Holding up cold weather as proof that global warming isn’t happening is like hitting a winning streak at the blackjack table and saying “Who says the casino has an advantage?”

Exactly.

The Samsung Space Monitor’s sleek adjustable display revolves around an integrated clamp-secured arm engineered to allow the 27-inch or 32-inch screen to angle from a fully upright position toward the user with only a slight pull.

Neat idea for someone unfamiliar with monitor arms and VESA mounts.

# of course you'd need your own path here
PATH="$PATH:/Users/jgoebel/.rbenv/bin/"
eval "$(rbenv init -)"
rbenv shell 2.5.0
ruby -v

Pipe that into Large Type and you should see the familiar ruby 2.5.0 ... etc.

To customize the Control Center, swipe up from the watch face, scroll down (you can do this with the crown), and tap Edit. The icons will start jiggling, which means you can drag them into any order you like. When you’re done, just tap Done at the bottom of the screen. While you can’t remove icons from the Control Center, you can move the least used ones to the bottom, as just 6 icons appear on the screen without scrolling.

I had an Apple Watch for years before I knew you could do this. And then the other day I lost a few minutes trying to long-hold on the icons (like you do on Home) to get them to jiggle because I’d forgotten to scroll down to find “Edit”.

Immediately I moved DND to the top left, and it’s been great.

Yesterday I was unable to login to one of my (personal, not work) computers because I had forgotten my password. …

But that still meant a few hours where I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to login to my personal computers. Which is definitely a scary thing. Even though important things are backed up elsewhere (NetNewsWire’s code is on GitHub, for instance), it’s still scary.

I don’t type passwords from muscle memory (or maybe I do, but the password itself always pops into my brain first before I start typing). I do kind of understand the fear though. Sometimes I wonder what would happen if I had a brain issue/fluke of some kind and simply forgot my 1Password master password…

Seems 1Password doesn’t have an extra “backup key” - like OS X has when encrypting your disks. I suppose you could always write down your actual master password and place it in a safety deposit box at the bank? Is any better way to deal with this? (other than turning your 1Password into a Family/Team account)

Just try to imagine that world without ad targeting. It’s hard to imagine that it wouldn’t be a better one.

Indeed, just imagine. Imagine (John Lennon)

Jason Fried: I wish ad-supported services could look at my average usage (# of pages I’ve viewed, ads I’ve seen, etc), and give me an option to directly pay them the same amount they would have charged the advertisers for my slice of views/clicks/etc. No ads for me, they get paid as if they were serving me ads.

I’d love to see a company or two try this. I bet for one the logistics would be a lot more complex/expensive, but I suppose they could build that into the equation. The bigger worry though is that people who feel this way are likely in the minority - most would prefer to continue to get their services for “free”, since they either don’t mind or don’t comprehend the cost they are truly paying for those “free” services.

Caldwell couldn’t make lots of screws for Apple, even though it once had the capacity, because that part of its business was beaten by cheaper competition in China years before. (The article also quite rightly points out that U.S. workers are paid far more than Chinese workers and also don’t live under an authoritarian government that can compel them to work all day and all night.)

… they can’t simply move manufacturing back to the United States like the President of the United States keeps saying.

The older (wiser?) I get the more I realize nothing is ever as simple as it seems. Nothing is ever as black and white as it seems. The real world seems to be almost infinitely gray and complex.

Well dearest host, it is not my responsibility to tell you what I was doing. But, to ease your mind, I’ll tell you we were doing one of two things – either we were having a drug and sex party[1] with 100 of our closest friends, or we went to bed at 9:15 exhausted from kids and being on EST. What was I trying to hide on New Year’s Eve… indeed.

Absolutely hilarious little snippet in the middle of all this AirBnB camera drama. Glad they got their money back. I’ve had a few pleasant AirBnB experiences over the years.

Discovered by researchers at Qualys, the flaws are two memory corruption vulnerabilities (stack buffer overflow - CVE-2018-16864, and allocation of memory without limits - CVE-2018-16865) and one out-of-bounds error (CVE-2018-16866).

They were able to obtain local root shell on both x86 and x64 machines by exploiting CVE-2018-16865 and CVE-2018-16866. The exploit worked faster on the x86 platform, achieving its purpose in ten minutes; on x64, though, the exploit took 70 minutes to complete.

