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There’s also a Base64URL variant that is a little more friendly in the modern world where the +/= often need escape sequences.
The first two are replaced with more sensible characters and the third is just removed entirely - do you really need padding?
They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV
Yes they do. It’s just they’re choosing to spend all of it on hydrogen, which the Japanese companies still think is better than batteries.
Supposedly hydrogen cars are a solved problem now, all the investment is going into infrastructure. The ability to fill your tank in a few minutes is useless if there’s nowhere to fill up.
In October the Gaza Health Ministry claimed 471 people were killed by an Israeli missile strike on a hospital. Widespread credible (independent) evidence proves a small Hamas rocket missfired and hit a carpark near the hospital, causing relatively minor damage (there was a large fireball, but it was mostly rocket fuel - which is far less damaging than an explosive payload intended to kill).
None of the credible evidence was able to put a number to the deaths in that accident but it’s highly improbable that 471 people were in the carpark. And it definitely wasn’t an Israeli rocket.
In other words - Gaza’s health ministry is not a reliable source. Some of the things they report are probably accurate but they have been proven to be unreliable. Don’t trust anything they say unless it’s been backed by someone more reliable (in which case, you might as well refer to the other source instead).
At best, the ministry failed verify facts (e.g. was a large missile even fired at all?) before reporting what happened. But I think that’s being too charitable. For example where did they get the 471 number from? I think they made it up. I don’t have proof but it’s the only believable explanation.
Worse though - they haven’t retracted the claim. Mistakes are understandable… but failing to admit someone in your organisation made a mistake is unacceptable.
Signal Just Works™️
Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you’ve ever received is just… gone. Forever.
Sorry but I don’t buy any claim that Signal “just works”. It’s pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that’s fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I’m glad Signal exists. But it doesn’t really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).
What’s weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else’s device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it’s not. It’d make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number… and if they forget their password… come up with new username.
The feature does require confirmation.
It also requires accessing your contacts database, which is encrypted on iPhones…
Because it’s encrypted, it’s impossible to share contact details unless someone enters the device passcode (or else does a biometric unlock - which effectively stores your passcode temporarily in a secure location that is wiped whenever the device is powered off or left unused for several hours).
It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all.
Those forums are wrong. A title should accurately reflect the content. We can’t choose the title other websites choose… but we can choose a title for our posts and we should take advantage of that.
Also - if you find yourself posting on a forum with that rule, just ignore it. And then tell them the title you typed out yourself was copy/pasted. They’ll have no way of knowing since so many news services A/B test titles anyway.
Here’s the tile I would’ve used: “Police Alert Parents to iPhone’s Automatic Contact Sharing Feature” — I think we can agree it’s more accurate than the deliberately unclear title this post currently has.
IIRC the test for being an employee, is having the employer at least controlling the employee’s schedule
No that’s “a” test, it’s not “the” test. And you don’t have to pass all of the tests.
A perfect example is the CEO of a company. They control their own schedule. They are still employees… and in most of the world you need a reason to fire them.
It also has no timeline for wasm-gc
Apple has been removing support for garbage collection from other technologies that used to support it. Wouldn’t be surprised if they never add support for that, they’ll tell you not to waste CPU cycles (and therefore, battery power) collecting garbage.
They want you to figure out when memory should be deallocated at compile time, not run time.
Ah - that’s got nothing to do with supported features. Apple has always been a major backer of web based video distribution - a lot of the tech (from video formats to delivery platforms like HTTP Live Streaming to the tag were partially or even fully invented by Apple.
Your video wasn’t working because the by default Safari assumes (correctly) that most video on the web is an ad. Safari generally only tolerates text/image ads* and to get video to work, you need to make it clear to Safari that the video is a real video the user wants to see.
Safari also silently blocks something like 99% of cookies… only cookies that behave like login/session/etc cookies are allowed. That’s a lot more problematic than blocking video… since there’s often just no way around it.
(* even text/image ads are barely tolerated… as far as I know, Safari is the only major browser that includes explicit support for ad blockers - Chrome/FireFox/etc allow extensions to arbitrarily manipulate the page, but safari actually has an ad blocking API - though they call it “content blocking”).
