To me it seems they’re behaving (driving? riding?..) in a very surprising/unsafe manner on the road. Admittedly I’m from a country with a completely different driving culture. Do people just ride scooters like that in China?

Also, there’s this interesting legal question of who is responsible when one of those things crashes into a car or a pedestrian.

Other than that, this is cool as heck and I want my bicycle to do the same now.

For example, in the US, Samsung has had locked bootloaders on all its phones since the Galaxy S7.

Yikes. While shopping for a new phone last year I was under the impression that at least in the European market they still allow you to unlock the bootloader, even on the latest models. The catch is that there’s pretty much no third-party Android distros that work with the phones, because they don’t release drivers or kernel patches and people have to scrape them from first-party OS images, which sounds horrible.

You can (on most Android phones) run an Android fork that doesn’t have Google services running and gets software and updates from elsewhere, e.g. GrapheneOS. Can’t do that with an iPhone. I get that you’re still ultimately dependent on Google to continue Android development and make security updates, but it’s way less of a dependency. And yes, GNU-ish Linux on phones would be awesome.

Both iPhones and MacBooks (to a lesser extent) rely on US services provided by Apple. They (techically) can execute arbitrary code on your devices if you have auto-update enabled (and probably even if not). They’re almost definitely spying on you, your habits, your decisions etc.

I just use IBM Plex, but that’s mostly because the keycaps my keyboard came with used it :) I also think it’s just fine for readability (i.e. I/l and O/0 are different enough)

Anything more complicated than business logic in JS/Python sends LLMs into a guessing game that can take you those 3 hours to get out of. Try asking it to write embedded software in C, hardware-interfacing code in Rust, or any non-trivial TemplateHaskell.

That’s not what I want though. I really enjoy jumping around the actual syntax tree of the code, e.g. “select the entire function body” or “select the next list element”, stuff like this. It becomes the natural way of traversing the code after a short while. Also, Emacs is still single-threaded and thus quite laggy and slow at times; however I do like it a lot and have used it for a number of years (with evil-mode), before finally jumping to my own editor and then helix.

Nah. I was so annoyed by how primitive editors are that I started writing my own one, that would allow me to seamlessly traverse the AST of the code, rather than being stuck on the low abstraction levels of characters, words and paragraphs. After a bunch of misery making tree-sitter work with Haskell, and using it for a while, I stumbled upon Helix. It is pretty much my idea but faster and working well.

I guess it depends on the definition, but I’d say they absolutely are errors; if some function produces a result that is both unexpected for the user and outside the design criteria it should be considered an error.

I hate that I understand the joke…

We made a (so far internal) tool at work that takes your activity from Github, your calendar, and the issue tracker, feeds that to a local LLM, which spits out a report of what you have been doing for the week. It messes up sometimes, but speeds up the process of writing the report dramatically. This is one of those cases where an LLM actually fits.

The article is very light on details, but the numbers don’t seem to check out at all. Back-of-the napkin math (assuming a square 1km × 1km solar array and total sun luminosity of 3.83e26 W):

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 1 year to TWh ≈ 11.94 TW·h

This is a “measly” 12 TWh of TOTAL energy delivered to the array over a year - not accounting for solar panel efficiency losses (20-24%) or the elephant in the room of transmitting this energy back to earth. For context, China alone consumed around 39 PWh (39000 TWh) of energy from fossil fuels just over the course of one year, 2023. The entire world consumed 55 PWh (55000 TWh) of oil energy in 2023 alone. It’s not even comparable to the annual consumption of oil. If we consider the aforementioned factors, assuming 24% solar panel efficiency and an extremely generous 50% power transmission efficiency, we get:

1 km ^ 2 * (3.83e26 W) / (4 * π * (1 AU) ^ 2) * 24% * 50% ≈ 163.43 MW

Which is literally nothing on a national scale - it’s less than a percent of the Three Gorges Dam output.

Why -z? I have no idea.

From man test (note that [ <expr> ] is just sugar for test <expr>):

       -n STRING
              the length of STRING is nonzero

       -z STRING
              the length of STRING is zero

So, -z stands for Zero.

Hope this helps you remember it!

It’s the fact that Mercurial tags the commit with the name of the branch that it was committed to which makes it much easier to determine whether a commit is included in your current branch or not.

Isn’t this trivial in Git too? git branch --contains COMMIT ?

Seconded, it somehow manages to lag on my overclocked 5950X w/ 64GB of RAM. (this may be related to the Dark Mode extension or some shit, however it’s still absolutely inexcusable)

Well, now I want a cervelat sandwich, but vegan sausage is too damn expensive :/

I stand corrected! I’ll have to tune my internal AI detector a bit :)

If you look closesly there’s a lot of nonsensical details, like the quite high water tower in the top right, window layout on the side of the building facing us, different lengths and angles of fire escape stairs, a weird semi-reflective “thing” (scaffolding?) on the left of the image (and if it is indeed reflective, the reflection doesn’t match the original), extremely weird-looking humans on the hoist and artifacts on the hoist railing. None of these are a dead giveaway, but the general vibe is off.

Image likely generated by GenAI, funnily enough

Have you ever tried to use one of those superapps? It’s still a clunky experience overburdened with dozens of useless UI elements eating up screen estate of what I actually care about, and then whenever I wanted to do something for which there’s no sub-app in the super-app it would be difficult due to lack of integrations with “the outside”. That’s even before we question the idea of putting all the eggs functionality in one basket centralized app with one developer entity, allowing them to ultimately control all aspects of one’s online life.

And more philosophically, I’m surprised that as a functional dev you prefer one big tightly coupled combine to a collection of small but useful on their own utilities lightly coupled to produce more than the sum of their parts.