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tjl

414 karma · joined February 19, 2014

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tjl··on Make: Electronics Book Bundle
I have an earlier edition of "The Art of Electronics" and I'm wondering how different the latest edition is. That said, I rarely open it so it probably doesn't really matter anyway.

I've done only one electronics project since my electronics course in undergrad. I keep meaning to do more, but I never get around to it.

tjl··on What is Differential Privacy?
I believe that's how it works.

They even limit the number of samples they get from a specific person so they can't filter out the noise for that person and get their individual response.

But, keep in mind that Apple will have records of all your iTunes rentals and purchases at least for billing purposes. However, at least in the US there's a law about keeping that data private (because of Robert Bork).

https://epic.org/privacy/vppa/

tjl··on What is Differential Privacy?
https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/102/

You can find all the videos from WWDC 2016 some time after the session is done. I usually check the next day. They have the videos for several previous WWDCs up as well.

tjl··on What is Differential Privacy?
According to the State of the Union (where they explain how they're doing differential privacy) there is an overall database, but only in aggregate. It's specifically designed so you don't know the individual answer from each person.
tjl··on What is Differential Privacy?
They talked a bit more about differential privacy in the State of the Union. Basically, they hash the data and add noise. By collecting data from a bunch of people that noise gets averaged out. They also limit the amount of samples (over a relatively short period of time) they can get from a single person so they won't be able to identify them.
tjl··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
Actually, they put up the videos on their site and you can watch them there or download them. So, complaining that you can't stream it is a really minor complaint. Plus, I tried to stream it on my Apple TV and it wasn't available to stream, so the complaint is completely invalid.
tjl··on Apple File System
When Apple dropped ZFS, Sun was in the middle of a lawsuit with NetApp regarding ZFS. If I recall correctly, Apple wanted Sun to be on the hook in the event of any possible patents, but they balked. Apple isn't going to touch ZFS.
tjl··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
https://twitter.com/siracusa/status/742435975079419905
tjl··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
They cover things like this in the "Developer State of the Union" which is the talk really focused at developers. That's later today.
tjl··on OS X is now macOS and gets support for Siri, auto unlock
The beta for XCode 8 is up which includes Swift 3 and support for iOS 10.

Before you decide you're disappointed, wait for the Developer State of the Union later today and the other sessions. There's interesting things like an "Apple File System" session. It looks like the beta for the file system will be in macOS Sierra and come out officially in 2017. You won't be able to use it as a boot drive (probably a safe precaution) and it has a few other restrictions, but it's a good start.

tjl··on Apple opens Siri to third party developers
It's sort of open.

https://developer.apple.com/sirikit/

Basically, it looks like you can extend Siri in a few different ways, just like extensions last year. I expect that it will open up as time goes on.

The API reference documentation is linked to at the bottom of the page.

tjl··on The Origins of SageMath; I am leaving academia to build a company [pdf]
I think people underestimate how much work a professor does. Everybody in my department who started a company either did it before starting at the university or they did it while on sabbatical.

Good luck!

tjl··on Report: Smart contact lens and other ambitious projects at Verily are floundering
It's not really road-ready. Right now it requires a very precisely mapped set of roads. Plus, they've only been testing it in a state with very good weather. I'm very curious to see how it behaves in a harsh winter. Even then, there's the pretty public mess up with the bus a few months back.
tjl··on Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
They also have some accounts for specific things, but no general Apple one. The support channel is about the closest to an official overall Apple account. The support channel seems to be pretty decent so far.
tjl··on Facebook disabling messaging in its mobile web app to push people to Messenger
For me, it's two reasons. First, they have a history of changing their policies that mess with what the user has explicitly set in the past (e.g., changing all the e-mails to facebook.com ones, changing private things to public). That's what prevents me from using Facebook.

But, for those that use Facebook, the apps have a history of being poorly written and do things that drain your battery even when you're not actually using the app. That's why people want to use the web interface. At least with the web interface they know the web browser should be reasonably behaved. Making this change to push people to the app instead of using the web means that you now have to watch your app battery usage more closely if you start using Messenger.

On iOS (I don't know about Android) you can see how much time app is spending in background. If it's an app designed to run in the background like a music or podcast player, seeing a lot of background time is normal. For an app like Facebook, that's a problem. Every few days I check my battery usage per app and it all breaks down pretty much as I expect. The apps I use the most are all using the most battery and in the rough proportions I expect. That's not been the case recently with Facebook at least according to the stories I've read documenting the problem.

tjl··on What UX designers can learn from 1990s Japanese video games
I first saw the term hamburger menu several months back and I thought, "huh?" as I had no idea what it meant. I had to go search the net to find out that they meant those three stacked bars. Why not just call it that? It doesn't really look like a hamburger.
tjl··on Linear algebra for game developers – Part 1 (2009)
When I was going through undergrad engineering we were taught linear algebra in first year but didn't really have a lot of the other background for the different applications.

