Ambroos

In my last job we considered it was well (2.5-3 years ago I think), and decided it wasn't worth implementing the GraphQL server part for just a limited set of clients that could basically use a small set of REST endpoints. We were building a video streaming app exclusively for the Belgian market, so bandwidth was not a concern.

GraphQL shines when you have a big(ish) data model with a high variety of queries you want to run on the client. It's also cool if you get it for free with your tech stack, I think. But if you have to implement a complex GraphQL server stack yourself to work with existing data sources it's definitely not always worth it.

This is not going to be fun for Ireland. Ireland doesn't have its own regional Amazon, but the UK one would have great fast shipping. I wonder if shipping from Amazon DE or FR will be more popular in the future.

This is still used for set-top boxes, at least in Belgium. It happens in the background now, but up until a few years ago when you first got one you'd only see the firmware downloader for an hour or two, with this block diagram where you could follow along: https://i.imgur.com/hh7eWZr.jpg

The worst part about that was if your signal quality wasn't great. You'd see blocks fail, and it'd take ages for them to come up again.

The boxes now ship with usable firmware preloaded, and will update in the background in the first few days usually.

The album "Out Of Season" she did with Rustin Man is really good, all of her tracks on my 64K playlist are from that one.

One of my playlists is called "64K", after the seat I had on my first BA 747 flight two years ago, AUS>LHR, my second ever trip in Business Class. I prepared the music in advance to download it, all nice relaxing tracks (Aimee Mann / Feist / Beth Gibbons / Norah Jones). I was super excited for the flight, and really happy that 64K was available, it was supposedly one of the best business class seats on the plane. Upper deck, window seat, last one on the right. No need to step over anyone, near-perfect privacy, a massive amount of storage space, and first in line to get off the plane.

I put on my playlist in shuffle after dinner, and drifted away into a very nice, long, uninterrupted sleep. When I woke up my breakfast was ready and waiting for me on the big surfaces below the windows. BA Club World has it's issues, but that flight was so memorably that I renamed my playlist from "Night Tunes" to "64K" to remember it.

I surfed through a Google network for a bit a few years ago, and it does reveal things. The most common was Drupal and WordPress sites with some malicious code running that would link to online pharmacies on every page, but only to Google user agents / networks, I assume to boost their ranking. I let a bunch of webmasters know, most of them didn't believe me because they didn't see it themselves.

It's one of the 'advantages' of having a relatively uncommon first name. Everyone knows who Elon, Adele, Beyonce and Barack are. I have an unusual first name and tend to go by just my first name, which works fine too. Sometimes a first name is just all you need.

In browsers at least, DRM doesn't work if your full page doesn't use HTTPS.

The encrypted media extensions (EME) are only available on secure contexts, which means the page needs to be HTTPS. Segments are typically fetched with standard XHR/fetch, which means they need to use HTTPS on secure origins as well. You really don't want to have to deal with mixed content.

Unrelated to DRM, Apple's ATS on iOS kinda requires developers to only use HTTPS origins in their apps.

At that point, you might as well just do HTTPS everywhere.

Netflix hasn't lowered resolutions, they have only reduced the bitrates at the same resolution. I'm still getting my Netflix in 4K HDR, but at ~10Mbps instead of the usual ~16Mbps. You can see it a little, but it doesn't bother me (and I'm a quality nerd).

I think the MMI interface, in one specific generation (the one just before they introduced the touchscreen, where the four-corner buttons were dropped), has one big advantage: you learn the amount of clicks things are away.

It's been over a year since I had an Audi A3 with the system, but I still remember that going from anywhere to Android Auto would be pressing home, then just giving the wheel a big turn clockwise, then back one click counter-clockwise and confirm. You got used to the common operations, and you could do them blindly after a while. In a moving car, a touchscreen is almost always problematic because you need to see if your finger is going the right direction to compensate for car movements.

Don't be ridiculous. I work for a FAANG company and we get great but very standard Dell monitors that are all well below $1100.

