dictum

friends have turned from dovish "can't we all just get along" types into rabid "Russia Delenda Est" types

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

Slightly more involved, but still serviceable:

- start typing the text on a link near the icon you want to click (for this comment, `thomasa`...)

- then press Shift+Tab to highlight the previous link

Why is the Facebook integration not lazy-loaded only for users who log in through an FB account?

Docs are less likely to be broken if GitHub implements some automated, global way to rename the main branch: when this isn't done in an ad-hoc, per-repo way, they can implement logic to redirect URLs.

(Or, for a quick and dirty fix, always redirect master to the main branch)

I think a key aspect of remote work being successful is for the distributed team to be in the same time zone or have less than 1 hour time difference

I think the exact time difference doesn't matter so much as everyone can be at work simultaneously at least 70/80% of the time.

I'm very obviously not a lawyer nor lawmaker, but I'm under the impression that anything can be classified as an act of war as long as another country is willing to treat it as such, and other superpowers/blocs are willing to sign off on this assessment, and back it militarily and through sanctions/incentives.

(Though this would all probably swept aside as soon as somebody reverse engineers the vaccine.)

Random thought: we're now closer to 2038 than to Y2K.

Maybe I'm overengineering, but couldn't you store the sanitized version as the normal value, and also store and make publicly available the original unsanitized value in an ominously and obviously named key (say, dangerouslyUnsanitizedValue) that happens to be easily greppable/lintable?

Hm... Features take some time to get to production. The stuff I use/appreciate most launched either before Microsoft acquired them, or shortly after the deal — so its development predates that.

In those places, old Apple hardware isn't significantly cheaper than new hardware. You might get a 25% discount for a degraded experience (security updates may end in ~3 years) or buy much older hardware (e.g. 9 year old models) that cannot run current macOS and Xcode, etc.

And yes, a local PC can work out to lower prices due to specific tax arrangements, sourcing components straight from manufacturers and assembling them locally.

Leaving common knowledge undocumented is, in itself, a misguided attempt at DRY.

Your common knowledge isn't necessarily everyone's common knowledge; what you perceive isn't necessarily what it is.

Every day there are many people just starting to code. There are cultural and regional differences. They might not have hit the exact spot in which this information appears.

Knowledge also disappears, fades, gets censored or destroyed, gets mixed up and remembered incorrectly. You might take something as a given and misremember it 20 years from now. You might read your own code 5 years from now and not know why something's there — something that was taken to be obvious.

Brotli has wide browser support (https://caniuse.com/#feat=brotli) and comes closer to zstd in compression ratio and compression speed, but its decompression speed is significantly lower and closer to zlib.

https://github.com/facebook/zstd#benchmarks

AFAIK (I haven't looked much into it since 2018) it's not widely supported by CDNs, but at least Cloudflare seems to serve it by default (EDIT: must be enabled per-site https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/200168396-W...)

It's also a lot bigger than the EU.

Not to gotcha this, but "I'm someone whose statements should not be taken to heart" is not a message I'd want to convey in an apology.

Then again, corporate communication is often a game of being as cynical as you can get away without getting arrested or having your business shut down, so maybe there's some meta-honesty here.

I would love a customer-company relationship in which the customer gets meaningful information by privately contacting the company with a polite message, but in my experience this is rare. When an answer comes, it tends to misdirect rather than tell the whole truth.

Here you have a bank and a company known for secrecy.

But you acknowledge this;

random CSRs don't get a pithy explanation

What the throwers of hissy fits are pointing to is that, by building blackboxes, you can get whatever result you want (which doesn't mean all results are expected) with plausible deniability.

For many Internet related phenomena, you can find an example where it already happened a long time ago with AOL.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AOL_search_data_leak

To put it shorter, with permission, liability stands with the organization; with forgiveness, liability stands with the individual. At worst, one or two levels up the hierarchy too.

Per the article, "Mozilla intends to deprecate OpenSearch and eventually remove it from Firefox".

