Like [0] that Windows has for its console? This API has just recently finally lost to UNIX's in-line signaling, because the in-band controls can be proxied through almost anything, including literal serial line with two RX-TX wires and a common ground; the downside, of course, is that you have to build "out-of-line" signalling on your own.
If getting the current cursor position in the terminal were as easy (and as fast) as calling GetConsoleScreenBufferInfo, instead of sending "\e[6n" to the terminal and then reading input from it and looking for "\e[(\d+);(\d+)R" inside and then somehow unreading the input before that device report, yeah, that'd be nice and would allow solving a lot of problems with mere brute force. Sadly, it is not, and so most reimplementations of e.g. readline/linenoise functionality in shells and prompts (Erlang's shell went through 2 internal reimplementations just in my time using it, for example) are flying blind, hoping that their implementation of wcwidth(3) matches the terminal's one.
What I personally have in mind is something very different-a terminal ioctl which gives you an fd which speaks a completely different protocol, such as JSON-RPC - or whatever else you prefer - to avoid endless disputes over which alternative protocol to use, it could be you pass the ioctl a string saying what alternative protocol you want, and it gives you an fd if the pty master has registered support for that protocol, an error otherwise. The “other fd” could actually be a Unix domain socket. This also means the kernel code change required would be minimal - it doesn’t have to actually understand the alternative protocol, just let the pty master register a mapping of protocol name strings to listening sockets.
> This API has just recently finally lost to UNIX's in-line signaling, because the in-band controls can be proxied through almost anything, including literal serial line with two RX-TX wires and a common ground; the downside, of course, is that you have to build "out-of-line" signalling on your own.
SSH/etc is totally capable of carrying “secondary channels” - that’s how it implements X11 forwarding, port forwarding, etc - admittedly would require some code change in SSH clients/servers but the change would be modest rather than massive.
The Windows approach can’t be so easily forwarded over the network because it is defined in terms of a C language API not a wire protocol. My idea doesn’t have that issue
Could you give an outline of an example scenarios? For e.g. "print a line with a highlighted word in it" (alternative to print 'This is \e[7mhighlighted\e[m text\n'), and "print some text, move cursor to the second last word, delete it, move to the new end":
print 'This is a line of text which is being line-edited in an imaginary editor.'
if no line-wrap happened:
# move left a manually calculated amount of 17 (wcswidth?), delete
# everything to the right, reprint the rest of the line
print '\e[17D\e[Keditor.'
else:
# You need to know how much fit on the previous line, and the
# terminal's width. Let's assume 80, and that wrap happened
# after 'imagi', so 'nary' was on the next line. Move up 1, move
# right 63 (or do \r and move right 75), clear the rest of the
# screen, reprint
print '\e[A\e[63C\e[Jeditor.'
One of the problems with secondary channels is their synchronization with the main one: say you printed some text to the main fd, requested cursor position from the control fd, and then immediately printed some more text to the main fd — what cursor position will be reported?
> Chris Lattner, inventor of the Swift programming language recently took a look at a compiler entirely written by Claude AI. Lattner found nothing innovative in the code generated by AI [1]. And this is why humans will be needed to advance the state of the art.
Lots of people have ideas for programming languages; some of those ideas may be original-but many of those people lack the time/skills/motivation to actually implement their ideas. If AI makes it easier to get from idea to implementation, then even if all the original ideas still come from humans, we still may stand to make much faster progress in the field than we have previously.
> That leaves innate desire, which just doesn't seem to be that strong. We don't need to posit some recent drop in innate desire to explain the drop in fertility rates. The historical behavior we see fits just fine with innate desire being constant, and just not that high.
It varies from person to person; some of that variation is social/cultural influences, some is life experiences/circumstances, some is just randomness-but very likely it has a genetic component.
If certain alleles predispose one to be more likely to desire to have children, then in a society with strong social pressure to have children and limited availability of contraception, the selective pressure in favour of those alleles is going to be limited; in a society where social pressure to have children is low and contraception is readily available, those alleles will significantly increase the odds of having children, likely resulting in their frequency increasing over time, and maybe even (in the very long-run) a rebound in TFR
Oh what amazing advice! Never thought to ask her why!
Seriously: she is really good at evading conversations like that. I have done all I could imagine to get her to actually talk about kids and our non existing intimate relationship. She always either gets angry or silent or changes the topic. Without knowing anything about me, some people are always inclined to believe something is wrong with me, not her. That’s so utterly unfair. I always treated her like a princess, work out and try to be healthy and look good, share all chores and take care of the house. Really if something is wrong with me she has never told me. Like I said I have no idea what to do.
