threepio

You can take an image and use DDIM inversion to find the coordinates

I'd like to try this. Any suggestions where I can learn how to implement this technique?

The article that first described what came to be known as responsive design was published on ALA by Marc van den Dobbelsteen in 2006:

https://alistapart.com/article/switchymclayout/

"Start Paying for Internet Stuff" … says the man using a free Google Font on his website

Nothing says "rebellious" like private equity —

"Code and Theory is a proud member of The Stagwell Group, a private equity firm"

https://www.codeandtheory.com/about-us

As an individual developer with many open-source projects, I'm pretty sure that my docs would be better if I had $2+ billion in funding ;)

the journalists in question never followed up this incredible bombshell

They did publish more stories on the topic, which are collected here:

https://www.bloomberg.com/2018-the-big-hack

IIRC, didn't some of the journalists quietly leave Bloomberg later?

AFAIK the authors of The Big Hack, Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley, are still employed by Bloomberg. Riley was even promoted about a year later:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/09/17/bloomberg...

how horrible the PR from suing is and how pointless it is suing the very rich Bloomberg corporation in an American jurisdiction for nebulous damages

Based on what? This past year, for instance, Dominion Voting Systems sued Fox News and certain individuals for defamation and claimed billions in damages

Bitcoin: by limiting issuance to 21M we have made price manipulation of our currency impossible

Tether: hold my beer

Jack Dorsey ... probably left Twitter to focus more on Block.

I don't think he was fired by the Twitter board, exactly. But given the increasing conflict of interest between being CEO of Twitter and his use of Twitter as a place to promote crypto (thereby increasing the value of whatever interest he personally or Square has in crypto), it's not hard to imagine that the Twitter board told him that it was time to end one activity or the other. Though it looked sudden from the outside, it's clear this was all carefully orchestrated.

Moreover, certain Twitter investors had (rightly) been complaining about the arrangement for a while.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/technology/twitter-silver...

From the article:

The magic is that all Scheme code, by virtue of supporting the capture (and unwind) of delimited continuation

Is that true? I thought Racket was the only Scheme (and maybe the only language in general) that supported delimited continuations.

Variable fonts aren't "Metafont-style procedural fonts"

Would it be legal for the US govt to take over the renters' leases under the 5th amendment?

That is, they would "take" the leases (just like they might take land) and pay "just compensation" (which I assume would mean reimbursing landlords for all back rent, and whatever the lease rate is going forward). At that point the fed govt would become the tenant, and the original tenant would be a subtenant of the fed govt.

In that case, the fed govt wouldn't be dependent on states distributing federal rental aid, because they would be interceding directly in the landlord-tenant relationship.

(Let's leave aside the fact that politically, this will never happen, and practically, HUD doesn't have the staffing or logistical infrastructure to take responsibility for these leases en masse)

1) No, you don't need to speculate. He describes three years of events that all happened in private (with no resolution). Starting from the very first sentence of the piece ("In January 2020, I told two members of Racket’s core team …")

2) The private email is relevant because its message is so starkly at odds with the public statement. It goes directly to the whole thesis of the piece: that bullies gain power through secrecy. He does not owe the bully any secrecy, because the bully has misused secrecy in the past. His attempt to find a principled middle ground is reasonable.

Apple is creating a yawning double standard between its "privacy is a human right" [1] refrain and its own profit interests.

If you're skeptical, the pricing says it all. Apple could've sold AirTags for $99 each with a $1/mo service fee to use the Find My network. That would've boosted their profit margin on the initial sale and created recurring revenue, while restricting network load.

As it stands, AirTags are $25 each and free to operate, which means that Apple wants them to be ubiquitous — buy 10 or 20 and put them everywhere.

Apple has gotten a lot of mileage on their idea that "the customer is not the product" but this is a turn in the wrong direction. Despite months of claims that AirTags are impregnable, unhackable, etc. the news is just going to get worse.

[1] https://www.apple.com/privacy/

Mine report as “With you” so perhaps they don’t advertise themselves in this state.

So you know for certain that AirTags have multiple broadcast states (e.g., "with me" vs. not)? Apple's description makes it sound like they only have one state:

"Your AirTag sends out a secure Bluetooth signal that can be detected by nearby devices in the Find My network." [1]

[1] https://www.apple.com/airtag/

What are the practical ramifications of Apple harnessing every existing iPhone as an AirTag discovery device in the Find My network? (I think it's awful from a privacy and device-ownership standpoint, but let's leave that aside.)

For instance, because physics is real, it must take some amount of battery power & data transfer to collect information about nearby AirTags. Suppose I walk into Disneyland on a summer weekend with an iPhone. The place is going to be full of AirTags. Assumedly my iPhone will be very busy reporting on their location. Hour by hour, how does that workload compare to the stuff I ask my phone to do for me (e.g., receive text messages, download mail)? Will it run down the battery / chew up bandwidth caps in any significant way?

Once it reaches a certain size, many tech companies grow a department called "business development". This department always seems to contain highly paid people who take a lot of meetings and promote various big ideas, but who hold no actual operational responsibility or revenue accountability. For this reason, they only tend to be fired during massive cost-cutting campaigns, because otherwise the value of their work is entirely in the eye of the beholder. They are like human Bitcoin.

I don't get why so many great fonts have a dot inside the digit 0 instead of a stroke

A slashed zero often looks too similar to the figure 8

This is a sample Pollen project, annotated by the author using Racket's literate-programming dialect.

