delta_p_delta_x

I'm not surprised the Mercedes has the best privacy...

Singapore is also a 730 km^2 island city-state with a population of about 6.2 million people. I have honestly no idea why people and articles keep comparing it to literally the largest countries on the planet both in terms of land area and population. Ask any other wealthy cosmopolitan world city of about the same area and population what their electricity reliability figures are, and the answers will probably be quite similar.

Inb4 (in this case in-after) trope answers (see below) like 'veneer of perfectly clean and orderly society', 'punitive'. It is small; that is why it can get stuff done.

> seat heater subscription services going for BMW?

Own a recent-ish BMW. Haven't had to pay for heated seats; I have a button on my climate control to switch it on/off/change the heat levels.

In places like Serangoon North (which is highly residential, I might add), or some atas area like the green bits of River Valley etc, which are genuinely 2+ km from any MRT station, even the buses can take forever as they get stuck in traffic.

I think you might not have read the rest of what I wrote. Just because cars are super expensive doesn't mean people don't buy them or don't use them. People regularly take out 7-year loans to finance the car + COE + ARF + VES.

My point is that the land use in Singapore truly shows where LTA's priorities are. Look at Tengah or Bidadari, both brand-new neighbourhoods. Huge, wide 6+-lane dual-carriageways with hardly any traffic on them.

My family has a car in Singapore that has about 70000 km on the odometer after about 6 years of driving, which is quite a lot for purely urban driving. The fact is I can get to most of destinations in about half or a third the time it takes on public transport. It is primarily why I drive if I have to get there quicker.

Singapore says it likes to be car-lite, and makes cars correspondingly expensive, but the government doesn't seem to truly walk the talk.

Singapore uses about 11%[1] of its extremely limited land area for land transport (primarily, roads, since all railways are urban passenger rapid transit and not freight). I believe this is too much. 10-13 lane stroads are not uncommon, especially at junctions[2]. Singapore needs more light rail, trams, and permanent bus lanes with bus priority signals, as well as considerably more traffic calming measures in residential neighbourhoods.

Don't get me wrong, its mass rapid transit story is superb, first in class, but mixed-mode transport and last-kilometre connections need to be better.

Also, and related to the post: the Tamil in the website is wrong. Even in the colloquial register I haven't really heard anyone say 'வந்துட்டு'; it ideally ought to be the formal 'வந்துள்ளது'. Better still, a simpler and more accurate translation of 'Waymo in Singapore' is 'சிங்கப்பூரில் Waymo'.

[1]: https://tablebuilder.singstat.gov.sg/table/TS/M891211

[2]: https://maps.app.goo.gl/gg7HR7H3qBJmBz4U6

COE was around 30K in the first year of COVID. Not exceptionally long ago. We have a continental car we bought at the end of 2020 with a 41.5K COE; we paid less in total than what a base-model Corolla costs nowadays.

The solution is not an SUV, but an MPV.

In almost no situation are pickup trucks, SUVs, or even a crossover the correct kinds of vehicle.

Things can be hauled just fine in an estate, saloon, or even a hatchback. European camper vans are regularly hauled by tiny Golfs or Polos with barely a litre of engine displacement and a hundred kilowatts of power.

Americans just buy much bigger vehicles than necessary.

This single comment of yours has in my eyes made your entire post worthless.

SystemD has single-handedly consolidated and streamlined Linux administration. I think valid criticism is useful, but calling it malware is a non-sequitur.

Also in aviation, but with caveats; you want to take off and land with a headwind, because the headwind gives a greater airspeed which means greater lift.

Calling the Weather app an 'app' is doing all the Win32, WPF, WinForms and WinUI developers a huge disservice.

It is essentially an entire Chromium instance around msn.com/weather.

Not to be confused with the other R#, which is ReSharper.

https://www.jetbrains.com/resharper/

lld-link is already a big step up from link.exe. Although the latter has incremental linking, which none of the Unix-like linkers have.

I feel Vista was by far the best. 7 simplified it a bit, but that Start orb and black taskbar on Vista, man, that was glorious.

