caspianm

I don't think vertical vs horizontal is quite the thing - people don't always hold their phones and tablets horizontally while using them - often they'd be almost vertical. But standard laptop vertical screen position is uncomfortable to use as a touch screen. I'm curious how that research would relate to how people normally use handheld touchscreens.

I don't do a lot of drawing, but I tested using an iPad/pencil combo as a graphics tablet for a laptop and it was pretty nice.

I think laptop screens are badly positioned for use as a touchscreen, but I do sometimes miss the ease of touch-scrolling that tablets have, if I'm reading a laptop screen and need to look away from the screen and reach for the laptop touchpad to scroll. So I'm slightly drawn to the idea even though I don't think I'd really like it.

I like the idea of a horizontal touchscreen on a laptop - like Jobs said, a vertical one has flaws. Some ideas for where to put the extra screen: maybe replace the touchpad with it. Maybe extend it to full laptop width, use half as touchpad, half as touchscreen, or let you swipe either one into the centre.

Another idea - normally a laptop it a screen that folds down onto the keyboard with a hinge, add an iPad attached with another hinge to the left, right, or front of the keyboard.

So when open, the iPad lies next to the keyboard in a decent position for use as a drawing tablet (with the apple pencil). Ideally it can be detached and used in other positions.

One issue, when closed, this three layer laptop has thickness issues a two-layer one doesn't - either it is thicker or the screen and keyboard need to be much thinner. I'm a bit tempted to try to DIY this by attaching a laptop and iPad together with some flaps as the hinges. I don't think I'd like a DIY version better than two separate devices though (iPad and laptop).

Another idea again: have a stylus-supporting screen and keyboard, where you can unfold the screen backwards like on a normal laptop or you can unfold it to the side for touch convenience. Not sure how doable it is to fold out in two directions like that - I've seen it done with Rubik's Magic Puzzle but not with practical tools.

"I’ve read many articles on the same topic but never found it presented this way" it reminds me a lot of a description I saw in a video with Jonathan Blow talking about precedence and parsing with Casey Muratori.

The video is 3 hours long though, and I'm not sure the text he shows is available.

At this point he's talking about left leaning vs right leaning trees, after having already talked about one of them: https://youtu.be/fIPO4G42wYE?t=2256&si=aanthLGe-q8ntZez

Not sure I'm gonna get any replies, so I don't want to just leave this as a message of support for the bill. It is concerning.

I think I saw MidnightBSD said it seemed like they were thinking of iOS when they made this law, and I agree.

If you did make a child account on a desktop system, and it had some age category signal that programs and scripts can access ... do you have to prevent the child from making their own programs and scripts, since they could be modified versions of the apps that are supposed to have access to the age signal? So are they not allowed to do programming and app development, or even scripting from a child account? Not so much of a problem on iOS where these are already heavily restricted.

On the other hand, if my Android phone had allowed me to set up an account labelled "adult" and another "child", and disable side-loading on the child account except for specific apps I approve, and then the discord app would stop bugging me for photo-based age identification on the adult account, and would prevent access to adult discord channels on the child account but not the adult account, that sounds fine. Still not sure what to do about programming apps on the child account, maybe parents could decide which ones to allow, but there could be similar problems to deciding this question for a desktop system. Also, it would be good to have a quick-switch - if I want to let my hypothetical child play approved games on the phone, there shouldn't be a cumbersome log out/log in process, just a quick change change that changes the age signal, and tells discord etc not to allow access to adult channels until the signal changes again.

This looks like previous discussion of the bill that became the act: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45244049

Doesn't this law just let parents set up age-labelled accounts for their children with the idea that apps not suitable for children won't be allowed under those accounts?

Seems no worse than what mobile OSes already do and not that bad a feature for a modern general use OS (except if you monitor someone's age bracket and noticed the exact day they change, you can work out their precise date of birth.) It does seem unsuitable to force it to be added to embedded OSes, freedos, CP/M and historical/retro OSes in general.

I like open source and I don't want to lose it but its ideals of letting people share, modify and run code however they like have the same issue as what the AI companies are doing. Openclaw is open source, there are open source tools to run LLMs, many LLM model files are open, though the huge ones aren't so easy for individuals to run on their own hardware.

I don't have a solution, though the only two categories of solution I can think of are forbidding people from developing and distributing certain types of software, or forbidding people from distributing hardware that can run unapproved software (at least if they are PC's that can run AI, arduinos with a few kB of RAM could be allowed, and iPads could be allowed to run ZX81 emulators which could run unapproved code). The first category would be less drastic as it would only need to affect some subset of AI related software, but is also hard to get right and make work. Not saying either of these ideas are better than doing nothing.

Faster and more complex hardware can also have bugs or back doors, as can cheaper hardware. That said, I'm not happy with buggy and untrustworthy code either.

> People will literally create blacklists of sites, and if you don't follow the blacklist you'll get added to it.

I imagine some will, but hopefully that won't be the norm. Beehaw isn't doing it.

There's probably been similar stuff on twitter though - blacklists where you get added for following someone else on the blacklist

On Twitter and Tumblr you can make extra accounts to participate in discussions you're interested in, and select people to follow based on that, so the feed system is okay for talking about things other than yourself if the feeds don't include everyone you know by default.