There’s been no talk of anything changing. Just different people in charge of deciding how to get to the goal which is to create safe state of the art AI tech that will benefit all of humanity.
It could take centuries to get there and cost trillions of dollars, figuring out how to raise that money is where things get controversial.
… Safari added support for HTML5 video in 2009. Chrome did not even exist yet in 2009.
In fact, Safari was the first to support it. At the time you had to use Flash to deliver video in every other browser.
Firefox added a half assed implementation of the video tag shortly after Safari but it wasn’t fully supported until 2013 according to caniuse.com. In fact FireFox was the last browser to fully support HTML5 video.
It’s not a myth - I just fired up the install of Windows I have in a virtual machine. It’s a clean install, downloaded direct from Microsoft with a license key the gave me through their Developer Program… absolutely nothing has ever been installed on it, and the start menu has ads for:
- Office 365
- Spotify
- There’s a note under that - the more you use your device, the more we’ll show “New Apps” here. So presumably if it wasn’t a clean install, I’d see more ads in the start menu.
- Even worse - the Task Bar has an ad for Microsoft Teams. I can’t figure out how to remove that one either - right click does nothing, left click asks me if I want to “get started” with installing Teams. At least the ones in the start menu can be removed with a few clicks.
They are definitely ads - when you click on them it takes you to the Microsoft store page… except for Office 365 which I assume is part of OneDrive - I can forgive that one, since it’s part of their free cloud storage service and probably should be integrated into the OS. If you’re not doing cloud storage of some kind, you should be.
The headline misses the real controversy - they tried to cover up the incident and only reported what actually happened after the government came back and asked questions, because the reports from first responders didn’t line up with what Cruise themselves had reported.
There are also rumors of internal people who felt the cars weren’t safe, with a list of scenarios they didn’t handle acceptably. The cars really should have had human safety drivers ready to override the car while fixing those issues.
It shouldn’t show you as online in discord/slack, but it should be downloading messages/etc so that when you do come online you don’t have to wait for it to sync with all your cloud services.
Also - consider those cloud services might not necessarily be available when you come online - maybe you open your laptop on a train in an underground tunnel or something.
Macs do a good job at this. They have “high efficiency” CPU cores which are still very fast (like, very fast*) but draw about half as much power as the regular cores. Software is also able to schedule background tasks based on various things like power level, network connectivity, how often the user actually launches your app on this device (maybe you have an app installed on all your devices but only actually use it on your phone…).
Background tasks like checking emails, backing up your computer, installing security patches, etc will all run while your Mac is sleeping.
Anti-theft features run even fully powered off. So unplug the battery, and never plug it back in, if you’re going to steal anything with an Apple logo… the fact you can never turn it on does hurt the resale value, but that’s better than going to jail. It’ll phone home as soon as you boot it up too, and even after a full factory reset is still probably tied to the actual owner. You’ll need the owner or Apple to deregister it - and Apple is likely to call the cops unless you’ve got a good story.
(* to give you an idea how fast the “Efficiency Cores” are on a Mac — in Game Mode the “Performance” cores are powered down, because the efficiency ones are more than fast enough and generate less heat - which allows the GPU to be pushed to the limit of the cooling system. The “efficiency” mostly comes from reducing features like speculative execution… though they do also run at a lower clock speed - as in ~3Ghz instead of ~4Ghz)
Sure… but they didn’t just fire the CEO. They also fired a third of the board members including the chair of the board. And they did it with zero notice, zero discussion, just “You’re out. k-cya-bai”.
And then they fired their interim CEO a day later.
Yes, they have the right to do all of that… but they need a bloody good reason. In this case the reason was so insignificant they seriously considered changing their mind and reinstating everyone. WTF.
They require a license. They have the same road-legal requirements as any other “electric vehicle”: turn signals, head and brake-lights, license plate, etc
Only in some countries.
Even where they are regulated that generally only covers on-road use. If you ride them on private property you’re fine, which allows stores to sell high powered ebikes for “private use only”… for about the price of a good motorcycle helmet. No turn signals, no brake lights, a $3 headlight lucky and forget about number plates because there’s no way the tyres or brakes are suitable for the weight of the bike even at regular speeds, let alone the high speeds they can reach.
