The aforementioned series continues, and today's episode includes notes from an email discussion (centered on basically manual bit-twiddling Huffman coding) involving several people whose algorithms Eric implemented over the past few weeks, after the author of one of them, David Stafford, got in touch with Eric about it.
These things happening is one of the reasons why the Internet is great.
The pronunciation "ax" predates "ask" in the English language & has been in continuous usage for 1200 years. When English was formalized, upper class white English usage became "correct."
Last month, Bandai Namco announced a special bonus for Switch players who invested in the new Namco Museum Archives Vol. 1. In addition to 10 emulated Namco classics, the game's official Nintendo store page notes it includes "a newly created 8-bit demastered version of Pac-Man Championship Edition" (emphasis added) [original emphasis maintained].
[..] As it turns out, though, the "newly created" part of the game's promotion isn't quite accurate. Bandai Namco has confirmed to Ars Technica that its much-lauded Championship Edition demake is actually based directly on an obscure NES/Famicom ROMhack created over a decade ago by a Japanese fan going by the handle Coke774.
"Throughout Pac-Man's 40-year history, he has inspired countless fans to take on game development as either a hobby or a career," the development team said in a statement provided to Ars Technica. "In the case of Coke774, his work was highly appreciated by our team and we worked with him officially to implement his design into our game."
I would never use LinkedIn in the first place and can't understand people who would, with their legendary, genre-defining platform-owner selfishness at the cost of the personal privacy and discretion of the people they claim to serve. I don't doubt that this is a bug, but it wouldn't surprise me if this wasn't a bug either.
It’s finally here. The thing I have been advocating for through my work, writing, videos and talks for years. A swing of the pendulum. A reemergence of fun in visual design. I have been waiting 7 years to write this.
[..] this attack was facilitated by the fact that the attackers were able to turn off 2 factor authentication on Google's password.google.com without needing to confirm by the 2 factor authentication mechanism, which defeats the point of enabling 2 factor authentication.
Whoops.
Triso— short for “tristructural isotropic”—fuel is made from a mixture of low enriched uranium and oxygen, and it is surrounded by three alternating layers of graphite and a ceramic called silicon carbide. Each particle is smaller than a poppy seed, but its layered shell can protect the uranium inside from melting under even the most extreme conditions that could occur in a reactor.
[..] Most nuclear reactors today operate well below 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit, and even the next generation high-temperature reactors will top out at about 2,000 degrees. But during the INL tests, Demkowicz demonstrated that triso could withstand reactor temperatures over 3,200 degrees Fahrenheit. Out of 300,000 particles, not a single triso coating failed during the two-week long test.
Between triso, Thorium and Bill Gates' vaunted "Terrapower" — where you recondition spent rods into a big heap that you essentially light on fire, lock up and walk away from for a steady production over several decades — nuclear technology seems to exist that is able to manage the enormous downsides associated with its operating thesis.
No one is taking the inadequate first few generations of solar panels as indicators of what current photovoltaic technology is capable of; it's downright reckless to do so with all nuclear technology, considering the changes we're all going to have to make in the next few years.
—
˙ɹǝʞɐq 'ɹǝqɯnןd 'ǝɔıʇuǝɹddɐ ɹǝʇuǝdɹɐɔ 'ʇsıuoıʇdǝɔǝɹ ןǝʇoɥ 'ʞooƆ
Interesting story behind the shaping of Hey's design and general approach – it started by taking the "gnarliest threads" and building around that. Email is relatively painless for the simple cases, which everyone else is obsessed with adding trivial sparkles to.
Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.
Filed under the beauty of the Internet:
Something About Zelda Breath of the Wild, a chaotic and unnervingly accurate depiction of the state-of-the-art of Breath of the Wild speedrunning.
Speedrunner Link, as animated in that video, included as a character in a community-made fan game.
bangorlol on Reddit:
I reverse-engineered the app, and feel confident in stating that I have a very strong understanding for how the app operates (or at least operated as of a few months ago).
TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device... well, they're using it.
[..]
Here's the thing though.. they don't want you to know how much information they're collecting on you, and the security implications of all of that data in one place, en masse, are fucking huge. They encrypt all of the analytics requests with an algorithm that changes with every update (at the very least the keys change) just so you can't see what they're doing. They also made it so you cannot use the app at all if you block communication to their analytics host off at the DNS-level.
