cbdumas

Maybe I'm just a tech philistine but I find my Pixel 8a and my wife's iPhone <N> to be basically indistinguishable in any meaningful way.

Despite mounting evidence this perspective remains shockingly common. There seems to be some effect where one might convince oneself that while others are constantly introducing high severity bugs related to memory un-safety, I always follow best practices and use good tooling so I don't have that issue. Of course evidence continues to build that no tooling or coding practice eliminates the risk here. I think what's going on is that as a programmer I can't truly be aware of how often I write bugs, because if I was I wouldn't write them in the first place.

My understanding is that modern touchscreen keyboard use very aggressive predictive text so that the actual "shape" of the keys in terms of where you touch the screen isn't even well defined. This certainly feels like the case in contexts where it's turned off, like Google Search. Is this more of an aesthetic thing?

Very cool. Goes well with your Ghost S1 as well I see in the background. I love mine, though I will say it's getting harder and harder to find decent 2 slot GPUs.

Increasing housing density is a great thing and I'm all for it. That said I wish that cheapo stick framed buildings weren't the only way to get it done.

In my experience, living in a multistory stick framed building usually means absolutely zero sound isolation from neighbors which can lead to some really frustrating situations. It was night and day better when I moved into an apartment building from the 60s with the levels made of concrete.

For anyone planning a visit to Spain, I can't recommend Madrid highly enough. I wasn't sure what to expect from the city, but it might be my favorite I've ever been to. Madrid is beautiful, clean, walkable, and very welcoming. The food was all amazing and it seemed like we never had to wait for a table. I had a great time in Barcelona, but I'd recommend Madrid over Barcelona in a heartbeat.

> PUBG as the first Battle Royale and catalyst for Fortnite?

As I recall, H1Z1 actually came out before PUBG (though it has since faded into obscurity). A quick search on Wikipedia seems to back that timeline[0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PUBG:_Battlegrounds#Developmen...

I don't read that paper as backing that claim. At best the paper finds that the mechanism is more complicated than "money transfer from the poor... to the rich". To quote the conclusion directly:

"Notably, our results are not driven by income, as they hold within the sub-samples of low-, middle- and high-income individuals. In particular, high-FICO high-income consumers benefit the most from reward credit cards, but they do so at the expense of low-FICO high-income consumers. While credit card rewards are often framed as a “reverse Robin Hood” mechanism in which the poor subsidize the rich, our results show that this explanation is at best incomplete."

There's nothing more permanent in this universe than a quick hacky proof of concept that was never intended for production use.

> Have either database-like transactions or (at a minimum) write barriers for file operations.

Go one step further and have the kernel expose a much more structured view of storage to user space by default. 99.9% of user space programs I've written don't want to deal with file IO, they want a database, or some other way for arbitrary in memory objects to be persisted and shared between processes. There's so much room to improve on the 1970s era IO primitives we use by default.

My first real software job I worked primarily in Python and diligently added and maintained unit tests for every code path. This effort really paid off as my team and I could be so much more certain that changes and refactors wouldn't break things in prod.

A few years into that job, gradual typing came to Python and I realized that a substantial fraction of the unit tests we were writing were in fact just making up for a lack of static analysis in Python. Since then I've come to believe that with decent typing and static analysis, unit tests are most useful during development of new code and only marginally useful after that. Integration tests are much harder to set up initially but are much more valuable.

I may be in the minority here but I bought an LG TV in 2020 and the built in webOS interface and streaming apps have been great. I think there might be some ads but I'm honestly not 100% sure as they are very unintrusive. We had a Roku from our previous set up I had planned to use after hearing terrible things about the typical smart TV software, but have since gotten rid of it.

An alternative might be regulation ensuring people have access to banking services, either privately or by the government offering these services directly

> we actually follow deserialization is validation (is that a term?)

Perhaps you are thinking of this great blog post on the subject https://lexi-lambda.github.io/blog/2019/11/05/parse-don-t-va...

Terrifying. It is my understanding that in the US all BEVs are required to have a mechanical braking system in addition to the electronic regenerative brakes, though I can't find a source for this at the moment. Does anyone know if the UK or EU has a similar requirement? If so it seems in this case the electric motor was able to overcome the disc brakes which is astounding

This one hurts. Simple interface, does exactly one thing well. I use it every day, never had an issue with it.

This is interesting, I read that question as unambiguously about permission, not logistics. I would only interpret it as being about logistics if the question was "How can I ...".

Super cool that this shows latency under load! It's a shame ISPs seem to only market their throughput numbers, and never mention latency. So many people play multiplayer games now, you would think there would be at least some consumer demand to measure and improve latency over throughput.

You should post this as an answer to the question on stackexchange

> Is this just due to all the marketing from Apple around their proprietary M processors leaking into the enterprise market?

That doesn't seem likely, as the release of AWS Graviton based instances predates the Apple M1 release by about two years

Very cool, thanks for sharing!

It's a shame magnet URIs never caught on outside BitTorrent

The rise of SMS as a second factor for security across the web has raised the incentive for SIM-swapping tremendously. No one should be shocked that when tech companies start outsourcing their identity verification to cell phone providers those providers come under attack.

Introductory programming courses at the University of Arizona were still taught in C when I was a freshman in 2008

Yeah now that I dig in a little further it looks like it's not as clear cut as I thought. DBM read performance is better for me with larger test cases than I was initially using, though I am getting some weird performance hiccups when I use very large test cases. It looks like I'm too late to edit my top level response to reflect that.

So I read the script used to compare 'dbm' and 'sqlite3', and in sqlite it creates a table with no index. Hard to take that comparison seriously. I wrote a little benchmark script of my own just now and sqlite3 beats DBM handily if you add an index on the key.

The script linked at the bottom of this page uses sqlite without an index on the table. In my testing if you add an index sqlite quickly outperforms dbm in terms of read performance

This cuts both ways though. Working from home my "circle of communication" has gotten much smaller than it ever was before, because I don't run in to people.

> Private transport represents freedom, public transit represents control.

I think you have this backwards. Public transport gives freedom to many many people who are unable to drive (can't afford a car, too young to drive, too old to drive, etc.). In the US if you can't afford to drive your freedom is vastly curtailed precisely because we do not have effective public transport in most cities.

IMO GraphQL shines when used more like an RPC framework. I've never found the "Graph" parts to be worth the complexity.