Count another “told ya so” for all the systemd haters. Not a religious issue to me personally, but I do see where they are coming from.

Gruber: I don’t think it was hard, per se, but that the entire announcement was bullshit intended to distract people from the biggest privacy scandal in company history — and Facebook is a company riddled with privacy scandals.

Still not regretting my decision to leave Facebook years ago one bit.

So, what’s the problem with unikernels? Let’s get a definition first: a unikernel is an application that runs entirely in the microprocessor’s privileged mode. (The exact nomenclature varies; on x86 this would be running at Ring 0.) That is, in a unikernel there is no application at all in a traditional sense; instead, application functionality has been pulled into the operating system kernel. (The idea that there is “no OS” serves to mislead; it is not that there isn’t an operating system but rather that the application has taken on the hardware-interfacing responsibilities of the operating system — it is “all OS”, if a crude and anemic one.)

So those are the reasons for unikernels: perhaps performance, a little security theater, and a software crash diet. As tepid as they are, these reasons constitute the end of the good news from unikernels. Everything else from here on out is bad news: costs that must be borne to get to those advantages, however flimsy.

Worth a read if you think Unikernels are the new hotness.

Unikernels are entirely undebuggable. There are no processes, so of course there is no ps, no htop, no strace — but there is also no netstat, no tcpdump, no ping! And these are just the crude, decades-old tools. There is certainly nothing modern like DTrace or MDB. From a debugging perspective, to say this is primitive understates it: this isn’t paleolithic — it is precambrian. As one who has spent my career developing production systems and the tooling to debug them, I find the implicit denial of debugging production systems to be galling, and symptomatic of a deeper malaise among unikernel proponents: total lack of operational empathy. Production problems are simply hand-waved away — services are just to be restarted when they misbehave. This attitude — even when merely implied — is infuriating to anyone who has ever been responsible for operating a system.

He mentions a talk he gave at DockerCon 2015 where he received strong applause after emphasizing the need to debug rather than just restart systems. I do see the point, but I also think the industry is kind of pulling the other direction on this as a whole. If your system is generally reliable [enough] and easily distributed, then there is a certain elegance to the notion or just ignoring edge cases completely and just letting them die.

When you had one huge server any small issue with it was worthy of detailed investigation - but when you have 10,000 tiny servers and it only takes 20 seconds to spool up a new one… it becomes a lot harder to justify the debugging and pragmatism starts to kick in. Hard to say whether this will bite us in the long-run.

It probably already is having a negative effect on personal computer software reliability in general. It’s easy to forgive Vivaldi for getting sluggish after a few days since it restarts so smoothly and preserves it’s state so well, but it would certainly be nicer if I never had to restart it.

Apple does make great hardware — hardware so good that to some extent it sells itself. But the core of Apple’s platforms are the OS’s — the software, not the hardware. I’d much rather run MacOS on a ThinkPad and iOS on a Pixel phone than run Windows on a MacBook Pro and Android on an iPhone XS.

So true. A ThinkPad running official and supported OS X would be quite something.

If the appeal of iPhone in China is only or even just mostly about the hardware — because the software that matters is WeChat (or anything else that is cross-platform), not iOS and its native exclusive ecosystem — then China is never going to be a consistent market for Apple.

Sad, but I think this might be true. Going to be tougher for Apple in China than other places.

Reply to Slack messages via email. Stay focused.

What a great idea.

You spotted an opportunity to optimize, but you were too early. You should avoid generalizing code until it is absolutely obvious that you should.

The more use-cases you have, the easier to know what to generalize. I mean, how can you know which functionality your components share if you don’t even have those components yet?

You can’t.

YAGNI, always good advice.

You may have seen Ruby 2.6’s Proc composition, but did you know there are far more operators you can abuse using Ruby’s proc coercion ( & )? Get ready for another wild ride!

Fun and potentially useful if Ruby is your thing:

json_data.map(&Mf['name'])

In this season of giving, let’s stop to consider one of the greatest gifts given to us by modern computer systems: the gift of abstraction.

