vurpo

He was talking about HAL9000, not Google's AI.

Is there any reason at all to go with anything other than Let's Encrypt if you're getting a cert for your personal blog?

Debian's reproducible builds would allow allow anyone to grab the source to a package and build it the same way as Debian does, and get matching builds. This would allow a Debian mirror to host self-built but binary matching packages. Not sure if these kind of mirrors exist.

I can imagine a government that would enforce that ISPs block adult sites by default (a specfic government comes to mind), and as those sites would both use HTTPS (as websites do), the design agency's website would be blocked by default as collateral damage.

"Sorry, your website is blocked by default on all ISPs. It's to protect the children."

I wonder how much memory this translation via an intermediate representation of a sentence takes. It seems like representing the semantic meaning of a sentence in a language-independent way would take a huge amount of data.

You can just disable Google Now in the Google settings, and install a different launcher like Nova Launcher, if you want to get rid of Google Now entirely. Modding your phone is not necessary for this.

It would need a more complex solution than that. For example, this is the website of a local bus company where I live:

http://åbus.fi

The characters are from the Latin character set, but non-ASCII. Highlighting the Å in red would look pretty confusing. And in many countries you want the entire domain name written in non-ASCII characters, depending on the language. E.g. websites in Russia, China, India, etc...

> Letters in in two languages that are otherwise the same, but one has an accent. Is the accent part of the letter? Separate? Are they really the same letter?

It gets worse than this. Example: the letters Ä and Ö exist in both Swedish and German (as an example).

In German they are actually counted as the letters A and O with diaereses above them, and they alphabetize together with other instances of the letters A and O, because that's what they are.

In Swedish those are their own letters, which are completely separate from the letters A and O. They get their own place in the alphabet (second-to last and last, respectively), and replacing them with AE and OE is technically not acceptable in Swedish like it is in German (though it's often done anyway, e.g. on airline tickets).

And in Unicode they are represented by the same code-point even though in one language it is a letter, and in the other language it's only a variation on another letter. What a mess.

Emojis are characters in the Unicode specification, which have glyphs in the macOS default font, and are rendered by default in native macOS apps that display text. Why should Emacs make the decision that most characters are okay to display in their text editor, but these specific characters are a no-no?

You're sounding like "I'm not using this feature, why does it even exist?". If things worked like that, then everybody would be using Linux on all computers today.

If I understand correctly, this is not even a compatibility layer like Wine. This is literally a part of the Windows kernel and userspace, running entirely inside Linux userspace.

This is a common method of payment in Finland as well, but, the store always asks you to choose your bank, then redirects you to the online bank where you then authenticate and authorize the transfer on the bank's website. It then redirects you back to the merchant's website.

Basically, banks provide an API (similar to OAuth? I guess) where the merchant only asks the bank for a specific amount of money, and the authentication and authorization of the payment happens only directly between the customer and the bank.

Why would this be so hard to so in other countries?

This effect is also extremely noticeable in the Finnish language. The rules of Finnish grammar are followed much more strictly when writing any kind of text, than they are when speaking. There are rules of grammar that are always followed when writing, but are not really that important when speaking.

As an example, take the sentence "kirja on työpöydälläni", which means "the book is on my desk". The word "työpöytä" (desk) gets two suffixes, "-llä" which corresponds to the preposition "on", and "-ni" which is the first-person genitive. But when speaking, this would easily come out as "kirja on minun työpöydällä" instead, where the noun doesn't isn't in the genitive form at all anymore, the genitive has become a separate word which is a pronoun with a genitive ("minun").

If you study just the grammatical rules and nothing else, you might think that the second sentence is obviously grammatically wrong. (Because according to the rule, the noun must change its case to correspond to the genitive.) Yet it's completely acceptable to say it aloud that way, even in a formal context, and nobody would bat an eye. While at the same time if you put it this way in any kind of writing, you would almost surely be notified by the grammar police that you have made a grave mistake.

I find this duality of language fascinating. And this will certainly continue producing problems for the field of machine translation. Google Translate is infamous in Finland for being near-useless for translating anything to or from Finnish.

CQ has been used for over a century as a call by radio operators (mostly in Morse code, where it's encoded as -.-. --.-). It's a general call that invites any operators that receive it to respond to you.

It actually originated from the French word sécurité, but in English-language countries it was quickly backronym'd to become an abbreviation of "seek you".

Chromium never uses Finch except if you specify it in the command line flags.

The download is not over HTTPS, so you also have to trust the network. Also, the package you're downloading is not signed (which it would be if it came from a software repository, which almost all major operating systems have) so you have to trust whoever runs that website.

How could they? They can't just disable autoplay but make an exception for YouTube, that would be wrong in so many ways. You can't make that into a web standard, so it would promote browser fragmentation, for example.

So how about a whitelist/blacklist? Well, since users can't even agree among themselves on which websites belong on which side of the fence, such a list would quickly become a nightmare to maintain, still be based on someone's personal bias, and would still leave small websites at a disadvantage.

Pretty much the only thing that would work is a permissions question to the user, like there is currently for e.g. location access. "Do you want to allow videosite.example.com to automatically play video content? \Allow, \Allow and remember, \*Deny"

It would be more like "Dear Apple: Please End Monopolized Browsers for our devices"

Google's and MS's operating systems don't monopolize the browser. I'm not sure if Mozilla is even making an OS anymore. The only OS in this day and age which doesn't let you implement your own browser engine is iOS.

Compiling your kernel hasn't been necessary for like a decade by now. Configuring X is becoming a thing of the past, partially because of working automatic config, and partially because of the move away from X to Wayland-based desktops.

I use Fedora on a ThinkPad X230. It works an absolute dream. GNOME is my favorite of all the desktops, and Fedora by default ships a fully setup and functioning Gnome on Wayland session (which will also be the default session in the next release, coming in a few weeks).

The reason I chose to run Fedora on a ThinkPad is because it required no tweaking and fiddling at all to get working nicely. I'm all about that seamless out-of-the-box experience.

I was amused by the post here today about the Touch ID fork of sudo for macOS, because I already use the same feature on my ThinkPad every day, and it required absolutely no configuration or setup (other than enrolling my fingerprint).

There was originally a company called Smart Projects SRL. They manufacture boards. Arduino LLC was the company originally founded for the Arduino project, and Smart Projects SRL manufactured the actual boards for them, because it's owned by one of the Arduino project founders, Gianluca Martino, and they were all friends. That's the backstory.

But when Arduino LLC tried to register the Arduino trademark, it turned out Gianluca Martino had registered the trademark for his own company two years prior, and not told the others. (Arduino LLC got the trademark in the USA, but were not able to register it anywhere else) This happened in 2008. At the time, they just agreed to stay friends and not make a big deal of it.

Then, last year, Smart Projects SRL made a big deal of it. They renamed their company Arduino SRL, registered arduino.org and cut their ties to Arduino LLC. This was reportedly because LLC wanted to start licensing the name to other manufacturers, but SRL wanted to keep official Arduino manufacturing to themselves. This led to the arduino.cc/arduino.org split.

That's pretty sleazy and anti-open source of them if you ask me.

"Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."

--Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jurassic Park)

> "That's a good essay isn't it?" "Yeah, Yeah."

That's sarcasm, which is not a grammatical construct but a cultural(?) one. "Yeah, yeah" is a positive statement (grammatically, a double positive never turns into a negative in English), but a statement said sarcastically implies that you meant the opposite of what you said.