Not strictly Danish but a Danish-Swedish co-production: The Bridge (Bron/Broen). There's a decent American remake but the original is incredibly good.

Could it be a limitation in thickness? Laptop display assemblies are thin, which means you need a very small lens and as a result probably can only fit a very small sensor. There's a lot more room for camera modules in phones.

Woops! Thanks!

For others who might be wondering, this replaces the 15-inch MacBook Pro. There's a small increase in size (15 vs 16):

- Thickness: 1.55cm to 1.62cm (+0.7mm, +4.5%)

- Width: 34.93cm to 35.79cm (+0.86cm, +2.5%)

- Depth: 24.07cm to 24.59cm (+0.52cm, +2.2%)

- Weight: 1.83kg to 2.0kg (+170gr, +9.3%)

The display alone is ~1.3cm wider (and ~0.7cm higher), so there was a small reduction in bezel sizes, allowing the screen to grow more than the rest of the hardware.

Funnily enough, Apple did a design thing where they tried 'what would Sony do', and that design turned into the iPhone 4: https://www.theverge.com/2012/7/26/3189309/apple-sony-iphone...

The looks of recent iPhones/Pixels/Samsungs are what make me even more of a fan of Sony's smartphone designs than I already am.

The Xperia 1 for example: https://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/phones/xperia-...

It has a clean, simple look. Three cameras, but they're understated in positioning. No notch, just a small balanced bezel on the top and bottom. A side-mounted fingerprint scanner (where your thumb/ring finger/middle finger naturally rests). A simple, flat display with only very slightly rounded corners.

Sony has been acing smartphone design for years, by simply doing their own thing and not jumping head first into every trend. I wish they did better on marketing and software, because hardware-wise they're killing it. They deserve to be more popular.

If you upgrade and wonder why fonts in Chrome look just a little bit off, there's a bug in Chrome/ium (HarfBuzz). Most text will look a tiny bit too narrow, some text will be slightly too wide. Nothing major, but I noticed. (Also affected: Chromium-powered apps like VS Code, Atom, many messaging apps, ...)

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=100596...

Well, I would hope the engineers working on Netflix and Caraoke aren't the ones who are working on self-driving features. They seem like different enough things that they could be worked on simultaneously. Full self-driving is a long time away anyway, and while we wait for that, features like this help cope with not having full self-driving and differentiating the car in the market.

For clarity, this is a general surveillance facial recognition project that was started only a few months ago (with security cameras).

The automated passport gates (for Belgian eIDs and EU biometric passports) are not included or affected and will keep working (when they're not broken or closed).

That is a limit placed on the receiver, I can't imagine that being hard to get around with a custom receiver or maybe even just customized receiver firmware.

Similarly, my Belgian ISP (Telenet) has WiFi home gateways that are configured by their web portal, and config is pushed by the ISP.

I figured out that they only did validation on SSIDs client-side, so managed to get around that to put emoji's in my SSID.

Which then proceeded to soft-brick the entire thing on config push. I'd have to log in to the web portal via another connection, change the SSID there, and then reset the hardware with the reset button to get internet working again.

I've just embraced it. My real first name (Ambroos) is usually my username and I'm easy to Google with just my first name as a result.

I think it's possible but it's hard to execute well.

I tried 4.5 years ago with https://vivavlaanderen.radio2.be/ - disclaimer: the experience isn't great on mobile (design issue, not tech) and the JS/HTML is massive (it was my first JS project ever, so I messed a bit with Webpack etc).

One of the tricks I used is partial rendering. If you click an artist page (the square/rectangular people photos with a name) and have JS enabled it'll first only render the header, then add a few body items, then the rest of the body items. Since we used a horribly inefficient handmade Markdown to JS thing with a renderer in old naive React it took way too long to render them all at the same time, it'd easily lock up the browser for two seconds on a large page.

Another ridiculous thing was to preload enough data to render the top part of every single artist page while you're on the homepage. A complete waste of data, but otherwise navigation would need a request before being able to render something useful and that defeated the point.

