thelopa

There could be bits of plain text data left over in over-provisioned storage set up in case a block goes bad (e.g. a flash cell that can no longer erase).

I completely disagree. My company is absolutely “monorepo scale”, but I also know we’re nowhere close to having the test coverage to allow people unfamiliar with a project to freely land changes in it.

Do you really feel that confident working in another team’s code base? I work in a multi-repo company, and almost every time I’ve gotten a patch from outside my team it’s been wrong in some way. Why would I want to make it easier for people who don’t understand (and aren’t interested in understanding) my project to land code in it?

When I replaced all my spinning disks with SSDs and fans with ultra quiet ones I realized just how much I relied on fan noise to signal things. E.g. if my computer isn’t visibly on, the fan/disk noise tells me whether I need to power it on or just wake it. I’ve had to start changing my habits as a result.

Proton is the answer to the chicken-and-egg problem of linux gaming. No one will make games for it because no one games on Linux because no one will make games for it. With Proton and this, they’re trying to bootstrap a Linux gaming community. From there, native ports will happen when the community is large enough to be worth optimizing for.

It turns out, people generally don’t change the terms of address they use for you unless you ask them to!

You joke, but there is a profound truth to this. Don’t reinvent the wheel. To be fair, it’s not like I wrote any real code for my auto-responder. I used a slightly janky mail tool that could, if held just right, be used to set up an auto-responder. I should have looked for something a bit more bulletproof and focused, but I wanted to play with this specific tool and see what I could make it do.

Mostly, I’m kicking myself for not thinking to put safeguards in. Dependencies can fail in unexpected ways, and I should have set up my auto-responder to be a bit more defensive.

I had a experience like this, once. Luckily it was less visible, but I felt like a fool all the same.

I came out as trans and changed my name last year, and with the name change I set up a new email alias for work. Then I set up automation to send out a gentle reminder email about the change for people who emailed my old alias. It worked fantastically for a few months… right up until the point that (due to a series of individually innocent events) the automation ended up running across the entirety of my 7 years worth of inbox. Everyone who had mailed me over the 7 years prior to the name change started getting the reminder email. One reminder for each email they had sent me. The worst part is that due to a bug in the email automation stuff, emails sent by the automation weren’t preserved in my sent box. So I don’t even know how many people I spammed. If I had to guess, I sent dozens of emails to the CEO and other execs, hundreds to my director, and thousands to people who worked closely with me over the years.

I learned a valuable lesson that day.

Exactly! If you walk the expanded form you have implementation-specific junk to deal with. Also, it may not be possible to map a form post-expansion to a source location. If you walk the pre-expansion form you’re going to get bad results. There’s no winning here unless you have help from the implementation.

A naive AST traversal might also interpret some bit of fancy macro DSL as being “regular” code and have a spurious match. Any reliable whole-program source transformation in CL needs to leverage compiler-specific extensions (code walker, environment, etc.).

Please try to contextualize those quotes. The context I’ve seen has actually only made them seem worse.

“Most women in the Bay Area are soft and weak, cosseted and naive despite their claims of worldliness, and generally full of shit. They have their self-regarding entitlement feminism, and ceaselessly vaunt their independence, but the reality is, come the epidemic plague or foreign invasion, they’d become precisely the sort of useless baggage you’d trade for a box of shotgun shells or a jerry can of diesel.”

“PMMess, as we’ll call her, was composed of alternating Bézier curves from top to bottom: convex, then concave, and then convex again, in a vertical undulation you couldn’t take your eyes off of. Unlike most women at Facebook (or in the Bay Area, really) she knew how to dress; forties-style, form-fitting dresses from neck to knee were her mainstay.”

“Out of nowhere British Trader informs me she is once again pregnant; the calendar math takes us right back to my move- out imbroglio in December, our last tryst after a breakup desert of nonintimacy. After a brief debate, British Trader confirms her desire to keep the child, whatever my thoughts on the matter. It occurred to me that perhaps this most recent experiment in fertility—and the first—had been planned on British Trader’s part, her back up against the menopause wall, a professional woman with every means at her disposal except a willing male partner—in which case I had been snookered into fatherhood via warm smiles and pliant thighs, the oldest tricks in the book.”

“To make an analogy, a capped note is like having to seduce five women one after the other, while an equity round is having to convince five women to do a sixsome with you. The latter is exponentially harder than the former.*

* The women analogy breaks down in that, unlike with women, the more investors you seduce into your moresome, the more likely others are to join. This is an expression of the lemming-like nature of tech investors, most of whom scarcely merit the title.”

—Antonio Garcia Martinez

Completely agree. I’ve been working on a Common Lisp collection library, and I went out of my way to make the element comparison function a parameter at data structure init time. If someone disagrees with my very strict definition of equality, they are welcome to provide their own comparison function! It always bothered me very much that FSet (the most prominent collections library for CL) used a definition of equality that is based on the a specific generic function that couldn’t be replaced. The icing on the cake is that FSet’s equality generic function messes up with derived classes. Oops.

