently adding an automated AI translation feature to my custom static site generator, so that I can translate the website to multiple languages and reach more people. I'm trying to make the process as seamless and automated as possible, because I'm running this website solo, and there are only so many hours in a day.
It's a surprisingly tricky endeavour! As usual, the first 80% are easy. It's getting the last 20% right that requires a lot of work. There are so many small hurdles. For instance, translating the URL structure and translating the URLs within the content, getting the translations to be accurate, getting the SEO right, translating the templates and the JS tools I've built, keeping the costs low.
For anyone interested in the basics of nuclear weapons, I highly recommend the "Nuclear 101: How Nuclear Bombs Work" lectures by Matthew Bunn, a man heavily involved in nuclear arms control.
His lectures are always highly entertaining, a real pleasure to watch.
This is a clip from his lecture explaining the basics of thermonuclear warheads:
As much as ~88% of tested kale contained PFAS, and it's because of commercial compost. Organic kale has more PFAS than non-organic because it uses more compost rather than more synthetic fertilizer.
> I find that history contains many more surprises than authors can get away with in fiction.
There are however some brilliant authors that combine the two genres, sometimes more on the site of history, sometimes more on the site of fiction. Some random recommendations: Tolstoi: "War and Peace", Solzhenitsyn: "The Red Wheel" cycle, Yourcenar: "Memoirs of Hadrian", Brecht: "The Business Affairs of Mr. Julius Caesar", Foote: "The Civil War: A Narrative" (non-fictional narrative history).
For anyone into this sort of game, I always recommend Starsector [1]. It's a beautifully made game that is in active development and already very fun to play.
Long time ago I talked to a friend about cameras in classrooms. I commented about how many problems it prevents. He explained a definition of moral: moral is the non physical limitation that bars you from doing something you want but harms another person even if you won't be punished.
It was then explained to me that children who grow in over surveillance have a tendency of not exercising moral. They will do whatever they want once they are confident that nobody will know. It is the same thing with excess of punishment: if people know something is legal and won't be punished, they won't care about moral.
I tried to ask about the good side of having cameras but he said it was not worth the price of growing a generation of amorals.
I love nerding out on food as mich as the next person. On food and cooking is one of my favorite kitchen tools. Sichuan chili oil is a staple condiment in our house.
That said, i find the following to be an oft-repeated bs phrase parroted across the internet. You can find it tracing back to reddit threads over ten years ago.
> You can end up with what are called fines and boulders, fines being tiny, dust-like pieces of coffee that create bitterness in the cup, and boulders being large chunks that create sourness or emptiness in the cup.
I dare any coffee drinker to blindly try their coffee with a crappy grinder, and compare to their $200 carbon fiber whatever. You wont detect the difference. I once looked into someone’s reddit account who was repeating this - and found that they were selling grinders elsewhere. Must be awesome margins.
Having worked at a lot of companies, I think this advice is hit-or-miss.
I'd say as often as not, a good engineer is more knowledgeable than their manager in most respects, including the people dynamics. Ask your manager for help is often the nuclear option, because there's such a wide-range of outcomes when a manager tries to intervene -- maybe they misunderstand your message, maybe they fumble the delivery, maybe they forgot, etc. Even if the manager does intervene it could be neutral or negative "Hey I got you some 'resources' who know nothing about the project that's due this month to help out." Miscommunication is particularly common when there's a language and culture barrier at play.
Also, what? IIRC most engineering teams miss most goals most of the time. I guess if it's agreed in advance something is a "hard commitment" then yes let the manager know early you're not going to make it happen. But also the manager should be even more responsible and should be asking for periodic updates on all goals if not receiving them.
Also there's something really offputting about the "get it done" phrase/mentality for public companies. Delivering faster is not one of Meta's (or google's) top 50 priorities. Their priorities all need to be "This time, build a product that's going to be around in 10 years that will reflect well on our brand." Hustling is not only not a part of that equation, constantly feeling "under the gun" is antithetical to the kind of "Let's take a step back and do it right, even if it's twice as expensive and takes twice as long" approach they need.
I completely understand where Louis Rossman is coming from. [1]
Daniel does not apologize for anything he says or does and refuses to acknowledge any wrongdoing. He still refuses to acknowledge that how he responded to Louis was wrong.
He hops on every thread of GrapheneOS and regularly accuses everyone of being sockpuppets and trolls. [2] He has accused me of being a Techlore and CalyxOS troll numerous times. Worst still, his community are full of psychophants that enable his abusive behavior. They refuse to see him or his outbursts as negative. They routinely collaborate to downvote comments and raid rooms to manage the narrative which I find to be underhanded.
I was an early Copperhead customer who was very disappointed that he got up and destroyed the signing keys without providing any evidence to back his claims up. When I brought up the issue to him via email, his response was to throw his previous business partner under the bus without offering any apologies for damaging my business.
