I think it's inaccurate to claim that there are people who aren't enamored with unions simply because people don't like unions.
Take police unions for example. It is well documented that many unions are fervently against policies such as always-on body cams that theoretically should protect a (good) cop and the citizen. Fail that, they are against releasing body cam footage.[0] Police unions are also known to protect abusive officers. [1]
I'm not trying to claim that there isn't an anti-union attitude, but it is not simply associating them with communism.
And therefore an engineering union is probably going to be bad?
Some police unions do these things and need to be stopped. But that does not mean all unions in every field are bad. There are evil corporations too, are all corporations bad? Are the majority? Why does the public precive that differently?
Since the cold war, the communism claim has given way to universally negative portal: the sole presentation in fact is negative. Usually by tacitly implying an unusual behavior is typical and inevitable of every possible union.
The difference is Exxon runs ads of happy children running through flowery fields and unions don't. And pointing out a union's deficiencies is not going to loose sponsors, possibly the reverse.
Keeping the lightning port is what really jumped out at me. Now some iPads are going to have USB C and others are going to have lightning, all under the same umbrella product of the iPad.
What is even worse (!) is that the iPhones and iPads still ship with a USB A to lightning cable, meaning even users inside the Apple ecosystem need a USB C/thunderbolt dongle with usb A ports to connect their iPhones/iPads to their computers. I have no idea how this decision was approved without thinking about this.
1) USB-C doesn't fit on the old iPad mini case design. The mini is used in a lot of embedded applications where keeping the exact same form factor is important.
2) It's incorrect to say that "now" some iPads will have USB-C and others Lightning. That was already the case. This simply continues the status quo.
3) It's also incorrect to say that "users" in the Apple ecosystem will "need" a dongle. That's only the case for those with MacBook Pros. That's a minority of users.
4) You also got it wrong about the iPhone. You don't need any cable at all to connect an iPhone to a Mac; they connect wirelessly. For those who want to do this, the majority of users are still on Macs with USB-A.
It's probably more like 300 iPads. However, I'm not sure this really matters as you get the cables and chargers with the new iPads and you would have to purchase new cases anyway, even it was the same form factor as the old machines.
I'm talking the classroom cart[1], so no, we don't have to buy new anything other than the iPads. If you are in a school setting and you are managing iPads lose, then you really need to get a cart. Just the theft deterrence is worth it.
I'd love to see some data on how much of Apples profits come directly from selling dongles.
Their hardware nowadays is probably designed to facilitate a certain amount of dongle sales.
They will mark-up the sale price of an intel cpu by 3 or 4 100%, but the markup on the dongles is even greater, 800 or 1000% it seems to be comparing the prices to similar cables.
I keep seeing accusations that Apple has a nefarious plan to make money through dongles, but if that were the case, wouldn't they have more proprietary connectors rather than less? The only dongle I have for my iPad Pro is one that allows HDMI output, and it's from Anker. And while I do have a USB-C to USB-A dongle from Apple for my MacBook Pro, in practice I rarely used it; I just used cables with the right connectors on both ends (e.g., USB-C to Mini USB), and none of those cables were from Apple except the USB-C to USB-C cable that came with it.
> to connect their iPhones/iPads to their computers
Why do you need to connect your iPad to your computer? I have never connected mine - everything goes through the cloud or Bluetooth. Are you developing apps on it? That's a pretty niche use-case.
I think these are pretty obtuse use-cases these days for the vast majority of people. I also manage videos and things but I do it via the cloud like most people. You may disagree with a that but it explains why they went that route - it wasn't a case of them not thinking.
Why? You keep repeating this without ever defending your argument. As of right now, and in the near future, more Mac users have USB-A. There is simply no compelling reason to make this change unless you absolutely need extra features provided uniquely by USB-C. And this device doesn't need anything like that.
The reverse problem (I have lots and lots of USB-A devices, while the only USB-C device in my house is my wife's Android phone, so like almost everyone else I had "no compelling reason" to want a device with any USB-C ports, let alone only USB-C ports) didn't convince Apple to leave one or two USB-A ports in their pro macbooks, unfortunately. That you can't go buy a current macbook and current iphone or ipad and connect the two when you get home unless you buy extra stuff, but you can if you have an older macbook, is silly. It is a point in favor of that "Apple's greatest MacBook Pro yet: the 2015" joke/actually-true-thing, I guess.
I know it's a problem! But I don't think it's Apple's job to forever hold back their development for people's very particular personal problems. You bog a product down by making sure you can handle all these issues. Keep it simple and move on, I say.
If you can't get reliable WiFi maybe the iPad isn't the product for you? I don't think that's an issue - there's loads of other products on the market and people who do want the clean Apple experience can get that. Why do all products have to do everything and suit the entire world's crazy workflows? You end up with a Homer Car.
As someone that historically relied on an iPad Mini for media consumption on the many weekly flights I take, it is not realistic to download 10+ GB of content directly onto the device. Especially since I don't use Apple's ecosystem of media and generally rely on my own, I find myself using the VLC app to watch content that is loaded via iTunes and its ability to load files as you would any other document app.
The "use case" of connecting your devices to your computer is still alive and well, despite being in the era of cloud.