Both Firefox and Chrome support a common format for defining search engines from add-ons

...which have nothing to do with the Open Web, mentioned in the parent reply. Both require participating in, and consequently adhering to the terms of, stores operated by third parties.

We can act more effectively in the domains in which we are most authoritative, knowledgeable and able to effect change.

Sometimes the desired neutrality, put to practice, is so dull that it fails to reach advocates for either position.

In practice, a biased statement can bring better counterarguments: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Cunningham%27s_Law

This isn't technology, it's politicians and bureaucrats deciding policies.

The underlying argument of critics of algorithms that make decisions, in government and in private companies, is that this technological apparatus becomes a justification in itself: if a mistake is made, blame the algorithm; if the algorithm says so, it must be right — we can't make exceptions.

Over time, people and institutions begin to shape their own actions so they don't fall afoul of the criteria that can be reverse-engineered out of a black box decision-making system.

Regarding "this isn't technology", this doesn't invalidate the criticisms: part of the argument is that, indeed, what gets called "technology" often shouldn't be simply described as technical tools and processes. They're often the opinions and goals of individuals (politicians, bureaucrats, and other wielders of power) transformed into code, data and other technical artifacts; sometimes this transformation merely hides the underlying sources of these opinions and goals.

Answer:

- Whoever gave cachet to certain characteristics that are present at specific points of the grass

- Whoever made it desirable or necessary that passersby reach a certain location at the periphery of the field

- Whoever set up restrictions to entry at certain locations around the periphery of the field

- Whoever made any changes to the field (including non-human intervention)

More generally, culture at large and historical precedent.

—

Imagine a green field of grass.

There are minor differences across the field, but some of these differences can be noticed: a slightly darker patch of grass, a slightly yellowed patch of grass, some stones of varying sizes, a section that is slightly raised from the rest of the field.

Around the field, other things can catch the eye: there's a road to one side, some trees of varying sizes, one currently in bloom.

Over the seasons, the profile of this grass changes. At some point there was a park bench to one side of the field; later, it was moved to another side. There was once a storefront near to one side of the field.

I'm not convinced, but there's a possible setup: a fund. Entities donate to the fund, and then the money would be distributed among the candidates (either equally, among a smaller number of qualifying candidates, or for all candidates, proportional to e.g. a party's representatives in the legislative branch)

(This would do nothing about money buying influence — as long as the donors are known, their wishes would be carried out by at least the major parties)

My local AASP is one of the reasons I contend with some of Apple's dubious choices.

It's the best service shop I've dealt with.

If one considers absence of desire to take a certain approach as a constraint, anything can be a legit constraint.

I'm so used to scrolling by keypress (i.e. any of the vim-like extensions), with smooth scrolling disabled and a higher scroll step, that I just recently noticed that this reduces resource usage/heat.

Remote fonts can be used for tracking and fingerprinting

Isn't it the reverse, local fonts can be used for fingerprinting?

(There are some snags with remote fonts — rendering bugs/exploits — but they're not exactly low hanging fruit anymore)

EDIT: I see what you mean by tracking. If the fonts are loaded with a third party script, this is indeed a problem. If the font files are served by a third party directly (without some intermediate script), this could be remedied with an extension that strips headers. It would obviously run afoul of this only do one thing rule from Google, the company that once attached Google+ to its search results.

So, U2 from All That You Can't Leave Behind onwards?

I'm not intimate enough with any of the parties involved in this situation, so my reply will also be comfortably generic:

Yes, it's a reasonable demand. If public opinion is asking something of Apple, and its CEO chooses to answer, every aspect of the answer is open to scrutiny. Gruber indeed lists the specific evidence he would expect:

- When was HKmap.live “used maliciously to target individual officers for violence”?

- When was it used to “victimize individuals and property where no police are present”?

- What local laws in Hong Kong does it violate?

It's unlikely that a CEO would be so thorough. Apple is particularly obsessed with secrecy, and tech companies in general seem to not want to disclose details when they restrict access to a product or platform.

But it's still a reasonable demand from an individual standpoint.