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen-tfl/

Pollen, written in Racket, is arguably a "dsl for specifying ssgs"

https://docs.racket-lang.org/pollen/

the false Supermicro hack story (never retracted BTW)

So the idea is that Bloomberg, a company owned by a multibillionaire, published a story full of libel, and for some inexplicable reason none of the corporations damaged by that story sued them?

Or maybe ... the story is true, and those mentioned found it embarrassing, so they put out denials to the press and social media that will never have to be scrutinized (say, under testimonial oath in a deposition)?

Frankly I'm surprised the effect was so small

Only because of the moratorium on evictions, which is deferring a lot of financial pain till later, and thereby making today's numbers look a lot better than they are.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/u-s-house...

Yes! For instance, the Albertsons/Vons/Pavilions grocery chain recently fired all its in-house delivery drivers and contracted with Doordash instead, in order to take advantage of Doordash's access to (cheaper) Prop 22 drivers.

https://knock-la.com/vons-fires-delivery-drivers-prop-22-e89...

And yes, this shift was widely predicted by Prop 22's opponents. The only surprise is how fast it's happening.

I have bought Apple refurbished machines. I always understood them to be more-or-less unused returns. IIRC Apple cannot legally advertise returned machines as "new", hence the "refurbished" designation.

Moreover Apple has an essentially unlimited supply of machines. I can't imagine it would be worth it to actually take in machines and repair them (not least because it would undermine confidence in the refurb store if it was a gamble about whether you'd get a basically-new machine or beat-up machine.)

I'm referring to GUI apps like the kind currently sold in the app store. There has long been a path to sell these apps direct to customers. But with each OS release, it has become more onerous (codesigning and notarization and whatnot). Still, no one wanted to tolerate the 30% tax. Now it's 15%.

The noise around the app store reminds me of all the complaints when Adobe said it would move its apps into the Creative Cloud on a subscription basis. Yes, a certain percentage of customers left. But the extra revenue more than made up for the loss.

I was a creative genius, and then I bought myself an iPhone

That's worse

Unfortunately — because I am a longtime Apple user & developer — I have to agree that this is a cynical gesture designed to deflect regulatory scrutiny.

Moreover, I expect that this announcement is mostly paving the way for Apple to force all Mac OS apps to be distributed via the Mac App Store (as they do on iOS).

The optimist in me doesn't want to believe it. But this is probably consistent with Apple's economic incentives. Especially because the major role of Macs in the world is to provide a platform for developing iOS apps.

This week I ordered an M1 Macbook Air. Not because I really need it, but because a couple years from now I will be happy I have a machine that can run Big Sur, which will be remembered as the least restrictive OS of the Apple Silicon era.

Apple is the biggest corporation in the world. We can like their products, but we shouldn't give them more credit than, say, ExxonMobil or Foxconn or Goldman Sachs. They will make choices based on what creates the most profit, nothing more. That's not cynicism; it's why corporations exist at all.

I’m disappointed that Prop 22 passed.

I also think it will not end up mattering much because the unit economics of the rideshare companies are so bad.

If they had gone along with AB5, they would’ve had cover to say to their investors “we need to make some expensive changes but it’s not our fault.”

As it stands, they’re still going to be hemorrhaging money, but now the question will be “you literally wrote your own law and you STILL can’t turn a profit?”

Most of all, it sets a very bad precedent in terms of signaling to other rich companies that amending Calif law to suit your needs is relatively easy and affordable.

Is Robert Traister an actual human being? Or just a pen name that the publisher puts on quickie books? Or a name, like Alan Smithee, applied to books that have gone wrong?

Why is there a need to "write legislation"? If Uber wants to treat drivers as contractors (or employees), California's lawmakers & courts have already set out a clear path toward legally doing either. Meanwhile, I'm sure you're right that many drivers would prefer to be contractors.

So who's the resistant party? Right -- Uber. Why? Because they can't make their unit economics work either way.

"But if the drivers want this intermediate arrangement, and Uber wants it, why should Calif stand in the way?" States make a lot of contracts, especially labor contracts, illegal because they go against public policy (including externalizing too many costs on state & local govts themselves). Still, Uber would be welcome to restrict its activities to states and countries that have labor laws more to its liking. Chemical & manufacturing & agricultural firms have been doing this for years. But Uber can't turn a profit without being in dense cities in liberal states (where labor laws are usually stronger)

One more argument is often advanced, which is "there is no scenario under which Uber could use contractors." This is also untrue. For instance, instead of working directly with individual drivers, Uber could pursue a franchise-style model, where it might, say, solicit bids among companies representing groups of drivers to handle all the rides in a certain zip code. Variations of this model are already used in a lot of industries, of course. But Uber's margins are already too thin, and it would have to give up too much control. Uber prefers the current model precisely because the balance of negotiating power is permanently asymmetric.

I'm afraid you're repeating Uber's favorite talking point, which is that everyone should respect the worker's decision to be an employee or contractor.

Nobody disputes that Uber can have employees or contractors (or both), or that drivers should, in principle, be able to choose what status they hold.

The problem is that Uber currently exerts so much control over its "independent contractor" relationships that they have become, as a matter of law, employment relationships.

Moreover, in practical terms drivers don't end up with the choice they ought to. If they want any working relationship with Uber, they have to accept a mash-up of all the burdens of employment minus many of the benefits of being a contractor.