maggit

I can't comment on the iOS client, but the Android client is what's primarily holding me back from switching to Protonmail as my default. The problem is that it keeps logging me out, for one reason or another, and to log back in I have to enter the password and TOTP code. That's a pain in the butt, and it makes it impossible for me to rely on for, say, airplane tickets.

I disagree. The article quotes and links to three different articles (the first of which is the one you have pointed out) and ties them together. I agree that it is not the most substantial post, but I wouldn't call it blogspam.

The author seems to be from Dallas, Texas, but the quote in the title is from another post: https://eand.co/what-do-you-call-a-world-that-cant-learn-fro...

No, that quote is not out of context at all. The expectation that Apple would in some way ruin the Mac Mini in the next update is the topic of several of the first paragraphs in the article. The gist is indeed "It hasn't gotten worse! Yayy!"

Granted, that's not all of it. He is celebrating that it's gotten better, but he is also specifically celebrating that it hasn't lost many advantages.

This has some similarity with something I've been organizing with some friends 1-2 times per year for the last four years, but our's is even tinier ;)

It is a one-day conference and we fill the day with talks on engaging topics for the audience. (We're techies, so this works better for us) There's been 10-18 attendees and this has been working well as long as the room we have been in has had the right size. It is invitation only, and we're struggling to keep the invitation list from growing too quickly. We're taking turns giving the presentations, so we have a reason to keep inviting the same people back. We order take-out for lunch and after the talks we go out for dinner.

This is dirt cheap. The admission price is really that you have to prepare a talk once in a while. We sometimes charge a little bit to cover costs for coffee and snacks and we have made an investment in a HDMI capture card.

The most striking similarity with the "Tiny Conferences" of the article is that it is definitely the conference I get the best value out of. I heartily recommend organizing something like it! :)

(If you are super curious, recordings mostly in Norwegian are here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCiAz5MrT56_p2DCt0D4fz8w A few are in English, and some are captioned in English)

You misread. Java being old is counted as a positive here; Java is old, so it has plenty of tooling, is the message. Despite this, they are not using Java :)

I agree, which I why I specifically said "similar" rather than "as good" or "better". I'm not impressed by competing touchpads.

Yes, please do! I've spent some time researching this as well, and to me it seems like the author has missed one thing; the Mac touchpad hardware is so much better than other touchpad hardware. (As I understand it, the competition is barred from making similar touchpads due to patents)

I have been running Linux on MacBook Pros for many years, and the touchpad is a constant source of disappointment. For the effort to be worthwhile to me, the goal would have to include getting Apple's touchpads working excellently in Linux.

I would definitely participate in crowdfunding this effort. (Kickstarter or otherwise)

That's what "software engine" in the title is supposed to describe :)

I was excited about this when it was all the rage. It speaks to me as a programmer. Some years later, I stumbled upon this excellent article by an artist considering the problem from the art perspective: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/a-pixel-artist-renounces-pixel-...

It points to the problem with these upscaled versions: They aren't any good. In the end, the artist demonstrates how to get good results, draw it again: http://www.dinofarmgames.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/yosh...

Of course, the algorithmic approach lets you upscale any number of preexisting games. However, I have concluded that I like the original art better.

>Any idea why…

No idea. It's a bug that I haven't been able to straighten out.

>My only other complaint…

Sure. As noted in the article, this is unescapable. For the situation you describe it would be possible to segment the constrained squares into distinct "islands" and then consider these independently of each other, reducing the complexity of the solver in these situations.

But it is proven that it is always possible to get into degenerate situations which no solver can ever hope to figure out.

I think my implementation is sufficient to demonstrate the concept and illustrate the article :)

Yeah, I disabled that rule for that specific game :]

Thank you, that's a nice compliment :)

My inspiration for the format is Red Blob Games (https://www.redblobgames.com/), truly a marvel of interactive writing. (https://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/ is my all-time favorite)

A small comment for clarification; my remark about making the game less mechanical is for the part of the game that automates the simple, purely deterministic, constaints. So there are two things: Automation of simple deterministic things, that makes the game less mechanical, plus "Request help" that makes the game less random. The two are separate.

I don't think this speaks to your central point, however :)

A dictionary really isn't a great source for the exact definitions of technical words. Wikipedia does much better in this instance: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compiler

> A compiler is computer software that transforms computer code written in one programming language (the source language) into another programming language (the target language).

Later on it lists some classes of compilers that could be called by more specific names than just "compiler".

Compiling is independent of source and target language, although it is mostly used to describe transformation from a higher-level human friendly language into a lower-level machine friendly language. Even so, the defined meaning of compiling is independent of the source and target languages. If you want to use the word "transpiling", you would have to define it in terms of compiling; transpiling is a special case of compiling, where the source and target languages have such and such properties.

I'm a paying would-be user of ProtonMail. "Would-be" because it is simply not reliable enough. It is frustrating that they are diversifying (contacts, vpn) when I find the core product too unreliable to depend on.

I mainly have two problems: 1. The mobile client logs out spontaneously (or crashes and logs out) every once in a while and I have to reenter both the password and the TOTP code. Cumbersome, and really inconvenient if I'm on the go and for example my plane ticket is in ProtonMail. (I don't know my password and keep it in a password manager, inaccessible from my mobile), 2. The web client logs out whenever the browser is restarted. The web browser at least remembers the password, but I need to interact with my phone to get the TOTP code in. This means that I end up in a state where I don't get notifications for new mails, and I have to go and deal with it proactively. They recently released the "bridge", which runs as a daemon and lets me access the mail via IMAP. This alleviates the problem, but it is unfortunately still unavailable for Linux.

