mondoshawan

I'm a native English speaker, and that sounds like something I've said before, and all I've had is public schooling, with no college. :)

I built a widget set for small monochrome LCDs called "bitwidgets" as part of my g13d rewrite because nothing came close to what I wanted in terms of features and simplicity. I use it to give the G13 applets their UI on the LCD screen. Its built on top of Pillow, and I'm planning on extracting it from the g13 repo as a separate library.

https://github.com/jtgans/g13

...and yet we still have these things, like Gtk, Tk, ImGUI, some parts of Qt, etc, and they work reasonably well. I just spent time building a new widget set for small LCD screens (~160x40) and built the set in as simple a way as I could, and this was the easiest method to do so. Sure, it's not great from a designer perspective, but it gets the job done -- more or less what HTML + CSS do now, but (frankly) in a far less verbose way.

> Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s)

Modern linux does have swap, and it is quite useful. Proper support for swap is coming in k8s (looks like 1.23). Quite a few workloads need swap to run safely, so adding this to k8s will be an improvement.

Ah, I see the HN pedants have arrived. I was not claiming that Modern Linux does not have swap. Note the words "don't necessarily". I was claiming not all machines have swap.

Most of mine do not have it enabled, and I take effort to ensure on machines with 16GB or more RAM that it is disabled. I do run a K8S cluster as well, and those machines do not have swap enabled, not because K8S requires it to be off, but because having it on would be adverse to the health of the flash storage they use.

TBH, this is the kind of vapid pedantic response I've come to expect of the average of HN comments these days, and why I'm considering just not using it anymore at this point.

Just bear in mind, what he says you probably shouldn't take at face value. After all, he is king of shorting currencies that has actively ruined lives.

This article is a bit strange and conflates disk storage with swap and RAM. Modern systems don't necessarily even have swap (looking at you, k8s), so the whole article falls on its face.

And then there were the secondary store, paper tape, magnetic tape, disk drives the size of houses, then the size of washing machines and these days so small that girls get disappointed if think they got hold of something else than the MP3 player you had in your pocket.

This is also written terribly.

The formal C semantics are defined in Isabelle/HOL, checked, and then the compiler output is also checked. They use standard GCC compilers for all of this.

See https://riscv.org/blog/2021/05/sel4-on-risc-v-verified-to-bi...

Ookay. Not sure how you can glean all that from a statement like the one I was responding to...

The constitution is dead, and we the people, are left holding the bag.

Can I borrow the IBN? Please? I promise I'll return it...

Isn't that Von Neumann architecture vs. Harvard?

We weren't talking about contracting or consultancies...

And yet, this is how our system works. We all need to participate and realize that politics is not a career -- it is part of living in such a system, and a part of our responsibility as citizens. The only way we are going to fix things is if we fix it ourselves.

I have tried in the past as well. Political apathy is a very real, very dangerous vulnerability in our system of government, and is being exploited all the time.

No, realistically, it is called exempt salary works for hire, and there are legal limits to it. No salaried job has "set hours".

The limits you can work with are: working on your own equipment, non-working hours, working on it at home in an area not typically used for $dayjob, the subject of the work, and above all else your locality. These agreements are generally overreaches by the lawyers drafting them, depending on the nature of the job. Remember: no contract can limit rights granted to you under the law, every contract has limits, and you cannot be prevented from working, even if stated otherwise.

Washington, for instance, has state laws against this kind of IP assignment.

IANAL, so don't read into this too much, but I have consulted IP attorneys about this. If you're doing something like this, definitely consult -- the kind of work you do does matter. In this guy's case, it seems he does have a conflict of interest w.r.t. the work he does for IBM.

This seems to be incredibly short sighted...

"Twitch said it would rely more heavily on law enforcement in “off-service” cases and is partnering with an investigative law firm to support its internal team."

So if a user becomes noteworthy, expect to have investigative checks periodically done by the agency? What an insane concept -- this is how we end up with corporate governance and unjust punishment without societal review by fiat, without review by our peers.

Consider that Twitch is owned by Amazon. If Amazon were to start doing things like this, suddenly someone so accused can't walk into Whole Foods?

Android has a Linux kernel, but uses a totally different bluetooth stack called Bluedroid, and speaks raw HCI to the controller, bypassing all bluetooth drivers in the kernel.