For what it's worth I've reversed the Instagram, Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter apps. They don't collect anywhere near the same amount of data that TikTok does, and they sure as hell aren't outright trying to hide exactly whats being sent like TikTok is.
Paints a fuller picture than "it helps itself to your clipboard", doesn't it?
During the (excellent) WWDC episode of The Talk Show, there was this:
John Gruber: I've seen in, day one, there has been some - to me - misreading the message, but some coverage along the lines of: "Apple is moving the Mac to its own silicon to further lock in [insert either developers or users or both users and developers]", that this is to increase lock-in. And I just have to ask... I don't see it, because I've seen these announcements and I don't see where that's coming from in terms of any aspect that was announced.
Craig Federighi [SVP, Software Engineering, Apple]: I think those guys are being total tools, honestly.
This comes in the middle of a segment where both Craig and Greg "Joz" Joswiak (VP, Product Marketing) are talking about the lack of respect they get from showing that their focus in on the Mac, and that they want the Mac to continue existing, not be subsumed by or replaced by or absorbed into iPads and its OS, and so on and so forth.
To begin with: I agree with them to a point. As much as I've been able to tell, you will not be allowed to do less on macOS Big Sur running on Apple Silicon than on Intel processors. The limitations that are there have excellent technical motivations: it is hard to straight up virtualize a different processor architecture, and they have still provided good support for everything up to that point in terms of automatic binary translation of programs compiled for Intel.
I also empathize with the pressure on a personal level. Although they are well-compensated for it and should be accountable for the decisions they make, there's no need for incivility or personal attacks. Luckily, I do not have to stretch myself as far in order to enumerate a number of reasons why this is the feedback Craig and his team gets.
Apple's modus operandi is to find big changes, make big bets, and go from the current status quo to where they want to be over a series of small, incremental changes. Once every blue moon, a big change is needed, or a new component or technology or device or market needs to be introduced, and this is seen by some, especially outsider experts, as the core of Apple, to the point where if they don't regularly do it, they have "lost the innovative spark" and you would be a complete fool to not immediately short AAPL. But the core is the silent trudge, the long term mixed with the incremental.
Apple is judged by their actions, by their behavior and by their history, and in the absence of roadmaps and rationalizations, and in the recurring presence of re-contextualizations as new changes happen, the guessing game is the result. Every change turns into a proposed Chekov's gun.
When Sandboxing is introduced, the logical conclusion is that at some point it will eventually be required for everything. Since Sandboxing is inconsistent, flaky and insufficient, and since many of the current applications many people depend on could not survive Sandboxing, this creeps me out. The conjecture is unproven - Sandboxing is not required for everything, but we are not also at the end of history. Office is now sandboxed, but also has loads of handcrafted exceptions. Sandboxing wasn't built to scale to accomodate all current app behavior, not even of just the legitimate apps, it was built to force developers into a box. For increased security, yes. At the cost of tremendous inconvenience and missing features to the apps that adopt it and their users: also yes.
When the App Store is introduced on Mac, with the bluster that all developers should find it manna from heaven because it unties knots many developers had never even ran into for several years, the logical conclusion is that at some point everything will be required to be in the App Store. This theory has gone both back and forth, due to the introduction of Developer ID and Gatekeeper, and then the subsequent move towards making it harder to allow non-Developer ID apps.
I stopped writing Mac apps largely because of this. I want to maintain a pseudonym, and Apple's assumption that it means I can't be trusted to make well-behaved software offends me personally. My software was used inside Apple, and I got bug reports when it broke on in-development OSes. The last updates I released, I signed with my own signature chain - I have no qualms with the security aspects, or with cryptographic signatures or even with blocking them after the fact.
When 32-bit Intel application support was dropped, it meant people couldn't run some applications any longer. There's now excellent justification to believe this happened to lessen the burden of the already capable Rosetta 2. But it still means applications people paid for, learned, loved, were productive with, possibly got a Mac for, stopped being usable. This is the opposite of user-friendly, and there's not even a security angle.
When Mac hardware consistently and consequently lost ports and user-accessible/user-serviceable parts over the years, they hardly ever came back. Additionally, some hardware was left to rot, and had a tendency to return at a steeper price. There are exceptions – worth noting precisely because they are exceptions.
