Zak

Voiding a warranty due to unauthorized repair is only one of many things a company can do to make third-party repair, or any repair more difficult.

The first part is clearly illegal in the USA. Is it not in the EU?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...

Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it.

I'm sad there was so much less backlash to restricting user control on phones.

https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/30/business/technology-a-saf...

To borrow an idea from Nilay Patel of The Verge, all the other items in the parent comment describe consumer products. People like smartphone cameras and cheap TVs and effortless data backups, and they'll put up with some significant problems if it gets them great consumer products. When it's a concrete benefit weighed against an abstract harm, the benefit usually wins.

A massive network of surveillance cameras is not a consumer product. For most people, it's an abstract potential benefit of crime reduction weighed against an abstract definite harm to privacy. Definite usually wins against potential.

Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.

It's not the tinkering that's sociologically important, but the ability to install things like ICEBlock even though the government and OS vendor don't want you to.

I like the goal of making it harder to overfit, but there are a couple significant weaknesses.

A big one is TM-30 Rf is still an average, and with a larger number of samples, the average minimizes the effect of strong deviations that only affect one or two samples. Actually looking at the color vector graphic reveals it, but some formats, like putting a bunch of different light sources in a table make that information harder to convey.

Probably worse when it comes to LED sources is that it doesn't include a primary red or primary blue. R9 (strong red) is a classic weak point for LEDs, with many "high-CRI" LEDs measuring in the 50s, and some other white LEDs having negative scores. R12 (strong blue) is a different kind of weak point; negative scores aren't common, but neither are values over 80.

So I'd like to a standard that uses more values, but it needs to include the red and blue primaries, and it needs to clearly report significant deviations - "Rworst" or some such.

Some additional notes on the topic:

The author describes color rendering index as a percentage; it is not. It's 100 - [a calculation of average color error on 8 color samples]. Reporting the color error directly would probably be better; 90% and 95% would both be pretty good grades on most tests, but a rendering error of 10 sounds a lot worse than a rendering error of 5.

Being based on only 8 samples, CRI Ra doesn't tell the whole story. There are other standards like TLCI that use more samples, and six supplemental samples some sources report. R9 (strong red) and R12 (strong blue) are particularly relevant to modern lighting, as LED sources often struggle with them despite high CRI (Ra) ratings.

CRI is a comparison to blackbody radiation (like an incandescent bulb) or simulated daylight at the same correlated color temperature as the sample light source. An incandescent bulb and midday sunlight at the equator both have CRI of 100, but a CCT of 2700K and a CCT of 5700K will render colors very differently. White balance in a camera's settings or raw development software can make one look like the other.

CCT is roughly blue-yellow balance, but light sources can deviate from blackbody radiation on a red-green axis. This is most often expressed as "delta u v" or "Duv", as it refers to distance in the CIELUV color space[0]. Duv numbers are small, with differences of less than 0.001 being noticeable in a side by side comparison and more than +/- 0.006 falling outside the ANSI standard for white light. Positive numbers are green, and negative numbers are red/pink.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELUV

Somebody I was talking to about a web app I wrote in Clojure asked me how I hosted it. He seemed surprised my answer was an $8/month VPS. That might be the wrong solution if it was going to have a million users, but it isn't.

This seems like the same phenomenon where desktop apps bundle a copy of Chromium.

I don't like the article's tone of inevitability:

> I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners....

Indiscriminately filming people in public places is illegal some places, e.g. Germany. Allowing the creation of large networks of cameras surveilling public places is a choice.

An open question is whether the rideshare model, where the service provider knows which passenger was with which driver at which time and place solves the problem that regulation was trying to address.

I would have expected someone to publish research comparing crimes against passengers by rideshare drivers versus taxi drivers by now, but a quick attempt to find that came up short due to lack of data about taxi drivers.

> the complexity of the problems demands so much code that the REPL cannot keep up.

Now we disagree, at least in part.

REPL-driven development is in part about incrementalism. You wouldn't run all the complex code every time you want to examine some state or try out an experiment. You would run it once at the start of your session, then compile just the definition you're editing with your editor's equivalent of `compile-defun`.

Of course that breaks if you're making changes that touch a bunch of different areas of your program and require rebuilding all the state, but it's usually a mistake to design programs in a way that would make such an issue frequent.

I think we're largely in agreement here. Unit tests and REPLs serve different purposes and are poor substitutes for each other; red_admiral was arguing that unit tests obviate the need for REPLs.