Consider those billions of people around the world who use computers and mobile devices on a daily basis. They do this without having to know anything about the millions of CPU transistors and SSD sectors and LCD pixels that come together to make that happen. All of this is thanks to abstractions like files and directories and apps and documents.

Indeed, we stand on the shoulders of giants - giant abstractions - or perhaps giant layers of abstractions. Without them we’d all be sweating over the decision between NAND gates and NOR gates for every new project - and that would be no fun at all.

Also seems to be a great article in general if you’d like to learn more about Bundles and Packages.

It’s now the largest provider of cloud computing services and a maker of home security systems. Amazon is a fashion designer, advertising business, television and movie producer, book publisher, and the owner of a sprawling platform for crowdsourced micro-labor tasks. The company now occupies roughly as much space worldwide as 38 Pentagons. It has grown so large that Amazon’s many subsidiaries are difficult to track—so we catalogued them all for you. This is our exhaustive map of the Kingdom of Amazon.

I didn’t disagree with the intro, but I laughed at this whole “Kingdom of Amazon” hyperbole a little until I read the article. Yikes. It’s more than a little scary, seriously. Amazon has been slowly growing more concerning in my mind. A year or so ago I switched my Prime membership back to monthly and perhaps this year I’ll cancel it completely. Right now it’s only Kindle Unlimited that keeps me hanging on. I’ve been leaning a lot more on local libraries this past year though, and that might just be the trick that finally helps me break away.

However, the reality is that running the last-gen A11 Bionic flat-out would overheat the device, leading to lower CPU and GPU clocks, severely impacted performance and highly compromised battery life. Epic’s solution is simple then - lock to 30fps and in the process give the device the thermal headroom to stay cool enough to run at peak frequencies.

It’s a completely different ballgame with the A12 Bionic found in the iPhone XS, XS Max and the cheaper but just as capable iPhone XR (which Epic supplied for Fortnite 60fps testing). Epic says that the extra processing power allows Fortnite to complete a frame in the eight to 10ms range, meaning that there’s still plenty of ‘down time’ for the silicon. Apple’s move to TSMC’s new 7nm process also opens up the thermal headroom required to maintain peak clocks.

Imagine a world where Apple was actually seriously interesting in gaming… what might be possible?

On and off over the last year or so I have spent some time in Windows 10. Mostly with the Eve V, but also on my XPS 15. I have found the experience pretty terrible on many occasions. The hostility and lack of respect towards the user shown by Microsoft and some Windows software developers is egregious and angers me every time I encounter it.

I’m aware that the vast majority of computer users manage to use Windows but I’ve concluded it’s not for me. I find it unpleasant to use, slow, full of junk, and offensive to its users.

Scathing critique of Windows, though after looking at his sample screen shots I can’t say I disagree.

A further concern I have with the message and tone of contemporary feminism is that women have evidently forgotten that we have power over men as a result of the fact that we’re women—men adore us, and almost all their efforts at work or at home or in social settings, are made to win our approval, if not our admiration. In short, I am bewildered by the fact that in a culture in which The Patriarchy has never had less power over women, women seem to want to attribute to it a greater power than men in fact have, thereby confining women to a position of victimhood and powerlessness.

…

The orthodox line of feminism is that women don’t need men, and that it is men who keep women in a state of dependence. This is the doctrine of women’s liberation: we are trying to liberate ourselves from our dependency on men. Pragmatically speaking, the notion that we don’t need men is largely true. (As a single mother and single woman, I’m certainly poorer than my married counterparts, but I am running a family household successfully, if chaotically.) Paradoxically, however, the rhetoric of orthodox feminism implies the reverse: we need men in order to prove to ourselves that we don’t. I don’t need to sleep with a stuffed animal at night, but were I to insist on mentioning this at every opportunity, it would become abundantly clear that the idea dominated me. At a time when Western women have achieved economic independence, control over their reproductive rights, legal equality, and equal professional opportunities, the continued obsession with the need to win independence from the thing that we are, in every measurable way, already independent from, reveals just how subservient we are to the idea of powerful men. After all, only a child still dependent on the comfort of a stuffed toy needs to insist to herself that she isn’t.

Worth some thought.