Many developers could use Mac Pros in the cheesegrater days, because it was recognized that you didn't have to be a film maker with a studio budget for modularity and customizability to be useful. And yet, even when the Mac Pro reverted from the "trash can" form factor to a full-on accessible desktop workstation setup as it previously had been, the price was hiked significantly and the product was completely repositioned, in the same breath as Apple declared developers one of their most populous "Pro" groups; indeed, the announcement was made to a room full of developers. There's a wide array of displays, and if people don't need an HDR display, they don't need to buy the Pro Display XDR, but making an entire Mac model inaccessible is a different animal.
If you meet a person and they act a certain way, over time you learn to recognize that pattern in them. If you develop for Apple platforms and every year is a series of new inconveniences to manage just as much as it is new technology to consider adopting, you learn to assume a negative progression in convenience, utility and freedom, just as much as you have hopes for the advances in frameworks and hardware.
The "tools" Craig's talking about have all seen the beginning of, effectively, the closing of the Mac as a platform. We know that Apple doesn't like to dwell on the bets they make, and we know that Apple doesn't usually back out of things. We're waiting anxiously for the moment where the hammer drops. That means we assume that sweeping transitions will bring those changes. The small ratcheting moves have often happened without being announced, or by being announced with individual bullet points in presentations during the week of WWDC (the interview was recorded on Tuesday, by which point not even half of the presentations were available).
This bed is of Apple's own making. By never copping to imperfection, by never really listening to and answering the detractors who are in its own camp, by avoiding humility and the taking of other perspectives than its own, the only method of communication left is loud and clear dissent.
You might think that for a person with so many opinions, I would love rating interactions and customer satisfaction. The truth is that I get stressed out at the prospect most times.
Most rating systems are used to form a single number, a single indicator saying "are we on track, are we doing a good job?" and there's nothing wrong with that, except that my data point will be "is representative X doing a good job?". Most of the time, people aren't rude and they aren't unreasonably applying the script or process in front of them, and there's no reason for me to give them a low rating for that. Almost all the time, I do have significant qualms with the process itself in one way or another, but there's no way for me to express that aside from putting representative X in hot water for "being so bad with customers", or nudging them down some well-meaning but counter-productive ladder of incentives.
For any company that really cares about their customers' actual satisfaction and their process, whatever it is, the question should be split into at least two questions: Was our representative helpful, supportive and informative during the execution of this process? and Are you satisfied with the process?
This truly is the weirdest timeline.
Reflections:
Reflections:
Reflections:
This is a misconception that many people have — they think the App Store brings some kind of exceptional distribution and marketing that developers wouldn’t have on their own.
It’s just not true. It lacks even a grain of truth.
[..]
Build it (and upload it to the App Store) and they will not come.
Instead, you have to do marketing on your own, on the web and on social media, outside of the App Store. Just like always. The App Store brings nothing to the table.
But let's for a moment assume that Apple does not intend to shut down the App Store. There's something they can do that would have both good optics and be actually productive.
Strike the mentions of In-App Purchase from section 3.1, and replace it with a set of hard rules for qualifying services. The services must be as easy to unsubscribe from as they are to subscribe to, may not use misleading "dark patterns" to trick people into staying on longer than they intended to, and must be straightforward to understand. In other words, the kind of rules that would usually come from hard laws or region-level consumer protection practices.
Sprinkle on some APIs implemented by the apps to make it possible to get to the appropriate aspects of the other payment solutions from within Settings, or the App Store subscription panels, and there's suddenly a whole lot more freedom without the risk of a precipitous drop of usability or confidence. The people that have been kicking up a stink about this for ages have been doing so because they've been trying to run businesses in a hostile environment – it's in their interest to handle this well.
I mention optics because Apple could still reasonably come out of this as a pragmatic, customer-focused leader. Not a terribly responsive one, mind you, but a leader none-the-less.
A hardline stance will not sway hearts and minds, and it has proven unable to change developers’ business models without sacrificing the user experience. Apple needs to decide if it wants to be “right,” or if it wants to be happy.
One of the reasons I started Take was to make a clean break from my previous site Waffle where I'd gotten into a rut. There's a whole world full of things to write about, and somehow I centered on the same subjects and with the same mentality and tone, and it wasn't very positive. Now, for good reason, the innate failures of the App Store are in the news again, and I'm writing about it again and while it feels good to be topical, I do want to do something different and highlight the reasons I am so frustrated.
