goblin89

(That was in 2020, as of iOS 13 IIRC. It’d be interesting how much of that works against the current iOS 17, and whether Zerodium simply had cashflow issues at the time.)

I find cities in Taiwan frustrating to navigate without personal transport, at least a bicycle.

Having lived in Kaohsiung for a bit, I observed that very few people use public transport unless they go to/from intercity rail or airport. Buses in particular are unreliable (mostly used by older people), and MRT alone is obviously not enough for the sparse city.

As a rule, I would not say a botched implementation is grounds to discard an approach. If you committed a change by mistake, acknowledge that as the root cause first and foremost.

That said, if certain approaches reliably lead to increased likelihood of botched implementations, then that could be weighed when making relevant architectural decisions; “soft deletion” (not liking the term, personally) may be one of such approaches.

On which note, a good way of implementing soft deletion without implementing soft deletion is audit trail, externally to the system.

Something was created and then deleted? Both events are captured in the trail. Pile on a stringified JSON dump of the change (where it’s going it won’t require a schema) and you have all you need with low effort.

An important invoice was deleted by a paying customer? CS will get pinged, and if it is indeed a problem—well, you have the trail, so reinstating is not automatic but is possible within the retention period.

(Speaking of, remember to observe the retention period. In general, it can actually be architecturally simpler if you maintain an audit trail separately: if that system deals with just trail records, you do not need to worry about accidentally expiring current data and can apply the same purge logic to everything within. Pro tip: there can be different retention policies for different kinds of data; may be worth capturing that.)

Client accidentally batch-wiped 50000 objects? Get a junior to write a script that walks the trail and returns the requisite SQL.

As a side benefit, having audit trail is a must for all sorts of compliance and reporting scenarios, so it addresses multiple issues in one go.

> MDM them

Many of us cannot afford the luxury of working overtime as tech support for relatives. I personally do not even think I can do a good enough job at that for myself, in fact—I would have to be a professional information security researcher.

Furthermore, I am sure if there is enough misplaced outrage, MDM will be unable to restrict this.

> But we do not need to surrender in the war on general purpose computing for it.

Where is that war? General purpose computing is everywhere, with all of its associated benefits and liabilities[0].

iOS has more or less been the only island where it is reliably not an option, that making it preferred for the reasons I mention.

[0] How many of us literally airgap machines that run unvetted code (at least once you realize that all vitalization and containerization is circumventable), not letting any personal data on them? How feasible is that with a phone, and by an average person that is not exactly infosec-savvy but who is obligated to have a phone to simply get on with daily life?

As a user, I cannot recommend iPhone to my older relatives if there is a way to run arbitrary code beyond Safari’s JS sandbox. Simple as that.

It is a nuanced question with a computer[0], but for a phone (increasingly used for more important transactions and sensitive private data by people more naive when it comes to security) it is simply a no-brainer.

Unless cyber crime is prosecuted as robustly as robberies, I want this kind of jail to constrain the device. Believe it or not, it is a feature.

[0] I do run arbitrary code on my MBP, but then I am a dev who writes code. And, being that, I recently re-enabled the warning for running non-app-store apps on my Mac—I consider myself proficient enough, but perhaps that is exactly why I prefer having to go through an extra warning dialog if it helps reduce the attack surface.

I get very little spam mail. So, when I recently started to get some random invitations to webinars related to “adding” AI features to products, I have shed any doubt on whether this is a bubble. (First because they call it “AI”—it’s ML, of course; second because it’s cold mass mail, there’s obviously not enough actual demand if they resort to dipping into spam databases—that speaks volumes.)

This actually vaguely rings the bell. I think it happened just a few times and because I quickly heard it I corrected the slider and did not pay attention at the time I suppose.

Don’t think it ever happened in DAW though, only when playing audio from OS.

IIUC this crackling has always happened to me regardless of the OS, both on macOS and Windows. It should be solvable by increasing audio buffer size (& therefore latency), getting better hardware, or bouncing/freezing tracks to audio.

I have been producing music on macOS for 8+ years on multiple laptops (from x86 to ARM), different external DACs, wired and wireless headphones, etc. I am very sensitive to L/R balance and sometimes have to adjust the panning ever so slightly if my ears are off (e.g., after pressure change during a flight) in phone’s Accessibility settings.

