Zak

3 ms·

1.
by Zak 8d ago
I remember reading about narrow exceptions, but a quick search suggests I was mistaken.
2.
by Zak 8d ago
Yes, there's a difference: US citizens have the right to enter the USA; visitors do not. US officials can deny a visitor entry arbitrarily, and the visitor has limited recourse to appeal such a decision. A visitor who does not cooperat
3.
by Zak 8d ago
> It is insane to me that judges consistently rule that the constitution doesn't apply because there's a "border" within 100 miles. People keep misconstruing this. The border search exemption only applies when someo
4.
by Zak 8d ago
Most of them do. They're usually constructed as restrictions on the government's authority rather than grants of rights to a specific group of people, and there are court rulings clearly stating rights like freedom of speech and f
5.
by Zak 9d ago
It might - let's assume it does. My point is that it's better to use the explicit optimized method for joining strings in a performance-sensitive context than to try to meet the conditions for an implicit optimization.
6.
by Zak 10d ago
I find that decision a bit odd given that accumulating a string with a loop is also quadratic in Python if you use = instead of +=, or even if you use += when the left operand isn't provably unshared. I don't believe removing loop
7.
by Zak 12d ago
Nucleus programming language: https://github.com/zakwilson/nucleus/ It's still pretty early, possibly buggy, and almost certain to get breaking changes without warning. My original thought was to combine Lisp
8.
by Zak 14d ago
The brand name that comes to mind is the Wicked Lasers Flashtorch, which uses a 65W halogen bulb that emits most of its energy as infrared, and a ~30 Watt-hour Li-ion battery. The old-fashioned light source is better suited to party tricks
9.
by Zak 14d ago
> flashlights so powerful they'll fry an egg by shining at them Flashlights that can do this exist. I don't know if they're being advertised on Meta platforms.
10.
by Zak 15d ago
"May contain" should provide legal protection. It may be compliance tits in some cases, but that's better than forcing the addition of a compliance ingredient .
11.
by Zak 15d ago
"May contain" labeling seems like the better solution to this problem. This should be allowed for allergens that are present in the manufacturing or packing facility but not intended to be ingredients in the product.
12.
by Zak 26d ago
This seems like a beginner-level OOP-in-Python tutorial, and I'm disappointed the author didn't demonstrate a functional abstraction for `find_by`.
13.
by Zak 27d ago
The term "missing person" calls to mind someone who is in serious danger, but a majority are something minor, like someone quitting a job without notice or taking an unannounced trip. The vast majority are resolved by finding the
14.
by Zak 29d ago
Google Maps has a better excuse for wanting to be an app than most since a primary use case on mobile is turn-by-turn navigation. That's possible to do in a web page now, but several features that improve the experience are not avail
15.
by Zak 1mo ago
The only time I've ever managed to burn through a quota that fast (on the cheap plan) was with an open-ended request to check a codebase for any defects or deficiencies. It dispatched five Fable subagents.
16.
by Zak 1mo ago
I also found the description of Lisp development weird, as if it's a second-hand repetition of someone else describing watching a Lisp developer in action. The workflow I always use is to write code in my editor and use a keyboard shor
17.
by Zak 1mo ago
This is a half-truth. In a full banana republic, technical compliance with the law will not prevent consequences for failing to do what the authorities want. In a jurisdiction with perfect rule of law, it always will. The USA is somewhere i
18.
by Zak 1mo ago
For exactly the border search scenario, I wish smartphones could be imaged and restored as easily as PCs. Imagine booting the phone from a flash drive, making an encrypted image of the phone on said drive, and writing a fresh OS before reac
19.
by Zak 1mo ago
They do, and 20 years ago a move like that would have also drawn widespread condemnation. It's not as big a problem as it is with phones though because the vast majority of PCs on the market are not locked down in this way, and only a
20.
by Zak 1mo ago
Voiding a warranty due to unauthorized repair is only one of many things a company can do to make third-party repair, or any repair more difficult.
21.
by Zak 1mo ago
The first part is clearly illegal in the USA. Is it not in the EU? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty...
22.
by Zak 1mo ago
Microsoft proposed locked-down PCs decades ago and got criticism from sources as mainstream as the New York Times. Everyone more technical than that, with the possible exception of corporate IT types flatly rejected it. I'm sad there w
23.
by Zak 1mo ago
To borrow an idea from Nilay Patel of The Verge, all the other items in the parent comment describe consumer products . People like smartphone cameras and cheap TVs and effortless data backups, and they'll put up with some significant
24.
by Zak 1mo ago
Most people do not want to be surveilled all the time. Most police departments would like to surveil everyone all the time. City governments tend to do what the police department wants unless a lot of people get mad.
25.
by Zak 1mo ago
It's not the tinkering that's sociologically important, but the ability to install things like ICEBlock even though the government and OS vendor don't want you to.
26.
by Zak 1mo ago
I like the goal of making it harder to overfit, but there are a couple significant weaknesses. A big one is TM-30 Rf is still an average, and with a larger number of samples, the average minimizes the effect of strong deviations that only a
27.
by Zak 1mo ago
Some additional notes on the topic: The author describes color rendering index as a percentage; it is not. It's 100 - [a calculation of average color error on 8 color samples]. Reporting the color error directly would probably be bette
28.
by Zak 1mo ago
Somebody I was talking to about a web app I wrote in Clojure asked me how I hosted it. He seemed surprised my answer was an $8/month VPS. That might be the wrong solution if it was going to have a million users, but it isn't. This
29.
by Zak 2mo ago
I don't like the article's tone of inevitability: > I think cameras in all public spaces are going to happen. Imagine Ring comes out with a nicer camera system for homeowners.... Indiscriminately filming people in public plac
30.
by Zak 2mo ago
An open question is whether the rideshare model, where the service provider knows which passenger was with which driver at which time and place solves the problem that regulation was trying to address. I would have expected someone to publi

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