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Patterns.dev (patterns.dev)
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Love this! Just wanted to note that I think there’s a mistake on the flyweight pattern page’s example. You’re using getting a boolean with Set.has but treating it like a Book (as if you had used Set.get). I also don’t really understand how this saves memory if you’re spreading the result into a new object, but maybe someone here can enlighten me!
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[delayed]
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Thanks, I was looking for something just like this today!
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
Rubio stages font coup: Times New Roman ousts Calibri (reuters.com)
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You know what they always say…never waste a good crisis. This is our opportunity to tell our friends that neither Times New Roman nor Calibri are very good fonts. If they’re using Word—and they definitely are—Aptos is a better choice than either. If they want to look fancy and have a serif in their life, maybe they could try a little Cambria. But if they have a twinkle in their eye and seem like they want to learn, take a moment to introduce them to the wide and glorious world of Roboto. Tell them about the wonders of medium and light and semi-bold and extra-bold and wide and display and condensed and custom ligatures. Give them a taste of what real office typography could’ve been if Microsoft didn’t absolutely destroy it in the 90’s. Open their mind. Show them the truth. This is your time.
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Seriously, with all the shit going on in the world, these guys spend time thinking about the wokeness of computer fonts?! What a clown show. Strike-through this administration.
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Most federal courts require documents filed there to be in Times New Roman font.
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Moreover, due to executive order the typeface is now called “Times New American”.
I've seen some comments about how Times New Roman was replaced with something else to improve readability by many. There's an irony: the _Times_ (of London) commissioned it in 1932 to improve the readability of its newspaper, which previously used a Didone/Modern style typeface. I like Times New Roman and I find Calibri, a rounded-corner sans serif, to be an absolute abomination of milquetoast typography.
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It may look better but it's harder to read basically across the board for anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters. Sans serif fonts are easier for people with dyslexia without going all the way to a dyslexia specific font. They're also generally far better for people with all sorts of poor vision. It really comes down to the fact that it's better to be functional, forms don't need to /look/ good they need to work well. For aesthetic things we can still use the pretty fonts.
US has genuinely lost it It genuinely feels like someone worked out that you don't actually need to build a better stealth bomber than the B2. You just need to infiltrate government enough to have them debate what fonts are woke Then I think "nah surely not. can't be that easy". And then next week...another insane thing comes out of US republican camp. I'm starting to think one does indeed not need B2s to defeat an enemy
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Go visit the popular hangouts for folks of the far right persuasion and you learn pretty quickly that this stuff is absolutely important to them, and they get spun up about it. What you don't see discussed is policy. It's almost 100% outrage about cultural issues and pretty much any reason to hate the left. Never substance. To be fair, in response to this dynamic the left has gotten pretty good at focusing on hate for the other side, too. We all lose when nobody wants to talk policy any more.
My understanding has always been that serif fonts read better for long text, and sans-serif for short text - so signage in Arial and policy statements in Times New Roman. And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously. There are all sorts of statistical rules falling out of studies about where the long/short divide is, ambient lighting, blah blah blah - but human vision is even more variable than most biological quantities, so in the end general rules are the best one can really do. Here of course, it's nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs, while the captain targets the next iceberg "to teach the ice a lesson!"
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> And Comic Sans for letters sent to friends finishing design school, obviously. ... and libressl. https://web.archive.org/web/20140625075722/http://www.libressl.org/ (and the talk - https://youtu.be/GnBbhXBDmwU?si=gMlhb2Xis5V8sR6K&t=2939 )
Calibri font has "I" and "l" the same, according to Wikipedia. A better font should avoid characters being too similar (such as "I" and "l" and "1"). Another issue is due to the font size and font metrics, how much space it will take up on the page, to be small enough to avoid wasting paper and ink but also not too small to read. So, there are multiple issues in choosing the fonts; however, Times New Roman and Calibri are not the only two possible choices. Maybe the government should make up their own (hopefully public domain) font, which would be suitable for their purposes (and avoiding needing proprietary fonts), and use that instead.
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True though the confusion about that is largely when you're not dealing with words like passwords or hashes. In the context of words it's going to be generally disambiguated by context, I can't think of an example off hand in writing where I and l will that ambiguous. The removal of serifs probably has a higher impact to more people unless I'm missing some common situation where they'd be easy to confuse in context.
That's the "diversity" they were talking about?? Fucks sake.
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It's not, although blind or highly vision impared people who use screen readers sometimes also have to rely on OCR when the document isn't properly formatted with text. Using a sans serif font generally helps anyone with difficulty distinguishing letters so dyslexic, low vision, aging vision etc. individuals. It's not just for digital OCR.
No, because normal people can read "l00l" as a number just fine and don't actually care if the underlying encoding is different. AI won't care either. It's just us on-the-spectrum nerds with our archaic deterministic devices and brains trained on them that get wound up about it. Designing a font for normal readers is just fine .