Are there any other happy or unhappy ProtonMail users out there? Am I alone in these frustrations?

Ah, let me throw my take on Minesweeper into the ring as well: http://magnushoff.com/minesweeper/

My final variant is like the original Minesweeper except that when you are provably stuck, the game will help you to move on.

Hm, I think we strongly disagree here.

I am bilingual myself, and I strongly prefer each context to be self-consistent. When reading English text I find Norwegian date formatting confusing, and vice versa. I routinely have open tabs in different languages.

> Why must the date format be Norwegian?

Otherwise the page isn't in Norwegian. This is a UX question only.

It is important that a Norwegian visitor with a browser configured to prefer en-US [1] would see the entire web page in the same locale. Why should _parts_ of the web page localize to a different locale than other parts?

The standard Norwegian date format is DD.MM.YYYY, _easily_ confused with MM/DD/YYYY. Why is it a feature to include this confusion?

[1]: This is pretty common, either deliberately or by accident. If you actually want to serve content localized in multiple ways (eg. you want to serve both an English and a Norwegian version) you have to sidestep browser localization anyway and offer the user a way to select which version they want.

That's an awful shame. I can't really see myself using this when authoring websites as long as it has that behaviour. If I am authoring a Norwegian web site, the date format must be Norwegian, regardless of the user's preferred locale.

Those are two orthogonal concerns. A (theoretical) browser in full screen mode might or might not display UI elements/browser chrome. A windowed browser might or might not display browser chrome.

A chromeless windowed browser would look something like QuickTime in macOS, if that helps you; the window consists entirely of the playing video until you mouse over it.

A small nomenclature clarification seems to be in order:

"Headless" means without output. It is often used to describe servers without any attached monitors (the monitor would be the head that it is missing), but can similarly be used to describe browsers that do not even create a window on your desktop. It simply runs as a service that can be scripted.

What you are looking for, I would rather call "chromeless". The browser is there, but it has no visible UI-components outside of the webpage.

My Android 7 device is pretty good with realizing when the wifi doesn't actually give Internet access, and it then routes data through the 4g/mobile connection instead. Nexus 6, stock Android 7.1.1.

The text on the linked page actually compares this to Project Naptha:

> For extension gurus: You might have heard of Project Naptha, a great addon that applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. Copyfish solves the same problem, but it takes a different user interface approach. It does not try to alter the website. Instead, it lets you mark the text in the image that you want to extract. As a result Copyfish works with every website, even videos and PDF documents.

You have gotten many decent replies already. I think one thing that is missing is that the phrase talks about "free as in free beer". So it is not a statement that beer in general is free, it is a clarification that we want the meaning of "free" as in the phrase "free beer". In other words: At no cost. ("gratis")

This is in contrast to "free" as in "free speech", which is about freedom/liberty. ("libre")

Ah, I apologize, but I have to join the unhelpful choir ;)

It seems to me that the question of whether or not electricity has mass is a proxy for whether or not information is tangible. This is the same interpretation that "Greg Graviton" at stackexchange has. And it is hard to meaningfully answer by yes or no; information needs material in order to exist, but by itself it is not tangible. Both yes and no are misleading.

My advice, which is completely ignorant of how law is practiced, is to find another way to settle the original question of whether or not the coerced obtaining of the virtual sword could be named "stealing". When taking intuitive notions such as "is this a _thing_ or not?" to the fundamental levels, the questions often stop making sense, as it has in this case, because the intuition is dependent on another level of abstraction. At this point it is no longer constructive to attempt obtaining answers to the questions as posed, and maybe this is why you have struggled to find a good answer. That's probably not helpful to you, but it is my best attempt at resolving this question :)

(About DC: It is more accurate to say that there is an exchange of mass. The same count of electrons go down the wire as up the other wire. There is no net transfer of mass. See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14087221 )

The comment is accurate, and electricity should not be considered as having mass.

In a direct current (DC) setup, electrons will be moving continuously though the wires in a big loop. But the displacement of the electrons is not the electrical energy we are interested in.

It is instructive to think about alternating current (AC). In this case, electrons will be moving a bit forward, and then a bit back. So, basically wiggling more or less in place. There is still a lot of energy transferred.

A metaphor is a chain, like in a bicycle. You can use the chain to transfer energy, but it is not the chain links that are the energy. The movement is the energy. This is similar to electricity; it is not the electrons that move that is the electrical energy, instead the electrical energy is the movement itself.

(Due to Einstein's theory of relativity, we know that E=mc^2, which can be summarized as "all forms of energy are also mass". Considering this, all transfer of energy is transfer of mass. But it is miniscule. A small nuclear power plant could produce 4450 GWh in one year. The relativistic mass of this is 180g. All the energy produced in one full year of this plant has a total mass of 180g. So you should not consider electricity to be transfer of mass, even though it technically is :P )

(Also, since you asked for a physicist: I am not a physicist)

Fortunately, you can override it by adding, for example, `text-shadow: 0 0 0;` to <body>. I was unable to read the page before fixing this, I would strain my eyes trying to focus. (Perhaps this problem is exacerbated by "retina" screens?)