rerdavies

Not sure you're aware of this... most markdown engines allow you to also use a very constrained set of HTML tags inline.

e.g.:

``` ## <p style="margin-left=4em;font-family: 'Courier,mono"> Life is death's way of giving what it kills time to grow in. &mdash;w.s. burroughs. </p> ```

Necessarily, inline HTML tags, attributes and CSS is carefully sanitized by engines that support this. And, unfortunately the extent of sanitization, and actual supported tags vary from engine to engine. But it's there, and it is widely supported, and relatively predictable for basic HTML formatting. And mostly manages to excise ever-evolving ways to inject javascript into standard CSS.

HNs markdown engine doesn't support inline HTML; but Github's markdown engine does.

I'm fine with characters having a variable number of bytes. The problem comes when I have to interpret individual characters and/or codepoints and/or glyphs in a UTF string when trying to correctly lay out text on a Linux Terminal.

I just find it disconcerting that a single character in UTF-8 can be of infinite length (an infinite chain of modifiers, followed by an emoji; or an infinite stack of composing accents). And that the Unicode consortium has chosen to break the one-code-point-per-glyph convention.

An example of a truly weird outlier: the "family" emoji, which is composed as ManEmoji+ZeroWidthJoiner+WomanEmoji+ZeroWidthJoiner+ChildEmoji, which produces a single glyph.

And then how to deal with modifiers? e.g.

   MonochromeEmojiModifier+
   AsianSkinToneModifier+
   ManEmoji+
   ZeroWidthJoiner+
   WomanEmoji+
   ZeroWidthJoiner+
   ChildEmoji. 

(70 UTF-8 characters, 14 UTF-16 characters, 7 UTF-32 characters! How many glyphs? From one to three depending on what typeface you're using!). Unlike composing accents, which have a combined code-point, the Family emoji does not have a combined code-point, so it is typically implemented using combining in glyphs in the output TrueType/OpenType font, since TT/OT fonts can combine glyphs into private codepoints visible only inside the font.

or

   AsianSkinToneModifier+
   ManEmoji+
   ZeroWidthJoiner+
   AsianSkinToneModifier+
   WomanEmoji+
   ZeroWidthJoiner+
   AsianSkinToneModifier+
   ChildEmoji. 

(Is that even legal?)

And then an appendix of special rules that apply mostly to obscure scripts/locales that have to be dealt with almost on a case-by-case basis (fortunately, of those, German and Turkish are the only locales with odd special cases that Linux supports).

ALL of which are encoded in about 500,000 lines of code, documentation and data files by the Unicode consortium, that are updated annually. Unicode 18.0 includes 18 new emoji (including the infamous Pickle emoji, and skin-tone modifiers for left- and right-thumb), and three new scripts including proto-cuneiform. Yay! One assumes that Linux will implement the Pickle emoji on an urgent basis, and that proto-cuneiform will never be supported as a system locale.

The use-case that almost broke me: line-wrapping and displaying and editing arbitrary user-entered UTF-8 paragraph text on a Linux terminal -- both graphical (almost full Unicode support but very out-of-date emoji), AND true text mode (up to 512 locale-dependent glyphs, each of which may or may not be double-width) that has to be supported to allow use on machines without desktops. The IBM Unicode libraries get you part of the way there, but far from all of the way there; and the few system APIs that Linux do provide are buggy as heck.

If you don't care enough to read it, perhaps you should not care enough to comment.

I am very much looking forward to the day when I can use em-dashes again. I genuinely like em-dashes. Such a great punctuation mark!

To my ears, I find accusations of "it was written by AI" to be a bit MAGA-ish. It's a far too convenient way to say that I don't like what someone is saying without actually having to think for yourself (or heaven forbid, actually read it).

ANSI: the American National Standards Institute, a private non-profit group that oversees the creation of voluntary safety and product guidelines in the United States. Including ASCII. Pretty sure they own plain text, in the sense that OP uses it.

And then ISO, which owns a bunch of extended ASCII encodings that provide essential support for "plain text" in languages other than English (and an ugly historical hostility toward non-European languages).

And then Unicode Consortium, which owns Unicode, its ever-expanding list of complexities and exceptions and an ugly history of hostility toward Asian languages.

This isn't a competitor to markdown. It is a competitor to JSON. Not sure what brashtag does that JSON does not. I'm not at all convinced that brashtag is simpler than JSON.

And you seem to be a bit confused about code points and graphemes clusters.

UTF-32 grapheme clusters can easily be six or seven code-points long. Examples: modifier characters, flag/regional-indicator sequences, (and to a lesser extent, combining characters).

Why does it matter? Because you can't insert a linebreak in the middle of a grapheme cluster.

So even after converting all of your UTF-8 text to UTF-32, you STILL have to deal with multi-character code-point sequences.

Madness!

Remove user and press any key to continue.

:-P

Your government really needs to fix that. That's nuts.

With particular emphasis on "almost any bug might be exploitable".