As a grad student, I had a friend of mine who was teaching that same linear algebra course. I provided her with a lot of materials (similar to this) to help her students better understand different aspects of the material. There's a reason why the different introductory topics are taught, but often you don't really understand the topic until you get deeper into the applied material in 3rd and 4th year.

tjl··on Fast.com: Netflix internet connection speed test
The simplest way would be to cheat and prioritize traffic for a few minutes and then throttle. That way, any speed test would come out fine but not actual shows.
tjl··on Gboard: Search, GIFs, emojis and more from your iPhone keyboard
They've made the conscious decision to use their Material design and Roboto in all their iOS apps. This is funny because in their Android UI documents they stress that you should stick with the OS style. But, they do exactly the opposite on iOS. It's one of the reasons why I use the Google apps as little as possible.

I doubt I'll use this keyboard. I have an iPhone 5 so screen space is limited and I don't want to waste it on a big Google logo in my keyboard. Plus, I can't see that I'll have much use for it.

tjl··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
It's been $7 for a while. It was $7/month when I cancelled my service back in 2013. I was paying for private repos when I was doing my PhD thesis and once I finished I just kept my local copies and deleted the GitHub version. Now I just use my GitHub for public projects. All my private projects are on GitLab at the moment.
tjl··on Introducing unlimited private repositories
When I was doing my PhD I ended up putting all my development into one repo and all my documents in a second because of GitHub's per repo rules. I didn't know about an academic pricing (they might have had it, but I think it was added after I finished) and I asked about the rules because I wanted a number of small repos, but all told would only be a few hundred meg at most. I was told no, so I decided on the two repo strategy. It worked, but it was awkward.
tjl··on Japanese Words That Don't Exist in English
Borrowing words is pretty common. I went on an exchange to a small town in Québec when I was in high school. They borrowed English words to use in French. The only thing is that their use wasn't quite the same as English. For example, I was asked if a girl who was a good friend of mine was my "chum". I said yes, not knowing that they use it to mean girlfriend/boyfriend.

Good examples for English borrowing words are "nirvana" and "dharma". Both are hard to translate their meaning into English so we just go with the word itself.

tjl··on [dead]
I hadn't tried the UI stuff in playgrounds (I use it for experiments mostly). I'll take your advice and set up a project. Table views are useful, but a definite pain point.

Good luck!

tjl··on [dead]
I don't need to do any RESTful JSON apps at the moment, but this is being put on by a friend of mine and I like to learn new skills in the event I need them for something else. Thanks for the pointer!
tjl··on iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs
I spent a lot of time researching cell phone providers here in Ontario as I was just getting a cell for the first time. All the plans are pretty universally terrible. I ended up with Wind Mobile for $40/month for BYOD. Unfortunately, they're 3G only but it's 5GB data vs. 100MB for similarly priced plans on other carriers.
tjl··on [dead]
I like that it's coming through by e-mail. Are you expecting that we play with the code for the lesson in a playground?

P.S. This has got to be somewhat challenging to do while living on a boat.

tjl··on iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs
I have the iPhone 5 now. Until getting this phone, I've never had a cell phone (I don't really get that many phone calls so I haven't bothered). To be honest, the battery life isn't great, but I just bought a small external battery to charge it when necessary. It was cheaper than a replacement and I didn't want to risk making a mistake in the swap. I have more than enough technical skill to do it, but since it's now my only phone I decided not to take the chance. I might do it if the battery life gets too bad.
tjl··on The End of Numeric Error: An interview with John L. Gustafson
It won't really help. You'll get the same issues with stiff DEs or ill-conditioned matrices for perfect precision or floating-point. There will be some cases where it will help, but not a lot.

I've implemented a few DE solvers and sparse matrix implementations before. I think sparse matrices is one case where it would help.

tjl··on iPhone Sales Drop, and Apple’s 13-Year Surge Ebbs
My parents only replaced their iPhone 5 when the battery wasn't holding a charge as well as they'd liked. So, they replaced it with a 5S (this was before the SE, but it was free with a contract anyway). They use it for calls and directions, but not much else so the 5S is more than adequate.
tjl··on Homebrew now sends usage information to Google Analytics
That's basically the main reason why I left MacPorts. The other was the fact that they'd build their own version of already installed programs. The worst offender for a long time was tetex until they finally added support for looking at an existing tetex installation.

I also ran into a number of broken ports. I had used Fink, but I ran into issues with its packaging too. So, when I heard about Homebrew, I decided to try it. It's been pretty decent for me so I've stuck with it. The only major issue I've had has been related to Octave, but that's been a problem for MacPorts too as the OS X version isn't as up to date as the Linux version at times.

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