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.
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.
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.
updates for safari are generally tied to the operating system
Sure - but Apple also ships bugfix and web standards compatibility updates for old versions of Safari. You don’t have to be running the latest version to be fully supported. You only need the latest version for user interface features (tab grouping, etc).
It’s generally only a problem with really old hardware.
Apple’s current 7 year cutoff includes radical evolutions of hardware over recent years.
The latest cutoff, as far as I know, is Macs that typically were sold with a spinning rust HDD - which are honestly useable anyway on the new filesystem which has been designed from the ground up for SSDs. Modern MacOS just can’t cope with seek time lag to access the disk.
The big cutoff before that was transitioning from 32 bit to 64 bit CPUs. And the next cutoff will be from x86 to ARM.
Apple doesn’t have a hard cutoff - they have a “we will support as far back as we can” cutoff, which is a combination of the cost required to keep it compatible and the number of actual users on old hardware.
Also - even after things are no-longer “supported” they often still get security patches from Apple. Especially if something is actually being exploited.
As you say even a dot at the top would be adequate to show there’s notifications
That red dot on my Apple watch is always there. I always have notifications.
The biggest advantage Siri has is it’s able to perform simple actions on the phone, without connecting to the internet at all.
That’s always going to be faster than sending your voice to a server and waiting for a response.
As for how reliable it is - a lot of that depends how much you use it. It’s a machine learning voice processing algorithm that needs to learn the owner’s voice and it works a lot better when you’ve issued tens of thousands of commands than when you’ve only issued a few.
That has to do with the fact that iOS runs the UI on a separate thread with a higher priority,
No that’s not true at all. In fact iPhone CPUs are under-clocked whenever they’re idle, running at about 0.5Ghz which is drastically less than full speed.
When you tap on a button, an iPhone CPU might ramp up to full speed, but by the time it does the animation is already half way completed. However usually the CPU load during the animation is so low that it doesn’t bother to ramp up.
There’s nothing high priority at all about an animation on an iPhone. If it was Apple would setup their CPUs to run animations at the full clock speed.
iPhone animations are fast because they use low level GPU instructions such as “here’s a static image, move it to the left by half a dozen pixels, repeat until it has moved all the way from one end of the screen to the other”. Any phone sold in the last 20 years can do transitions like that effortlessly.
Android hardware is absolutely capable of stutter free animations. And the software could be extensively rewritten to be more efficient. They’ve had 15 years to do that work and they still haven’t done it, even though for that entire time the iPhone has had smooth animations. At this point I’m not sure it will ever be fixed.
A beefier CPU won’t help much. Bottlenecked software will be slow even on the best hardware. The video frame is stuttering because the CPU is doing something else - probably twiddling it’s thumbs idle while waiting for slow flash memory to provide a file. And why is the flash memory slow? Again, because they choose to put slow flash memory in the phone. Fast flash memory is available, it probably just costs and extra five bucks. Users would be happy to pay five bucks more for a significantly faster phone… but the phone manufacturers want to keep that profit for themselves.
On my pixel with graphene os, I have changed the animation speed to be much faster, and it takes maybe a quarter of a second to do those same actions. Ofc I didn’t time anything but the iOS animations felt like slow motion compared to my phone
iPhone developer here.
The default animation speed on iOS is 0.2 seconds. I agree, faster would be nicer… but it’s already less than a quarter of a second. Personally I like animations closer to 0.05 seconds… but that’s not the norm on the platform and in fact changing it is difficult.
Anyway I don’t think that’s what OP was talking about, I think they meant the smoothness of the animations, not the speed of them? A 0.2 second animation is 48 animation frames on a modern high end iPhone. On a lot of android phones it would be significantly less than that, especially Samsung (and they said they’re coming from Samsung) which has a reputation for dropping frames in animations.
Samsung’s issue is a combination of not caring enough to get the software right and also choosing to use hardware that has a tendency to throttle itself to avoid overheating. The techniques Apple does are not rocket science, Samsung could make their animations run smoothly and reliably. They choose not to assign developer resources to that task. And it shows.
Most people use a gesture - swipe from the left edge of the screen. Or from the bottom if you want to leave the app.
I hate the lightning connector, it’s a PITA compared to UsbC but I don’t interact with it often, only for charging.
Do yourself a favor and get a magsafe charger. It’s far better than USB or Lightning.
Valuation is usually based on potential revenue, not actual revenue. A $2 billion valuation would have been about $50 per user. It seems reasonable Stack Exchange should be able to make that much money per user somehow over the entire future existence of the company… if it’s run well. Which doesn’t seem to be happening from where I’m sitting.
What’s your opinion? Does google really “not work” anymore?
Depends what you’re searching for. For some searches I’ve given up on using it. For example I just purchased a new TV and one of the features wasn’t working. It took me several hours of Googling to figure out how to fix it — almost every result offered by Google didn’t contain an answer to my question.
Are there any better search engines?
ChatGPT works well for some searches. Especially if you pay for GPT-4.
It’s pretty impressive how ChatGPT is better than Google despite never being designed as a replacement for Google. I think when someone applies the same technology to a proper search product, the result will be really awesome. Time will tell who manages to pull that off - it might even be Google.
Why did the quality of search results go down?
The main issue, I think, is all the websites these days that exist exclusively to show banner ads. Many of them are packed with information that Google’s algorithm determines might be relevant to the user, but the algorithm is wrong.
The websites want you to click on an Ad, and you’re a lot more likely to click an Ad if you give up, don’t find what you’re looking for, and decide to buy a new weight loss gadget instead.
I’m sure part of the problem is Google itself is an ad company. A lot of the things they could do to fix this issue would harm their own revenue.
No, it’s not a fork. A fork is when you take the Chromium browser and change it.
This uses the same rendering engine as Chromium - but the browser itself was built from scratch, uses a completely different architecture, and on other operating systems it doesn’t use Chromium at all.
As for “forced to create an account” Arc is temporarily free. Longer term you’ll have to pay a subscription to use it. So it makes sense that you need to sign up.
Chrome is run by a massive corporation with a reputation for for invasions of privacy. Opera is run by a nation state with a reputation for invasions of privacy.
Vivaldi is far better than either of those.
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.