neallindsay

So a Surface Pro is a laptop then. Does a SteamDeck become a laptop if you install Windows on it?

I also raised an eyebrow at "the vast majority of laptops are only sold with a specific proprietary operating system: Microsoft Windows", but after looking at some estimates it seems legit. Probably only about 1 in 10 laptops is a Mac. Software developers really just live in a different world than normal people.

It got me thinking though: what is a laptop? People probably count Chromebooks, and that seems fair. Is a SteamDeck a laptop? Is an iPad with a keyboard case a laptop? Is a Microsoft Surface Pro a laptop when it has its keyboard attached?

You have to participate in order to get access to most iPhone users.

If someone is charged with and found innocent of a crime, you can't just remove that record. If someone else later finds an account of them being accused, they need a way to credibly assert that they were found innocent. Alternately if they are convicted and served their sentence, they might need to prove that in the future.

Sometimes people are unfairly ostracized for their past, but I think a policy of deleting records will do more harm than good.

Isn't that what I said?

1.7x more is not the same as 1.7x as many.

Some TypeScript features are only available through JSDoc. The one I encounter most often is `@deprecated`.

There's a Kingdom Hearts joke in there somewhere, but I don't know enough of the lore to make it.

We're all suffering from the curse of dimensionality.

In-band signaling can never be secure. Doesn't anyone remember the Captain Crunch whistle?

The search deals were already not exclusive. The real impact will be the other businesses (especially GenAI) where Google will be barred from having exclusivity clauses in its contracts.

-update- CNBC has fixed their headline.

I don't think that blueflow is being obtuse at all. If you assert that genes have an intended way of working, then the questions

> How do we know how things are intended to work? (Intended by whom?)

are very salient. Your reply talking about

> …a specific receptor in the body is not working properly.

just raises the same question again. What does it mean for something in our biology to be working "properly"? Who is deciding what is "proper"?

> …as intended.

Genes and biology in general do not have "intended" purposes.

Unicode support in Ruby has been great since the beginning.

Ruby has been extremely slow and deliberate in rolling out frozen string literals. They added a magic comment to opt in to them on a per-file basis all the way back in Ruby 2.3—almost a decade ago.

https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/news/2015/12/25/ruby-2-3-0-rele...

Most linting setups I've seen since then have required this line. I don’t expect many libraries to run afoul of this, and this warning setting will make finding them easy and safe. This will be nothing like the headache Python users faced transitioning to 3.

I guess "esoteric" is in the eye of the beholder, but Promises seem a lot easier than the old callback style we used to use for asynchronous operations.

Promises in JS make this stuff much easier (at least to my mind):

const lockify = f => {

  let lock = Promise.resolve()

  return (...args) => {

    const result = lock.then(() => f(...args))

    lock = result.catch(() => {})

    return result.then(v => v)

  }

}

By following the work of authors that you trust and getting recommendations from people you trust, you can reduce your need for recommendations from machines and companies. Then you won't need to rely on clickbait images and headlines to decide if you want to read or watch something.

This requires effort, so it's not free, but I think it's a better way to engage with media.

I guess they expect you to set all your repos to public before applying for a visa now. Maybe your Venmo history as well?

The xenophobes making these decisions don't care if they create problems for US citizens traveling abroad.

The picture at the top of the article seems to be a bad (AI-generated, I assume) illustration of the Gartner Hype cycle. There are supposed to be five stages, but the text at the bottom doesn't line up with the graph because it is missing the "peak of inflated expectations" while the graph seems to be missing the "plateau (of) productivity" stage.

Computers keep getting better at acting like humans, but humans don't get any more obviously human.

I was looking at quarterly revenue numbers—it seems like a dollar value to me.

Apple should abandon the console model for iPhones (and iPads, etc.). It's corrosive. By my back-of-the napkin math (subtracting an estimate of Google's quarterly search payments from Apple's stated "services" revenue and comparing to iPhone revenue), Apple would make the same amount of money by just charging me an extra 25% when I bought a phone. I would gladly pay that up-front instead of indirectly when I buy apps.

Despite all the data about climate change, the thing that is actually shifting us away from fossil fuels is that solar panels are cheap.

If they didn't prevent selling derivative game engines, someone could fork it and add a valuable feature that was only available in the paid fork. This could split the community.

That's a good point. Setting up a benign release first that you have engineered a same-hash malicious release you can swap in later is a higher bar than gaining control of a repo and immediately replacing a popular release.

The general problem is media companies that:

1. show you more stuff automatically, and

2. optimize for engagement when choosing what to show you next

That optimization works, and they have little incentive to optimize for anything else (like minimizing harm to users). TikTok is not the only offender, but they are the best at it (read: worst for users).

It is an additional concern that they are ultimately controlled by a foreign country that is relatively hostile to us and has low transparency to our law enforcement apparatus and regulators. Facebook and YouTube have to at least be worried about breaking our existing laws or annoying our Congress. This reins them in at least a little bit. TikTok actually did annoy Congress enough to prompt bi-partisan action (a very high bar in today's climate), but successfully won a game of chicken, as the law they are violating is officially being ignored.

Yes but SHA1 collisions are easy enough to engineer, so even then compromise is probably possible.

(I don't know how hard it is to push a different object to an existing SHA on GitHub—I'm guessing that you probably have to remove all references to the original object at that SHA?)

This doesn't even mention ESOPs[1], which have very favorable tax benefits in the US. I don't think that ESOPs are very compatible with high-risk/high-reward startups, but for businesses that turn a profit and grow at a sustainable rate, they are excellent.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Stock_Ownership_Plan