Article URL: https://samwho.dev/reservoir-sampling/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43928315

Points: 253

# Comments: 58

Article URL: https://250bpm.substack.com/p/accountability-sinks

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43877301

Points: 483

# Comments: 298

Way back in 2021, in the Epic v. Apple court case, judge US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ordered Apple to allow third-party developers to tell users how to make payments inside iOS applications without going through Apple’s App Store. As we have come to expect from Apple, the company maliciously complied, lowering the commission on purchases outside of its ecosystem from 30% to 27%, while also adding a whole bunch of hoops and hurdles, like scare screens with doom-and-gloom language to, well, scare consumers into staying within Apple’s ecosystem for in-app payments.

Well, it turns out Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers is furious, giving Apple, Tim Cook, and its other executives what can only be described as a beatdown – even highlighting how one of Apple’s executives, under orders from Tim Cook, lied under oath several times. Gonzalez is referring this to the District Attorney for Northern California “to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.”

In stark contrast to Apple’s initial in-court testimony, contemporaneous business documents reveal that Apple knew exactly what it was doing and at every turn chose the most anticompetitive option. To hide the truth, Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath. Internally, Phillip Schiller had advocated that Apple comply with the Injunction, but Tim Cook ignored Schiller and instead allowed Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri and his finance team to convince him otherwise. Cook chose poorly. The real evidence, detailed herein, more than meets the clear and convincing standard to find a violation. The Court refers the matter to the United States Attorney for the Northern District of California to investigate whether criminal contempt proceedings are appropriate.

↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers

Gonzalez’ entire ruling is scathing, seething with rage, and will probably do more reputational damage to Apple, Tim Cook, and his executive team than any bendgate or antennagate could ever do. Judge Gonzalez:

This is an injunction, not a negotiation. There are no do-overs once a party willfully disregards a court order. Time is of the essence. The Court will not tolerate further delays. As previously ordered, Apple will not impede competition. The Court enjoins Apple from implementing its new anticompetitive acts to avoid compliance with the Injunction. Effective immediately Apple will no longer impede developers’ ability to communicate with users nor will they levy or impose a new commission on off-app purchases.

[…]

Apple willfully chose not to comply with this Court’s Injunction. It did so with the express intent to create new anticompetitive barriers which would, by design and in effect, maintain a valued revenue stream; a revenue stream previously found to be anticompetitive. That it thought this Court would tolerate such insubordination was a gross miscalculation. As always, the cover-up made it worse. For this Court, there is no second bite at the apple.

↫ US District Judge Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers

Gonzalez effectively destroyed any ability for Apple to charge commissions on purchases made inside iOS applications but outside Apple’s App Store, and this order will definitely find its way to the European Union as well, where it will serve as further evidence of Tim Cook’s and Apple’s continuous, never-ending contempt for the law and courts that uphold it. For its part, Apple has stated they’re going to appeal.

Good luck with that.

I haven’t had much use for Windows for a while, but I like to keep abreast of whatever fuckery Redmond has in store for everyone else. I picked up a new laptop with the dreaded Copilot key, and thus had to figure out how to make it useful. And along the way, found a bunch of other settings to adjust. The plan is that I won’t need any of this knowledge until it becomes obsolete, but the only way to ensure that outcome is to write it all down; thus by being available it will never be necessary.

copilot key

First up we have the Copilot key which has eaten the right control key. Turns out I use the right control key a lot. Actually, having the key taken away led me to observe my typing habits more closely. I use opposite side shift keys (left shift and L, right shift and A) but same side control (left control A and right control L). Thank you keyboard for affording me this opportunity for self reflection, but now I’d like control back.

The obvious thing to do is to search the internet. Unfortunately, we’re in a war against Big Basilisk and conscientious objectors have flooded the forums with resistance. (I’m trying to put a positive spin on things.) Do not believe the lies about using PowerToys to remap the key. It doesn’t work. Also, the next version of Windows will not include a setting to change it either, at least not to anything useful.

What does work is installing PowerToys and creating a new keyboard shortcut. This is actually pretty straightforward once you know the possibilty exists and to not waste time on a keymap. It comes with some caveats, though.

Sometimes PowerToys crashes and then the shortcut disappears. Quality. In more than twenty years of using xmodmap to map the windows key to something useful, it has not once ever forgotten its mapping.

Apparently because the Copilot key is some weird ctrl shift F23 hybrid, the shortcut doesn’t always play nice if you also press shift. This primarily seems to affect WSL. Pressing copilot tab would advance tabs in my terminal. Pressing shift copilot tab to move back would return to the previous tab, but also leave the shift key stuck down, CAPSLOCK style. It was weeks of frustration until I figured out it depends on the precise order I chord the keys. If I lift copilot first, then lifting shift generates the proper event. If I lift shift first, somehow the key up event gets lost.

wsl

To make the system a little more useful, I installed WSL. Find a buntu in the store, click install, click run. This creates a little terminal window that says it needs to install WSL. Okay, let that go. But the ubuntu window still says it can’t run. Whatever the WSL installer does, it doesn’t actually install the WSL Windows feature. You still have to go into control panel to add Windows features, and check WSL. It’s literally one line of powershell, but the installer can’t run it.