I think you actually want the Find My system service.

I think you are mistaken. Activation is unrelated to cellular service. Activation is an anti-theft feature. E.g. even M1 macs are subject to activation and activation lock.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208987

Replacing the sim card in a device immediately triggers activation (e.g. to stop someone from using a stolen, passwordless device as their own). So, if the sim went bad, it seems plausible that the device might need to re-activate.

Sudo persists authorization for a short period of time so that you don’t need to re-authorize for back-to-back commands.

Also, once they get ACE they can modify your bashrc to make sudo an alias for “sudo rm -rf / ;” or all sorts of other evil trickery.

Sort of. I think CL has the right direction but the details are wrong. This pattern requires declaring the function notinline, and that is a much stronger statement than just “wait I take it back”. Using this pattern, the function can ONLY be inlined in the contexts where you allow it. Similarly, compiler macros are disabled for notinline functions. I would like the compiler to use its normal judgement for inlining and continue using compiler macros for call sites where I don’t provide an inline declaration.

I don’t know about the legalities, but according to Apple you are only allowed to run macOS on real Mac hardware. Anything else is probably an EULA violation or something.

As an aside, in the script you link to is this line

> VBoxManage setextradata "${vm_name}" "VBoxInternal/Devices/smc/0/Config/DeviceKey" "ourhardworkbythesewordsguardedpleasedontsteal(c)AppleComputerInc"

I think that’s Apple’s way of reminding you about their rules regarding host machines.

I didn’t go to caltech, but at Harvey Mudd we had a similar vibe. I once had a take home exam that stipulated I had to take a 5 minute break half way through the test. During the break I was not allowed to think about the exam problems. That was probably the most difficult rule I was ever asked to follow during a take-home. I tried to follow it as best I was able.

On one take home math exam I decided to TeX up my answers. This was permitted as long as you stayed within the time limits, but I forgot the command for a specific symbol. I wouldn’t be able to print my exam until after my time had elapsed, and so I wouldn’t even be able to draw the symbol on the printed exam without violating the letter of the law. Naturally using the internet to look up the command would also be a violation of the rules. I chose to just include an apology in my proof that explained the situation and then introduced a replacement symbol that I used instead.

I got the impression that most students were similarly strict about adhering to take home exam rules.

If you set Google Maps to While Using the App you will stop seeing the prompts you’re thinking of. Those “downgrade” prompts only apply to apps with Always. Apple Maps doesn’t support Always and so it cannot get a downgrade prompt.

The prompt you’re thinking of only shows if the app uses location in the background. An app that has While Using the App authorization can’t get the background usage prompt. It’s not that Camera is exempted, it’s that Camera isn’t relevant.

> Rowling is well known but is currently having her reputation blown up and being stabbed in the back by the starlets she birthed, because she's not on board with "people can pick their own gender at will".

Wow. So much to unpack here. I’m getting the impression that you sympathize with Rowling’s views. I’m a little more immersed in trans issues than most on HN, so let me assure you that Rowling is flat out wrong. For example, in her essay she alluded to (but didn’t cite) studies that have been discredited. A lot of her central points are easily dismantled when faced with reality. Her arguments are only convincing if you aren’t familiar with the issues.

You also echoed the idea that trans people casually picked their gender. If you ever talked to a trans person I’m sure you’d realize just how wrong that idea is. All the trans people I know report feeling like they had little choice. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve head trans people say things like “I would give anything to be a cis X”. By portraying it as a casual choice you’re belittling the daily struggle trans people endure. It’s not “just a choice” if transitioning is the only way to suppress suicidal urges, and suicide is rampant among trans people. The 2015 survey found that 41% of trans people had attempted suicide during their life. The percentage of people who had considered it was MUCH higher, but I don’t remember the exact number. It’s not a choice when your options are live or die.

I’m speaking not only from the experience of participating in trans groups, but also as a trans person myself.

IIRC, the logo you see outside buildings is a random color from a set of 5 or so. They match the Apple logo colors they use on the employee badges, which are also assigned randomly.

That’s really cool! I got more than a few new ideas for SHCL by browsing through that list. Thanks for sharing!

“Lisp-based shell” is so overdone. The hot new thing is merging Common Lisp and POSIX shell into a single, monstrous language!

https://github.com/bradleyjensen/shcl

Not sure if you're being sarcastic, but they are right. there isn't an OSX team. Apple doesn't slice things up that way. If there were an OSX team then surely there would be a manager for that team, right? The only person that could plausibly fill that role is Craig Federighi... but he arguably fills the same role for iOS, too.

In the Scott Forstall days, there was a distinct iOS team (Scott) and a distinct OSX team (Craig). now there isn't.