kemayo

> Is anyone here actually excited about the features they just announced?

I'm somewhat tempted by the camera improvements. Mostly the increased resolution on the ultra-wide camera, though the dedicated camera button might be nice. There've also been times when the higher zoom lens would have been useful for me, and it being available as standard means I'd actually have it without needing to buy a too-large phone.

The ultra-wide matters even when you're not using it for the zoomed-out fisheye shots, because it also is used for the macro mode. When you're within about a foot-or-so of a subject, the Camera app will switch to macro mode and quietly transition to using an extremely cropped view from the center of the ultra-wide lens. This lets it focus really well on up-close things... but the image quality is noticeable worse. So hopefully a vastly higher-res ultra-wide would result in me not feeling I should fiddle with camera settings around that transition point.

(Yes, this is very much a problem of Apple's own making. It started being annoying around the 14, when the main camera's focal length changed a bit and made them push the distance they had to trigger macro mode from out so it was no longer only happening when you were around 6 inches from a subject.)

> Why can’t I snap a picture of a written WiFi password to connect to WiFi?

You can actually do that, as of last year's iOS release. It's sort of a pain, but it's doable.

You need to be at the point where it's asking you for the WiFi password, tap the text field, choose "AutoFill", choose "scan text", and use the camera interface to pick the text.

This is extremely undiscoverable, no argument, but it is at least a system-wide standard for how to scan in arbitrary text when you have a text input. (They've picked "AutoFill" as the brand-name for all their get-text-from-somewhere-else features, so it also contains standard password-filling from apps.)

Sourceforge.

I think that shitposting would be the opposite of what you want to do, insofar as doing things that get you downvoted would lower your karma.

Comment in subreddits without those restrictions for a bit. E.g. this list: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewToReddit/wiki/index/newusersubs/

I can see how it's frustrating, but the communities you're trying to post in are essentially offloading their moderation burden onto the big popular subreddits with low requirements -- if you can prove you're capable of posting there without getting downvoted into oblivion, you're probably going to be less hassle for the smaller moderator teams.

It seems fine to me. If your app is using weird edge cases of markdown syntax, or extensions, it should probably specify a different UTI. If you’re pretty much just doing the level of markdown in the average rich-notes app, that’s pretty interoperable.

There's a "type" field in the spec, defined as: "The UTI of the text.* file. E.g. set to net.daringfireball.markdown for Markdown. This field should default to net.daringfireball.markdown to be backwards-compatible with version 1."

So it's whatever you care to specify. Doesn't have to be Markdown at all. It looks like it'd be completely valid to use this as a way to bundle up a webpage with all associated images and scripts, for instance.

There seems to be a dead person on a nearby roof, who the news is claiming was the shooter, with an interview with someone who was outside the event saying that they saw said rooftop-person get shot presumably by the secret service. https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/c51yly4085lo

...honestly, if they're right about the person on the roof being the shooter, there was a serious fuck-up by event security.

There's three different assassination attempts on major-party candidates in the 70s (Ford twice, Wallace once), none of which propelled them to victory. Situations are quite different, of course.

The election rests on the "undecided voter", which is a person I have a really hard time understanding at this point. So yeah, what effect will this have? Damned if I know.

In the short term perhaps, but with four months to go I doubt it'll have staying power unless Trump can (miraculously given his personality) avoid any other scandalous story about himself cropping up.

Relatedly, the US election timeframe is ridiculous.

It's in the same category as salt, which I'd kinda expect to be in the 11-things "secret recipe", but which isn't a herb or spice.

Big SciTE energy, really. There's just something about binding these powerful components together with Lua...

https://scintilla.org/SciTE.html

I don't think that slavery and fiddly details of how regulations are interpreted are really comparable. Morally or practically.

It would be the funniest "textualist" outcome, certainly.

Every time I hear some disparaging comment about "the penumbra of the constitution" from the conservative justices, I can't help but roll my eyes because of that.

That said, it's also valid for Congress to decide to abdicate its powers.

We've had 40 years of Chevron deference, during which time Congress wrote laws expecting that this is how they'd be interpreted. If they didn't want this behavior, they could have passed laws about it. Or included some boilerplate language within new laws about how the agency has to defer to courts for interpretation of those regulations.

(Granted, by the same logic, they could presumably start adding some "these rules should be interpreted according to the agency's definitions" boilerplate to new laws, if they really want that.)

The court's previous ruling on this was that you couldn't make "being homeless" illegal, and so laws against things like sleeping in the park were only valid if there was a reasonable alternative available. Generally this meant that the municipality needed to provide homeless shelters.

I can't say that I like this outcome, since now cities are motivated to just run the homeless out of town rather than helping them in any way.

