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akdor1154 commented on (Aus) Federal court rules Apple and Google engaged in anti-competitive conduct   abc.net.au/news/2025-08-1... · Posted by u/abbm
akdor1154 · 12 days ago
> While Apple argued it imposed those restrictions for security concerns and risks, Justice Beach ruled it remained anti-competitive.

> "The fact that Apple has imposed those centralised app distribution system for the purpose of protecting security, does not entail that there is not also a substantial anti-competitive purpose involved."

Hoping against all else that this forces Apple to build us a gate in the garden walls and allow other app stores. Platform control is market manipulation.

akdor1154 commented on Why tail-recursive functions are loops   kmicinski.com/functional-... · Posted by u/speckx
hinkley · 13 days ago
Practically the day after I learned about tail recursion in CS class, I learned that almost all recursive calls can be translated to iteration, that in many cases the iterative version is easier to scan, is as fast if not faster, and that they can usually handle much much larger inputs than recursion due to avoiding stack overflow.

Tail recursion is meant to fix the latter. But what we mean to happen and what actually happens ain't ever exactly similar.

Tail recursion IME is a bigger foot gun than relying on someone to add a new conditional branch at the end of a block in an iterative algorithm without fucking it up in the process. And iteration responds generally better to Extract Function. And while I can think of counter cases easily enough, in the large iteration is less work and less vigilance. And you cannot scale a project up without the vigilance requirement amortizing basically to 0 per line of code.

akdor1154 · 12 days ago
There are cases where iteration is clearer, and there are cases where recursion is clearer.

It's well worth being familiar with both - if you learn how to shoehorn both approaches where they aren't ideal, your judgement on avoiding such practices will improve. :)

akdor1154 commented on DrawAFish.com Postmortem   aldenhallak.com/blog/post... · Posted by u/hallak
serf · 20 days ago
it's just incompleteness -- a human issue.

most in-use LLMs prompted with a simple "You're in charge of infrastructure security, let's review possible problem points" would have uncovered this.

I wouldn't fault a compiler for erring when someone left out a period; i'd tell the person to start including it -- but for some reason the expectation for LLMs is hands-off work ; I guess we're just in that phase of the hype at the moment.

akdor1154 · 19 days ago
> for some reason the expectation for LLMs is hands-off work

The expectation is the same as the expectation for self driving: users expect it to be fully hands off, even when they are explicitly told they need to keep their hands on the wheel.

This is because it's tricky, tedious, and unejoyable to thouroughly vet the actions of a machine in realtime.

akdor1154 commented on At a Loss for Words: A flawed idea is teaching kids to be poor readers (2019)   apmreports.org/episode/20... · Posted by u/Akronymus
hirvi74 · 22 days ago
While the data on phonics suggests it works well, I feel like I may have benefited from an alternative method (my school taught phonics growing up).

I personally do not think I am all the special, but I from what I remember, I believe many of my issues with phonics were:

1. The inconsistency of the English language makes it so phonics is limited after a certain number of words, and then memorization and context must be used. For example, take words like cough, rough, through, though, etc. or words like read, lead, wound, etc. Not to mention all the silent letters we have too. If I am not mistaken, most languages do not have Spelling Bee contests because how clearly the language phonics map to spelling, e.g., German.

2. This is purely a hypothesis on my part, but I wonder if certain accents of English are better suited for phonics than other English accents? I grew up in the Southeast, USA. People slur words, drop off endings, contract words n >= 2 words, and even mispronounce words all. For example, the words "ten" and "tin" or "pen" and "pin" are not typically pronounced differently where I am from.

3. If you are like me and had speech problems, then phonics are substantially harder. It's hard to sound out the words when one's mouth cannot produce the proper sounds.

I do not doubt the other alternative methods are worse than phonics, and perhaps I am ignorant, but this debate also seems to be predominately an English only issue. Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?

akdor1154 · 22 days ago
> Mandarin Chinese does not have phonics instruction to my knowledge, and they can read just fine. So, perhaps English is just a difficult language to read and pronounce correctly -- even for native speakers?

I think your conclusion is right but that example is a bad one (though interesting). Chinese is not a phonetic language. Each symbol is a 'word', roughly. This means you can quite possibly read without knowing how it sounds. This is how the many Chinese languages co-exist - the written forms are roughly the same, it's just spoken with different sounds.

It's an interesting tangent on this topic because Chinese are starting to see a comparable literacy problem - inability to recall the written characters when hand-writing. This is because most writing these days is done by IMEs on computers and phones, where you actually DO input a phonetic latin 'word', and the IME turns it into the Chinese character you want.

