There’s also a Base64URL variant that is a little more friendly in the modern world where the +/= often need escape sequences.
The first two are replaced with more sensible characters and the third is just removed entirely - do you really need padding?
They don’t have the capital to pursue an EV
Yes they do. It’s just they’re choosing to spend all of it on hydrogen, which the Japanese companies still think is better than batteries.
Supposedly hydrogen cars are a solved problem now, all the investment is going into infrastructure. The ability to fill your tank in a few minutes is useless if there’s nowhere to fill up.
In October the Gaza Health Ministry claimed 471 people were killed by an Israeli missile strike on a hospital. Widespread credible (independent) evidence proves a small Hamas rocket missfired and hit a carpark near the hospital, causing relatively minor damage (there was a large fireball, but it was mostly rocket fuel - which is far less damaging than an explosive payload intended to kill).
None of the credible evidence was able to put a number to the deaths in that accident but it’s highly improbable that 471 people were in the carpark. And it definitely wasn’t an Israeli rocket.
In other words - Gaza’s health ministry is not a reliable source. Some of the things they report are probably accurate but they have been proven to be unreliable. Don’t trust anything they say unless it’s been backed by someone more reliable (in which case, you might as well refer to the other source instead).
At best, the ministry failed verify facts (e.g. was a large missile even fired at all?) before reporting what happened. But I think that’s being too charitable. For example where did they get the 471 number from? I think they made it up. I don’t have proof but it’s the only believable explanation.
Worse though - they haven’t retracted the claim. Mistakes are understandable… but failing to admit someone in your organisation made a mistake is unacceptable.
Signal Just Works™️
Until you drop your phone in the swimming pool, and every message/photo you’ve ever received is just… gone. Forever.
Sorry but I don’t buy any claim that Signal “just works”. It’s pretty clear they care about security more than anything else even when that means making decisions that are user hostile. And that’s fine - if you feel like you need that level of security I’m glad Signal exists. But it doesn’t really align with the general public and Signal is never going to be a mass market messaging service unless something changes (Signal or the general public).
What’s weird to me is an app that excludes itself from phone backups considers SMS a valid form of authentication when a user links a device to a phone number - especially when you can necessarily link a device to a number that is already tied to someone else’s device. Like how is that ever going to be secure? Spoiler: it’s not. It’d make a lot more sense to me if users simply crated a username and shared it with other people instead of a phone number… and if they forget their password… come up with new username.
The feature does require confirmation.
It also requires accessing your contacts database, which is encrypted on iPhones…
Because it’s encrypted, it’s impossible to share contact details unless someone enters the device passcode (or else does a biometric unlock - which effectively stores your passcode temporarily in a secure location that is wiped whenever the device is powered off or left unused for several hours).
It’s a tough call. Many forums have a rule against changing the title at all.
Those forums are wrong. A title should accurately reflect the content. We can’t choose the title other websites choose… but we can choose a title for our posts and we should take advantage of that.
Also - if you find yourself posting on a forum with that rule, just ignore it. And then tell them the title you typed out yourself was copy/pasted. They’ll have no way of knowing since so many news services A/B test titles anyway.
Here’s the tile I would’ve used: “Police Alert Parents to iPhone’s Automatic Contact Sharing Feature” — I think we can agree it’s more accurate than the deliberately unclear title this post currently has.
You could start by not calling them “nuts”… you set the tone of the conversation and it could only ever go down hill from there.
The article you linked disagrees - they said it pretty well:
Of course, some issues come from the fact that people are trying to use the Relational model where it doesn’t suit their use case. That’s why I prefer a document model instead of a tabular one as the default choice. Most of our applications are more suitable for it, as we’re still moving the regular physical world (so documents) into computers. (Read also more in General strategy for migrating relational data to document-based).
I never joined the NOSQL hype-train so I can’t comment on that. However I will point out storing documents on a disk is a very well established and proven approach… and it’s even how relational databases work under the hood. They generally persist data on the filesystem as documents.
