I know it goes completely against Apple's business model, but I'd love to be an Apple customer if I could buy their hardware and use it with software of my own choice. Holding an iPhone or a MacBook feels great, they're all easily among the best consumer electronics ever as far as the physical part goes. But Apple's software is completely different from how I want to use my devices so I just don't end up considering them when buying.
Would love for Asahi or similar projects to be fully usable but it also doesn't seem very likely. Apple is arguably not hostile to other OSes on MacBooks, they're designed to freely boot non-Apple operating systems, but by not publishing any hardware manuals Apple ensures that an Asahi-style project is always going to be well behind, likely years behind, in hardware support.
Oh, they’re definitely hostile, by the way, Darwin is still open source, but no one’s bothered in 26 years market inertia? Just like no one’s bothered to take a license out with SoftBank to design something from the ground up (like those three ex Apple engineers) using Linux, the easiest and fastest way to get something working from the ground up.
More accurately, 112 is the EU emergency number (and the GSM standard) but actual organization of emergency services is entirely national so who deals with your call and how will be local. The article also points out that handling of 911 is local in the US, even if apparently most 911 dispatchers are somehow subordinate to the police.
Also, like 112 forwards to 911 in the US, most cell networks in the EU will forward 911 to 112. American cultural dominance has made it so everyone knows 911 and even Europeans apparently end up dialing it.
I had a weird thing happening with that. I just returned from dinner in Germany driving through a semi-industrial area in the netherlands when I spotted a fire in one of the buildings we drove past. I called 112 and was connected to the German dispatcher and they couldn't connect me to the Dutch fire department. So they sent the German firetruck across the border and meanwhile alerted their Dutch colleagues as well. Apparently my phone had not yet re-registered with the dutch network even though we were already well across the border.
> and meanwhile alerted their Dutch colleagues as well
It's great that they were able to do this! I wonder what that looks like on their end. Maybe it's just a matter of having a direct telephone number for the closest Dutch dispatch center?
That’s super cool of them. I guess fire is one of those things where jurisdiction doesn’t have to be exact. And with the lack of physical border there, they could easily just hop over and do their Dutch colleagues a favor.
Emergency services work cross border lots of times but I had never seen it in action. They were super fast too, far faster than I thought was even possible and their dutch colleagues weren't all that far behind. They managed to save the surrounding buildings but the building where the fire started was lost.
I mean they were possibly going to help anyway or even physically closer. And I imagine that sitting around in the fire department does get boring, something to do occasionally is welcome :)
I wouldn't look as far as cultural dominance. If you're abroad and in an emergency, you're just going to dial the number you remember from your home country on autopilot, and there's no good reason not to support that if the number isn't already taken for something else.
Yes, sure. But I am talking about Europeans, not Americans, who know 911. I see kids here who are familiar with 911 just through American media, which is really the only source here for anyone to know the number.
It’s weird that that opinion occurred in a comment where they already knew about the reverse decision. It’s more of a case of pragmatism than cultural dominion.
I suppose they think that if America didn’t have so much cachet, that calls to 911 in Europe should route to a recording of someone chewing you out (in whatever the local language is) for being a cultural imperialist.
I am not surprised - the general pattern with Torvalds seems to be that he's maximally pragmatic. His problems with say Nvidia drivers aren't the fact that they're proprietary, it's that they are difficult to interface with the kernel. I have a strong impression that what matters to Linus is software that works well, so he cares a lot about the quality of the kernel and ideally wants other software to be similarly reliable.
If he judges that Claude does the best job, it'd be very much like him to use Claude. It would be unlike him to use an open program if he considers it inferior.
I think he also understands that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority. He wants an incredibly important piece of software that everybody needs and uses (OS kernel) to be OSS. If he also tried to push other political projects (whether about Nvidia, or AI or Palestine), it would detract from that.