There is much to be said about the irony in said New Worlders refusing to get with the programme, and instead obstinately clinging to an ancient, Babylonian-Roman-Anglo-Saxon-Viking hodge-podge of units instead of something modern and universal.

> make technical writing parsable by the unwashed masses

> If the masses want to understand science they should just go to Oxford

This is a bad strawman. I learnt scientific notation in secondary school. I expect most educated people to understand what is meant by '1.5 × 10^8 km' in an instant. If they don't, then honestly, skill issue, and it is a big indictment of their parent country's education system.

For science education, I am strongly for using the units directly to describe everything at first, with these looser comparisons in brackets, rather than inline prose. So I would've instead said, 'is 500 km in diameter (roughly the size of Ohio, or Germany from East to West)'. For extremely large or small values I would use scientific notation only, and expect my audience to understand it, because I'd expect their education to be up to mark.

You said these comparisons are made to make things real or relatable; I personally would expect more out of my audience and give them the magnitude and units directly. I'm not writing for a tabloid; having a strong grounding in units understanding without needing to relate to daily phenomena is in my view critical to not making apparently trivial mistakes that can potentially lead to horrible disasters.

Lovely article. Although:

> Enceladus is far smaller than the Jovian ocean worlds, roughly the size of Ohio

Why not just say 'has a diameter of about 500 km'? The propensity of astronomers to compare diameters of a small spherical object to a surface patch of a much larger spherical object is intriguing. Similar things happen with 'the Great Red Spot is about two Earths wide'.

Io is in orbital resonance with Europa and Ganymede, which causes its orbit to be slightly elliptical. Due to Jupiter's immense gravitational field strength, Io experiences a very high changing tidal force, which causes a changing stress and strain on the entire structure of Io, which causes tidal heating due to friction. This makes it by far the most volcanically active body in the Solar System. Its surface is regularly completely resurfaced, and is covered in sulfur compounds.

> only RF down the TV antenna input

Holy shit. RF to zero-click exploit is a new one. I guess digital-everything wasn't always a good idea, this probably wouldn't ever have been a problem with analogue antennas and CRTs.

What are the people at LG even doing?

On any Windows release, you can switch all of those off, and GPE out the update channels for non-system-critical changes. Windows Enterprise doesn't even get the so-called 'fun stuff'.

> how much nicer a (well supported, well put together) Linux distro is, compared to Windows

As someone who regularly uses both, and even in spite of the ad avalanche that (a bog-standard home install of) Windows has become: [X] to doubt. I regularly have issues on my corporate Linux laptop that I suspect wouldn't ever happen on Windows. Fleet management is easiest on Windows, with Active Directory, Group Policy, images, etc. Maybe package managers make software management easier on Linux, but fleet sysadmin is basically built-in on Windows.

Linux is superb for servers—I use Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on my homelab—but it still has a rather long way to go as a sharp-edge-free desktop OS, regardless of whether it is for home or corporate use.

Win liao lor[1]. I wish they made the Circle line terminating like it was before; it makes much more sense that way. Oh well. At least one can board a train in the morning and never get off, and exit at the same station eight hours later.

[1]: https://singlishdict.app/?q=win+liao+lor

I wish they hadn't got rid of STARIS 1[1]. It was highly intuitive and informative, and showed you everything you needed at a glance, and was visible from nearly anywhere within the carriage.

In fact I am not very happy with the little things when it comes to LTA.

They ruined MRT wayfinding with highly abstract symbols[2] in the new Thomson-East Coast Line, so much so that station staff have had to regularly supplant it with ugly printed signs that aren't standardised. They also changed from using alphabetical exits to numbered exits, with no listing of nearby landmarks. Older stations still have this wayfinding, but I suspect they will be replaced in short order, as everything in Singapore is wont to be.

Speaking of standardised, LTA have two corporate typefaces: LTA Identity, and Ocean Sans. They stopped using both and moved to Stroudley, which just looks bad, with ugly vertical terminators on the 'a', 'e', and 'g' glyphs. Ocean Sans is simultaneously superbly readable and yet very distinctive, something very few fonts have achieved.

