watersb
Decades ago, I met someone at a conference who was red-teaming a NATO country's infrastructure: power plants, water treatment etc.
Said that things had improved dramatically since 1990s nethack days.
But the team had a secret weapon: a young woman in a short skirt with a laptop computer, pretending to be a systems software vendor. The Weapon had been able to compromise every site, had never failed. Never.
I seem to recall that you could hold down Alt key and drag the tab horizontally. So a tab could stick up anywhere along the top of the window frame. The SPARCStations had three-button mice, and this might have been mapped to middle or right mouse button.
The tabbed interface features the ability to gather windows into tab groups. So when you are moving a window by dragging its tab, if you drag the tab next to another window's tab, the dragged window will snap to that other window's frame, the dragged window will be the selected tab and its contents displayed in the frame. Then dragging any of the tabs drags the whole set of tabs that are snapped to that frame. Click on a tab to make it the active tab displayed in the frame.
It's effectively like tabs now, but sort of inside out: tabs are managed by the windows manager and not the app. Tab groups of multiple, different apps. The app does not have to be "tab-aware" to be in a tab group, although I suppose there are events that can signal the manager to make a window the selected tab. It's just raising a window, making it frontmost. Modal dialogs can get tangled up, but it's no worse than the mess commonly accepted today.
Which is how I discovered Toby Thruston's classic, "Drawing with MetaPost".
https://github.com/thruston/Drawing-with-Metapost
Procedural drawing with Lua is lovely. MetaPost provides another drawing language that might be considered more TeX-like.
I'm not sure. I tend to be humbled by the TeX community. Inspired.
I was installing GNOME pieces compiling from source, on top of Sun Solaris. So it was a weird configuration. But FWIW I relied on the tabs a lot.
https://www.idealsoftware.com/opensource/fast-windirstat.htm...
On the Mac, I've used Omni Disk Sweeper for pro a the last 20 years, and it still receives updates. Not open source, but no $$.
https://www.omnigroup.com/more/
(I used OmniWeb as my favorite web browser for NeXTStep, followed it to macOS. Also their pro diagramming tool, OmniGraffle - remember Visio before Microsoft bought it?)
"FISA court, post-9/11, is an insane secret tribunal..."
But at least they were subject to Congressional oversight.
> the Trump administration is illegally withholding a secret court’s findings from Congress
Oops.
Ok, plausible number for that use case. Striking how it seems like the M-series Macs are almost too good enough for most people.
It's almost desperate prose.
(The AI image processing in Pixelmator Pro saved me hours of work on a recent project. Two button clicks vs a day of tweaking. But even that was on my M1 MacBook Air.)
Dropbox would fire up to do massive walks of the filesystem tree and the fans would take off. I think the thermal interface material on the GPU got cooked at some point. It would be a relatively easy fix, for me a couple of hours, but I chose to fix it with an M1 MacBook Air.
I'm assuming that all of my local work would be lost. But I'd still have the sixteen million duplicate photos.
iCloud's priorities are not a great fit for preserving my source code repos. Fortunately those aren't very big.
But when my son's Mac dies, his huge Logic Pro projects are toast. And he is a few thousand miles away now.
Modern lawn-care practices amount to devastating habitat loss. You can learn more about good choices for your area from your local county extension office.
If your office has been defunded, you can also try your friendly neighborhood public librarian.
Ah, the competition between doing their fucking job and obeying a monster.
https://youtu.be/0j-Wakm5B84?is=7dU_EvFyk_nQNwjO
It's like a peek into a CSS future from a different timeline. Something we could have had.
Text has lots of edges, hard transitions between bright and dark areas. So text requires lots of high-frequency detail, and JPEG adds a lot ringing as it bounces off all those lines and curves.
AVIF seems to follow contours, so it does a good job with line art.
Otherwise, it's hard to beat the Mozilla JPEG encoder.
JPEG XL can represent lossless images that exceed the limits of human vision. I don't expect it to replace FITS for astronomical images, but the future is weird.
(Super huge thanks to Jake Archibald for the SVGOMG web app. Which is also fantastic for line art.
https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
Squoosh is a web app front end to various image encoders
)
Hello, old friend.
