bsoft16385

Incidentally, WeChat mini apps (and the equivalents in AliPay and other services) are essentially specialized websites.

WeChat itself on Android bundles a Chromium-based engine to run these mini apps.

Most people in China are using Chromium frequently, even if they don't think of it as a browser.

A big part of the problem in Manhattan is that most places don't have alleys. There is nowhere for the trash to be left except on the sidewalk.

Some cities have the trash trucks drive around playing music, ice cream truck style, and you are required to bring your trash out to the truck. Logistically that would probably work in Manhattan. Politically I don't think you would ever be able to get it done.

Which aircraft you are on is at best loosely correlated with the quality of in flight entertainment system you will use.

Seats are purchased by the airlines, they are made by separate manufacturers like Recaro or Zodiac and not by the airframe manufacturer (Airbus or Boeing). While the seats obviously need to be compatible with the airframe, there are a wide variety of options and it is common for airlines to refresh old airframes with new seats.

IFE systems are not manufactured by the airframe or the seat manufacturers, they are made by companies like Panasonic. They obviously need to be compatible with the seat, and my understanding is that it is uncommon for airlines to update the IFE system without also replacing seats.

So, while a newer aircraft type typically will have a more up to date IFE system, there are plenty of old aircraft that have new IFE and seats retrofitted.

Spamhaus or another IP reputation provider will contact your hosting provide or ISP and warn them that either: - You need to follow their best practices (which practically for me meant paying for a subscription) - Or your upstream net block would be marked as untrustworthy (which basically blocks email delivery from that IP range)

You can imagine what your hosting provider or ISP will do with this.

Source: I ran a URL shortening service from 2004-2007 and this happened to me.

I have 7 Mitsubishi heat pump head units being controlled using ESPHome running on D1 mini clones (ESP8266). The D1 mini clones are powered by and interface with the head units with Mitsubishi's CN105, which is just 5 volt UART.

The total cost was maybe $30 of parts on AliExpress.

I use 433Mhz Acurite temperature sensors with a software defined radio (rtl433) running on my Home Assistant box to have remote temperature sensing. The 433MHz sensors are cheap, have good range, and have excellent battery life.

T-Mobile has a SIM lock feature that you can enable to block at least most employees from being able to swap your SIM. You can enable it in the account management app or website.

I was able to verify that it worked because an employee in a store literally could not transfer my SIM with it enabled. Their iPad app just gave an error of "customer has SIM lock enabled".

Interestingly the T-Mobile employee had never even heard of this feature, which suggests that basically no one uses it.

T-Mobile already does exactly this for eSIM transfers, though the waiting period is 10 minutes, not 48 hours.

Energy usage isn't measured in "time the dryer needs to run".

A typical US vented dryer has a 5500 watt element, although it doesn't use that amount of power continuously since it cycles on and off.

I have no idea how much power a typical dryer uses in Switzerland, but the heat pump ventless dryers you can get in the USA now typically use around 1000W when they are running. They typically take around 90-120 minutes to dry a load depending on how big it is and how much water there is to evaporate.

This white paper has a nice graph that shows power usage over time: https://www.energystar.gov/ia/partners/pt_awards/SEDI_Fact_S...

You may notice that, while the heat pump dryers take longer to dry, they use so much less power that it more than offsets.

Here in Colorado (Denver metro) I frequently get items same-day, though most items are still 1 or 2 days.

Modern deep packet identification gear looks at packet size and pacing to distinguish video traffic patterns. It is possible to fool these systems, but it is not trivial.

Costco manages to do this well. If you buy a Mac (or almost any other high-value small item) you take a paper slip which is scanned by the cashier or self checkout. You then go to the cage and they hand you your item right then and there.

The brand "WeChat" is not as well known as you might think. In China, it's known as 微信 (Weixin), and most people in China have never heard of the WeChat brand.

I also think it's an understatement to call Weixin as ubiquitous as Google in China. There are alternatives to basically every Google service. In China, many times there is no alternative to Weixin. 支付宝 (Alipay) is sometimes a substitute, but in many cases only Weixin is supported. Want to order food at a chain restaurant? Want to buy tickets for a museum? Want to choose the song at a Karaoke bar? Need to fill out a customs exit form? Weixin is often the only option.

To be more precise, fractional scaling in macOS is implemented by rendering the entire display at 2x dpi at a resolution greater than the actual display resolution, then scaling the entire output down to the display resolution.

In some ways, this is smart - it avoids the need for applications to handle anything other than 1x and 2x modes, and it avoids the complications of handling fractional pixel sizes (how does an application draw a 1 logical pixel wide line at a 1.5x scale).

In other ways it is monumentally stupid. The macOS technique wastes resources rendering at a higher resolution than you actually need. Worse, even though the downscaling is excellent in macOS, it still has ringing artifacts and it still is blurrier than native fractional scaling.

This is personally one of the things that I hate most about macOS. Many Mac laptops ship with internal displays that default to a resolution that is scaled in this way (though fortunately not the 14/16 inch Apple Silicon MacBook Pro). That's annoying, but it's not nearly as bad as the situation with external displays. I use a UHD (3840x2160) 32" display. On Windows it's perfect at 1.25x scale. On macOS, my laptop ends up rendering at 6144x3456 and then scaling the output down. This looks very noticably blurry, and it's a huge waste of resources.

Only Windows really gets this right among desktop/laptop operating systems.

GNOME uses the same behavior as macOS, except that the "render at higher resolution and scale down" options are hidden by default, and the scaling itself is a lot blurrier.

KDE does support native fractional scaling, but there are a ton of bugs related to rounding errors causing 1px gaps and random cases where applications end up being blurry, especially on Wayland. Worse, display scaling changes often don't apply until you log out or restart applications, which is particularly annoying if you have a different scale factor on an internal and external display.