They’re not mopeds at all. They’re e-bikes with a throttle and excessively large electric motor. And if you ride them to work every day, nobody’s gonna stop you. Shit will hit the fan when you run into a pedestrian or car though.
The Trump government shut down automated mail sorting machines, cut overtime for workers (so if they weren’t keeping up with the workload, they’d just stop delivering mail instead of working a longer shift), replaced a bunch of air mail delivery routes with road ones, added delays to re-delivery attempts when a letter couldn’t be delivered and removed mail collection boxes.
Supposedly all of this would “improve the efficiency” of the postal service. Yeah right.
Yesterday I gave OpenAI’s latest chatbot a photo of a challenging board game quiz card with questions that I couldn’t answer.
The questions were intentionally difficult, no ordinary human is expected to be able to answer them all - at least not without spending an hour googling/etc. Most of us could only answer a couple of the questions before the timer ran out and we all compared answers.
The new version of ChatGPT answered every question, perfectly, in two seconds. It couldn’t do that a week ago, the tech is advancing incredibly fast.
There are definitely some things it’s not very good at, but there are equally things it’s very very good at - the technology is useful, unlike crypto which I see as an interesting solution to a problem that nobody has.
for the “Rate I currently pay”, which is 0.08c/kwh
How did you get that rate? We pay 33 cents, and it was 24 cents just a few months ago… wouldn’t be surprised if it goes up again next year and the year after since even 33 cents is government subsidised (so - there’s no cheaper option available).
otherwise I would have not have pulled the trigger on a 50,000$ project
Ooof. Why’d you do that? We simply put (a bit over) 5kW of panels on the roof, and a good 5kW inverter. One day of sun generates about as much power as we use in a week, and even if it’s overcast we still come out ahead.
We’re basically only paying for overnight power and pretty easy to keep that to a minimum (with good insulation, efficient overnight appliances, avoiding unnecessary overnight power consumption - such as putting the beer fridge and hot water heater on a timer).
I paid $5k recently without the battery - it’s not just affordable, it’s cheaper than drawing power from the grid. Pay off on the upfront investment will be about 7 years and it has an expected life of 30+ years (we paid extra for long lasting panels).
Battery prices will come down - in the mean time it’s still better to just get that power from the grid.
Facebook and Twitter have become an excellent opportunity and tool to get important causes in from of peoples’ eyes
CNN/Fox are biased, for sure - but that’s nothing compared to straight up lies pushed by large sections of the internet. And those lies tend to perform better than facts on algorithmic timelines that optimise for engagement. For example articles showing “proof” that covid-19 killed various celebrities who are, in fact, very much alive and healthy, with the clear intent to create fear among large sections of society. A tactic that seems to be far too effective.
I think the world needs to go back to human moderation. Like we have on (well run) fediverse communities.
Hell, I regularly use all of my 32GB of memory
On what operating system?
I have 16GB on my Mac and half of it goes to a virtual machine. And I’m definitely a heavy user - five browser windows open with who knows how many tabs is pretty common. An IDE or even two, plus all sorts of other stuff, and a bunch of electron apps too.
MacOS definitely uses “all of the memory”, but often at least a few gigabytes (as in, almost half my memory aside from the VM) is dedicated to caching files on disk. And with a fast SSD that’s not buying you much performance.
… one of the tests here is editing an 8K video. That’s not an every day use case.
There are pro users that don’t need anywhere near that much memory.
For example QLab. It’s definitely “pro” software - but it’s just automation software and commonly used for tasks like sending a 20 character text string to another computer on the network when you hit a button… it can do more complex things but most of the time the cheapest Raspberry Pi has enough compute power (you can’t run it, or anything like it, on Linux however).
A MacBook Air would be useless, because it doesn’t have HDMI, and that often is needed. Professionals don’t want to use dongles.
While most people running QLab won’t be too budget sensitive… they might be buying six Macs that won’t be used to do anything else ever*,… so since it only uses a few hundred megabytes of RAM why spend Apple’s premium prices on 16GB?
(* half of them will probably never even be used, since they’d be backups powered on and ready to swap in with a few seconds notice if the main one fails, which almost never happens)
Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn’t.
