dictum

> It's even easier to co-ordinate such messages online. Not a day goes by without stories and comments about China on this site.

What shows up often is just as important as what's never seen, because it's been censored.

China knows a thing or two about manufacturing consent and astroturfing, too.

This headline bothers me: it's simple, expedient and even whimsical, but it describes the situation as if the robots have agency and an innate drive to seek jobs, and by continuous self improvement, are closing in on human candidates.

Most operating systems have chosen a different tradeoff, reducing fresh reads from persistent storage, keeping files cached in RAM, which may work out to equivalent power savings.

Good to know, thanks. Hope it makes it to GM.

Yep, but some say it's gone from Catalina. I don't try betas. Can someone on 10.15 verify that this still works?

> Mercifully, subpixel has become less relevant over the years: retina displays really don't need it, and the subpixel layout on phones, prevents the trick from working (without major work). On newer versions of macos, subpixel-aa of text is disabled at the OS level by default.

Speaking of mercy, I wish Apple had disabled it only on hidpi displays and chosen a longer deprecation window for normal displays.

I prefer keeping displays at a distance slightly longer than my arm. This completely hides the slight blur of subpixel antialiasing.

Now a 1440p has significantly degraded text rendering (even though other graphics look great) and if you want to use an external display, it must be 4K or 5K to not get a blurry, thin mess.

> It's not really the garbage seller's business whether it is recycled into fire or buried. They aren't harmed.

Apparently the companies use artful language to imply certain processes without specifically naming them:

"All three companies make green promises on their websites and in promotional videos, using buzzwords like "sustainability" and "environmental solutions." One Waste Connections video goes as far as to say, "sustainability and becoming more green … have been hallmarks and backbones of Waste Connections from the day we formed the company."

But if any company specifically contracted for recycling and did not recycle, it is a breach of contract with possible repercussions.

Recycling requires that the materials return to the market at a certain point, but it does not require a short window of time between collection and processing of materials.

This is where some creative lawyering can go a long way: if you can say that you're going to process it at some indefinite point in the future, you're not comitting fraud unless the contract defines an specific time limit, specific technical processes, and an specific destination for the processed materials.

I don't think commercial contracts that meet all these criteria are viable at scale.

It's curious that "restroom during class" is the only concrete, non-arbitrary event in that log.

"Not following instructions", "off task", "teamwork" and "great day" could mean many different things, in different contexts.

"Teamwork" could mean playing nicely along with a colleague who is bullying others out of teacher's view.

"Not following instructions" is whatever an authority wants to be.

"Off task" could mean that you're not succesfully juggling forcing yourself not to get a bathroom break while concentrating on a task.

(I may not sound like it, but I appreciate teachers and I wish they didn't need an app to justify their actions to hovering parents.)

I don't know if I should be reassured or concerned that the insularity and provincial-but-seemingly-worldly spirit of journalism professionals is apparently equal to that of technology professionals.

> Isn't it what all those Gertas of the world want?

You can defend a position without snidely representing other positions, similar or opposite to yours, but if you choose to make so, make sure you've correctly named your target.

I saved the paper for reading later, so this may be already discussed in it, but enough information leaks through the Referer HTTP header when browsing the web in a traditional browser.

I've never inspected Recaptcha (on gstatic.com), but it does some degree of tracking, ostensibly to detect unusual usage patterns and pick who gets to help train Google's ML models with distorted street objects, and who's never shown the captcha window.

Yep. I make some changes that SIP would catch, but I'm mostly comfortable with the boot into Recovery -> run a script -> boot back again. It's not kext stuff, though.

I might have to use PurgeWrangler for an older iMac. Apparently, can keep it mostly enabled, but you need to mind updates and be ready to recover if your modifications are invalidated https://github.com/mayankk2308/purge-wrangler/issues/2#issue...

Can't they be patched once, and then re-patched when system updates change make changes to system files?

Not that it's novel — there are corporations specialized in tools to monitor employee activity — but there's no bamboozling in that claim: monitoring nearly every activity, no matter how intrusive, is what almost software and hardware does now.

uBlock Origin replaces some third-party scripts with empty (noop) functions or otherwise sterilized APIs.

https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Resources-Library

It all depends on how an individual feels about the status quo.

A. You can be moderate because you believe moderate actions will bring about radical change, or

B. You can be a moderate because you believe things are good to some degree as they are, and any actions should result in moderate changes.

I'm inclined to believe the calls to moderate discourse come from the latter group. "Rational discourse" stands in opposition to "irrational discourse", with implied irrational demands.

In other words, if you can't see why group X would want something, you won't see anything group X does to get that as rational.

I would like to rewrite it into something less abrasive, but this was not intended to highlight the gender split. In some circumstances a group of men can be more empathetic towards a woman than a group of women would be.

I believe the default state is to be moved by what you can perceive as a more immediate danger. This doesn't stem from some underhanded camaraderie, one's mind is just more attuned to what can directly affect it.

Here, the gender split already makes HN more likely, when all comments are summed into a chaotic generalized opinion, to defend RMS by default. He's a man, he's a hacker, he's at the root of many things we take for granted.

