Apple is highly sensitive to dangers to its reputation. They would nuke any service that seemed to be spying on users, just like they revoked Facebook's cert back in 2019 over the same issue.
Apfel filled that role: $ apfel "List the files in this folder." https://apfel.franzai.com/
You only had to include a doctype if you needed to turn on strict XML rendering or do fun things with XSLT. It was great if you wanted to convert, say, TEI to something browsers could read. You were always, since the…
The FSIS, a branch of the USDA (not the FDA: for the difference in jurisdiction see https://www.fda.gov/media/172542/download), found this problem, according to the original article. The food from the Shanghai Ravioli…
There is a certain convergence of wills here: watermarking AI products on the one hand, and infusing AI into everything on the other hand. When you layer generative AI into Notepad, once just a raw text buffer, then…
My exgf was adamant that aspartame (in Diet Coke) was a mind control drug. Turns out that Donald Rumsfeld (of Bush administration fame) was CEO of the company that made it, and he was the one who got the FDA to approve…
So, this is less a technical than an aesthetic question—why does it look like an old Macintosh? I think I would have thought of GEOS [0] before Macintosh. There's also Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Why 3.5" floppy drive icons…
Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the…
Christianity gets its seven day period from Judaism, and it may well hearken back to Babylonian astronomy (seven planets, including the sun (Sunday) and moon (Monday)). The Romans, on the other hand, had an eight-day…
Can it produce accessible PDF files that will pass accessibility tests? Someone who can do that will make a killing laundering PDFs for academia: by April 26, every PDF, syllabus, and academic document needs to comply…
There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to…
It's sad how much faster and cooler my phone runs with the accessibility feature that turns off parts of Liquid Glass.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage…
Awnings used to be everywhere on brick buildings with no wind load problem. You can still see where awnings were meant to go on many old (early twentieth century) buildings. Air conditioning, not wind load, killed the…
The phenomenon of "nail houses" testifies against the notion that the Chinese government will expropriate whatever land it wants, although nail houses aren't graves. Graves are less of a concern, because the dead by law…
You are extremely unlikely to get HIV from anything other than risky sex. That's what "risk" means: it's another word for "probability," just a probability of negative outcomes. These probabilities are known:…
[flagged]
Why should I want to hand mu domestic surveillance over to any company? Why wouldn’t I prefer a private solution that lets me host my own data?
The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en…
General Atomics no longer manufactures the MQ-9A, because they've moved on to the MQ-9B; but the US Air Force has been looking into replacing the whole program with a cheaper model that wouldn't hurt so much to lose.…
The future is bleak if you are attempting to cross borders with a forged or stolen passport. Nobody else is adversely affected by this.
Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as…
It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries,"…
An American and a European sit at a bar drinking. Their Chinese friend, who had been detained by business, comes and joins them. After he's started his drink, the bartender warns them all that it's dangerous to drink…
It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.
Apple is highly sensitive to dangers to its reputation. They would nuke any service that seemed to be spying on users, just like they revoked Facebook's cert back in 2019 over the same issue.
Apfel filled that role: $ apfel "List the files in this folder." https://apfel.franzai.com/
You only had to include a doctype if you needed to turn on strict XML rendering or do fun things with XSLT. It was great if you wanted to convert, say, TEI to something browsers could read. You were always, since the…
The FSIS, a branch of the USDA (not the FDA: for the difference in jurisdiction see https://www.fda.gov/media/172542/download), found this problem, according to the original article. The food from the Shanghai Ravioli…
There is a certain convergence of wills here: watermarking AI products on the one hand, and infusing AI into everything on the other hand. When you layer generative AI into Notepad, once just a raw text buffer, then…
My exgf was adamant that aspartame (in Diet Coke) was a mind control drug. Turns out that Donald Rumsfeld (of Bush administration fame) was CEO of the company that made it, and he was the one who got the FDA to approve…
So, this is less a technical than an aesthetic question—why does it look like an old Macintosh? I think I would have thought of GEOS [0] before Macintosh. There's also Windows 1.0 and 2.0. Why 3.5" floppy drive icons…
Jaynes relies on some earlier work that's been invalidated, like Bruno Snell's idea of archaic Greeks lacking a concept of an integrated body because they painted what appear to be individual limbs on vases from the…
Christianity gets its seven day period from Judaism, and it may well hearken back to Babylonian astronomy (seven planets, including the sun (Sunday) and moon (Monday)). The Romans, on the other hand, had an eight-day…
Can it produce accessible PDF files that will pass accessibility tests? Someone who can do that will make a killing laundering PDFs for academia: by April 26, every PDF, syllabus, and academic document needs to comply…
There’s an unquestioned assumption underlying “using our wealth to lift up many,” namely that wealth lifts people up. A great deal of money has long been thrown at social problems that remain unsolved. Another way to…
It's sad how much faster and cooler my phone runs with the accessibility feature that turns off parts of Liquid Glass.
Safari has a very pleasant reader mode that, while not pure markdown, does capture quite a bit of the experience by standardizing presentation and stripping out distractions. You can set Safari to automatically engage…
Awnings used to be everywhere on brick buildings with no wind load problem. You can still see where awnings were meant to go on many old (early twentieth century) buildings. Air conditioning, not wind load, killed the…
The phenomenon of "nail houses" testifies against the notion that the Chinese government will expropriate whatever land it wants, although nail houses aren't graves. Graves are less of a concern, because the dead by law…
You are extremely unlikely to get HIV from anything other than risky sex. That's what "risk" means: it's another word for "probability," just a probability of negative outcomes. These probabilities are known:…
[flagged]
Why should I want to hand mu domestic surveillance over to any company? Why wouldn’t I prefer a private solution that lets me host my own data?
The double-hyphen is by no means "old school": it's a kludge for twentieth-century systems like typewriters and word processors that did not have em dashes or an easy way to insert them. The very names "em dash" and "en…
General Atomics no longer manufactures the MQ-9A, because they've moved on to the MQ-9B; but the US Air Force has been looking into replacing the whole program with a cheaper model that wouldn't hurt so much to lose.…
The future is bleak if you are attempting to cross borders with a forged or stolen passport. Nobody else is adversely affected by this.
Musk bought Twitter looking to build an “everything app,” the western WeChat. AI came along and promised an end to apps via an agentic OS that does what its user wants and vibes whatever it needs to accomplish that as…
It was required when I was a student in American schools. I don't think it really had much to do with democracy, though. I suppose there are lessons that you could generalize to any state, like "don't hire mercenaries,"…
An American and a European sit at a bar drinking. Their Chinese friend, who had been detained by business, comes and joins them. After he's started his drink, the bartender warns them all that it's dangerous to drink…
It's pretty common to read "attack surface" in security.