Cell phone owners in California could soon pay extra for the privilege of sending text messages, thanks to landline-era legislation and changing usage patterns. According to recent public law filings, the state’s Public Utilities Commission (PUC) is considering a plan that would bill users a monthly fee for any text message services they use, and phone service carriers aren’t happy about it.

Feels not so long ago that SMS became a free element of most cellular plans… and now the government wants to start taxing it? Ugh.

And of course, there’s always the risk that applying such a charge will push consumers away from traditional SMS altogether, which would certainly impact the PUC’s estimated $44.5 million figure, and subsequently the people the charge is meant to help in the first place.

A completely valid concern and definitely a possibility - if people even notice the new charges on their bill. I don’t see anything mentioned about how much the tax could be.

Essential reading in today’s world: Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance. In the mid-20th century there wasn’t any debate in the West over whether we should tolerate the intolerant, because they had to fight the Nazis in a bloody war. We don’t want to learn this lesson that way again.

When someone draws a goddamn swastika on a “Happy Hanukkah” sign, “Fuck Nazis” is the appropriate response.

Amen. “Fuck Nazis”, indeed.

This bugs me. I’ve seen Feedly do annoying things with a small number of feeds in the past. I have some feeds I like to read periodically, but not regularly. Very rarely some of these same feeds would start disappearing their old items far too quickly (like within a few weeks, not a month). But I digress, and maybe this didn’t have anything to do with their feeds.

In any case 10 seems like a completely arbitrary number to me and also a bit small for my personal tastes. Thankfully, you don’t need jekyll-feed or it’s limitations. I glanced at Daring Fireball’s atom.xml feed for a little inspiration and just built my own from there. Here’s what it looks like:

atom.xml

---
layout: null
---
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
 <title>{{ site.title | xml_escape }}</title>
 <subtitle>{{ site.description | xml_escape }}</subtitle>
 <link href="{{ site.url }}/atom.xml" rel="self" type="application/atom+xml"/>
 <link href="{{ site.url }}/" rel="alternate" type="text/html"/>
 <id>{{ site.url }}/</id>
 <generator uri="https://jekyllrb.com/" version="{{ jekyll.version }}">Jekyll</generator>

 <updated>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>

 <author>
   <name>{{ site.author.name | xml_escape }}</name>
   <email>{{ site.author.email | xml_escape }}</email>
   <uri>{{ site.author.url | xml_escape }}</uri>·
 </author>
 <rights>Copyright © {{site.time |date: "%Y" }} {{site.author.name}}</rights>

 {% for post in site.posts limit:30 %}
 <entry>
   <title><![CDATA[{{ post.title }}]]></title>
   {%- if post.link_to %}
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="{{ post.link_to }}"/>
   <link rel="related" type="text/html" href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
   {%- else %}
   <link rel="alternate" type="text/html" href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
   {%- endif %}
   <id>{{ site.url }}{{ post.id }}</id>
   <published>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</published>
   <updated>{{ post.last_modified_at | default: post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
   <content type="html"><![CDATA[
     {{ post.content | markdownify }}
   ]]></content>
 </entry>
 {% endfor %}

</feed>

The post.link_to conditional is just how I do my link/commentary style posts - allowing the default link to point the content itself rather than to my blog post. If your use case is simpler just remover that if/else; and that’s half the point of just using a template rather than a plug-in - so easy to bend to your own use.

Why alternate between CDATA and xml_escape? No reason. I may just as likely go back and change them all to CDATA later. It that’s your style, go for it. My goal here isn’t to say “use my great templates” or to publish another feed plug-in - it’s to point out how easy this all is to do it yourself - the way you want.

But perhaps you’ve head XML is dead or at the very least it sucks.

feed.json

---
layout: null·
---
{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
  "title": "{{site.title}}",
  "home_page_url": "{{site.url}}",
  "feed_url": "{{site.url}}{{site.json_feed}}",
  "author" : {
    "name" : "{{site.author.name}}",
    "url" : "{{site.author.url}}"
  },
  "icon" : "",
  "favicon" : "",
  "items": [
  {%- for post in site.posts limit:30 %}
  {
    "title": {{ post.title | jsonify }},
    "date_published" : {{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema | jsonify }},
    "date_modified" : {{ post.last_modified_at | default: post.date | date_to_xmlschema | jsonify}},
    "id" : "{{ site.url }}{{ post.id }}",
    "url" : "{{ site.url }}{{ post.id }}",
    {%- if post.link_to %}
    "external_url" : {{ post.link_to | jsonify }},
    {%- endif %}
    "author" : {
      "name" : {{site.author.name | jsonify }}
    },
    "content_html" : {{ post.content | markdownify | jsonify }}·
  }{% if forloop.last == false %},{% endif %}{%- endfor %}
  ]
}