Tumblr has some pretty good discussion about movies and books.

Twitter not so good for discussion because off the length limit, but there's plenty of people posting concise observations and jokes rather than posting about themselves.

On both systems, people can reply to content from strangers, and there's lots of conflict arising from that.

I do think Tumblr would be improved by making it easier to have discussions that don't go to all your followers by default, for example like on Twitter where if you tag people at the start of your tweet, it doesn't go into the main feed for your followers who aren't tagged.

Or you can go all the way to partitioning a system into topics, as with Reddit. I wouldn't call that a social network though, you don't just casually start a conversation with people you've chosen to connect with, you start a conversation with a subreddit.

One thing I really want to know is what data can apps access. Is it like most phone apps where my data in one app is secure if some random game would like to read it?

Do the apps or the users manage security choices like these?

They want the ease of use and security of a phone OS and app store, but they also don't want the data stuck in separate silos. I'm not sure if the idea is to have isolation between apps like iOS has or what.

This is true. What I find puzzling is that advertisements have most of the same issues but many people accept them. You could argue that people's acceptance of ads suggests they should accept micropayments, or people's rejection of micro payments suggests they should reject ads. But I put up with ads and haven't signed up for any micro payment schemes yet.

Compared to a regular welfare system where they stop paying if the recipient has the ability to support themselves / doesn't need it (from each according to his ability, to each according to his need) UBI is the opposite of communism. This one where people have to be jobless at the start isn't ideal though.

What about postal voting? Probably less of a threat because it's not that common I guess. But does it mean there are no countries complying with secret ballot demands?

In Australia we have the option of voting for someone as our first preference, and letting them direct your lower preferences for after they get eliminated (according to their previously published preference list). If you made that the only option, you'd just need to count the votes for each candidate, then any further calculations could be based on these totals.

Primary voters' optimal strategy, if voting within their preferred party, should also be to pick a centre candidate, so they will win.

Could get complex if people vote in the opposing party's primary though.

I would suggest voting for the lesser of two evils if you'd do that in a plurality voting system, plus whoever else you like better. Though there might be three equally likely winners you hate, in which case I dunno.

Say I have two categories, programming articles and non- programming articles, and some other data about each article. And I want to predict whether the article will be interesting or not. And I want to be fair to interesting non-programming articles by having the same proportion of false negatives to correct positives in the non-programming subset of articles as in the programming subset of articles.

Is there a technical term for that in statistics?

It's like trying to get a representative sample, but only representative in one specific way (topic), and deliberately non representative in another (interestingness)

I think this could get at one of the things people mean, and it might be interesting to see how this trades off against overall accuracy or representativeness in other categories.

Here is a discussion of Intel limiting the code that can run in security subsystems in their processors:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11007060

I'm not saying this is acceptable, but it seems to be happening.

They don't control the supply of search services so much as they control the supply of eyeballs.

A better analogy is a piece of paper. Like a mirror, it reflects rather than thermally emits the light, but unlike a mirror, it scatters the reflected light, limiting how much it can be focused.

I made the file DanBC referred to above, and wondered about how much computation you could do with iterated decompression (specifically, deflate-type decompression). Could you make a zip file representing a Turing machine, so that after unzipping it it represented the machine after one step of processing, and after unzipping the result, represented the machine after a second step, etc.

Or if not a direct translation of a Turing machine, then some other Turing complete system.

As far as I know, no one has done this, but if it is possible, one implication would be that you couldn't prove whether the process of recursively unzipping a file could continue forever, or would halt.

Interesting, is there a description of how it works or cheats?

So long as it used the usual deflate algorithm, and you don't need to deal with recursive compression as in the article, yes. The size counter program would be structured similarly to the decompression algorithm, but there are some points where the compressed file says "repeat this many bytes from this location" where a decompressor would have to copy that many bytes, where the counter would only have to add the number.

If the author had a reason for why they didn't like non-monetised free clones, it wasn't clear to me, so I'm going to make up some possible reasons, so there's something substantive to discuss.

Monetised free clones still support the market for game developers (i.e. they can have and pay employees).

Monetised free clones provide a model other for-profit developers to copy, whereas non-monetised clones can destroy a business model without suggesting an alternative one.

Monetised free clones have a motive that he can relate to more, and developers supporting themselves is more worthwhile than whatever motivates developers of non-monetised games.

Monetised free clones can have more resources and incentive for creating good games.

Monetised free clones do not devalue the game as much as non-monetised free clones, as there's still a cost, if not so direct.

Competition from free clones in general harms the original developers, but for-profit clone makers are likely to be harder to persuade to stop, let alone by using moral arguments, so its only worth arguing against people who do it for admiration or because it makes them happy, both of which can be reduced by criticising them publicly.

That's pretty cynical and I've probably got some strawman arguments there, so I don't want to attribute them all directly to the author.

Password authenticated key exchange should do what we want. I was hoping WPA2 would have have used it already.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Password-authenticated_key_agre...

I still don't feel like I know the relationship between the perpetrators and google. Subcontractors, employees, or what? But I would be surprised for that apology to happen if there was no relationship other than impersonation.