At some point since I last used WSL, I believe they changed the virtual framebuffer size. It’s only half the resolution of my screen, and scaled up with blocky pixel doubling. Apparently, somebody ran their linux app and it was too tiny, so instead of telling them to fix their config, the WSL team just force scaled the framebuffer. So now I, who know how to set an appropriate scale for applications, am forced to look at grotesque aliasing until I get frustrated enough to find the secret WSL settings.

[system-distro-env]
WESTON_RDP_HI_DPI_SCALING=false
WESTON_RDP_FRACTIONAL_HI_DPI_SCALING=false
WESTON_RDP_DEBUG_DESKTOP_SCALING_FACTOR=100

That goes into a %HOME%/.wslgconfig. Note that the filename has an extra G; it is not the .wslconfig file that already exists. (Also make sure you don’t accidentally create a .wslgconfig.txt file.)

Drawing to the front buffer in an OpenGL program doesn’t work. To avoid unnecessary buffer swapping, I will draw to just the front buffer. The WSL virtgl or whatever doesn’t appear to notice this and fails to update the display. Have to use full double buffering for everything.

I think vsync is broken. If you want a serene frame rate, you have to insert your own pauses.

I could not figure out how to set the keyboard repeat rate. Nothing I changed would slow it down. I like to set it just right for me to hold j and scroll through a file while reading. Fortunately, I own the terminal and was able to insert my own key repeat rate limiter.

edge

Figured I should use edge and bing while we’re here to see what’s what.

Go to Settings > System > Show tabs from apps if you want alt tab to be useful.

The setting to disable saving passwords is buried in the wallet settings.

Need to disable elastic overscroll in edge flags or pages bounce around wildly. I’m fortunate to have fairly good fine motor control, but I still can’t execute a two finger vertical scroll with zero horizontal movement. Somebody on the edge team decided to interpret this to mean I want the content to vibrate back and forth as well. No thanks. There are remnants of forum posts talking about scrolling personality, but that option has been removed.

Edge has a feature called efficiency mode. The help says the settings are balanced or maximum, but the status indicators says it’s currently moderate.

misc

Pleased to report sticky keys appears off by default, and I’m no longer hounded by beeps after tapping the shift key a few times.

Pleased to report there is finally a setting to reverse mouse wheel scroll direction without installing a vendor app per mouse.

Failed search: how to disable wifi when sleeping. Microsoft may have figured out how to do low power always connected not really sleeping mode without draining the laptop battery, but it’s murder on my phone battery. They’ve finally invented an iPhone killer that works. The only way to get it to disconnect is to disable tethering on the phone.

Touchpad settings: Three finger gesture: tap -> middle click. Four fingers -> nothing or it opens notifications. Took me a week of the notifications panel popping open randomly before I was able to figure this out.

If the weather app is wide enough to display three panels, it shows a bunch of ads, but they are hidden if it’s only two panels wide.

Turn off all audio enhancements in system > sound > speakers. Sounds like constant crackling static. This only affects some programs, so I’m speculating it has something to do with buffer sizes and consuming data faster than the program expects. No idea really.

Now that we’ve installed PowerToys, turn off the mouse finder or it will draw weird circles when you press control.

Stopping OneDrive backup ate my endless legend saves. Dozens of hours of progress lost, like tears in the rain. I read the prompt pretty carefully, and I was fairly sure that I was only turning off backups, but apparently doing so causes the system to delete everything in the documents folder. So make sure you get to that early, before you have anything to lose.

Find Windows compatibility telemetry in task manager. Kill it before it kills your CPU.

Renaming something pinned in the start menu is not at all obvious. The right click open file location takes you to the folder in the start menu hierarchy, where you can rename the shortcut. I didn’t click it at first because I thought it would open the application folder.

Window now has an attention feature, where it’s always watching and will lock the screen if you walk away. I guess this could be useful if you struggle to press win L. The implementation isn’t great. In particular, the option to dim the screen when you look away doesn’t restore the screen when you look back. I’m always looking around, so this was pretty annoying.

Unboxing a new computer still requires hours of updates and reboots. And this is after the hour long first time setup. The initial setup took forever because whatever it was downloading stalled many times. I can see on my router that no packets were flowing, then it would download a little more, then stall, then trickle in some more.

The worst part is I turn on performance mode so that the never ending updates will finish before I turn into a pumpkin, and then Windows hounds me with popups about wasting electricity. The cherry on top is the little notice that Windows Update is dedicated to reducing carbon footprint by using green power. Maybe we could try just using less power? I’m pretty sure half the power consumption of this system has come from installing updates.

I was typing up the first draft of these notes in OneNote. At some point I installed Visual Studio and the color scheme in OneNote changed. Great.

Copilot itself

Figured since they’ve gone to all the trouble to take over my keyboard, I should at least try out this miracle software. I gave it a very serious business task of helping me OCR a sign I saw at a business. This is real work, right?

Without prompting, it offers up its own commentary on the sign. Then when I ask what the sign says, copilot has forgotten how to read. How can something this dumb help you with your job? What is your job?

Can’t wait until I get the Recall update.

Article URL: https://koomen.dev/essays/horseless-carriages/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43773813

Points: 525

# Comments: 342

Article URL: https://fedi.rib.gay/notes/a6xqityngfubsz0f

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43775926

Points: 788

# Comments: 255