And of course don’t forget to add your fancy new feeds to the <head> section of your template:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" href="{{site.url}}/atom.xml" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/json" href="{{site.url}}/feed.json" />

While other companies may require all their existing paid customers to subscribe in order to get future updates, we instead decided that none of our existing customers should require a subscription! Slowly, we hope to earn each one of your subscriptions by continuing to deliver great updates to the features you have, and by introducing exciting, subscriber-only features that (we hope) will be difficult for you to pass up.

What a great approach. And some funny examples to top it off:

Capo {VERSION_FROM_THE_FUTURE} adds an all-new Virtual Reality Song View that allows you to walk through your favorite songs! Want to isolate an instrument? Take a virtual lawn-mower and trim away the sounds you want to eliminate. Pretty cool, right? Unfortunately, you would not get this for free.

The summary is: master and slave have racial meanings (especially in North America, but also more generally) and it would be good to avoid them.

I’m anti-slavery (of course) but I think some of this recent “sensitivity” to all topics is a bit ridiculous.

Some great comments:

Mariano Pérez Rodríguez: Most words have a plethora of meanings, it is YOU (the reader) the one who chooses to take a system’s dynamic description term as a racial thing, so, maybe you should just not do it.

Itamar Haber: IMO dominatrix and submissive is the politically correct terminology, since it is in fact consensual as well as puts the gentler gender in the proper place.

Just some guy: It’s slave/master which are very well established terms for “the thing that controls the databus” or “the bit of software that dictates what the others do and coordinates things and the other ones that obey”. If it was “Massah” and “N!gger” I’d totally agree with you.

And the conclusion:

TLDR: If I would start Redis from scratch I would pick a different terminology. … 3.Redis has a SALVEOF NO ONE command that was designed on purpose as a freedom message. So I’ll leave it as it is.

But it gets better:

Again, by using this term in Redis and by linking to external pages, I want to take the opportunity to remember that we are all slaves. Slaves of businesses, of food advertising, of industrial complex, of politically correct rules to follow, and so forth. Feel free to address the same problem in different ways in other software projects, but for Redis I want to purse this way I said.

A decade ago, shilling products to your fans may have been seen as selling out. Now it’s a sign of success. “People know how much influencers charge now, and that payday is nothing to shake a stick at,” said Alyssa Vingan Klein, the editor in chief of Fashionista, a fashion-news website. “If someone who is 20 years old watching YouTube or Instagram sees these people traveling with brands, promoting brands, I don’t see why they wouldn’t do everything they could to get in on that.”

Sydney Pugh, a lifestyle influencer in Los Angeles, recently staged a fake ad for a local cafe, purchasing her own mug of coffee, photographing it, and adding a promotional caption carefully written in that particular style of ad speak anyone who spends a lot of time on Instagram will recognize. “Instead of [captioning] ‘I need coffee to get through the day,’ mine will say ‘I love Alfred’s coffee because of A, B, C,’” Pugh told me. “You see the same things over and over on actual sponsored posts, so it becomes really easy to emulate, even if you’re not getting paid.”

I bet brands love this. So much about modern consumerism culture just makes me sad. I hope I’m getter truly wiser and not just curmudgeonly.

Apple has confirmed to The Verge that some of its 2018 iPad Pros are shipping with a very slight bend in the aluminum chassis. But according to the company, this is a side effect of the device’s manufacturing process and shouldn’t worsen over time or negatively affect the flagship iPad’s performance in any practical way. Apple does not consider it to be a defect.

This seems very bad to me.

This type of response makes me think this affects a LOT of units - and is some sort of subtle flaw in the manufacturing or structure of the device. If it was very, very limited you’d think Apple would be more like “Bring it back - we’ll be happy to give you a perfect one to replace it.”