In October 2007, Steve Jobs posted an article to Apple's Hot News page announcing the development of an iPhone SDK. Before this, he was hounded by developers of all stripes and from all places (including inside Apple) to be able to develop apps for the iPhone, including getting into a spat with John Carmack who wanted to put games on the thing. The first iPhone was a watershed in hardware capability for a phone, in being able to deliver applications that weren't just "pocket" versions, to the point where Nokia spent the rest of the day of the original announcement in denial, saying that it must be fake. The demo was carefully choreographed along a working path, but it wasn't fake, and it shipped five months later.
Everyone saw the potential. There was a jailbreak of the then iPhone OS shortly after its release, which allowed for unlocking the carrier lock, and let me import one that fall. I wrote the beginnings of an iPhone app with the jailbreak makeshift SDK - it was not pretty, but it did work, and the Cydia package manager that quickly appeared and was bundled with jailbreaks contained many apps, some polished, others not quite so polished.
The next WWDC, Apple announced iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0, which included the original App Store. If they hadn't done something to pull in developers, and even if they'd included all apps they make themselves, my guess is that iPhones would now occupy something like 4-7% of the market, instead of the 35-45% it currently does.
The iPhone's killer app was apps. Apps that could live and frolick on hardware and a platform that strived to be something more than the prototypical real-time embedded OS of the time.
For nine months in 2007, Steve Jobs told people that the reason there was no apps was because AT&T doesn't want their cellular network to go down, which is straight-up bullshit. There is a resource management and security aspect to having apps run in a constrained environment with sensitive information, but the ways you deal with that does not affect the carrier's network any more than it proscribes how those apps are distributed or what they actually do. More so than on Mac OS X, he wanted control, and the App Store gave him control.
Now, in 2020, the App Store is still the App Store. Apple is forced to justify contradictory and inconsistent stances on what's a valid app or not, to allow in apps that they probably do not really like to be associated with them because otherwise there are consequences and to deny apps that they probably would want to be associated with because of business decisions. And it has turned into Chekov's gun, where as a completely unnecessary funnel point, Apple can be pressured by dictatorships to drop apps that are politically inconvenient for bullshit reasons.
I tore into Phil Schiller, Apple SVP of Worldwide Product Marketing and de facto boss of the App Store, because of the things he said in defense of the recent actions, and other responses have set the worst possible tone for Monday's WWDC opening. Everyone of us who are reacting to this, everyone who's writing apps, everyone of us (I'm told there are 20-30 or so) who are still holding off on writing iOS software because of the App Store in general... we don't want to do this.
If I had five minutes with Phil Schiller, I'd ask him if it was worth it. Is it so worth it to not renege on a silly compromise formed to placate a difficult, if often brilliant, man? Is it so worth it that you end up antagonizing the people who build on your life's work? Is it worth it to be remembered for being a politruk, an apparatchik, spouting an opaque party line no one in view of the world and the facts agree with, instead of for having the courage to see a solution that no longer works and take action to fix it? All the status quo gives him and gives Apple is money at the cost of lost trust and long-fomented frustration.
We don't want to do this. What we want is the same we have wanted from the beginning, from before there was an App Store, from the moment we saw a pill with an arrow and the words "slide to unlock".
All we want is to write apps.
Real apps, good apps, innovative apps, apps that make money sunstainably for their creators, apps that build on what's there to go further, apps that make life better, apps that respect the time of their users, apps that are great because they have paid attention to details.
Why won't you let us?
One of the lower hanging fruit in the CMS powering this site was that, for each edit or new post or deleted post, it would reload the entire thing from the database. (To keep load times at a minimum, it keeps the HTMLized state of all the posts entirely in memory, essentially frying it, but entirely from the working set on every page load.)
I wanted to reload only the changing parts, but between having two separate "tracks" of "all posts in chronological order" depending on whether you only see the published posts or you're me and you see everything, it was enough complications to make me skip it before. But tonight, I tackled this and quickly realized that by limiting the changes to the only changes that really happen, which is one post being created, changed or deleted, all that was needed was to make a copy of the list of all post information, find its next/prev neighbors for each of the all/only-published combinations, reload them together with the post itself, insert this reloaded information into the list copy and create a new instance of the everything-about-all-posts object (which does all the lookups and even has the pre-baked JSON and Atom feeds) with the new list.
It now occurs to me that this way of doing it is in fact a bit more dumb because it introduces a flaw. If a post's published date is changed such that it is ordered differently, it will have a different set of neighbors before and after being saved. Reloading everything from scratch each time avoided this corner case. I suppose it's back to the drawing board to fix it – but not before documenting it, because I do find it interesting to write about these things. This site is about opinions and thinking, which often turns into criticizing or critiquing other people and the fruits of their labor. I don't talk much about my own work, so it's only fair to talk about something.