There are other safety differences with human-driven vehicles… interpersonal violence does happen with taxis (e.g. drivers sexually harassing/assaulting passengers, passengers robbing drivers) - by definition those things cannot happen with a Waymo
Place where I park my car for work (Gosford, Australia) just got rid of cash payment, they now take card payment only (apparently there is also going to be an app, but they haven’t launched it yet). I think the number one reason is they are upgrading to a new system, and the parking technology vendor doesn’t provide cash payments as a standard option-probably they could implement a custom integration to enable it if they thought it was essential, but cash payments are so rare, it would be a difficult decision to justify. The carpark is owned and operated by the local government, so they need to justify their decisions, either as commercially viable, or else as producing substantial public benefit, but I think both arguments would be difficult to sustain in this case.
It’s kinda easy to justify though from a financial standpoint. If the parking meters take cash, you need all the hardware to accept and secure the cash. Then you need somebody to go around at some point and actually physically collect the cash. Then someone has to reconcile the cash, etc.
So at least from that angle I see it as an easy “government is actually trying to be more efficient” argument.
As a user cash is a pain in the ass. I have to count it out, keep it in my pockets, etc. So much easier to just tap my phone or my card. But yeah that’s a tradeoff in the classic “You’re trading X for convenience”.
Even then with cards they may still need to consider fraud via skimmers, or that the equipment can be vandalized. Going app-only (or vastly reducing the availability of payment machines) means less upkeep for them, but it also moves the kind of fraud to where people have replaced the information or QR codes to scan. It seems like a parallel to what google and whatever entities are pushing them to make these changes are trying to do, at some point someone has to put in work to keep the system working securely and everyone wants to delegate it to someone else.
At least in Australia, skimmers haven’t really been an issue for a long time. Everyone uses paywave / nfc payments. The ticket machines I’ve seen installed lately don’t even have a way to insert the card or a pin pad.
They are in theory still possible to destroy but it’s a lot harder and the little electronics left are cheaper to repair.
There should be a legal requirement then, that there's an office you can go to and buy vouchers with cash, which you can use on the machines. There's no need to collect the cash from all the meters but you can still pay cash.
Don't pay and when you get a fine take them to court and state you don't have a bank card. There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.
Every council I've lived in has still taken cash for every type of council fee, despite their "official" statement being they don't.
> There's jo wat a council can legally require you to enter into an agreement with a bank to use council run facilities, it's likely nobody's challenged them on it though.
Is there some law saying they can’t?
This is a carpark. If you own a car, you are legally required to hold a CTP insurance policy as a condition of registration-so to be able to use the facility, you legally need to be customer of one type of private financial institution; given that, is it really problematic if council requires you to be a customer of a second kind as well, when close to 100% of the population are?
The next level of parking enshittification is pay-by-license-plate, which is starting to become widespread here in Perth, Australia, even for locations that are free parking, and locations that have parking machines. Surveillance just ratchets upwards.
> Even in the US, you can't set up a corporation at the federal level:
This is only because the drafters of the US constitution didn’t think to list corporations law as an enumerated power of Congress - I don’t think they omitted it out of an ideological conviction, simply because nobody thought of it at the time. That said, given SCOTUS’ expansive reading of the interstate commerce clause, there’s a decent chance SCOTUS would let them get away with a federal corporations law, but they’ve never had the political will to attempt a general federal incorporation law
The drafters of the Australian constitution did list corporations law as a power of the federal government-but they were working over a century later, and they studied the US system intently to try to identify what worked and what mistakes to avoid. However, it took until 1989 for a federal corporations law to be enacted, and then the High Court ruled in 1990 that the new federal corporations law was unconstitutional, because the corporations power in the constitution only authorised federal regulation of existing domestic corporations, not the act of incorporating them - however, this was fixed by a federal-state agreement voluntarily ceding corporations law power to the Commonwealth (this is another innovation the Australian constitution has compared to the US - the ability of the federal level to gain new enumerated powers without constitutional amendment, by the states voluntarily agreeing to cede them)
It's actually not clear to me in what sense "banned" is used here. The UK never formally "banned" leaded petrol. They banned sales of new cars which need it, and then later told places which sell petrol that they can only have a small portion of their fuel as leaded, and then (as anticipated) market forces did the rest.
