They just want things to change now, and that’s not happening.

Yeah see that’s exactly what gets everyone worked up. On one hand Youth detention centres are so overcrowded and understaffed the kids have to be locked in their cells 23 hours a day - a horrific breach of human rights if it was done to an adult, let alone kids. And on the other hand some of the crimes the kids are committing are even more horrific than that (seriously, I don’t even want to write about some of the stories I’ve been close to).

The people in those towns want the state premier (not just a single politician from a minor party) to drop whatever they’re doing and deal with this. Now. Right now. It’s hard for us to imagine anything else more important that could possibly be on the premier’s desk than this issue. But instead we get told “the problem is complex”. We know it’s complex. We’re living it.

As someone who grew up in Malanda… not much crime there as far as I know. Everyone in the town is on a first name basis and friendly.

But other towns only slightly larger in the same area are out of control. I’m talking nuisance crimes - such as a kid smashing in the windscreen of your car with a baseball bat or spray painting a penis on your shop sign or straight up burning a business building to the ground for no reason other than they think it’s funny.

If it was once in a blue moon… ok. That’s what insurance is for. But when you’re personally a victim of stuff like that several times a year and so is everyone else you know… it’s borderline unliveable. The police force are so under-funded most of these crimes don’t even get reported. They show up four days later and take a few notes, and that’s it.

As for what Knuth is doing about it… not much he can do other than complain. Police are run from Brisbane and it’s clear they don’t think it’s a priority. Shit’s been getting worse every year for as long as I’ve lived here. Supposedly they need 150 additional officers for the district and recently hired four. They don’t report how many retired or quit in frustration (I suspect more than four).

Last time I had a chat with a local Malanda officer, he said he’s in hot water because an independent audit reported people speeding regularly on a stretch of highway but where he’d never issued any speeding fines. It was a down hill where you need to be riding the brakes to stay within the speed limit and was recently reduced from 100km/h to 60km/h for no reason — the road is safer than it ever has been, due to upgrades, and there was never a crash even before the safety improvements. I’m talking a nice wide straight highway with nothing but cow paddocks on either side of the highway. Even if you “crashed”, you’d harmlessly get stuck in the mud and the next car to drive past would help you get out of the mud. I wonder if he’s been replaced by someone who’s happy to issue tickets instead of helping with real problems (I don’t live there anymore).

It also has no timeline for wasm-gc

Apple has been removing support for garbage collection from other technologies that used to support it. Wouldn’t be surprised if they never add support for that, they’ll tell you not to waste CPU cycles (and therefore, battery power) collecting garbage.

They want you to figure out when memory should be deallocated at compile time, not run time.

Do they store 32-bit integers as 16-bit internally or how does macOS magically only use half the RAM? Hint: it doesn’t.

As a Mac programmer I can give you a real answer… there are three major differences… but before I go into those, almost all integers in native Mac apps are 64 bit. 128 bit is probably more common than 32.

First of all Mac software generally doesn’t use garbage collection. It uses “Automatic Reference Counting” which is far more efficient. Back when computers had kilobytes of RAM, reference counting was the standard with programmer painstakingly writing code to clear things from memory the moment it wasn’t needed anymore. The automatic version of that is the same, except the compiler writes the code for you… and it tends to do an even better job than a human, since it doesn’t get sloppy.

Garbage collection, the norm on modern Windows and Linux code, frankly sucks. Code that, for example, reads a bunch of files on disk might store all of those files in RAM for for ten seconds even if it only needs one of them in RAM at a time. That burn be 20GB of memory and push all of your other apps out into swap. Yuck.

Second, swap, while it’s used less (due to reference counting), still isn’t a “last resort” on Macs. Rather it’s a best practice to use swap deliberately for memory that you know doesn’t need to be super fast. A toolbar icon for example… you map the file into swap and then allow the kernel to decide if it should be copied into RAM or not. Chances are the toolbar doesn’t change for minutes at a time or it might not even be visible on the screen at all - so even if you have several gigabytes of RAM available there’s a good chance the kernel will kick that icon out of RAM.