Depends. The actual rule being "violated" isn't that the app can't contain the string "itms-services". Rather it's:

  Guideline 2.5.2 - Performance - Software Requirements
  The app installed or launched executable code. Specifically, the app uses
  the itms-services URL scheme to install an app.

i.e. the app can't try to trigger an install of another App Store app. The app in question isn't doing that, it's just that the basic check is incompetent for the rule it's supposed to be checking and the reviewer isn't doing any manual checking after that to see if it was a false-positive. So obfuscating the string, if you're genuinely not trying to install other apps, should leave your app just as non-violating as it was before... just not tripping the badly written check.

Apple can of course be arbitrary and capricious after that point.

It would have been wild if they'd let this one continue with standing, since this is the case where the people suing were a bunch of anti-abortion doctors whose argument for how they were harmed was that they might hypothetically have to treat a patient whose abortion had caused complications. They didn't give any examples of this having happened. The remedy they wanted was that nobody should be allowed to use or prescribe this drug.

There's a proper export on the Mac if you have access to one, at least.

I agree up to a point. Credit card fees are pretty low, overall, so a business deciding to charge me a few percent more if I pay with AmEx vs Visa feels like they're just being petty. But with the App Store, it's a significant chunk of the purchase price -- a business wanting to pass on a 30% increase in their costs seems reasonable.

Yeah, we weren't thinking that Bartender had been stolen somehow, which is what this post is mostly addressing. Rather it's a question of whether we can trust the people who've legitimately bought it, particularly given a history of app acquisitions taking things down a shady road.

Surtees had a bunch of accumulated trust from having been maintaining Bartender for over a decade and not having done anything abusive with it in that time. A new developer is starting from scratch there, and the first impression being that they're trying to avoid people knowing about them doesn't make us jump to trusting them. (That's why people are being more inclined to trust random apps from unknowns like Hidden Bar or Ice...)

Its core feature is a non-cosmetic change: it hides the menubar app icons, and then shows them on-demand. The ability to make cosmetic changes to the menubar is a comparatively recent development.

Last update was three years ago, so probably not.

Bots from big companies like Amazon, which is who the author is complaining about, do tend to respect it. In fact, it's listed in their documentation that the GP linked to that they will. They could be lying -- but why bother?

Their robots.txt is a 404: https://git.gmem.ca/robots.txt

It seems like it'd be better to populate the robots.txt and request that all bots not scrape this site -- as-is they're still pounding away against the firewall and it'd be cleaner if they just went away. If it turns out they don't respect robots.txt, you can escalate from there.

Even "spent only on wikipedia" is a bit complicated -- bawolff's example was grants to Wikimedia Deutschland for work on wikidata, which sounds like it's some separate project. But really wikidata is used pretty extensively inside wikipedia, particularly for keeping facts synched up between the various project languages. Or money spent on Wikimedia Commons sounds like another random project, but actually it's the infrastructure for all the images you see on wikipedia.

It gets fuzzier as you go out to the promotion-of-free-knowledge stuff, for sure. You can argue its connection to keeping information being contributed to wikipedia, and the long term health of the community, but it's definitely less directly keep-the-lights-on.

I think it's worth viewing through an addiction lens. Some people have addictive personalities, and their brains work differently when presented with things like this. I can have just one drink, or play just a bit of a video game. But I know people who will tip into a destructive addiction spiral from a tiny impetus like that, such that completely avoiding what to me would be a harmless thing is the only way they can live a normal life.

It's sort of like people with clinical depression. Advice from people who're not clinically depressed is often terrible, because it's stuff that'll work great if you're a neurotypical person. And it's legitimately hard to get in the mindset of someone whose brain works differently than yours for things like this, and understand what's incredibly difficult for them despite being trivial for you.

You may have missed them saying "when accounting for inflation". In the US at the moment that's around 3%. Thus your local credit union's savings account, a nice and stable investment, is effectively giving you around 3% appreciation in real-money each year right now. (I have no idea whether their broader point about the rate over-time is correct, admittedly.)

Machine-readable infoboxes are surprisingly painful because an "infobox" isn't a top-level thing in mediawiki. Rather, it's something that emerged from community practice -- a template that's slightly-standardized, and has a sprawling network of subtemplates for specific categories of article. Then the assorted other language wikipedias have their own variants of these templates with their own names, etc.

Pulling it into a mediawiki extension (or core) and making it part of the page-level metadata gets suggested pretty frequently, but it's a bit contentious amongst the hardcore editors who'd need to actually adopt such things. The template-based nature of the current infoboxes mean that they're very accessible to the community, and it's easy to spin off new variants or make changes without getting programmers to help you.

There's slow movement towards getting the sort of data that winds up in infoboxes into wikidata, but it's still somewhat spotty.

(If you've never done it, it can be quite edifying to install mediawiki for yourself and seeing how much of the surrounding infrastructure of wikipedia is absent because it's all templates.)