an_d_rew

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211218

It’s bloody amazing.

A thousand blessings, health, and happiness to EVERYONE at Apple’s accessibility team for this!

I would perhaps classify that as "immediate" impact, not "lack of impact".

Number theory has driven computer science, calculus, statistics, and so on.

CS, calculus, stats... they all drive (for example) "nutrition". For example, how do you know what a "vitamin" is? How do you measure it? How do you quantify it's effects on the body (and mind)? A whackload of analysis DEPENDS on number theory for us to understand almost everything about the natural world!

In practice, it will stay pinned for years until a CVE forces a patch upgrade that ends up triggering a dependency avalanche and weeks or months of headaches.

So no standard library for you.

Which likely implies "no C++".

Which keeps us writing in C.

We use Bazel’s rules_docker as well, and I would caution someone evaluating it with a note from out experience.

What Bazel does well (and as well as Bazel fits your use-case) Bazel does extremely well and is a reproducible joy to use.

But if you stray off that path even a tiny bit, you’re often in for a surprisingly inexplicable, unavoidable, far-reaching pain.

For example, rules_docker is amazing at laying down files in a known base image. Everything is timestamped to the 1970 unix epoch, for reproducibility, but hey, it’s a bit-perfect reproduction.

Need to run one teensy executable to do even the smallest thing that’s trivial with a Dockerfile? Bazel mist create the image transfer it to a docker daemon, run the command, transfer it back... your 1 kb change just took 5 minutes and 36 gb of data being tarred, gzipped, and flung around (hopefully-the-local) network.

It may not be a dealbreaker, and you may not care, but be forewarned that these little surprises creep up fairly ofen from unexpected quarters!

Edit: after 2-ish years of Bazel, I would say that for 99% of developers and organizations, the most likely answer is "never".

...so your tested Intel-to-ARM port might work just fine until run on a different vendor’s core!

Bought the book, FWIW, and love it - but this will help me evangelize TLA+ with my employer and other groups!

Very nicely put, and thank you for putting that together!

This patch goes a long way toward eliminating a long overdue userspace crypto footgun. After several decades of endless user confusion, we will finally be able to say, "use any single one of our random interfaces and you'll be fine. They're all the same. It doesn't matter." And that, I think, is really something. Finally all of those blog posts and disagreeing forums and contradictory articles will all become correct about whatever they happened to recommend, and along with it, a whole class of vulnerabilities eliminated.

With very minimal downside, we're finally in a position where we can make this change.

My favorite quote (and when taken in context is much less tongue-in-cheek thank you might think):

systemd is an event-driven object manager with dependency-like side effects which ‘boxes’ primitive kernel resources and userspace subsystems into a generic object type called Unit. These Unit objects are scheduled through the state propagation mechanism of ‘jobs’ and dynamically dispatched via a singleton object called Manager, responsible for launching jobs in ‘transactions’ which do merging, cyclic ordering and consistency checks and serve as the main point at which unit dependencies are pulled in. Unit startup is executed as a non-indempotent parallel dataflow with weak ordering guarantees on the job level, mostly independent of the active state of dependent units.

Any night you have insomnia, just read that a few times and you'll be out like a light! :-)

I know it’s all the rage to say “gee why no v6 yet?”, but that’s a LOT of infrastructure and testing to overhaul…

The effort is much appreciated!

I do not believe this is true, nor has it been for quite a long time.

As a private individual I was on their Slack at least two years ago, And they recently moved to a public Discord group.

Excel is everywhere.

People are familiar with it. The same people are often not familiar with, and have never used, and may even be confused by “notepad.exe”.

Furthermore, Microsoft office is installed everywhere everywhere everywhere… like it leave it love it or hate it, it doesn’t matter… it’s true (at least for huge swaths of the demographic).

So the first thing most people learn is excel and the last thing most people use is excel. It’s a database, it’s a spreadsheet, you can even use it as a word processor if you want to. And some have.

I’m not saying you could and I’m not saying you should, I’m just answering as to “why“.

It is a scientifically and statistically rigorous look at the available data that takes into account how people probably feel about the whole issue.

Take 2d laminar flow around a circle. The flow field splits right in the middle.

Signed zeros ensure that, along with graceful underflow, the local solution is not wonky.

Lots of complex-arithmetic examples too.

What Bazel does well (and as well as Bazel fits your use-case) Bazel does extremely well and is a reproducible joy to use.

But if you stray off that path even a tiny bit, you’re often in for a surprisingly inexplicable, unavoidable, far-reaching pain.

For example, rules_docker is amazing at laying down files in a known base image. Everything is timestamped to the 1970 unix epoch, for reproducibility, but hey, it’s a bit-perfect reproduction.

Need to run one teensy executable to do even the smallest thing that’s trivial with a Dockerfile? Bazel mist create the image transfer it to a docker daemon, run the command, transfer it back... your 1 kb change just took 5 minutes and 36 gb of data being tarred, gzipped, and flung around (hopefully-the-local) network.

It may not be a dealbreaker, and you may not care, but be forewarned that these little surprises creep up fairly ofen from unexpected quarters!

And good point. I understand where you’re coming from, but... I didn’t understand it when I read the post and blurb(s).

It isn’t that I don’t trust you or your intentions now, it’s that intentions (and requirements) change.

You asked about allaying fears. Personally for me this means actually take-to-the-bank licensing that I could get through a legal audit, even if hypothetical.

Talk of “secret sauce” and future closed source and IP licensing of future maybe-must-have magic... that’s way too much future risk for me.

An example of what I think is good licensing is JUCE (https://juce.com). Everything from “free” to “paid with support”, all open source… but the point is I always know exactly where I stand legally, what I can and cannot do... and what I can and cannot do in the FUTURE.

(disclaimer: I don’t have one, but America’s test kitchen/cooks illustrated tend to be pretty reliable with their advice I find…)

edit: see also https://www.americastestkitchen.com/videos/4115-air-fryers

The difference between being assertive and being aggressive can be more subtle than you think, but the rewards for you and your team (and your friendships and your relationships) can be boundless.

This is a downright misleading statement.

It is possible that aliens created SARS-CoV-2 as an experiment. It is possible that my body quantum tunnelled from the USA to China, through the earth's core, and picked up the virus.

But these events are exceedingly improbable. Therefore neither deserve the merit of future study.

Besides... Hypotheses must be falsifiable. That's how science works. Anything else is just click-bait. So I question that this article has any real utility at all except possibly fanning the flames of racism or sensationalism.

We have some peculiarities of our Bazel setup that are not common, yet are (supposed to be) fully supported.

Building can take hours.

Apple’s anti-malware system was actually just working exactly as designed.