Seems like an opportunity for a hardware startup to develop a water quality tester that continuously monitors home water supplies. Can't seem to find anything on the market that can test any of these specific chemicals -- including lead. All I could find were TDS meters.

Stop geocoding by separating out addresses into singular fields, for one. Stop showing mostly irrelevant contours on maps, for another. OsmAnd~ is unfortunately the only game in town, and the UX is freaking terrible.

It wasn't. Play services is just add on features that proxy app permissions and centralize push notifications -- no actual Android features moved into Play services that I know of. Ie: auto filling SMS OTP codes. It feels like Android is being sucked up that way, but that's because there are a lot of really nice features in there, like push notifications, geofencing, etc.

You can still run Android without GMS core and Play services -- I do that, myself, on a Pixel 3a running Graphene. The trick is that you lose some nice functionality (which Android actually makes up for in some cases, ie: SMS OTP copy buttons), and the mapping experience is god-awful (mostly because the OSS mapping scene is hopelessly stuck in the 1990s GPS model)

Oh, neat! I had no idea it was WebKit on there. Still, what I had wasn't exactly what you'd be comfortable using for more than a few moments. I bought one of the original Nokia Internet Tablets and put together a full wearable system back then to make things a bit better for myself, but I never used the browser in S60 for anything serious because it was so cut down.

They have been integrating hardware from the beginning, not making it all themselves. What they do, though, is demand the ability to vet and fix vendor firmware.

What a hopelessly naive perspective.

Maybe, but I was there, helping it develop in the early days, which is the time span we're talking about. I can tell you the core of the Android team was fighting to keep it open -- so much so that about three years in one of the guys who dedicated his job to open sourcing drivers and kernel patches burnt out because of it.

What Android is about is decidedly not what Play Services and GCM core are about.

Try seeing how willing they are to add support for chipsets on phones that don't include Google Services

It's always been the system integrator's job to work with the OEM vendors to integrate drivers and functionality into Android -- not the Android team's. Even on Glass we had to do this as though we were outside system integrators.

Right. I didn't think I was trying to rewrite history -- I'm simply pointing out a gap in the market that Android was attempting to fill. Asking me to enumerate everything out there at the time is silly -- especially given the haze of memory.

Symbian was far more popular in Europe than it ever was Stateside, so bear that in mind. I had to import my Nokia E70 gullwing phone before I received my sooner, and what functionality it had was okay, but the browser was hardly more than a WAP browser in a feature phone. The app store was barely there as well, including only a handful of very simple apps at the time.

I missed a comma in that: closed source phones, low power feature phones, and Blackberries. The N900 is a different, rare breed that did not see widespread adoption.

Fun fact: the first Android phone was the sooner, and it looked and behaved much like a blackberry. Still have mine, in fact.

Android's development started long before Android became a company officially, and there was more fallout from those BSD lawsuits than what is officially reported in Wikipedia -- especially since the settlement agreement included that those that agreed must keep silent.

NewBlue died because I quit Google. I started that project and was its main motive force.

Unclear why you're being downvoted here -- I seem to remember you, and I definitely remember hearing about NewBlue while we were working on Bluedroid. At the time it wasn't clear what happened. When did you leave?

Actually the spec is overspecified and repeats itself multiple times in different layers. L2CAP specifies a TTL, so does RFCOMM, so does SOC, so does...

Such is the sad world of Bluetooth. The dirty secret to this industry is that this, while seeming hacky, is the bare minimum de-facto standard in most cases.

I can't speak to this directly because of numerous reasons, chiefly among them being that I don't get to make those decisions. Standard disclaimer follows: I rejoined in the last two years, what follows are my opinions, these opinions are my own, blah blah.

Android has never been about driving the hardware narrative -- it's always been about building a phone with mostly open contributions and driving the start of a wedge to open up the phone industry a bit. It's always been a software answer to a hardware problem, even today. Prior to Android, all we had were closed source low powered feature phones and Blackberries.

That being said, building silicon is non trivial work, and building a BLE stack and controller is even more so. Will a solid BLE stack sell phones? Hard to say how it could drive that narrative, realistically, and even harder to say if such a controller could be made cost effectively. Given Android's archetype (software solution to closed hardware), this puts such a project into a much more difficult position politically and financially.

I can't see this kind of thing having much in the way of legs in a large corp. That being said, I do think if a startup could challenge this landscape, it is a HUGE opportunity.