In fairness, the UK government is masterfully good at bureaucracy. Clear directions; spacious, beautifully designed forms that are easy to read, and that you don't need a team of lawyers to fill out. And jaw-droppingly beautify typography. And an implicit understanding that every piece of UK bureaucracy should be easy to navigate for anyone. And their websites reflect that.

The US government, on the other hand ranks close to the very bottom of 1st world nations for forms culture. Forms that are difficult to read, and even more difficult to fill out accurately, often requiring supplementary information from multiple sources. So much so that people are advised to consult a lawyer just to fill out an application for Tax Identification Number! (My personal worst experience with American forms culture).

So I don't think it's entirely fair to compare UK government websites to American government websites. Navigating a bureaucracy that's fundamentally broken is a significantly different kind of problem.

fwiw, I'm Canadian. Canadian forms culture falls somewhere in between. There aren't a lot of forms that are terribly difficult to fill out; it's rare to find a form that requires more than about a dozen pages of supplementary information (all of which comes with the form when you download it). But still not anywhere as easy to use as UK forms are.

Some kid straight out of highschool being paid minimum wage to answer calls with little or no real training, and performance metrics that reward getting people off the line as quickly as possible whether they've given the right answer or not; or an LLM that by many very reasonable measures provides answers as good as those provided by post-graduate students for difficult problems, and spookily accurate answers for questions that are not... I'll take the LLM please and thank you.

As far as I can tell, the america.gov LLM is mostly providing links to the landing pages you would have found through classical web search. Perhaps with a little bit of clarifying information when there are multiple choices.

Honestly, using an LLM the way america.gov does it, is pretty much the same thing as using search engines, except the result you wanted is almost always in the first result, not 2/3 of the way down the 4th page. Or 42nd on a list of things you are not interested in at all. So much more efficient!

Would your co-workers not make sh!t up if they weren't using LLMs? Pretty sure they would. And MUCH more frequently than the very rare hallucinations one runs into with decent LLMs these days.

JPackage - Dev.java is a command-line tool bundled with the Java Development Kit (JDK) since JDK 14 (fully stable since JDK 16) used to package self-contained Java applications into native, platform-specific installable package.

Which would need a teensy tiny modification to include a performance profile.

Hard to say whether he resigned, or "resigned". And I'm not sure there's a huge difference, practically speaking. By Greenwald's account, it was the former, I think. Either way, he took his marbles and went home. In fairness, I can imagine why, after having spent 7 years of his life mining through the Snowden archive, spending another few years mining the Biden hard disk might have been attractive.

False dichotomy. I thought it was funny, and not in the least bit offensive. (And I also think it's a great handle).

... but only after making $400K+/year for seven years, winning a Pulitzer Prize, and then CHOOSING to leave The Intercept because they wouldn't publish his extreme far-right lunatic stuff. If Greenwald isn't currently doing well, I don't think you can really say that it was because of the Snowden papers.

Very generous indeed.

Entering photos as evidence in a legal proceeding is currently bizarrely complex. You actually have to admit an expert witness to testify that the software used to process a photograph will not introduce artifacts. Even if you are simply zooming in or cropping an image.

Specifically, the AIs were prompted to break into a company, and the subcontractor who was running the test misconfigured their network so that the AI probed a real external company instead of an internal honeypot with the same name.

That is strange. I use Gemini frequently, with Google Auto, and whenever I make that sort of query, which I do often, it displays "Searching on Google Maps...", and comes up with correct results. Odd that the desktop version doesn't have the same functionality.

> taking on debt you don't really need.

How does that work? When inflation goes to 18%, borrowing rates go to 23%.

Of course. I don't think a language can support async/await without a library implementation, or the language features that support it.

And I can't honestly think of another paradigm that doesn't require callback functions or lambdas that, ergonomically, end up producing function implementations that end up drifting off the right side of the screen for anything more than a couple of sequential asynchronous operations.

Why would you not AOT compile at install time?! That would allow the compile to use CPU-specific features? And put a compiled preamble for class initialization on applicable functions that patches the VTABLE to skip the class initialization code.

The principal difference between dispatching in a thread-based framework and async/await is that async/await allows you to program sequences of asynchronous operations much more easily. No more separation of code that initiates an async operation and the code that handles the result!

If you mentioned your needs in the article, I don't see it. You need to explicitly state somewhere that you are only interested in the camera app and the phone app. I mean I guess it's obvious that you're going to end up with a phone where nothing works. But still...

Having established that they aren't neccesarily slop, may we ask how you determined which ones were written by AI? Or is that a matter of opinion too?

Yes, the tried-and-true first apartment cheap stuff is still there. But the majority of what's for sale in IKEA these days is of significantly better quality (and significantly higher price).

The best alternative to IKEA furniture is more expensive IKEA furniture.

Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that's all.”

-- Alice in Wonderland

My recently-purchased Google Pixel 10 Pro has an unlockable bootloader. (Although it may be locked if you buy it through a provider).

And, for a nominal one-time payment, you can register as a developer, and compile, install and run absolutely anything you want on a non-rooted Android phone with a locked bootloader (within the constraints of the security system, which is, of course, A Good Thing).