(Update: I fixed it by, after all the work is done, finding the next/prev neighbors again on the new state and comparing the ordered sequence of the next/prev neighbors before and after. If there are differences, get all of the new neighbors and reload them too – then, between the two passes, all posts that could possibly have been affected will have been reloaded. This is skipped if a post is deleted, because there's no "after" state that can conflict. This is a bit inefficient because it does all the work of the everything-about-all-posts object being created again, but it only happens on a tiny fraction of all edits and it takes very little time and CPU in the first place, so it's not worth complicating the code with tricky code prone to bugs and written only for this rare purpose to avoid.)
Another note is: why this constant frying (computing the page on demand)? Why not just bake the posts (into static HTML files)? There are two reasons for this – one is because it would complicate things slightly with templating, and the other is because I want for the pages to have the editing UI for me, but be "zero cost" to everyone else. That involves either having some sort of middleware trap to selectively serve something else, at which point I'm already taking a performance hit and might as well just serve it dynamically, or including a JavaScript for everyone into the baked page that checks for something and makes it show up, but I don't want for the page to incur that cost for most of its readers.
Say you don't care one whit about developer freedom, or owning the device you spent $1,449 on (a figure known in the industry as an arm and a wheel). The App Store is still a tremendously bad idea if you want good applications that work.
As detailed, Phil Schiller offers this excuse:
"You download the app and it doesn't work, that's not what we want on the store," says Schiller. This, he says, is why Apple requires in-app purchases to offer the same purchasing functionality as they would have elsewhere.
The amount of contortion this line of logic requires is unconscionable, and is the kind of reasoning that make people believe salespeople do not trigger automatic doors. The reason it doesn't work is because Apple's own damn guidelines prevent developers, reasonable people the lot of them, from including functionality that would make it work, and also feed their employees, kids and household pets. It allows it if you use a payment method that would require custom development and nick 30% off the top. Since this is so reasonable, I'm sure Apple wouldn't mind the principle of giving up similar amounts of money in the name of communal development into the many ecosystems they so wildly benefit from, not just in terms of personal talent but in enabling people to purchase high-margin products in the first place. Oh, wait.
If we allow ourselves to tease apart the thinly-disguised organizational avarice from Mr Schiller's statement, a trace of a soupçon of a reasonable usability concern can be detected: it would just suck if apps weren't usable and weren't good. The problem with that is that the App Store, for all the relatively recent improvements to its storefront and editorial articles, still has a rampant shovelware problem. It's entirely possible to go looking for something you know you want and come out with something else, and it's entirely possible to find 25 apps with no thought or care put into it for every app that is even merely competent.
The App Store has been a crappy idea from the very start. It serves only the monopolist owner, and all compromises break in favor of them and against the other party, be it the developer or the end user. The only winners aside from Apple are a few app developers that manage to beat all odds and achieve success (often fueled by loss-and-viability-insensitive venture capitalists who don't mind playing foul to grab market share) as well as the unscrupulous corner of humanity that always show up to squeeze what they can get from the naive, the weak and the misinformed. Users get left behind and developers pose the same well-reasoned feedback year after year after year, without anything changing.
I have no idea if it will take the US or EU torching it for things to change, but it baffles me that the bundling of a web browser was considered a bigger problem than this. One way or another, it's way past due for the App Store and its share-cropping mockery of users and developers alike to burn clean to the ground.
The passage that I'm going to read right now takes place right after a party, and what's happened is that typically, when I went to parties in high school, oftentimes there were three or four black people in a room of 300. So finally a black friend of mine and myself decided to invite some white friends to a black party, at an army base, out in Schofield Barracks, one of the major army bases in Hawai'i.
And we immediately sense that they're a little uncomfortable, being in this minority situation. You know, they're sort of trying to tap their foot to the beat... you know, they're being extraordinarily friendly... and after a while, they decide, after about half an hour they say "well, Barack, let's get going", you know, "we're feeling kind of tired", we're feeling this or that. And suddenly, this sense that what I've had to put up with every day of my life, is something that they find so objectionable that they can't even put up with it for a day, and these are good friends of mine, and folks who have stood by me for many years... something is triggered in my head and I suddenly start seeing, as I say in this passage, a new map of the world.