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Strange argument to double down on. I can see the contradiction right in your comment. l00l Also your reduction of accessibility concerns to autistic people is rather offensive.
Neither of these decisions likely originated with the SoS themselves. I say the reasoning matters, though. You can try to avoid the discourse, but if you're American then you're in it. This administration is destroying the country for many reasons: profit, hatred of democracy, racism, control. And FWIW, it's the current administration foaming at the mouth about a font change, not the last one. In this case, the decision is solely because the last guy did something and they can't let anything from the last administration stand. Let's say, in an alternate universe where Rubio's department genuinely thought there were cost or coordination issues with Calibri. They could have reversed the decision and cited that. But no: Making a font that is more compatible with screen reader technology is woke. Their words, not mine.
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> Let's say, in an alternate universe where Rubio's department genuinely thought there were cost or coordination issues with Calibri. They could have reversed the decision and cited that. So apparently Daring Fireball (of all places) got their hands on the full memo text[1]. And in all of the text, there are 2 sentences total that refer to DEI at all, the rest of it is talking about those coordination and cost issues. So I guess they did do that, they just also had to take their shots at DEI because why be in politics these days if you can't virtue signal even the most standard of decisions. [1]: https://daringfireball.net/misc/2025/12/state-department-return-to-tradition.text
When would you ever want bubblesort? (2023) (buttondown.com)
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When sorting eigenpairs of a dense matrix, usually tou end up with a Schur decomposition. The basic operation that you can do is swap two adjacent eigenvalues on the diagonal, so bubblesort is a natural candidate.
The article, and many of the responses, are hinting at the fact that bubblesort is an example of an anytime algorithm. This is a wide class of algorithms which provide a correct answer after some amount of time, but provide an increasingly good answer in increasing amounts of time short of the completion time. This is a super valuable property for real time systems (and many of the comments about games and animations discuss that). The paper that introduced me to the category is "Anytime Dynamic A*" [0], and I think it's both a good paper and a good algorithm to know. [0] https://cdn.aaai.org/ICAPS/2005/ICAPS05-027.pdf
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Am I missing something? If the algorithm is interrupted, the list will not be sorted. How exactly does it fit the criteria of an anytime algo?
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Okay, but it gives you a mostly good answer! Unlike many other sorts where if you interrupt it before the last step, you get total nonsense. It's basically asymptotically approacting the correct (sorted) list instead of shuffling the list in weird ways until it's all magically correct in the end.
I read this all the time from other people, but for me, Selection sort is the easiest to remember and implement. My next easiest would be Insertion sort. Bubble sort doesn't click for me easily. I think it's because the terminating condition seems uglier than Selection sort or Insertion sort. I always have a little voice in the back of my mind, "Is this outer loop guaranteed to terminate?"
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Terminating condition in Bubble sort is "did we swap any values during this loop"? Yes -> continue, No -> list is already sorted, exit the loop. I don't believe that insertion/selection sort is easier to grasp. Can you type it from memory, without looking it up? Here's bubble sort: var swapped = true while swapped: swapped = false for i in 0 .. list.len-2: if list[i] > list[i+1]: swap(list[i], list[i+1]) swapped = true
Why use it over insertion sort which is faster and easier to implement?
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There is "early exit after the first swap", which actually makes his algorithm closer to insertion sort than bubble sort. If the list couldn't change between each pass, it would be a very inefficient insertion sort in O(n^3) as you are constantly scanning the part of the list that is already sorted. But this is a case where theory doesn't count as much as having an acceptable result. It is typical in video games, if it plays well and looks fine, who cares if it is incorrect. Here I guess that sometimes a sprite appears on top of another sprite when it should have been behind it, because of the early exit, but while playing, it turned out not to be noticeable enough to change the algorithm.
↙ time adjusted for second-chance
How Google Maps allocates survival across London's restaurants (laurenleek.substack.com)
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Can anyone recommend an alternative to GMaps for searching for restaurants, services, or general "discovery" near a location?
I never understood why the "collaborative filtering" approach never took off with most review options. Google Maps shows you what the average person thinks is a good restaurant, meaning the rich get richer faster and tiny statistical noise converts to durable competitive advantage. Instead, I'd love for Google to understand me well enough to show me which restaurants I would disproportionately love compared to other people based on its understanding of my taste profiles. That way, the love can be shared amongst a much wider base of restaurants and each distinctive restaurant could find its 10,000 true fans. On top of that, it actually gives me an incentive to rate things. Right now, you only rate from some vague sense of public service instead of "this can actively improve your experience with our product". It's not just Google Maps, Netflix used to operate on the model of deep personalization that they've slowly de-emphasized over the years. I'm still waiting for Letterboxd to introduce a feature to give me personalized film recs based on the over 1000 ratings I've given it over the years as a paying customer but they seem in no hurry to do so. Amazon used to take your purchase history into account when ordering search results but I think that's also been significantly de-emphasized. About the only arena this is widespread is streaming music services like Spotify.