AFAICT it would still be legal for the place on the bypass near me to sell leaded fuel but they don't because (a) the market is too small, not worth it and (b) as a result wholesalers don't offer the product, so if they wanted to sell it they can't get it anyway.
Hmm. The thing is, EU directives aren't themselves law, or rather, in a sense they are but they're laws for the EU member states, telling them that they need to legislate to achieve this thing but without specifying how. The EU can write legislation which is binding on actual citizens, but it mostly writes directives, like this, which just tell the member states to do the legislating.
So, was this directive actually implemented by the UK before it left? Or did they go "Eh, we achieved the intended goal anyway, no action" ?
This way the EU doesn't have to worry about weird edge cases where the EU wants to control Foozling of Doodads but it turns out that in Poland ordinary people often Foozle their own Doodad at home and so their approach needs to consider individual citizens who want to Foozle a Doodad, but in Ireland that's crazy and you pay one of a few dozen Registered Doodad Foozlers to do it at scale, requiring a very different regulation to achieve the same goal.
Thanks. I too have no idea. I searched some FOIA sites but of course "lead" the element has the same spelling as "lead" the verb and noun, so e.g. in documents about fuel "Lead counsel" and "Lead role" aren't about the chemical additive. Maybe somebody asked but I didn't find it, and maybe nobody asked.
The permits are technically called "leaded petrol permits". Unlike "lead", I don't think "leaded" is commonly used with alternative meanings. Another useful search term is "tetraethyl" – the compound in leaded petrol is "tetraethyl lead" (also spelt "tetraethyllead" or "TEL") – while "tetraethyl" can occur in non-lead compounds, in practice the lead-based compound is mentioned much more frequently than other tetraethyl compounds such as tetraethylsilane.
If you read the regulations, they provide for the permits to be issued to members of the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs, since some classic cars have difficulty running on unleaded petrol. https://www.fbhvc.co.uk/fuels says "the Federation lobbied successfully to secure an EU concession for the sale of leaded petrol in the UK, a concession which survives to this day, although current sales outlets are few in number, and the uptake of the product is quite small. In part, the difficulty of setting up a satisfactory distribution for leaded petrol for the use of historic vehicles, is proof of the general truth that a good distribution system for specialised fuels for historic road vehicles is not a viable commercial proposition". It sounds like there may still be a small handful of isolated places where you can legally purchase small quantities of leaded petrol in the UK for use with classic cars – more likely the clubhouse of a classic car club, or a mechanic who specialises in such vehicles, than an ordinary petrol station.
The regulations also exempt military vehicles, but I'd be surprised if there was any remaining use of leaded petrol in the UK military.
The regulations apply to land transport vehicles, not avgas. Leaded avgas is still legally used in the UK for general aviation, despite repeated attempts to move away from it.
> also exempt military vehicles, but I'd be surprised if there was any remaining use of leaded petrol in the UK military.
Modern tanks are diesels yeah. However the UK has a lot of enthusiasts who own (obsolete and of course also de-fanged) tanks. And I can totally believe some of the archaic designs used leaded petrol. On the other hand, even a brand new production tank is very thirsty so realistically if you aren't trying to do a "Brewster's Millions" you would not actually drive your tank very far.
Releasing data at regular intervals gives people time to review the data, identify mistakes and rectify them. Releasing financial data daily, you are much more likely to release incorrect info and then have to go back and correct it.
For certain types of firms, daily revenue figures are likely to reveal individual deals. Many B2B firms have a modest number of high value deals, a daily data feed might show $0 revenue one day $1.374 million the next, which is more likely a single deal of that size than two or more smaller deals-and that would reveal a lot to competitors-especially if those competitors are in other jurisdictions which haven’t mandated this form of extreme transparency
> Releasing financial data daily, you are much more likely to release incorrect info and then have to go back and correct it.
Why do you need to "go back"? The corrected data would be available the very next day (or month (or week or fortnight) if you don't want to go to that extreme).
If you publicly release incorrect financial results, there is a formal process you have to follow to notify the public that you made an error (“restating results”). But if you catch the error before you release the results, you get to skip all that. Make people release results daily, they’d be restating past results all the time, because they wouldn’t have time to catch errors prior to release.
It could just be the path to a Unix domain socket in an environment variable, where that socket speaks some kind of RPC protocol
reply