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mindbleach, to privacy in Apple is bringing sideloading and alternate app stores to the iPhone

Apple is being forced to tolerate users controlling their own phones, and is kicking and screaming the whole way.

Don’t phrase this like they did it out of love. They’re trying not to do it at all.

mindbleach, to nostupidquestions in How do you address a letter to an army soldier or even a navy sailor on a ship?

For WWII specifically, anything written might not actually be sent. V-Mail services photographed letters, reduced them onto microfilm, and reprinted them overseas. A lot of people were sending a lot of mail and paper is fucking heavy.

AFAIK, addressing worked about the same way it works now: you’re given an address for a specific person, at a somewhat-abstract location. Sometimes it’s a very concrete place - no pun intended - like a permanent airbase or an actual city. Sometimes it’s a boat. Sometimes it’s a “forward operating base,” which falls somewhere between no-fun-allowed paintball facility and Burning Man with more grabassing.

Overseas military addresses must contain the APO or FPO designation along with a two–character “state” abbreviation of AE, AP, or AA and the ZIP Code or ZIP+4 Code.

AE is used for armed forces in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Canada; AP is for the Pacific; and AA is the Americas excluding Canada.

Also:

APO / DPO / FPO basics

APO – Army/Air Force Post Office. The Military Post Office for Army and Air Force personnel
FPO – Fleet Post Office. The Military Post Office for Navy and Marine personnel
DPO – Diplomatic Post Office. The preferred designation for mail addressed to Department of State overseas post offices.
MOM – Military Ordinary Mail. Mail originating from the Department of Defense.
MPO – Military Post Office. Provides postal services for military personnel.
PAL – Parcel Air Lift. An expedited service for Package Services is available for an additional fee.

Anyway you can also send “unit boxes” for a whole group, but I think you’re still supposed to address them a specific individual.

mindbleach, to memes in I love those path

I do some 8-bit coding and only last month realized logarithms allow dirt-cheap multiplication and division. I had never used them in a context where floating-point wasn’t readily available. Took a function I’d painstakingly optimized in 6502 assembly, requiring only two hundred cycles, and instantly replaced it with sixty cycles of sloppy C. More assembly got it down to about thirty-five… and more accurate than before. All from doing exp[ log[ n ] - log[ d ] ].

Still pull my hair out doing anything with tangents. I understand it conceptually. I know how it goddamn well ought to work. But it is somehow the fiddliest goddamn thing to handle, despite being basically friggin’ linear for the first forty-five degrees. Which is why my code also now cheats by doing a (dirt cheap!) division and pretending that’s an octant angle.

mindbleach, to memes in I love those path

“Concave?”

mindbleach, to linux in Reddit API blew up and now I run Linux?

Now see if “programming socks” do anything for you.

mindbleach, to memes in Don't read classical philosophers, they're cringe
mindbleach, to thefarside in 19 January 2024

“It must have come from upriver.”

mindbleach, to thefarside in 18 January 2024

There’s just no pleasing some people.

mindbleach, to thefarside in 18 January 2024
mindbleach, to memes in Put me in the trash can at the park.

“Y’all can bury me loose.”

mindbleach, to askelectronics in Light is light 🤷

Don’t even need to be facing them!

mindbleach, to memes in Hate when it happens
mindbleach, to thefarside in 16 January 2024

Oh, the squeedlyspooch.

mindbleach, to opensource in What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

Sorry, it just sounds like it was leading to some “ah-HA!” reversal, being so brief and general in response to normative statements about a complex topic.

Removing DRM is generally somewhere between outright illegal and getting attacked by flesh-eating lawyers.

Blizzard killed an independent Warcraft / Starcraft server called BNetD.

Nintendo’s whole attitude toward emulation is infuriating nonsense pushing for digital art to slowly rot.

mindbleach, to opensource in What comes after open source? Bruce Perens is working on it

In some contexts.

Is there a particular goal for this rhetorical poking?

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