I did use Android Hardening afterwards, used CopperheadOS for a bit and then moved back to LineageOS. I refuse to use any of his projects again.
I wish the best for him and hope he gets well. He's not mentally stable enough to run a project and he has a long way to go for understanding the nuance of interpersonal relationships.
Over the past few years, I've been teaching myself how to write better. I'm not talking about elementary syntax or grammar. I'm not talking about writing the traditional, American English five paragraph essay. I'm talking about writing longer pieces of prose, articles or blog posts or short chapters with word counts ranging anywhere between 1500-3000 words. On this journey of improving the craft, I realized that one of my biggest struggles was writing cohesively. Although I've been able to get lots of words on (digital) paper, eventually I'd get lost in my own web of thoughts, the article itself totally incoherent, no structure, no organization.
Constructing outlines and reverse outlines[0] has helped me tremendously. It's not easy ... but the concept itself is finally — years later — starting to click.
I think (and there are studies to back this too) that the more you eschew an allergen the more violent your reaction against it would be. I am from a third-world country and I know no-one from my country that has allergies related to foods like peanuts, sesame or gluten. The only other explanations for this would be:
a) These allergies occur so rarely that I haven't heard from the minority of the people.
b) Or, the people who had this allergies have already died without diagnosis.
c) Or, people have these allergy but choose to hide them for fear of social shame.
d) Or, people don't get medical checkup that allows the discovery of these allergies.
But I think the case that people being accustomed to the allergens due to forceful conditions is the best explanation for this.
As a parent of a kid with a sesame allergy, I wish it got the same treatment as peanut allergies do. It's common here (Canada) to have a school that will throw your lunch snacks away if they aren't labelled "peanut safe" but will have sesame buns at a school bbq lunch and just tell the kids with sesame allergy to bring their own lunch and avoid touching it.
> Jan 1, 2023 will also be a fine day for film in the public domain, with Metropolis, The Jazz Singer, and Laurel and Hardy's Battle of the Century entering the commons. Also notable: Wings, winner of the first-ever best picture Academy Award; The Lodger, Hitchcock's first thriller; and FW "Nosferatu" Mirnau's Sunrise.
Metropolis is so influential that I'd call it a must-watch for... well, basically any fan of popular media of any kind. Film, literature, graphic arts, video games, music(!). Its influence is everywhere.
Sunrise is one hell of a roller-coaster of a movie. As with anything in the silent era (especially the non-comedy films) it's a bit of an acquired taste but it's among the earliest films that I didn't just find interesting or funny, but that really got me on the edge of my seat, several times. It's got some real "yell at the screen" moments :-) I enjoyed it way more than the director's more-iconic Nosferatu. Though, for my money, it's no M or The Passion of Joan of Arc, as silent film dramas go. Still, really good, and I think a lot of critics hold it in far higher regard than I do.
Haven't seen the rest.
> On the literary front, we have Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, AA Milne's Now We Are Six, Hemingway's Men Without Women, Faulkner's Mosquitoes, Christie's The Big Four, Wharton's Twilight Sleep, Hesse's Steppenwolf (in German), Kafka's Amerika (in German), and Proust's Le Temps retrouvé (in French).
Damn, what a powerhouse year in literature. And look at that, my favorite novel (To the Lighthouse) is about to be public domain!
The Holmes news is awesome, too. Bunch of copyright troll dicks have been making doing anything with Holmes risky for years. Great that everyone can more-easily ignore them.
He makes a great point at then end when comparing VHS to DVD: Its like we are moving forward in technology but moving backwards in the amount of BS we have to put up with just to enjoy what we paid for. The VCR gave you more control compared to DVD players.
Streaming has eliminated many of these pain points in exchange for freedom to truly own your media.
The best way to fight back is to buy the Blu-Ray, rip it using MakeMKV thereby creating an MKV file that contains the ability to jump chapter by chapter, have any audio track you want, etc but with none of the junk that you are forced to use when you pop the Blue-Ray into the player. The best of all worlds.
It was made in the 70s and 80s yet much is still totally relevant today. Even the occasional thing that is out of date might be a fun history discussion.
I highly recommend "the art of doing science and engineering" by Richard hamming. It's basically a book collection of his essays and history in the field. In fact I think this might be a chapter of it.
> If you were building an OS that was going to be used by every device you make […] would you rely on an open source project that you don't control and may have different values, wishes, roadmap etc than you.
Apple's XNU kernel is a derivation of open source OSFMK and FreeBSD kernels, and Apple's Darwin has large components of FreeBSD userland. They use (se)L4 for running their Secure Enclave.
I remember in the early days of MacOS where entries from the FreeBSD release notes would appears as word-for-word copies in the Apple ones.
[1] https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=73
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9900758