Marko Karppinen: Apple should decide whether they want to be the company that ships iPads a little bent from the factory and calls it normal, or the company that charges up to $1899 for an iPad. Doing both seems untenable

Typical of a lot of the responses (collected here), and feels spot on to me.

Setapp says it’s adding a “substitute app” with similar functionality, and of course, the existing app will remain on users’ Macs—it just won’t ever be updated.

I think they could even go a step further - and allow you to reinstall it in the future if you’d installed it in the past. This “just keep it if installed” only works until you get a new PC and hope to set it up “magically” from Setapp. Better have good backups.

Thursday morning, many Slack users with ties to Iran discovered their accounts had been abruptly deactivated. The bans affected users living as far as Finland, Canada and the United States, many with few remaining ties to Iran in either citizenship or physical presence.

“In order to comply with export control and economic sanctions laws…Slack prohibits unauthorized use of its products and services in certain sanctioned countries,” the notice from Slack read.

This is what scares me the most with “big business” and how disconnected the average user is becoming from the businesses we frequent. Individual people lose their identities and instead it becomes all about statistics and dealing with “people” or “accounts” in the aggregate, in ways that increasingly seem less and less personal.

We need a ‘trip mode’ for social media sites that reduces our contact list and history to a minimal subset of what the site normally offers. Not only would such a feature protect people forced to give their passwords at the border, but it would mitigate the many additional threats to privacy they face when they use their social media accounts away from home.

To work effectively, a trip mode feature would need to be easy to turn on, configurable (so you can choose how long you want the protection turned on for) and irrevocable for an amount of time chosen by the user once it’s set. There’s no sense in having a ‘trip mode’ if the person demanding your password can simply switch it off, or coerce you into switching it off.

I’m glad someone is thinking about this, and I do get how this is a real problem - but I’m not sure we’ve stumbled onto the right solution yet. This seems a bit of a shotgun approach to me.

They can travel with special laptops and phones used for travel only, without social media apps or browser history. But such feints are easy to circumvent, particularly at the US border, where your identity is known to the border patrol hours before you land. Border agents can find your profile online and make you log in on their own machine.

(emphasis mine) Make you login? OMG, is this seriously a thing that happens? This is terrible. How would having a device in travel mode help in this case? I guess your on-line account would also have to lock you out until vacation was over? Talk about a support nightmare for service providers - and rife for social engineering if support departments are given any power to help correct “mistakes”.

The implication is clear: home cooks are being radicalized by the site’s recommendation algorithm to abandon their corned beef in favor of shrapnel-packed homemade bombs. And more ominously, enough people must be buying these bomb parts on Amazon for the algorithm to have noticed the correlations, and begin making its dark suggestions.

But as a few more minutes of clicking would have shown, the only thing Channel 4 has discovered is a hobbyist community of people who mill their own black powder at home, safely and legally, for use in fireworks, model rockets, antique firearms, or to blow up the occasional stump.

Close call. Thankfully for now Amazon is only a monopsony, not a supporter of terrorism.

More than 20 police units from two forces are searching for the perpetrator, who could face up to five years in jail.

Supt Justin Burtenshaw, head of armed policing for Sussex and Surrey, described attempts to catch whoever was controlling the drones as “painstaking” because it was “a difficult and challenging thing to locate them”.

“Each time we believe we get close to the operator, the drone disappears; when we look to reopen the airfield, the drone reappears,” he said.

I hope when they catch him he spends a few years in jail. This is reckless and juvenile behavior and I imagine downright dangerous also - when they go to the trouble of grounding all the planes.

Firstly, I know readers will again be worrying about performance with this change, as many people are wary of repeating a loop. But most of the time, rerunning a loop like this has a negligible effect on performance. If you timed the code before and after this refactoring, you would probably not notice any significant change in speed—and that’s usually the case. Most programmers, even experienced ones, are poor judges of how code actually performs. Many of our intuitions are broken by clever compilers, modern caching techniques, and the like. The performance of software usually depends on just a few parts of the code, and changes anywhere else don’t make an appreciable difference.

