branksy

> They can't keep themselves secure... they can't police themselves?

What does that have to do with it? Better laws on security will force the government to police itself better too.

Simple example: a law requiring all passwords to be stored with unique salt and encryption of certain minimum strength. Or a law preventing IoT devices from functioning on a network when their password is still set to the default.

How do you fail to see how simple actions such as these would help?

From Wikipedia: The bills in both House and Senate had bipartisan support, as well as strong support from numerous music industry groups representing musicians, producers, and publishers, as well as from digital streaming media services and related industry groups.

Notably missing from the list are musicians themselves (who are the "groups representing them"?) and consumers.

Is this actually a good thing? Will it lead to greater income for the majority of musicians (as opposed to the top 0.1%?). Will it end up raising prices on Spotify or making it harder for new streaming competitors to enter the market?

> Unsustained by the particle or droplet, the wavefront disperses long before reaching its slit, and there’s no interference pattern. The Danish researchers verified these arguments with computer simulations.

Wait, what? From what I've always understood, the math behind de Broglie-Bohm interpretation results in the same exact results as the Copenhagen interpretation. It shouldn't be possible for any "computer simulation" to disprove it, by definition.

This article feels 1) pointless and 2) like it has an agenda. Oil droplets are a macro-scale approximation of something on the particle level where we already know the math works. This doesn't disprove anything, any more than doing experiments with rubber sheets and basketballs lets you disprove the general theory of relativity.

> crushing a century-old dream that there exists a single, concrete reality.

This is just sensationalist, cheap journalism. I expected far better from Quanta Magazine, and I'm disappointed in them. I've enjoyed many of their articles in the past, but I'm not sure I can trust them editorially any more if they print something so obviously incorrect as this article.

Like many companies, yes.

However, unlike many companies, they actually have a process where you can submit your "weekend projects" for Google to review and "gain back" explicit ownership of them.

Basically Google just checks to make sure it's not competing with anything Google's already doing, and then contractually assigns it back to you. (And anecdotally, if it does compete, you may be offered the opportunity to join said team, since it shows you're passionate about it.)

Fascinating! Serious question: could this turn JavaScript (technically Walt) into a serious language for scientific computation? That now runs in any browser?

E.g. Python is used a lot together with NumPy/SciPy, but for performance the actual computation in NumPy/SciPy is done in C since Python is too slow. Would it be possible to create Walt-native versions of NumPy and SciPy... e.g. NumWalt and SciWalt? Or even Jupyter notebooks based on Walt?

Considering Apple has been making old hardware even more performant, that doesn't seem to be their goal at all.

I brought my out-of-warranty iPhone to the store last week because its battery was swelling, and they couldn't replace the battery due to employee safety issues. So they simply gave me a brand-new identical phone for the $29 battery replacement price.

In my experience, Apple goes further out of their way to give customers low-cost or even free replacements in far more cases than I've ever seen any other company do.

What?! It's criminal fraud, it's illegal and should be illegal period.

Your argument is extremely dangerous, it's no different from "of course you got robbed and beaten, what are you expecting when you walk into a dangerous neighborhood?"

There's a very important line between what's illegal/criminal (robbery, fraud) and what's merely objectionable/distasteful (not selling repair parts), and it's a dangerous game to confuse the two.

Does it scroll? It doesn't do anything for me (Opera), so I guess everything's broken.

But... phone apps already do all those things, so I don't get what you're complaining about. My point is, apps already seem to be doing the right things. So what's some kind of new manifesto needed for? What is supposed to be changed?

Responding to you and everyone else using weather as an example:

NO, I don't EVER want cached weather data! In fact, it drives me nuts that when I look up the weather on my iPhone to see what the current temperature is outside, I have no idea if it's accurate or 20 degrees wrong, because it just assumes that cached data from 1am is good enough, until it happens to get a connection again. For people who live in places where the temperature can vary 40 degrees in a day, this is really important.

[Edit: why is this being downvoted? Is it not clear that I'm talking about current weather conditions, as opposed to 3-days-out? And that having my phone present stale data as current data can be harmful? Many people use their weather app for current conditions, not forecasts.]

This is a great post, and it's a good illustration of the difference between fun hacking/project buildling, and actually creating a business around software.

The ugly fact is, when you're creating a startup, only about 5% of your time is spent on the fun coding stuff, the main implementation of your whole idea.

The other 95% is spent on "plumbing" -- refactoring, credit-card integration, e-mail newsletters, browser bugs, server administration, and so on. And that's even before you get to things like hiring, fund-raising, and such.

> We can’t keep building apps with the desktop mindset of permanent, fast connectivity...

That's just silly. A lot of apps are rightly useless without normal connectivity, like checking the weather [edit: for current conditions], or sending e-mails, or Facebook, or shopping on Amazon. There's no reason for these to work offline.

I mean, an app is pretty much online-only, or mostly offline (like most games, for example).

I don't see a big middle ground between the two where online apps need to be made to work better offline. And the few which do (which involve syncing data), seem to work fine.

So... I don't get it. What is "Offline first" trying to accomplish in the real world?