The fact that there is an Apple-specific L/R audio balance bug, which now seemingly everyone suffers from, is complete news to me. Sometimes I feel like I am living in a different reality…

That means I was wrong in my original understanding!

> A crucial difference is that there is no standardized form

Depends on who you ask. What’s the region in question? What counts as a standard? Is Nynorsk codified by ISO? Et cetera.

> People write Cantonese in private of course

It‘s used plenty in public in Cantonese-native areas!

> that usage is not uniform

Yes, there is a disconnect and different ways of writing down a turn of spoken phrase. Sometimes people wouldn’t know offhand how they would even do it about a purely spoken turn of phrase.

If they were solely written languages then you wouldn’t be able to, for example, read the text aloud, right?

I don’t have any first-hand knowledge, but according to Wikipedia on Bokmål it looks like it can be spoken as well (Wikipedia uses a phrase “spoken Bokmål”), but without a universally agreed-upon and regulated pronunciation. Isn’t it similar to English in this sense?

I know nothing about it except what is in the article, and the article characterizes Nynorsk as “cultural elite language”—it looks like the article is not accurate?

That aside, “cultural elite” or “status” are always relative, of course…

Nynorsk is, according to TFA, predominantly used in speech and less used in writing, while Bokmål is the opposite. (Minus region specifics.) Is that not correct?

My impression, only based on this article, is that Nynorsk and Bokmål are both spoken as well as written, just more or less so depending on context and region. Just as English is both a written and a spoken language, and Cantonese is both a written and a spoken language.

The status of Norwegian Nynorsk is reminiscent of Yue/Cantonese. In areas where it is native, it’s used in writing more rarely (and very rarely in official writing) compared to Mandarin (a distinct, not mutually intelligible language) or English.

Another similarity is that Cantonese, like Nynorsk, is considered higher status where it’s spoken, and like Nynorsk it’s under somewhat of a threat so the communities know they have to keep it strong.

What makes it more interesting is that the non-phonetic, semi-ideographic nature of the writing system means no direct unambiguous translation between sound and written symbols—so that you may actually struggle to write down certain turns of spoken Cantonese, even if you are a native speaker!

Another difference is that, unlike Nynorsk (which began as “New Norwegian”), Cantonese is old—at least on par with or arguably older compared to languages used for writing in the same area.

My comment was a bit tongue in cheek… but let’s say you are the weird prepper who (considering the generally poor population) finds money to spare on an actually functioning Geiger counter; what do you think you can really do if it starts beeping?

There is no need to worry of nuclear disasters in China, as you will most certainly not hear about it when they happen (even if you live in China). You can’t worry about what you don’t know, and after all everyone eventually dies of cancer…

It’s well-known[0] that discussing China-related politics is off limits for Apple-affiliated content producers.

Along with removing relevant apps and blocking relevant Airdrop features coincidentally right during Hong Kong protests, with giving up iCloud infrastructure, etc. (are there more examples?), can’t help wondering how far their collaboration goes.

On one hand, it was a matter of time that Stewart’s new show would be cancelled if he had any integrity. On the other hand, the show was IMHO not at his previous level based on the first few episodes.

[0] https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/10/apple-tv-china-...

Economy is not that different from psychology, physics, or indeed any natural science. All try to predict how they would change depending on various factors and invent explanatory models that are never perfectly correct.

It’s just that some have had more apparent prediction success than others (non-coincidentally, it’s those that don’t directly involve humans as subjects), while some are liable to affect people’s lives in more direct and drastic ways (non-coincidentally, it’s those that do directly involve humans as subjects).

You totally can, but we are talking about Google Translate here, how it mislabels scripts as languages and how it doesn’t support a major language (for what is likely political reasons).

We are discussing languages, not scripts.

Standard being ignored by laypeople doesn’t make it any less useful in formal contexts sensitive to ambiguity.

First, not every Yue speaker speaks Mandarin.

Second, the fact that they also speak Mandarin (because it was a mandatory lesson at school or they were otherwise forced by circumstances to learn it) does not mean there should be no support in Translate for their native language, which incidentally dwarfs many languages that Translate does support in number of speakers.

If you think that’s viable logic, you should try applying it to other languages with predominantly multi-language speakers. Start with Irish (98% of people in Ireland speak English, after all) and move on to Catalan, see where that gets you.

Your comment would be true if American and British English were linguistically classified as distinct, mutually unintelligible languages (beyond amusing accent jokes).

