robjwells

One way that Swift is certainly not more convenient than Rust is the tooling. I use a 2018 MacBook Air, using macOS 12, which is now unsupported by Xcode. Meanwhile SourceKit-LSP is treated as very much a second-class citizen. But Rust 1.81 and rust-analyzer build and run just fine.

It’s not mentioned in the blog post, but 1.81 merges support into rustc for the Xtensa-based ESP32, ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3 chips from Espressif.

It’s been great to see a microcontroller vendor really get behind Rust, even for its “older” designs (the chips are still in production, but Espressif is using RISC-V for its new designs). And being able to use std on a uC is brilliant.

Imagine you’re standing on a double-track section. From your perspective, the track on the left leads away from you, the track on the right leads towards you.

As to why: having this uniformity is useful in placing, eg, signals (which face in one direction).

Much more confusing in railways is which track is the “up” line and which is the “down” line.

“About to be fixed” ≈ “this is the year of Linux on the desktop”

Wake me up when a browser ships Temporal.

Edit: Here’s Temporal on caniuse.com: https://caniuse.com/?search=temporal

Handful of APIs in the Safari Technology Preview, otherwise nada. I look forward to Temporal landing but it is still a very long way off.

For those skimming, this is the controversy over J Michael Bailey's book The Man Who Would Be Queen. I highly recommend reading Dreger's article.

Conway (and others, particularly Andrea James) conducted a years-long campaign of harassment against Bailey. This included (among many other things) repeated attempts to get Bailey fired from his job at Northwestern, a series of vexatious complaints to an Illinois licensing board, and infamously posting photos online of Bailey's children suggesting that Bailey had raped them and asking whether his young daughter was "a cock-starved exhibitionist".

Much of this material is still on Conway's University of Michigan-hosted webpage.

You can see all of the TfL traffic cameras here: https://tfl.gov.uk/traffic/status/

Use the hamburger menu to enable "jam cams", and click on the icons to view the clips. They're 10-second clips that refresh every five minutes if memory serves. The actual videos are uploaded to predictable locations on S3 if anyone's so inclined to scrape them.

Help I'm Stuck In A Street Sign Factory Avenue

Even among current and recent MPs and Lords, we've had: O’Brien (5), O’Donnell, O’Halloran, O’Hara (2), O’Mara, and O’Neill.

https://members.parliament.uk/members/commons?SearchText=%27...

While I agree with you, it's common that standards are not available without payment. For example, to get a copy of ISO 8601-1:2019 (as in, the date format standard!), it'll cost you $190.

https://www.iso.org/standard/70907.html

Narrowly on the matter of “clean feeders”, I’d recommend people (particularly of interest to those in the UK) check out Finches Friend. They make feeders designed to avoid the spread of disease (primarily trichomonosis) and their blog posts are full of related information.

https://www.finchesfriend.com/

This is a great post. I’d previously started to write a tree-sitter grammar for djot but bounced off when I realised I’d have to use an external scanner. Nice to have an article that sets out how to do so.

Link in the post is currently broken, but here’s the author’s grammar on GitHub: https://github.com/treeman/tree-sitter-djot

Somewhat related: ijq https://sr.ht/~gpanders/ijq/

On MacOS HistoryHound gives you a searchable index of webpage content, though it doesn't store the full contents of pages in a way that can be viewed offline.

https://www.stclairsoft.com/HistoryHound/

One of the people involved in the film this is related to (Pistachio Wars) is Yasha Levine, whose book about the history of the Internet, Surveillance Valley, is excellent (if controversial!).

Background on the film: https://yasha.substack.com/p/pistachio-wars-the-back-story-5...

Surveillance Valley: http://yashalevine.com/surveillance-valley

Named in contrast to Basel Old Boys, apparently. (“Old Boys” as in former pupils of a school.)

So, that's a no then, since that would suggest installing it in a Linux VM?

Perhaps worth including the date that was in the original title (29-09-2023), since this is a regular quarterly update.

I wonder if this is a bug introduced in macOS 13 (Ventura). I've been watching the Activity Monitor inspector for Control Centre on my 2017 Air, running 12.6.8, and it's at 0.00, occasionally boosting up to 0.01.

Sadly Frayn will always be tarred in my eyes having been subjected to Spies in GCSE(? A-level? It all blurs together) English.