The single most soul-crushing experience I have on today's tech is the whoopee cushion.
I type this on a touch device that randomly Cheevers the words. (It literally changed "changes" just now. Henceforth, my word for this shall be Cheevers.) it Cheevers the words. It offers suggested words that you can tap to complete the word you're typing, and milliseconds before your finger makes contact with the screen, the suggested word flips to Cheevers and your finger taps that.
Now with the new improved iOS Liquid Glass, and possibly with janky web app development kits, buttons can move as you try to click on them. UI animation was supposed to help the user. But helping the user is hard.
Pop ups. The web needs more pop ups. More "Are you enjoying this app?" in your face.
But on the desktop, I recall complaining to a Windows (the OS) developer about stealing focus... in 1995. At the time, classic macOS tended not to do this, but it happened quite often multitasking on Windows, and I couldn't offer any constructive feedback, no obvious solution.
The sheer unpredictability, at 100 millisecond time scale... a few hours of this and I'm literally shaking. Because it affects muscle response, a startle reaction. Keeps firing away at the limbic system.
If I wanted slot-machine online gambling levels of simulation, I'd go to a casino. I hate this stuff. I hate where "engagement" metrics and the quest for more clicks has brought us.
Make it stop. I'm trying to work, here.
I wonder what the average interest rate is these days... I just saw a credit card with a usual (non-penalty) annual interest rate of 28%. Perhaps credit cards and car loans are not comparable. But it's an indication of where we are at with consumer debt.
These numbers don't make sense.
50 years.
The doctrine of cultural assimilation was at that time understood to be incorporation into a larger Russian society.
"The Singing Revolution" tells an Estonian side of this dynamic.
I'm trying to understand how they can role out occultation by ring systems but I haven't seen it yet.
It's been wild to reflect upon this story during this past decade.
Estonia emerged as a tech startup incubator in those first few years of independence, as a way of attracting capital and talent.
Now I need to learn about this game and book!
The Apple Disk II Controller discussed yesterday used two 256-byte ROM chips and a shift register for dynamic memory.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48723102
The linked article of the Disk II Controller has great detail about the state machine encoded in one of the ROMs, and walks through the bootstrap code stored in the other one.
I haven't tried any microcontroller projects myself, but my first computer projects were on the small home micros of the early 1980s. I enjoy this kind of thinking.
> Bogost's statement is akin to calling the Amiga 500 the only home computer to be called beautiful.
Oh! That's Ian Bogost, who is a great writer of how our relationship with technology can evoke truth and beauty. The canonical work is his deep dive on the Atari 2600 and the early 1980s revolution "Racing the Beam":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racing_the_Beam
Bogost wrote a number of books while working with MIT, arguing that video games were a new medium of communication back when that was a controversial point of view.
(I will need to re-subscribe to The Atlantic at some point. It seems churlish, but it's been an expensive year...)
I haven't seen any competitor even try to address the backside power delivery of 18A. I suspect that Samsung,TSMC have something similar and doesn't talk about it.
The design rules for the standard cell (sort of corresponding to the die area required by a transistor) for the Intel 18A seem to target dense, high performance designs. That's not a particularly meaningful insight - of course Intel wants to have the highest performance of all the fabs.
Intel's packaging expertise used to be a generation ahead, and indeed their server chips currently use a mad mix of chiplets and through-silicon visas for direct stacking, all heaped onto a reticule-limited monster interposer die. All of this expensive complexity might be sustainable as long as Intel can keep its enterprise customers happy. That hasn't turned out too well for them.
AMD has found a mass-market winner with mainstream gaming CPU with extra level 3 cache die stacked on top. Compared to Intel servers, it's brutally simple. But extremely effective in its consumer market.
But the Intel chiplets and packaging could be a great toolbox for M7 generation of Apple Silicon. Now that the M5 Pro and Max are multi chip packages, they more resemble the Intel and AMD designs, with chiplets dedicated to I/O or GPU.
(Speculation and dreams. That's all I got, and I'm writing it in the face of an absolutely psychotic autocorrect on a tablet.)
This made me remember that I've still got a G4 Mac Mini! I was bringing up a current Linux on it, last time I had it running. 2019, perhaps.
I need to fire it up...