As a Mac programmer I can give you a real answer… there are three major differences… but before I go into those, almost all integers in native Mac apps are 64 bit. 128 bit is probably more common than 32.
First of all Mac software generally doesn’t use garbage collection. It uses “Automatic Reference Counting” which is far more efficient. Back when computers had kilobytes of RAM, reference counting was the standard with programmer painstakingly writing code to clear things from memory the moment it wasn’t needed anymore. The automatic version of that is the same, except the compiler writes the code for you… and it tends to do an even better job than a human, since it doesn’t get sloppy.
Garbage collection, the norm on modern Windows and Linux code, frankly sucks. Code that, for example, reads a bunch of files on disk might store all of those files in RAM for for ten seconds even if it only needs one of them in RAM at a time. That burn be 20GB of memory and push all of your other apps out into swap. Yuck.
Second, swap, while it’s used less (due to reference counting), still isn’t a “last resort” on Macs. Rather it’s a best practice to use swap deliberately for memory that you know doesn’t need to be super fast. A toolbar icon for example… you map the file into swap and then allow the kernel to decide if it should be copied into RAM or not. Chances are the toolbar doesn’t change for minutes at a time or it might not even be visible on the screen at all - so even if you have several gigabytes of RAM available there’s a good chance the kernel will kick that icon out of RAM.
And before you say “toolbar icons are tiny” - they’re not really. The tiny favicon for beehaw is 49kb as a compressed png… but to draw it quickly you might store it uncompressed in RAM. It’s 192px square and 32 bit color so 192 x 192 x 32 = 1.1MB of RAM for just one favicon. Multiply that by enough browser tabs and… Ouch. Which is why Mac software would commonly have the favicon as a png on disk, map the file into swap, and decompress the png every time it needs to be drawn (the window manager will keep a cache of the window in GPU memory anyway, so it won’t be redrawn often).
Third, modern Macs have really fast flash memory for swap. So fast it’s hard to actually measure it, talking single digit microseconds, which means you can read several thousand files off disk in the time it takes the LCD to refresh. If an app needs to read a hundred images off swap in order to draw to the screen… the user is not going to notice. It will be just as fast as if those images were in RAM.
Sure, we all run a few apps that are poorly written - e.g. Microsoft Teams - but that doesn’t matter if all your other software is efficient. Teams uses, what, 2GB? There will be plenty left for everything else.
Of course, some people need more than 8GB. But Apple does sell laptops with up to 128GB of RAM for those users.
they also made the chip so it’s not much of a defence
It’s a pretty old chip though. They shipped it over a year ago and even that was mostly just an upgrade from LPDDR4 to LPDDR5. Which is a substantial upgrade, real world performance wise, but most of the engineering work would’ve been done by whoever makes the memory - not Apple’s own chip design team who presumably were working on something else (I’d guess desktop/laptop chips, and those certainly do have USB-3).
Apple certainly could have included USB-3 support in those chips… but three years ago there wasn’t any pressing reason to that so and this year they’ve added support for the models with the most expensive camera. And anyone who cares about data transfer speeds will buy the one with the best camera.
Apple has always been an enemy of the free software community
Apple is one of the largest contributors to open source software in the world and they’ve been a major contributor to open source since the early 1980’s. Yes, they have closed source software too… but it’s all built on an open foundation and they give a lot back to the open source community.
LLVM for example, was a small project nobody had ever heard of in 2005, when Apple hired the university student who created it, gave him an essentially unlimited budget to hire a team of more people, and fast forward almost two decades it’s by far the best compiler in the world used by both modern languages (Rust/Swift/etc) and old languages (C, JavaScript, Fortran…) and it’s still not controlled in any way by Apple. The uni student they hired was Chris Lattner, he is still president of LLVM now even though he’s moved on (currently CEO of an AI startup called Modular AI).
They might want to, but it’s illegal.
The “quiet period” is a reference to an SEC law that forces any company to be radio silent for a strict 40 day period during the IPO process. Reddit is in that period now and therefore they cannot say a word.
JPMorgan was fined almost a billion dollars for answering questions on a phone call during their quiet period.