A Mandarin speaker in Taiwan has a different accent and slightly different vocabulary than Mandarin speaker in Beijing, but neither of them would be able to converse with a Yue speaker any more than a Russian speaker would be able to converse with a Polish speaker.

Myanmar, while spoken by fewer people than Yue, benefits from an official standard for romanization from its own government (not ISO), and Jawi is a dialect of a language spoken by fewer than a thousand people total.

When saying “little demand internationally”, could you clarify what international demand was there for a standard for romanizing Mandarin and why that is somehow not applicable to Yue?

I think Google has the resources required to detect different languages in Chinese script (different combinations of characters and vocabulary, even specific Unicode characters, etc.) but there is 1) lack of incentives and 2) opposing political interests. Doesn’t help that there is a bit of a mess when it comes to Chinese characters, like a single Unicode point can be rendered differently depending on the font.

Let’s not mix cause and effect. There are multiple systems because there’s no standard, and there’s no standard because there’s strong opposing interest. Cantonese-speaking world would strictly benefit from this standardisation, lack of it impedes business and takes away from language’s legitimacy.

I wouldn’t be surprised if there were attempts to introduce a standardised way of romanising Yue, but certain groups with many votes considered this national interest as they try to maintain authority across a very diverse set of people speaking different languages.

Google should rid itself of the notion that “Traditional Chinese” and “Simplified Chinese” are anything but complete misnomers if you’re talking about languages. They are scripts, and scripts don’t have a 1:1 mapping to languages.

Imagine a world in which Google Translate has one entry called “Latin” for anything using Latin script (Welsh, Irish, you name it) and another entry “Simplified Latin” for English. Just like that, translation “from TC to TC” (e.g., Cantonese to Hakka) is very much a thing!

Be on the lookout for misinformation obscuring the fact that Cantonese (a.k.a. Yue), spoken in Hong Kong, is a language. It’s not mutually intelligible with Mandarin (unlike, say, Mandarin spoken in Taiwan, which is more or less Mandarin with a different accent and slightly different vocabulary) or other languages of Chinese family. Cantonese uses different transliteration systems as well (Pinyin doesn’t work for it).

Who’s mainly responsible for there to this day being no ISO standard for transliterating Cantonese, and its conspicuous absence from Google Translate (despite the whopping 86 million speakers—consider that Translate supports, say, Welsh, Basque, Dhivehi, and many others that are spoken by fewer than even one million), is probably obvious. That entity is much helped by the issue being opaque to most foreigners, who are sufficiently baffled by a completely different writing system to just not care and bundle all languages written in Chinese script into one basket.

One can say “non-capitalist society” yet mean that capitalism is the only thing that there ever is. Capitalism is a way to look at things, and it doesn’t require a modern society—social capital and economics of prestige is a thing since forever[0].

Indeed, in all large-scale supposed “non-capitalist” societies today there is capital—it doesn’t stop being so if a few people use unlimited power and oppression to install arbitrary rules and restrictions on capital for others without having being subject to any checks or balances themselves; it just becomes more contrived and perhaps perverted.

Some would probably say that it’s the infectious external influence of other capitalist countries that precludes full abolition of capital, but another way to look at it is that said external influence is in fact what gives such a regime life in the first place—i.e., if you remove the agitating antagonistic existence of “capitalism”, the pretend “non-capitalism capitalism” would not suddenly turn into a perfectly “non-capitalism non-capitalism” but rather revert to capitalism, regardless of whether it would be called so or not or whether it would happen violently or peacefully.

[0] https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2016/03/03/inequalities/

I own one device that I cannot imagine wanting to upgrade or call “obsolete” in foreseeable future: the 2018[0] 256 GB third generation 13-inch iPad Pro.

Granted, in my workflow it faces fewer demands than for example a laptop or phone (I don’t program on iPad or use it for full media production workflow), I don’t rely on it day in day out like I do on those devices, and perhaps I will change my mind once it stops receiving updates, but all of what it needs to do it just does (communication, leisure, music/art playground) and had been doing for years with no noticeable degradation. Somehow I have a soft spot for this particular trusty shiny rectangle.

[0] Replaced in 2020 due to no fault of its own but my idiocy that resulted in broken screen. Incidentally, with expired AppleCare+ that cost me around half of the original price. I’m not super wealthy but I don’t regret this specific expense.