I must also be in the minority but I do not like the new map[3]; it makes the city centre too cluttered. I much prefer the one from ~2010[4], which is quite reminiscent of the London Underground's map. In fact I believe they could've simplified it further by getting rid of station codes. Which passenger needs to know Dhoby Ghaut is NE6/CC1/NE24? Even as a (self-professed) transport nerd I don't really care.

I have other rants about the giant stroads, weird cycling paths, and their decision to use 'anticlockwise' and 'clockwise' for the full Circle Line, but that is neither here nor there, and I think other creators discuss that better than I ever could. Singapore's public transport is great, no doubt, but it could be so much better still. It needs trams.

[1]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/c151-st...

[2]: https://www.sgtrains.com/guide-wayfinding.html

[3]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/05-sm-2...

[4]: https://blog.sgtrains.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/03-Netw...

*10 metres

MTE is essentially hardware-accelerated AddressSanitiser[1].

[1]: https://clang.llvm.org/docs/AddressSanitizer.html

> OLED market share increasing I'd anticipate Windows moving away from it at some point too

Quite the contrary: many new OLEDs are moving back to an RGB stripe subpixel arrangement.

I posted this comment[1] in the previous discussion. Reposting here, because I don't like slightly-derivative typefaces that are just FontForge tweaks of a typeface that was designed from the ground up, even less if they have given it an entirely new name.

All glyphs are indistinguishable from Source Sans. The 'thin'/'light' weights are kerned further apart (and in my opinion, worse) than in Source Sans. Given these, why does this typeface deserve a new name? It is Source Sans, full stop.

At least Arial (Helvetica copy) and Segoe UI and Myriad (Frutiger copies) have a handful of distinguishing glyphs.

I have a very hot take—with typefaces, you absolutely get what you pay for. I don't like the vast majority of SIL Open Font Licence type faces, with a handful of exceptions. Most of them have glyphs that are an absolute eyesore, are weighted, sized, hinted, and kerned terribly, don't have any character whatsoever (they're all copies of copies of copies of Helvetica) and don't encode nearly enough glyphs/combining marks in Unicode.

Hint: if I can't type IAST/ISO 15919 without tofu showing up, then the font doesn't have enough Latin glyphs.

The majority of digital fonts are either not hinted at all (which makes them look like crap on low – medium resolution monitors), or appear to be hinted on and for macOS, which doesn't have sub-pixel anti-aliasing, but rather greyscale (i.e. full-pixel) AA. The result looks quite bad on Windows and Linux. It looks bad on macOS in monitors with lower pixel density, too.

I will gladly pay for a well-designed typeface (or by proxy, pay a font database subscription). The effort that designers have to put in to design something new from complete scratch is immense. Designers have to come up with unique glyphs, and then when actually setting up the curves, then have to think about how the typeface will vary along several dimensions: weight, size, display pixel density, print versus display, and so on. It's no wonder that the best fonts cost thousands.

Good fonts that have both character and are immediately legible without being unnecessarily fancy is an extremely fine line to tread and in my opinion only a handful of typefaces have managed to balance all of these through the centuries. Some of my favourites follow.

Sans-serifs include Helvetica, Frutiger, Futura, Myriad, Johnston, Optima, Transport, DIN (and its many variants; my favourite is FF DIN), Ocean Sans, and Segoe UI.

Serifs include Roman-cut (including Trajan), Garamond, Minion, a handful of Didone types, Berkeley Old Style, and Palatino.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43591662

KERNEL32.DLL (in spite of the name) provides user-mode system services for the Windows API. The CRT provides the C99 API. There are many entry points to the same thing on Windows; you can do any of `malloc`/`HeapAlloc`/`new`/`VirtualAlloc` to get a void* memory buffer. `malloc` is from the CRT; `HeapAlloc` is from KERNEL32.DLL, and `new` is from the C++ runtime.

Interesting to bypass CRT and work directly against the Windows API. That said, these rely on USER.32.DLL and KERNEL32.DLL to do the majority of the heavy lifting.

It's a bit like 'smallest hello world in assembly' but the code is just setting up the calling convention and then passing the zero-terminated character string into `write`. Cool, but that could be done a bit more straightforwardly in C, too. A lot of assembly (including in the linked repository) is book-keeping for the platform's calling convention.