Unit testing doesn't provide the level of interactivity a REPL does. A REPL lets you see the output of parts of an unfinished function based on the running program's state.

If you've already thought out the whole program before you start writing it, that may not be as valuable. In my experience, software often isn't that way and the ease of exploration a REPL and long-running process provide are unmatched.

C++ predated the OOP hype cycle and triggered, or at least accelerated it.

I don't think C++ succeeded because it was object-oriented. I think C++ was object-oriented because classes were an abstraction that could layer on top of C with fairly low overhead, giving it more expressive power without much mandatory cost to size or speed.

In other words, object-orientation was the means, not the end.

I was hoping it would address Lisp.

Lisp is fun. The interactivity and instant turnaround of a Lisp REPL is still rarely matched in other languages. Common Lisp also solved a significant issue other languages didn't address well until much later: the ability to write high-level code that was fast on cheap hardware around the turn of the millennium.

Lisp didn't get popular around the turn of the millennium. Success stories like Naughty Dog, ITA, and Viaweb were rare, and the dominant languages seemed to be Java and various scripting languages starting with the letter P.

Not a pilot either, but it's my understanding that accidental spins almost never happen at altitudes where they're recoverable. Preventing the spin is the only way to avoid most crashes involving spins.

Stalls, on the other hand are part of standard instruction. Recognizing the beginning of a stall early and preventing it will prevent the spin.

That may be, but quite a few of the things that people want to keep kids out of are entirely usable from a browser.

The commercial value of a ten year old smartphone in a wealthy country is approximately $0. It's probably not terribly hard for a determined child who goes to school and has friends to obtain one.

Is it? I saw macros and went mad with power. I wrote a macro that could have been a function today.

But seriously, I think Clojure has a particularly strong tradition of writing clean, readable code.

It seems to me the Clojure community internalized the lesson of not writing macros unless it's really necessary more than other Lisps did.

A "bad look" is legally irrelevant. A US citizen has an almost unlimited right to enter the USA carrying anything that's legal to import. Blank phones are legal to import.

The border search exemption is not intended to allow searching for evidence of crimes that aren't related to importing something illegally. Of course CPB isn't expected to ignore evidence of other crimes they happen to see incidentally while checking for things that are illegal to import.

Courts have been fairly tolerant of law enforcement using pretexts like that to expand their powers.

> That anything within 100 miles of the border is constitution free tosses that out

That's a misconception. Border/immigration agents can operate inside this zone, including making stops with reasonable suspicion or running checkpoints where everyone is stopped with no suspicion. The checkpoints are limited in scope, and do not provide authority for searching electronic devices. Some people, including a couple dissenting supreme court justices do feel the checkpoint part violates the constitution.

That's distinct from the border search exemption, which allows inspection of everyone and everything crossing the border. It only exists when someone is actually crossing the border and does not allow CBP to stop or search people who are not crossing the border.

Edit: https://www.aclu.org/know-your-rights/border-zone

This probably doesn't hold up legally, but it does hold up logically: if the reason a border search exemption exists is to prevent importation of material that is unlawful to import, wiping a storage device also fulfills that purpose.

Looks like the correct link is now https://geekyants.com/case-studies/nowmatch-next-gen-dating-...

This seems to describe a workflow with a small number of apps that store things remotely.

I want to back up my phone and restore it in one step, possibly to different hardware, and have it work like nothing ever happened. I can do that with a PC. I ought to be able to do that with a phone too.

I'll use Signal as my example of an app that's especially annoying to deal with in the border crossing scenario. I want to back up Signal and install it on a clean device without losing messages, changing my safety number, or verifying by SMS with a phone number I may not have access to at my destination. It's not possible, though I'll grant some of that is design choices made by Signal rather than the operating system.

I have to use its built-in backup function to keep my messages; if I just copy the data, it can't decrypt because the keys are in the old device's TPM. Even with the backup and password, I have to use SMS verification. Finally, the safety number seems to be tied to the keys in the old TPM, so I there's no way to do this without changing it and annoying my contacts (or teaching them to ignore safety number changes).

A US citizen has an almost unlimited right to enter the USA. The border search rule permits officials to search for things that are illegal to import. A blank phone is not illegal to import.

A non-citizen who arrives with a blank phone might be denied entry because it seems suspicious.

Possible, yes. Easy, not so much. Phone operating systems don't really place nice with local backup and restore, which I consider a serious flaw.