And before you say “toolbar icons are tiny” - they’re not really. The tiny favicon for beehaw is 49kb as a compressed png… but to draw it quickly you might store it uncompressed in RAM. It’s 192px square and 32 bit color so 192 x 192 x 32 = 1.1MB of RAM for just one favicon. Multiply that by enough browser tabs and… Ouch. Which is why Mac software would commonly have the favicon as a png on disk, map the file into swap, and decompress the png every time it needs to be drawn (the window manager will keep a cache of the window in GPU memory anyway, so it won’t be redrawn often).

Third, modern Macs have really fast flash memory for swap. So fast it’s hard to actually measure it, talking single digit microseconds, which means you can read several thousand files off disk in the time it takes the LCD to refresh. If an app needs to read a hundred images off swap in order to draw to the screen… the user is not going to notice. It will be just as fast as if those images were in RAM.

Sure, we all run a few apps that are poorly written - e.g. Microsoft Teams - but that doesn’t matter if all your other software is efficient. Teams uses, what, 2GB? There will be plenty left for everything else.

Of course, some people need more than 8GB. But Apple does sell laptops with up to 128GB of RAM for those users.

When someone posts on Discord, they will often get an answer within seconds. I don’t recommend or use Discord, however I absolutely do recommend every project use a realtime chat service of some kind.

With GitHub or a forum it’s likely to be overnight if you get a response at all. That fundamentally changes the type of content people are willing to post.

Projects should eventually have a website and an issue tracker and a chat service and an email address and a mastodon account. But you don’t need to create all of them at once…

And a chat is always where I start. In fact I usually start discussing my idea in a chat room of some kind before I’ve even decided to start work on the project at all. 99% of the time the discussion ends with me deciding it’s not a good idea.

I’m all for this as a soft rule, but so many articles have terrible headlines that it can’t be a fixed one.

Also, a lot of the news sites I follow do A/B testing on every title. So every article has two titles.

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.

I’m not suggesting Beehaw/etc should be government funded. Rather I’m suggesting it’s already possible for basically anyone in the fediverse to report a post as needing urgent moderator attention.

I think there will be tax payer funded efforts, donation funded efforts, volunteers, etc that are unaffiliated with any specific instance but go through major instances and hit the report button where they consider it to be appropriate — not just manually with people but also with automated tools such as searching for images by a hash of their contents or maybe even running messages through a Large Language Model to check if it is, for example, a form of targeted harassment.

And yes, the report feature will be abused. That’s unavoidable and needs to be taken into account when deciding how to respond to a report. An algorithm could easily prioritise reports based on the history of past reports made by the same person / organisation.

Stack Exchange has a pretty good system - decisions by individuals are not trusted. Rather those trigger a review by a randomly selected (and trusted) individual to get a second opinion. And even after a decision has been made and an action has been taken (ban a user, etc) there’s often a third or even fourth review. And there are processes to appeal and question decisions.

It’s not an easy problem to solve, but as the creator of mastodon said - many hands make light work. The fediverse can some day have a billion people doing moderation tasks - where even simple acts like hitting the upvote button become part of the moderation system (upvote would imply that this account holder tends to make valuable contributions to the community, and should make the moderation system less likely to come down with a ban hammer).

And I also think there is scope for some communities to be entirely government funded. For example I’d love for every city in the world to run an offical community, with official local government anouncements as well as moderated discussions relevant to people who live in or are visiting the city.

I agree, but who’s going to pay for it?

How about police/the tax payer?

If university researchers can find the stuff, then police can find it too. There should be an established way to flag the user (or even the entire instance) so that content can be removed from the fediverse while simultaneously asking for all data that is available to try to catch the criminals.

And of course, if regular users come across anything illegal they will report it too, and it should be removed quickly (I’d hope immediately in many cases, especially if the post was by a brand new/untrusted account).

Have you heard of QMK? It’s open source keyboard firmware commonly used in custom desktop keyboards.

You’d easily be able to customise the layout (e.g. to add a euro key) with the VIA web interface.

QMK supports macros and “layers” (basically multiple keyboard layouts, with a key combination to swap between them). And of course being open source you can modify the source code.

Some people go pretty nuts with layers - here’s one with six layer keys (but more than six layers - notice they hold multiple layer keys at once sometimes): https://www.reddit.com/r/MechanicalKeyboards/comments/13755u4/theres_nothing_you_cant_type_with_steno/