KPrepublic have a tester that includes all four of the Glove80 switches (Brown, White, Red, Red Pro) [0] and also a cheaper one that excludes the Red Pro [1]. (I ordered the cheaper one after reading the review.)

[0] https://kprepublic.com/en-gb/products/kailh-choc-switch-test...

[1] https://kprepublic.com/en-gb/products/acrylic-switch-tester-...

Thanks for this, very interesting.

Prompted me into ordering a choc switch tester from KPrepublic, as honestly it’s the switches that make me hesitant (just unfamiliar).

I’d been considering an Advantage 360 but have been put off by the reports of problems. I’m a current Advantage 2 user, and it’s great, though I find the little finger (pinky) keys a bit awkward.

Love the dog. A bit like the “Cool Bear” asides in Amos’s articles (fasterthanli.me), a chance to pause & consolidate.

Christophe Lécuyer’s Making Silicon Valley is excellent.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262622110/making-silicon-valley...

It’s about the development of high-tech industry in the valley generally, starting with vacuum tube manufacturers in the 1930s and ending up with Fairchild and other chip firms in the 1970s. Highly recommended.

Interesting to note that very similar concerns have been raised by staff at the GIDS youth clinic in the UK.

https://www.bbc.com/news/health-51806962

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-56539466

Louise Raw wrote a book about the Bryant and May matchwomen and their 1888 strike, Striking a Light, which I recommend: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/striking-a-light-9781441114266...

I’d highly recommend Drew Neil’s Practical Vim[0] for much more like this; it’s broken down into easy chunks and gets into the _why_ as well as the _how_ of Vim’s techniques.

Modern Vim[1], mentioned elsewhere in the comments, covers more advanced Vim usage.

[0]: https://pragprog.com/book/dnvim2/practical-vim-second-editio...

[1]: https://pragprog.com/book/modvim/modern-vim

Yes, that’s a good point (and, as someone who works in newspapers, something I’m well acquainted with).

Perhaps my original comment was too simplistic; it is a thorny issue.

(Starting with the caveat that I’m not hugely well-versed in the GDPR:)

I think that actively soliciting personal data from people (wherever they may be) and collecting or processing it entails a higher level of responsibility. The GDPR in that situation effectively says: if you want to collect or process data on EU citizens you have to follow some rules.

I don’t believe that simply publishing a document online, for anyone who may wish to see it, has that “active character.”

However, others have pointed out that offering the Gutenberg website in a German translation is a similar act. I do think this is arguable, and this point does appear in the court ruling:

> “Apart from that, the first defendant’s website is also intended to target German users. This is supported by the fact that the website is partially in German, that the site offers German-language works, and that the first defendant explicitly strives to make the works available globally” [from the English translation]

However, going back to my point earlier, my concern is with the idea of making the website “publicly accessible in Germany.” I think there is a disconnect here between the understanding of traditional publishing (where it takes effort to publish abroad) and internet publishing (where it takes effort to prevent access from abroad).

I worry about the chilling effect of such a ruling. Should I, out of an abundance of caution, only make my blog available to readers in the UK (where I am, and where my blog is hosted)? I think it is easy to see what the effects of such a ruling could be, and (take to their logical conclusion) would have a severely detrimental effect on information exchange via the internet.

> I just wanted to point out that the reaction of the court isn’t as entirely pointless as it may seem on first thought.

And I think you’re right to do so!

Honestly, regarding the whole case, I think the court has erred in accepting the publisher’s argument that Project Gutenberg is a valid target for a lawsuit in Germany.

If the publisher wants the books removed it should sue in the US, if it wants to prevent access from Germany it should seek another local remedy.

> for playing devils advocate I can see the courts point: International websites have to respect local laws

I think this is an untenable position as it would mean that any website, published from any country, hosted on servers in any country, would have to abide by the laws of the world’s 193 countries.

Project Gutenberg’s argument is that they are only a US concern — everyone involved officially is in the US, and the site is hosted in the US.

This is distinct from, say, a company explicitly providing a service to customers in a particular country (cf GDPR).

And, to counter your point with an extreme example, it would mean that no-one is ever able to criticise the Thai monarch on any website in the world lest they be jailed under Thailand’s lèse majesté laws.

It’s one thing to say that an in-country website respect that country’s laws, it’s another entirely to say that any website hosted anywhere in the world must respect that country’s laws.