Windows on the other hand handles this relatively well, although there are still some annoying bugs on Windows 10 related to the taskbar and notifications (mostly fixed in Windows 11). There are also still a lot of Windows applications that do not handle scaling at all, which end up in blur city.

That reminds me of a story about SiCortex.

My university (University of Colorado Boulder) bought one of a very few SiCortex systems ever sold. As an undergraduate I competed at SC07 and SC08 in the Cluster Challenge competition.

Our coach was a CU facility member, Doug, who also was responsible for the SiCortex box we bought. At SC08 he told us that another one of the teams was competing with a SiCortex box. We knew that they would win the LINPACK part of the challenge, but we didn't know that LINPACK was basically the only thing they managed to get working.

We had also heard rumors that SiCortex was in trouble financially at that time. When we were walking the show floor at SC08, we came across the huge SiCortex booth, which had 10 or so machines of different sizes (I believe the smallest was a 64-core workstation and the largest was a ~5000 whole rack system).

I remarked to Doug that SiCortex didn't look to be in such bad shape.

Doug turned to me and said, "25% of the machines SiCortex has ever made are in that booth".

The SiCortex idea was like VLIW. On paper the numbers look great. On highly optimized synthetic benchmarks it looks good. On real world code you find out how hard it is to get good performance.

Bonnell has a branch predictor: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/intel/microarchitectures/bonnel...

In-order execution does not mean that there is no branch prediction, it just means that the number of instructions speculated is much smaller.

In Google Chat, you can attach a Meet invite to a message for an impromptu meeting.

Personally I am glad that people can't just call me up. I would rather be asked over chat first.

Android has had the ability to disable notifications for at least the last few years.

Autoland is a common capability on many aircraft, and it is commonly used in inclement weather.

I don't know what you are talking about with the A380. I have never heard about it being able to fly a TCAS RA maneuver (collision avoidance) on autopilot.

The A350 can handle TCAS RA maneuvers on autopilot. It can also fly windshear escape maneuvers on autopilot.

Bill Palmer (A350 check captain) talks about it: http://www.airplanegeeks.com/2018/02/14/490-airbus-a350/

USB SuperSpeed requires extra wires and much better shielding, which means a thicker, more expensive, less durable, cable.

You also can't make SuperSpeed cables that actually meet the spec once they get past a couple meters.

If I just want to charge my phone or laptop, a High Speed cable is actually better.

Taskbar buttons absolutely benefit from Fitt's Law.

Fitt's Law says that the time required to interact with an element depends on both the distance to that element and the width/height of that element.

Putting an element on an edge (where the cursor cannot go beyond that edge) essentially makes it infinitely large in one dimension. Putting it in a corner makes it infinitely large in two dimensions.

Taskbar buttons in Windows (or menu items in macOS) do benefit from Fitt's Law, just not as much as items in the corners.

The take away your card system doesn't work with phone payments. That's one reason why they haven't really taken off in the USA.

A lot of chain restaurants now use tablets to let you pay right at the table, and usually they support contactless payments.

Fast food restaurants have also started accepting contactless payments by and large, although it can be quite awkward in the drive thru.

Python is a distant fifth place at Google today behind Java, C++, JavaScript and Go. It may be behind Typescript too at this point.

Performance critical, lower-level servers are typically written in C++ at Google - think things like Spanner or GCS. Google only allows a very restrictive C++ subset.

Application servers are typically written in Java or Go. Which is preferred depends on the organization.

Google of course makes extensive use of Guava and Guice, and Bazel, which itself is written in Java.

Zen2/Zen3-based, non-APU Ryzen still has pretty awful idle power consumption compared to Intel desktop CPUs.

My 5900X at idle draws around 22W. Modern Intel desktop CPUs (which are basically all Skylake refreshes right now) are 8-10W at idle.

+1 to this. I mostly use the CLI, but it's really nice in my IDE (JetBrains Rider) to be able to browse version history or resolve merge conflicts graphically.

Typically you only get one or two phone screen interviews at Google, so the bar should be much lower. The purpose of the phone screen is to see whether it's worth the time for onsite (now virtual onsite) interviews.

This may vary by hiring committee, but on mine we don't look at feedback from the phone screen interviews at all.

The one thing I will note is that most of what you have said about performance is relevant primarily in the AAA game space (and in higher end mobile titles, which increasingly look like AAA games).

In the indie space, you see a lot more titles where performance is a secondary consideration. The concept (and the style of the visuals) is often more important than having cutting edge graphics.

There are also segments of the business that are more like enterprise software. If you look at something like League or WoW, you have titles that are continuously evolved over many many years, and getting the infrastructure right matters a lot.

If you sign up for the Advanced Protection Program, Google will allow you to use a security key without allowing SMS recovery.

I write C# code on a medium-large solution (ASP.net, 60 or so projects, ~1M LOC) and to be honest I don't know why everyone thinks that VS2019 is so great.

VS2019 frequently freezes for multiple seconds. When project files change (e.g. because you check out a different branch) VS often fails to load the modified projects and I need to restart the IDE.

Then there's the fact that the refactoring tools in VS2019, despite improving significantly since older versions, are still way behind ReSharper or IntelliJ.

I also generally dislike the UI I'm VS2019. The Git integration works, but it's cumbersome to use. You can't easily have multiple run configurations. The error/warning list pops up seemingly at random.

I use Rider now. It's not perfect, but I am just much more productive in that environment.

I would still recommend Guava for immutable collections, and for the caching classes, both of which are much better than trying to piece things together on your own.

There are a lot of features that have been subsumed into the JDK, and you should usually prefer the JDK implementation where available. Guava has deprecated the redundant functionality, so if you pay attention to your IDE you will be fine.