lemoncucumber

It’s a common pattern for upstarts to embrace openness as a way to differentiate and gain a foothold then become progressively less open once they get bigger. Android is a great example.

The app in question relies on the network effect (lots of people crowdsourcing information) so introducing that much friction would kill its usefulness. 99% of users wouldn’t jump through the hoops, and without enough users the app is useless.

Any provider with a free tier doesn’t have the issue so that covers a lot of them

My company has a style guide that every public type/method/etc. must have a comment and it results in a ton of these comments for trivial methods.

Basically this paragraph from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Singapore:

"Singapore has consistently been rated as the least-corrupt country in Asia and amongst the top ten cleanest in the world by Transparency International. The World Bank's governance indicators have also rated Singapore highly on rule of law, control of corruption and government effectiveness. However, it is widely perceived that some aspects of the political process, civil liberties, and political, labour and human rights are lacking. The Economist Intelligence Unit rated Singapore a "flawed democracy" in 2024. Freedom House deemed Singapore "partly free" in 2025, at 48/100 — 19/40 for political rights, 29/60 for civil liberties."

Agreed, I guess I should have said it's not directly about making money from Maps, it's all indirect business reasons.

Same thing with Apple operating iMessage for free without ads... they don't care about monetizing iMessage but it's also not about altruism.

Thus far Apple Maps doesn't have ads. There are rumors they may ad them (pun intended), but I don't think their motivations for steering people towards Apple Maps are primarily monetary.

Reading NTSB reports themselves isn't for me, but I really enjoy reading this blog that does excellent write-ups of past plane crashes. It's really well written, easy to follow, and fascinating: https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com

Also the risk of their unproven approach of not using lidar for self driving, unlike every competing self-driving system.

One thing to watch out for is that you pick your "home region" when you create your account. This cannot be changed later, and your "Always Free" instances can only be created in your home region (the non-free tier doesn't have that restriction).

So choose your home region carefully. Also, note that some regions have multiple availability domains (OCI-speak for availability zones) but some only have one AD. Though if you're only running one free instance then ADs don't really matter.

"Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World" is a great book by Mike Davis about similar famines in the late 19th century caused by colonial powers putting profits and the sanctity of markets above human lives during periods when forces in the natural world impacted food production (climate swings in this case).

Nice work! A useful one you’re missing is `set list` which shows whitespace characters. The main thing I use it for is checking whether indentation is tabs or spaces (or an unfortunate mix of both).

It's a shame hither/thither/whither and their buddies hence/thence/whence are all archaic at this point

If you put lasers on them do they become killer whales?

I think of demand for EVs as being a little stronger among liberals and demand for trucks as being a little stronger among conservatives, so perhaps the venn diagram intersection takes a (small) hit from that.

I agree, but it's also pretty funny how so many of them have this tiny techie audience and 99% of the people driving past will just be like "wtf is that about, what are all those acronyms?"

Unfortunately that's the Google of a decade or two ago. Today's Google is very focused on cost-cutting and I can't imagine them investing in new future-focused projects like those which are not under pressure to turn a profit any time soon.

Google for Mac OS X Server 1.0 screenshots... the UI was a bizarre mashup of classic Mac OS and NeXTSTEP, you can see they were part way through bolting a Mac-like interface on.

When Mac OS X was eventually released it looked utterly different.

Star Trek: The Text Generation

They just take up so much space in your luggage though

That's already happening in the EU: https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/25/24050478/apple-ios-17-4-b...

> I couldn't even write an engine that used Vulkan in six months, nor a software rasteriser; meanwhile, Alyssa wrote an entire compliant driver on a non-native operating system running on locked-down hardware in one month flat.

Apple Silicon Macs are explicitly not locked down, it's just that the hardware is totally undocumented. This means that there's no jailbreaking necessary, just a lot of reverse engineering (which is still very difficult of course).

From https://asahilinux.org/about:

> Apple allows booting unsigned/custom kernels on Apple Silicon Macs without a jailbreak! This isn’t a hack or an omission, but an actual feature that Apple built into these devices. That means that, unlike iOS devices, Apple does not intend to lock down what OS you can use on Macs (though they probably won’t help with the development).

Like others have said, AppleTalk is the right way to solve this.

But if we’re going with crazy hacks, I bet one could emulate an ADB keyboard to copy binaries onto the laptop by sending keystrokes to “type” hex into ResEdit.

There are some minor advantages: checked bags are free, and canceling a flight for future credit has long been free on all tickets - once this became common among other airlines, they changed their policy to make the credit never expire to stay ahead of the competition (and allow transferring it to another person for some types of tickets).

It’s made more confusing by the fact that the comment omits all the S models from the list of unsupported models (along with the iPhone 4 for some reason).

So at a glance one could assume that the XS is lumped in with the X just like the 6S is lumped in with the 6.

That’s still not as bad as having to spell referrer wrong in http headers where it’s spelled “referer”... which is incorrect for every flavo(u)r of English.

Yeah, `git pull` is just shorthand for `git fetch` followed by `git merge`, so it's technically a superset of a "merge request".

And it also handles the cross-repo case, which is a common case in the Github model of "make your own personal fork of the upstream repo and send PRs from there," which has advantages -- it allows random people to send PRs without needing to give them permission to e.g. pollute the upstream repo's branch namespace.

I prefer to use gibi-dollars ($1073741824)

It took me a minute to figure out the last step of the final example since the author doesn’t quite spell it out. So for anyone else who’s feeling a little slow:

Once you’ve partitioned the search space into “values where the ith bit is 0” and “values where the ith bit is 1” (for example, even and odd values if it happens to be the least significant bit), then you can simply iterate through all the input values and xor together all the values where the ith bit is 0, then xor those with all possible values where the ith bit is 0, and you’ve found one of the missing values. Repeat the process with 1 instead of 0 to find the other.

How myopic of you