Where I find relational data really falls over is at the conversion point between relational document representation. That typically happens multiple times in a single operation - for example when I hit the reply button on this comment (I assume, haven’t read the source code) this is what will happen:
And every time the comment is loaded (or sent to other servers in the fediverse) that silly “document to relational to document” translation process is repeated over and over and over.
I’d argue it’s better, more efficient, to just store this comment as a document because over and over and over it’s going to be needed in that format and anyway you ultimately need to write it to disk as a document.
Yes - you should also have a relational index containing critical metadata in the document. The relationship linking that document to the comment that I replied to. The number of upvotes it has received. Etc Etc… but that should be a secondary database, not the primary one. Things like an individual upvote should also be a document, stored as a file on disk (in the format specified by AcitivtyStreams 2.0).
For me the article touches on the problem but doesn’t actually reveal it.
What I see day in and day out is projects using a relational database to store data that is not suited to a relational database. And you can often get away with that fundamental mistake when you’re writing raw SQL queries… but as soon as an ORM is involved you’re in for a world of pain (or at least, problems with performance).
Yes there’s software for this, but I think you can keep it simpler than that.
Just tell them to create a new spreadsheet every day (possibly by creating a copy of yesterday’s spreadsheet). Obviously name the files by date. With a new directory for each month.
Also, it sounds like they don’t have good backups. Help them with that.
I’m all for this as a soft rule, but so many articles have terrible headlines that it can’t be a fixed one.
Also, a lot of the news sites I follow do A/B testing on every title. So every article has two titles.
My advice is avoid tablets entirely. Even the best ones are not even remotely as good as paper.
Lots of people recommending the Supernote A5 X… I haven’t tried it, but a quick search says it has “15-20ms” of latency. I have an iPad (which I don’t consider usable for notes*) and it has 7ms latency which is too high in my opinion.
If you really must have your notes in digital form… try Whitelines paper notebooks. Their main feature is light grey paper with white lines, but more importantly they have subtle locator code on the four corners of the page, and Whitelines has a free phone app that uses those locator codes to perfectly sort out the perspective when you take a photo of the page to digitise it. That system works a lot better than regular edge detection other apps use, and also the white lines work better than grey or blue lines.
Officeworks has Whitelines notebooks. They’re available in various sizes and the same price as any other premium notebook (not as cheap as the Officeworks house brand… but it’s also better paper than that brand).
(* my iPad Mini is used as a portable web browser for situations where my phone is too small and my laptop is too big- which is a situation I find myself in regularly as part of my job… I have tired using it for notes and definitely don’t recommend it for that - a phone is definitely better than an iPad for note taking)
I’d bet sites blocking ChatGPT will regret it when (not if) Bing starts using it for search engine relevance.
Those batteries in your photo are NiMH batteries… which discharge on their own at a fairly rapid rate even if you’re not using them at all. They’re also pretty big and heavy for the amount of power they provide (which, due to the self-discharge issue, is effectively a lot lower than the official number on the battery).
I strongly recommend investing in devices that use 18650 batteries. They’re about the same size/weight as a AA, and they last much longer (both in terms of from full to flat and also the number of years (decades?) of use you’ll get from the battery.
A lot of “proprietary” batteries are in fact a bunch of 18650 cells wired together.
It’s worth investing in good ones - the quality varies significantly from brand to the next. With a good 18650 cell, you won’t be replacing it when the battery expires, you’ll be transferring it to a new gadget when the gadget is broken or so old that you decided to buy a new/better model.
They might want to, but it’s illegal.
The “quiet period” is a reference to an SEC law that forces any company to be radio silent for a strict 40 day period during the IPO process. Reddit is in that period now and therefore they cannot say a word.
JPMorgan was fined almost a billion dollars for answering questions on a phone call during their quiet period.