Most tablets were air dried, which would take a day or two. But some tablets were fired - dried in a kiln. I don't know about Hittites but at least in Mesopotamia, air drying was by far the most common method and only some important ones were fired. So methods were certainly available to dry a tablet quickly if necessary but I doubt if air drying delays made much of a difference. Messages and goods were limited to the speed of horse after all.
I love displays from space vehicles and nuclear plants for the same reason. Data and controls organized in a dense but presumably highly usable manner. And it covers the more specific view of an expert in a particular subsystem, as well as the higher level view of those responsible for the whole system.
I remember seeing glances of the Mission Control screens during the Apollo and early shuttle program - two screens and two channel selectors where the programming would be a screenful of real-time data rendered in the adjacent RTCC (real time compute center, or something like that) and captured by slow-scan CCTV cameras and piped to the consoles as TV signals.
> Many of us, deep down, are driven more by the joy of making things, solving problems, and seeing people use what we built than by the act of coding itself. After all, many of us decided we wanted to be developers before learning to code, just to create video games or websites. The desire came before the code.
This is a big disconnect that I think has been at the root of many different reactions to LLMs lately. Here on HN I see a lot of "I hate what LLMs did to programming" and equally a lot of "LLMs are awesome, I've never had a better time". I think the disconnect is between people who build software for the end result (having users, the joy of completing a thing, etc) versus building it for the process itself (architecting, coding, debugging).
I'm mainly the kind who enjoys the process. I think of an awesome startup job I had that solved real problems for real customers including some really big firms, but I can't honestly say I ever cared about those problems or the customers. I loved the job because it was technically challenging with a lot of freedom, and the customers were great because they were a source of new interesting details to solve, as well as confirmations that the previous solutions worked.
As such LLMs make me sad because they effectively replace a lot of what I like doing. Doing a refactor to support a new feature, digging through the code to try and understand a bug. One of my strengths as a developer, I think, is that I am fast at familiarizing myself with unfamiliar codebases. That's also a somewhat redundant skill as Claude can answer "how does feature X work in this code" in a small fraction of the time it'd take me.
A few years ago (before the LLM craze) I moved to game dev as my main job, which makes a lot of this easier because I actually care about the end product and the customers (players), so that's a whole new layer of satisfaction in addition to the usual technical one.
Which isn't to say that it's all bad. I've used Claude to get a few things done where I mainly care about the final result and not the process. There was one such project I wanted to get done, I'd had the idea and the data for five or six years, but I found that the implementation would be time consuming, often manual work and much of it involving the kind of tech I don't really enjoy. So I never worked on that but last month, I did the whole thing in a few days with Claude and got exactly the result I wanted.
I've been seeing things the exact same way. There are those that want the end product as fast as possible and there are those that love the process and the struggle of getting there. The former group is the ones telling the latter group that they'll be left behind.
This can't be the first time you're seeing such use of Я? It's very commonly used in Western typography / graphic design as a symbol to invoke associations with Russia. It's not being used as a Cyrillic letter, it's being used a "think of Russia" and people unfamiliar with Cyrillic will mentally associate it with R so TETЯIS is easily read as "tetris". Even if yes, people familiar with the alphabet find it harder because the first reaction to Я is to in fact read it correctly.
Same with Σ being used as a "think of Greece" symbol that people from Latin-script languages are expected to process as E, leading to "brilliant" designs in GRΣΣK. Or how the Chinese character 山 would remind a Russian speaker of Ш so ПО山ЛИ would be easy to read.
I'm in game dev but I also have very poor abilities for mentally operating on visual or geometrical data. I'm normally far away from the graphics parts but sometimes I take a look and shaders are by far the least intuitive type of code to me. I've learned enough about what shaders do to sort of parse the simple ones, but anything with shaders definitely feels like working against my brain's natural tendencies.
However, protective equipment is taken seriously and then shoes stay on. Here in Sweden, of course ordinarily all shoes are taken off (for 8-9 months of every year they're wet and dirty) but if workers come in to do some work, they keep their shoes on because they're protective equipment. If you're having them come during a particularly dirty time of the year, you may want to cover your floor with newspapers or give them shoe covers.
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