While great inventions, neither of those are "scientific achievements" IMO. The silicon transistor on the other hand is a good example of an invention that came directly as a result of science.

Mechanical engineering and paper science are sciences too.

That we're had them for so long shouldn't diminish the fact that they have specific physical characteristics that need to be discovered and optimized.

Doesn’t make much sense to me. If you are going to use a credit card for some payments, why wouldn’t you use it for all?

While OR can be performance killers, in other cases it works perfectly fine, or sometimes even better than the equivalent UNION ALL query. In this case the problem is that they are applying a LIMIT with ORDER BY so it can’t do the usual BitmapOr optimization and thus the index ends up being used purely for sorting purposes.

Even if the tracker didn’t alert the thief, how hard is it for a thief to find a tracker on the bike on their own? I don’t think an AirTag is going to save too many bicycles.

Seems like the calculus would only make sense when you are talking about big expensive items - cars, boats, RVs. But for those you probably want a non-bluetooth solution.

The bikes getting stolen here are people's "cars". Electric cargo bikes with room for two children is what people use to get around. Getting that stolen ruins daily logistics for people. They cost up to $10k, which is a significant amount of money. People should really rethink the societal cost of bike thieving, they are both more expensive and more integral in how people move around. Not just children's toys.

I only want AirTags or similar to guard against thieves. So if that is not going to work it's quite useless for me. Luckily for bikes, there is https://bikefinder.com/

So I've got the tools to cut that thick bike chain but I somehow can't pull device inside the handlebars out or destroy it? It looks like their special tool is just a star security bit.

And also, would it really hold up to just being cut with whatever tools the thief used to cut your bike chain?

But sudo already doesn’t do that either. Eg sudo may ask for a password, and output some control sequences which hide the text so your password is not visible.

This feels like much ado about nothing.

Edit: Also don’t forget the “with great power comes great responsibility” blurb that sudo likes to output. I know that doesn’t happen in scripts when output is redirected, but I’m sure run0 will figure that out too.

asking for a password to do an authenticated action is about as far away from surprising as I can legitimately reason about.

The contextual blurb does have a way of disabling it in a persistent config, which is easy enough to set. It also goes to stderr and not stdout and does nothing to alter the output of the command itself.

It also does not show if you have NOPASSWD: set in your sudoers. So even less surprising.

> sudo may ask for a password, and output some control sequences which hide the text so your password is not visible.

You can turn this off for certain users and/or programs.

> Deferred or alternative scenario planning should be adopted, especially for large and expensive queries. As it is today, your plan is finalized before it is executed, even though earlier stages of execution could provide information (like rowcounts or cardinality estimates) that could dramatically improve later stage plans.

Alternative planning sounds awesome. I saw a query plan the other day where it expected about 1000 rows from some subquery so did a nested loop to an index scan. In reality there’s about a billion rows. I’m not sure yet why the estimate was so bad, but being able to pivot from a nested loop to a hash join if the row count crossed some threshold would be great at avoiding some catastrophic plans.

This new requirement from Apple related to the EU's Digital Services Act will display developer's contact information (address and phone number) on app store listings in the EU. It's not clear to me what problem this is solving, and this is going to be a fairly large privacy concern for many small businesses.

This seems so obvious that it’s baffling to me that the article doesn’t discuss this issue.

Note the ids appear to be 40-bit numbers, which isn’t great for security in the first place. I’m not sure off hand if there’s an efficient way to test all 2^40 values but seems feasible.

There’s several things which break down if you eliminate layer boundaries.

Can you still have a layer that is bigger than the image boundary, or would pixels get cropped when they move outside?

What happens if you apply a noise filter? Does it generate an infinitely large layer with noise? Or only generates noise on the visible portions? Or some other arbitrary rect in between?

And how would you handle the case of a small layer with a weird blend mode like multiply/subtract? With no boundaries it now must apply to the entire image below.

I’m sure there are solutions to these individually but it’s clearly a very complex problem to solve all these kinds of cases in an intuitive way.