The gender split is just some context (and not even the most important piece of context — if I had time to discuss this at length, I would posit that if HN or tech in general were evenly split, it would have the same lack of empathy, just manifested differently.) for the next paragraph, which is the real problem: pretending feelings, emotions and perceptions can be discarded. Which is what makes me resent HN sometimes, as the parent says:

> I'm not really sure why you're expressing derision towards people that don't want sexual assault trivialized. I dunno, I feel like reading these types of posts, which are prevalent in this thread, that I have less and less in common with people on Hacker News

Once emotions are discarded, you can justify even genocide as long as you can convene an outcome that is favorable to a majority.

It tells me that HN has more people who fear being accused of sexual assault than people who are afraid of suffering sexual assault.

Somehow the former group has trouble imagining the fear of the latter group is more likely, within its demographic, to happen, and its outcome more deeply damaging, because its damage is somehow related to emotions. No emotions allowed. We're working with capital-R Reason.

—

Next time I hear about "the pipeline" on HN, I'm going to imagine something like the fish tube.[0] If only we had such a tube to pipe potential hackers into engineering and computer science, we would have a more diverse industry.

[0]: https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/the-nihilistic-eu...

I'm not well versed on the specific implementation details of ST, but whatever the ST team does on macOS yields a result that is much closer to a native application than VSCode does through embedded Chromium. The difference in text rendering is particularly noticeable on a non-hidpi display.

> Why Americans continue to willingly subject themselves to these torturous systems is beyond me. It's all in y'alls control.

https://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/2911271-america-and-am...

If only HTML could have hyperlinks, embedded multimedia and textual content in a single file...

(In all seriousness, it's sad that YouTube has such a narrow focus — video files only — which helped it spread to many different devices, from small phones to TVs, but hinders interactivity)

HTML has something of a legacy mode, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode

Roughly anything before HTML5/4.01 and XHTML renders in quirks mode.

AFAIK there are no legacy CSS properties. Only nonstandard (i.e. prefixed or experimental and never published in finished specs) properties have been deprecated.

Browsers already have some leeway with DOM APIs. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/01/scrolling-...

I use userChrome.css and userContent.css, and I get the nagging feeling that the silent end of that sentence is "...when we eventually replace the code that currently enables user customization with faster, less flexible APIs."

(I'm paranoid and FUDing because I care: there's some UX low hanging fruit before they could get rid of userChrome.css. For instance, you need userChrome.css to autohide the toolbar in full screen mode on macOS — that's not even a customization, it's a missing feature.)

> a lot of people in this thread are railing against the author saying nobody should care about the Amazon fire and that it's not a big deal

Any newspiece that can have a political angle, regardless of the textual content and the author's intentions, will have its potential political angle explored by other agents. Case in point: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20789081

So it must be read between the lines, even though that can muddy the technical/factual debate.

A more sophisticated reading of such a piece must take into account how people will perceive it, and what actions may come from it.

Especially in the US (which may not be an exception — I just follow it more closely) a lot of news organizations seem to operate with a "news you can use" viewpoint: these are the facts, here's how to act in face of these facts.

Readers are primed to change their minds after being presented with a set of facts. It's akin to overwriting data that should have been appended to existing data[0].

[0]: I'm dealing with data recovery, so this metaphor may be topical to me, but not entirely useful.

> I don't see how trying to tell the truth about something can be equated with trying to downplay the situation or encouraging people not to bother about it.

Because it's a red herring.

It's a very common form of red herring, to be precise: taking averaged measurements of a whole set to infer information about a single element. The converse is also a red herring; inferring information about a set by analyzing only a single, cherry picked member.

"Fires Globally" includes "Fires in the region X of country Y", but doesn't take into account the specific importance of that region, the trends over time, what's going to happen to surrounding regions in the future...

(For a quick metaphor: You have 99.5%~99.8% of your body in perfect working order when your eyes have just been gouged.)

I agree that a multidevice, always-available solution is better for many activities, especially for news, but the downside to this requirement is that desktop apps become unimaginative, blown-up versions of the mobile apps.

I want more developers to create unapologetically desktop apps — unconstrained, customizable, with multiple and filterable views of content, able to integrate and share data with other apps.

(Yes, these are not mutually-cancelling goals. You can have a good enough iOS app and a more interesting Mac app. However, developer time is finite, features beget bugs, and only a small fraction of users collaborate with an open source project)

If you want jail time, insurance fraud is probably a tad quicker.

Here's a certainly not contemplative answer which would suit HN best:

If money is no problem and you've correctly narrowed your problems down to your looks (here's where you might be wrong), plastic surgery is very effective.

Isn't the average server more likely to sustain 100Mb/s for 5 seconds than 1Gb for half a second?

This can work for smaller areas. Tourists get to see the result of preservation because can experience almost the full extent of the territory. However, for a larger area of which most parts are boring, unsafe and hard to reach, it's hard to cover preservation with such funds.

Bolsonaro is unhappy with one such arrangement, covering a much smaller area: visitors pay a $50 fee, collected by the federal government, to enter the archipelago of Fernando de Noronha for a 10 day stay. He wants to the abolish the fee.

Given his general outlook on taxes, I don't see how tourism could fund preservation, except for increasing its scale to a predatory level.

https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/2019/07/taxa-de-fern... (in Portuguese)