I still read that as somewhat supporting your opinion - that purely phonetic languages are easier to learn, and that languages that are less phonetic (English) or completely unphonetic (Chinese) are harder. Whether that supports phonics or not? I'm not sure, personally i think it does, but your experience that it's still a difficult system is not wrong.

akdor1154 commented on Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective   twey.io/hci/svalboard/... · Posted by u/Twey
jatins · 22 days ago
Do you do weight training in gym? I wonder if that has an impact
akdor1154 · 22 days ago
No, I'm pretty scrawny (for a westerner), stronger forearms from the childhood of piano though.
akdor1154 commented on Ergonomic keyboarding with the Svalboard: a half-year retrospective   twey.io/hci/svalboard/... · Posted by u/Twey
ssfrr · 23 days ago
Is there evidence that minimizing finger movement is ergonomically desirable? It seems like "repetitive" is a key part of RSI, so making the exact same small motion over and over again may not be optimal.

I think about piano players, who obviously need to move their hands and arms a lot to hit the keys (and with more force). Definitely takes a lot more energy than typing on a computer keyboard, but is there evidence that it's any more or less likely to cause injury?

akdor1154 · 22 days ago
I have the same crank theory. I have shithouse typing technique - hands fly everywhere, whichever finger is closest, wrists move a fair bit, what's a home row? I stuck rubber o-rings under all my keys so bottoming out wasn't painful. My keyboard has the heaviest sprung switches i could find, and I'm still on the lookout for a heavier mechanism (e.g. literally a typewriter or piano type mechanism).

I also started learning piano at 4 and played daily until 25 or so. I still play other instruments but with different movements.

I am 35 and still have no hint of RSI or carpal tunnel (touch wood). I had a scare for a bit but turned out my mouse was just in a dumb position.

YMMV but the above informs my crank belief of 'move heaps, varied as much as possible, get strong fingers and forearms' being a viable approach.

N.B. A note on the bottoming out stuff: this was again inspired by my piano teacher who taught a technique of imagining pressing the piano keys 'through' the base, further than they move in reality. This was combined with the weight coming from your entire arm, fore, bicep, and shoulder, not from your fingers.

N.B.B. If anyone knows input methods that take this to extremes I'd love to know. I.E. something that involves moving your entire arm around. I've occasionally looked at jumbo-sized keyboard for those with learning and dexterity difficulties for example.

akdor1154 commented on AlphaDec: A human-readable alternative to ULID/Snowflake IDs   github.com/firasd/alphade... · Posted by u/firasd
akdor1154 · a month ago
Entered with scepticism but left convinced. Looks very thoughtfully designed, nice!

I admit i do feel a bit uneasy about the rational numbers used in the definition, but i guess it doesn't matter for the purposes of this? And you do seem to have considered it. I still wonder if a less neat but integer-second or -millisecond definition might be useful, as round tripping could then be well defined i think? (If, as another poster hinted, you consider the interaction with leap seconds too)

akdor1154 commented on When we get Komooted   bikepacking.com/plog/when... · Posted by u/atakan_gurkan
sneak · a month ago
Why is that insane? A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.

To assume otherwise is foolish and naive. That’s simply not how employment works.

akdor1154 · a month ago
> A job this week is no guarantee, legally or practically, of a job next week.

It is in Europe - one or three months are the standard notice periods I believe?

akdor1154 commented on Vector Tiles are deployed on OpenStreetMap.org   blog.openstreetmap.org/20... · Posted by u/ikawe
maelito · a month ago
> so zooming in on a tile could cause it to get blurry, until your client requests a new, zoomed in tile. Now, they can serve tiles in SVG format, which scale better

They still are blurry, because openstreetmap.org uses a JS library that does not seem to support vector tiles :/

akdor1154 · a month ago
I just tested it and it's def vector here - Firefox Android. Looks great!
akdor1154 commented on OSS Rebuild: open-source, rebuilt to last   security.googleblog.com/2... · Posted by u/tasn
WhatIsDukkha · a month ago
So this seems like a bit of a half measure in the sense that it doesn't provide client side build?

With guix I can bit for bit reproduce with my client machine the upstream binaries.

This seems flawed to assume that google's servers are uncompromised, its vastly better to have distributed ability to reproduce.

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-chall...

akdor1154 · a month ago
It does provide client side build, see the bottom shell snippets.

u/akdor1154

KarmaCake day1601June 25, 2018View Original