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I have a theory: They realized the right approach is to focus purely on the yes/no of what you choose to consume, rather than trying to optimize the consumption experience itself. Remember how YouTube and Netflix used to let you rate things on 1-5 stars? That disappeared in favor of a simple up/down vote. Most services are driven by two metrics: consumption time and paid subscriptions. How much you enjoy consuming something does not directly impact those metrics. The providers realized the real goal is to find the minimum possibly thing you will consume and then serve you everything above that line. Trying to find the closest match possible was actually the wrong goal, it pushed you to rank things and set standards for yourself. The best thing for them was for you to focus on simple binary decisions rather than curating the best experience. They are better off having you begrudgingly consume 3 things rather than excited consuming 2. The algorithmic suggestion model is to find the cutoff line of what you're willing to consume and then surface everything above that line ranked on how likely you are to actually push the consume button, rather than on how much you'll enjoy it. The majority of which (due to the nature of a bell curve) is barely above that line.
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I have horrible news for you. Google had it, then they killed it https://www.reddit.com/r/GoogleMaps/comments/1737ft9/google_quietly_killed_your_match/
It's always annoyed me that zooming in on a building will not reliably show the business that operates there. I understand that at low zoom levels you may need to filter what is displayed based on the high density, but when I zoom in I want to see everything that is there. Sometimes I am forced to go to street view to read the sign, then type the company name into the search box to force the business marker to show up and get clickable. I've found Apple Maps is a little better in this regard. They show a higher density of business markers at any given zoom level.
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OpenStreetMap-based maps tend to be much better in this regard. Although this is counterbalanced by the fact that they tend to have less data on businesses in general.
Getting a Gemini API key is an exercise in frustration (ankursethi.com)
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I think now the Google One AI Pro subscription directly works for raising limits on the CLI? But otherwise, there is an Individual subscription. The problem is it doesn’t work out of the box. You have to create a whole Google Cloud project and attach the API to it to get it to work. Otherwise the CLI would stop logging you in, which it did when the account was free. The worst part is if that cloud project had any code in it, CLI will use it as context on every prompt.
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How long before Gemini is killed by Google and gets a nice grave at Killed By Google ? https://killedbygoogle.com/ I give it a single digit number of years.
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Hi if the Gemini API team is reading this can you please be more transparent about 'The specified schema produces a constraint that has too many states for serving. ...' when using Structured Outputs. I assume it has something to do with the underlying constraint grammar/token masks becoming too long/taking too long to compute. But as end users we have no way of figuring out what the actual limits are. OpenAI has more generous limits on the schemas and clearer docs. https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#supported-schemas . You guys closed this issue for no reason: https://github.com/googleapis/python-genai/issues/660 Other than that, good work! I love how fast the Gemini models are. The current API is significantly less of a shitshow compared to last year with property ordering etc.
Add me to the list of "saw nano banana pro, attempted to get an API key for like 5min, failed and gave up." Maybe I am a dummy (quite possible) but I have seen many smart people similarly flummoxed! You can walk into a McDonalds without being able to read, write, or speak English, and the order touchscreen UI is so good (er, "good") that you can successfully order a hamburger in about 60 seconds. Why can't Google (of all companies) figure this out?
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I tried at some point to sign up for whatever IBMs AI cloud was called. None of the documentation was up to date, when you clicked on things you ended up in circular loops that took you back where you started. Somehow there were several kinds of api keys you could make, most seemingly decoys and only one correct one. The whole experience was like one of those Mario castle levels where if you don’t follow the exact right pattern you just loop back to where you started. It makes sense for IBM, seems like google is just reaching that stage?
As the article states, generating the key itself is easy. But getting credit and billing are the issues.
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I have it running and calling but it's not showing the usage and I set it up the day gemini 3 came out
Sure, and they should have that option. But in my experience business-folks ask techies to evaluate services all the time, and ideally we can just start out in the low-/no-touch tier to feel things out. If that tier isn't available, us techs might just try a different service.
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The kind of products hidden behind sales calls are generally the sort where the opinion of IC-level tech staff is next to irrelevant. With these kinds of products, the purchase decision is being made at a group level, the contract sizes are large, and budgetary approvals are required. It’s a snowball the size of a house, and it started rolling down the mountain months (or years) before it got to your desk. Literally nobody cares if you buy a single license or not, and if you (personally) refuse to try it because it doesn’t have self-service, you’ll be ignored for being the bad stereotype of an “engineer”, or worse. About the only time you’ll be asked to evaluate such a product as an IC is when someone wants an opinion about API support or something equivalent. And if you refuse to do it, the decision-makers will just find the next guy down the hall who won’t be so cranky.
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