endgame

If the product succeeds and the market starts saying that this is acceptable for desktops, I could see more and more systems going that way to get either maximum performance (in workstations) or space/power optimisation (e.g. N100-based systems). Then other manufacturers not optimising for either of these things might start shipping soldered-together systems just to get the BoM costs down.

That doesn't feel great to me.

I spent a bunch of time working through https://www.briem.net/free-books/handwriting-repair and am really satisfied with the improvement.

As a reasonable form of civil disobedience? No - better to use Garry's Mod or whatever to bypass it entirely.

> To be very honest here, you risk having KeePassXC blocked by relying parties

Even if the bigtechs don't "officially" make the passkey standards require bigtech involvement, it seems very likely to me that conservative businesses like banks will only accept bigtech implementations. And then you're sunk.

Similarly, look at how OpenID turned into "Sign in with AppleGooFaceSoft".

This ZKP+hardware secure element stuff seems even worse, because how are you going to make it work on old hardware, or with free software, or with open devices?

* $ is "function application" - f $ x = f x, but lets you elide nested parens: f $ g $ h x = f (g (h x))

* & is "reverse function application" x & f = f x. This reads nicely in pipelines as "and"

* <$> is "fmap" what is like a lifted application over a structure: f <$> [1, 2, 3] = [f 1, f 2, f 3]

* <&> is "reverse fmap", which is nice when you have a big lambda

* Anything in <_> brackets is generally a "lifted" version of some operator

* And so on

* https://www.accc.gov.au/media-release/valve-to-pay-3-million... (not currently loading for me)

* https://archive.is/9mE7i#selection-4964.0-4978.0 (archive of the above)

> The Court held that the terms and conditions in the Steam subscriber agreements, and Steam’s refund policies, included false or misleading representations about consumers’ rights to obtain a refund for games if they were not of acceptable quality.

> In determining the appropriate penalty to impose on Valve, Justice Edelman noted that “even if a very small percentage of Valve’s consumers had read the misrepresentations then this might have involved hundreds, possibly thousands, of consumers being affected”.

> Justice Edelman also took into account “Valve’s culture of compliance [which] was, and is, very poor”. Valve’s evidence was ‘disturbing’ to the Court because Valve ‘formed a view …that it was not subject to Australian law…and with the view that even if advice had been obtained that Valve was required to comply with the Australian law the advice might have been ignored”. He also noted that Valve had ‘contested liability on almost every imaginable point’.

Valve's notice to consumers is archived here, and no longer on their live website: https://web.archive.org/web/20180427063845/https://store.ste...

I can find news articles saying that the court action began in late Aug/early Sep 2014.

https://www.news.com.au/finance/business/retail/steamowner-v...

Here's an old reddit comment discussing how Valve failed to implement AUD and KRW pricing on schedule, and speculates that at least in Australia's case, it's because of local compliance reasons.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Steam/comments/38dlvd/the_real_reas...

But I can't find anything that definitively ties the rollout of refund policies to an attempt to get the ACCC off their back. The comments on the above reddit post show that GOG and Origin had active refund policies at this time.

Even if I didn't the full power of a lisp macro system, it is an absolute joy to manipulate programs written in s-expressions. Being able to cut/copy/paste/jump-[forward/back] by sexpr is really convenient, and often done nowhere near as well in other languages. I think this is because until the invention of tree-sitter and LSPs (and the former isn't yet widely adopted in editor tech), most editors had regex-based syntax highlighting and some kind of ad-hoc "parser" for a language. This makes them less aware of the language the developer is editing, but was probably a pragmatic design decision by editor implementers: it's easier than writing a full parser and means the editor can still assist even if a program is syntactically ill-formed.

I think we're really going to miss having the fundamental parts of the system available under strong copyleft, and it will be very hard to go back.

Perhaps it was too overt?

Sounds a lot like the godawful "assistance and access" laws that were rushed through in Australia a couple of years ago, right down to the name of the secret instrument sent to the entity who gets forced into to building the intercept capability.

Now that Apple has caved once, I expect to see other providers strongarmed in the same way, as well as the same move tried in other countries.