But “mostly” isn’t the same as “alwaysly.” Sometimes a refactoring will have a significant performance implication. Even then, I usually go ahead and do it, because it’s much easier to tune the performance of well­factored code. If I introduce a significant performance issue during refactoring, I spend time on performance tuning afterwards. It may be that this leads to reversing some of the refactoring I did earlier— but most of the time, due to the refactoring, I can apply a more effective performance­ tuning enhancement instead. I end up with code that’s both clearer and faster.

So, my overall advice on performance with refactoring is: Most of the time you should ignore it. If your refactoring introduces performance slow­downs, finish refactoring first and do performance tuning afterwards.

Some great thoughts on refactoring and worrying too much about performance. (emphasis mine) I’ve been contributing a lot lately to the great site Exercism and I see this quite a bit - worry about writing fast code vs writing clear code - and all without ever benchmarking anything.

It’s possible to do this “in your head” guessing a bit more with time and experience, but as Martin said it’s still often never as simple as you think. And often your best efforts today can be foiled by a new compiler optimization or future change to the virtual machine. Better to:

• Write clear code that reveals the intent.
• Try to avoid anything too ridiculous (i.e., looping 1,000 times when once would do).
• Optimize only the “hot spots” that reveal themselves to be problematic.
• Attack the hot spots with the help of code profiling and detailed benchmarking.

Get the book:
Refactoring - Improving the Design of Existing Code

JoshuaJB: I very recently worked on the Edge team, and one of the reasons we decided to end EdgeHTML was because Google kept making changes to its sites that broke other browsers, and we couldn’t keep up. For example, they recently added a hidden empty div over YouTube videos that causes our hardware acceleration fast-path to bail (should now be fixed in Win10 Oct update). Prior to that, our fairly state-of-the-art video acceleration put us well ahead of Chrome on video playback time on battery, but almost the instant they broke things on YouTube, they started advertising Chrome’s dominance over Edge on video-watching battery life. What makes it so sad, is that their claimed dominance was not due to ingenious optimization work by Chrome, but due to a failure of YouTube. On the whole, they only made the web slower.

Steve Troughton-Smith: Make no mistake, Google crippling GSuite on iPad is absolutely intentional. They can singlehandedly propel the narrative that MobileSafari isn’t a good browser, especially in businesses and education. If Apple were to improve Safari, Google would just break something new

I’ve been using a mixture of Firefox and Safari and not missing Chrome one bit. Articles like this make me even more confident in my decision to switch away from using Chrome.

So that’s why we now invite our customers and anyone else who’s interested in reviewing our policies to collaborate on making them better, making them fairer. To this purpose, we’ve put all our Basecamp policies on GitHub!

This also means that every revision is tracked and date stamped. You can even subscribe to be updated whenever they change, if you care to follow along at that level.

Furthermore, since the spirit of this idea is to collaborate, we’ve also licensed all these policies under the Creative Commons Attribution license. If you’d like to use any of the policies for your own business, feel free! All we ask is that you give us a bit of credit, if you either copy them entirely or materially.

This is very awesome transparency and will be interesting to keep an eye on.

Already is:

https://github.com/basecamp/policies/commit/fe3e141a66d6f20bd182493763d5007201110389

Both size and resolution are misrepresented since Apple ignores the notch and rounded corners the phones have, the suit argues. The company markets the products as if they were no different from devices like the iPhone 8, which has a notchless rectangular screen, yet it tells app developers to design for “safe areas” on X-series iPhones that accommodate physical limitations and the iOS status bar.

The “false pixels” referenced in the suit are ones that have two or fewer subpixels. Only ones with red, green, and blue subpixels allegedly count as “true” pixels, though this also discounts numerous televisions that include extra white subpixels, effectively bringing the count up to four subpixels per pixel.

Are you kidding me? The rounded corners? The notch? Some people are just morons or else have way too much time on their hands. I’m all for honesty in consumer advertising, but this suit is nonsense. Plus typically when I see Apple mention resolution in the phone specs it’s done like so:

1792-by-828-pixel resolution at 326 ppi

In this form I think it makes perfect sense to advertise the “outside” pixel dimensions, which is what Apple seems to be doing.

Judge Reed C. O’Connor struck down the law, siding with a group of 18 Republican state attorneys general and two GOP governors who brought the case. O’Connor said the tax bill passed by Congress in December 2017 effectively rendered the entire health law unconstitutional.