I did pay a lot of attention to making it feel like real navigation though. Almost any meaningful interaction modifies the URL, and the site is practically fully functional without JS. Navigation and Cmd-clicking should all work perfectly. Including scroll positions handling. SEO worked really well too.

So for a classic website format, to make client side rendering work, you need:

- a URL for every view change, with regular old <a> elements that have those URLs as href.

- server rendering that actually handles all of those URLs

- something that restores scroll positions on navigation

- phased/batched rendering on click if your initial new view doesn't render in say 100ms (basically faking progressive rendering)

The development experience was a bit frustrating back in the day, and I don't think it paid off. Which is why for the next project (https://www.klara.be) we decided to go back to server rendering, but using React on the server. Some parts of the page (like the coloured box top right on desktop) are rendered as a skeleton on the server, and then React on the client reuses the same exact code to make these parts interactive again. Partial universal React basically, and it worked very well. I think klara.be feels like a nice and snappy site and it was way easier to develop for.

It's pretty funny how this has basically the same ports (besides the USB C for charging) as my 2010 VAIO Z.

VGA is the most surprising one to still see. I wonder what the reasoning behind that is. I can't really see them targeting the corporate market.

This has been widespread for the last week and a half, but nobody knows why. Unrelated to zoom.

Yeah, my daily driver was an Audi with a rotary dial for about a year (no touchscreen at all), and Android Auto was great on it. You get to know the structure of all menus and can take actions blindly after a while. It's been almost a year since I've driven that car and I still know exactly what to press to show alternative routes in Google Maps, for example.

Later I had a bunch of rentals with touchscreen Android Auto, and it was less convenient and less safe than rotary dial Android Auto.

I wish Audi would've kept the rotary dial when they added a touchscreen in their latest infotainment revision.

Highways are relatively easy (always the first target for almost any type of driving assist). And highways account for large amounts of the distance people drive. Maybe not for the time spent driving though.

If you can do full self-driving on highways and similar roads, you can start shouting about full self-driving on high percentages of distance driven.

We have those in Belgium and they work great. It's three years and you'll go out with a "professional" bachelor's degree in applied IT, with one of the specialisations being software development. I did this and am now an engineer at Facebook five years later, so they work at least to some extent, and in Belgium attract about the same numbers computer science BSc's do.

You start off right away with object oriented programming basics and simple algorithms, with most of your first year dedicated to those, design patterns, basic maths, basic communication (English and French in our case).

Second year moves into specialisations (networking, business systems design, or software development). I did software development and that's where the Java enterprise projects come in (applying design patterns), some Android programming, some more advanced algorithm stuff (still easy on the whole, similar level to the leetcode questions at FB interviews), ...

The final year will have some side courses on introduction to law (focus on copyright), some stuff about extreme programming, some communication, a bigger project and then the second half will be an internship.

And that's it. No crazy math, no super theoretical stuff, only basic non-engineering skills with a focus on the things that are practical skills as a software engineer.

I felt prepared for the professional world after that. Maybe not the things where you micro-optimise algorithms, build low-level tools and languages. But it definitely gave me a fantastic basis to join a web development company. Enough knowledge about programming and patterns to be able to pick up new languages and be productive in them fast.

You'll see few people with this degree in the hard computer science jobs, but I do think (having seen both) that people straight from school with my degree are better at just building applications on top of existing frameworks. We had practical experience with a lot of popular tools at school, and maybe less hang-ups about not always sticking with the theoretical most efficient way if it'd take longer to implement.

This type of education exists, works and has it's place.

(Note: I actually dropped out after three years without finishing the internship and without passing some of the non-coding courses because I had a nice job offer. I did do every subject so basically have the education, just not the proof.)

VW has a massive battery order spread between Samsung, LG and CATL, but yeah, I agree Tesla will have a solid lead on battery production for a while.

I wonder if Tesla/Panasonic will at some point start selling mass produced batteries to the traditional car manufacturers. Once EVs become mainstream, consumers will start expecting choice.