That tax measure eliminated the penalty for not having insurance. An earlier Supreme Court decision upheld the ACA based on the view that the penalty was a tax and thus the law was valid because it relied on appropriate power allowed Congress under the Constitution. O’Connor’s decision said that without that penalty, the law no longer met that Constitutional test.

This reasoning is interesting. We will have to watch and see where this goes.

It is hard to overstate what would happen to the nation’s health care system if the decision is ultimately upheld. The Affordable Care Act touched almost every aspect of health care, including Medicare and Medicaid, generic biologic drugs, the Indian Health Service, and public health changes like calorie counts on menus.

This is a bit scary to think about though.

Check out these rather ordinary looking portraits. They’re all fake. Not in the sense that they were Photoshopped, but rather they were completely generated by artificial intelligence. That’s right: none of these people actually exist.

NVIDIA researchers have published a new paper on easily customizing the style of realistic faces created by a generative adversarial network (GAN).

Have a good look. You may be staring into the faces of the Terminators coming after us in the not so distant future.

“‘Z’ is a letter symbolizing Nikon’s new camera brand,” Nikon says. “To emphasize this, there is a space between Z and 7/6.”

But there’s also the fact that camera models across the industry traditionally don’t contain a space in the middle (e.g. Canon 5D, Sony a9, Leica M10). Even Nikon’s latest DSLRs have names such as the D5, D850, and D7500, not the D 5, D 850, and D 7500.

Uh, good luck with that, Nikon.

The head was printed at Backface in Birmingham, U.K., where I was ushered into a dome-like studio containing 50 cameras. Together, they combine to take a single shot that makes up a full 3D image. That image is then loaded up in editing software, where any errors can be ironed out. I, for instance, had a missing piece of nose.

Backface then constructs the model with a 3D printer that builds up layers of a British gypsum powder. Some final touch-ups and colourings are added, and the life size head is ready within a few days, all for just over £300. You’re then the proud owner of an uncanny, almost-spectral version of your own visage.

For our tests, we used my own real-life head to register for facial recognition across five phones. An iPhone X and four Android devices: an LG G7 ThinQ, a Samsung S9, a Samsung Note 8 and a OnePlus 6. I then held up my fake head to the devices to see if the device would unlock. For all four Android phones, the spoof face was able to open the phone, though with differing degrees of ease. The iPhone X was the only one to never be fooled.

Emphasis mine. Very much looking forward to Face ID on my next Apple phone.

I spent a summer as an intern using Emacs at a Unix terminal, but didn’t have enough curiosity at the time to use it any differently from notepad.exe. I spent that summer wishing I had automatic features for completion, indentation, and all the things that made me appreciate the IDEs I used in college. How naive I was!

Poor boy, LOL. Naive indeed. Looking forward to absorbing these all these December VIM tips.

Adding to their two established locations (Russian River and Santa Barbara), California-based luxury camping company AutoCamp has announced its expansion to Yosemite National Park, a bucket list destination for seasoned backpackers and hobbyist hikers alike. In addition, AutoCamp is expanding its partnership with Airstream as it prepares to order hundreds of additional custom RVs in order to open more AutoCamp locations across the nation

Not your grandpa’s Airstream, that’s for sure.

Amazon says its new headquarters in Long Island City, Queens, will bring 25,000 jobs. It will also bring more crowds, more noise and, yes, more toilet flushing.

“It’s a health hazard,” said Ernie Brooks,” a musician who lives near the Amazon site, who also complained of an odor from the overflows.

Yikes. Glad someone is tackling these shitty logistics issues. 🤪💩

One of the most disturbing things about the Assistance and Access Act is that it apparently authorizes the Australian government to compel someone subject to its laws to surreptitiously take actions that harm our customers’ privacy and security without revealing that to us. Would an Australian employee of 1Password be forced to lie to us and do something that we would definitely object to?

We do not, at this point, know whether it will be necessary or useful to place extra monitoring on people working for 1Password who may be subject to Australian laws.

Yikes. What a terrible thing to have to worry about as a company responsible for protecting people’s private journals.

tztail (TimeZoneTAIL) allows you to view logs in the timezone you want

Where have you been all my life?