"alive and well" might be a stretch. I don't know a soul who plugs their devices into their computers. Using VLC to watch media is also a blast from the past. Grandpa, is that you?
I like lightning port, it's pretty natural compared to USB-C. Male port which could break on cable, female port which won't break on device. USB-C seems like very fragile decision, so it's only good that they don't abandon their better port. That said, they should definitely ship all necessary cables, it's really strange that they trying to save tiny money on premium product.
You have this backwards. Apple’s shoddy (but slim!) cable construction notwithstanding, the Lightning male metal bit is quite strong. The parts that wear out are the springy parts in the female connector. USB-C puts the springy parts in the male connector.
(Lightning also seems prone to arcing or overheating damage to the power pins. Source: visual inspection of my many failed Apple and third-party Lightning cables.)
Yes, I've had every lightning cable, apple or not, show darkened and eventually dying 4th pins. It's infuriating. You essentially have to unplug the USB-A side first to prevent it from happening.
Strange enough I've not seen this happen to a lot of other people.
Strange enough I've not seen this happen to a lot of other people.
Yeah, I've never had that happen, and I've been using Lightning cables since they were a thing. I've rarely had any problems with Lightning cables, though. (The same couldn't be said for their predecessor 30-pin cable.)
I'm trying to think if there could be anything weird about your environment doing that, but I'm drawing a blank. "You're holding it wrong" seems even less applicable here than it would to antennas. :)
> Then I found out that -white space is important-.
I hear this a lot and I think it's a misunderstood statement. Python does not care if you do not have a space in assignments or arithmetic or between commas or parentheses.
What Python does care about is the indentation of the source code. The indentation is what guides the structure - which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about indentation!
What I really mean to say is there are plenty of valid complaints with Python, but white space just is not one of them. If you are writing good code in a language with C-syntax you are doing just as much indentation.
>which is already what we are doing with most languages that don't care about indentation!
No that's not what the other languages are doing. They have explicit structure defined in the code (with Lisps being at the extreme end), which allows the development environment to automatically present the code in a way that's easy to read. This frees the developer from the job of manually formatting their code like some sort of caveman.
As someone with 8+ years of experience of programming in Python for a job, I've seen countless of bugs spawned by incorrectly indented code, which is incredibly difficult to spot. I've seen people far more experienced than me make these bugs because they didn't notice something being misindented. To me, the fact that we have to deal with this is laughable. Especially considering it's so easy to fix Python the language so that indentation becomes unambiguous: add an "end" statement for each deindent (aka closing brace).
> No that's not what the other languages are doing.
Is this a claim that people do not indent in other languages and leave it to the dev environment? Yes, those languages don't rely on indentation but people do still manually indent or rely on their environment to indent it for them to make the code remotely readable. I for one cannot read Java without it also being indented correctly.
> This frees the developer from the job of manually formatting their code like some sort of caveman.
I honestly don't understand this part. What tools are you using that don't do indentation for you? Emacs and vim extensions, vscode, Pycharm, atom...all of them have very intuitive indentation for when you type. The most you have to do is hit backspace after finishing a block.
> Especially considering it's so easy to fix Python the language so that indentation becomes unambiguous: add an "end" statement for each deindent (aka closing brace).
As someone with a lot of Ruby experience, the "end" is absolutely not more clear than indentation. There's a reason environments highlight do-end pairs together: because it's hard to know which ones match which.
>people do still manually indent or rely on their environment to indent it for them
Nobody manually indents their code. Almost any language other than Python is unambiguous to indent, so the computer does it for you.
>I for one cannot read Java without it also being indented correctly.
That's easy, just copy paste Java code into an editor and press a button to indent everything. Voila! Good luck if you're dealing with Python code which got misindented somehow (e.g. copying from some social network website which uses markup that doesn't preserve whitespace, which is most of them).
>What tools are you using that don't do indentation for you?
Python code cannot be re-indented unambiguously. So if you copy paste a chunk of Python code from one place to another, you can't just press a button to reindent everything. You have to painstakingly move it to the right level and hope that it still works. In Common Lisp I just press Ctrl-Alt-\ and everything becomes indented correctly.
>The most you have to do is hit backspace after finishing a block.
That works if you only write new code and never have to change existing code.
>There's a reason environments highlight do-end pairs together: because it's hard to know which ones match which.
No, the open/close brackets allow the IDE to highlight them so that the programmer can clearly see the scope of the code block. This is a useful feature of the language. In Python it's almost impossible to see which deindent matches what if the function is long enough/deep enough.
This position is hard to maintain after you've spent an hour trying to debug a nonsensical error just to realize you opened the python file in an editor that used a different tab/space setting than the file was created in. Significant whitespace is one of the biggest misfeatures in programming history.
I've been writing Python for over 20 years, and I don't think this has happened to me one single time. I'm not some kind of super programmer; I make as many mistakes as anybody else and spend too long debugging stupid mistakes occasionally.
I've mixed spaces and tabs before on a handful of occasions, and it's always told me straight away what the problem is.
Here is an example of mixed spaces and tabs for indentation:
IndentationError: unindent does not match any outer indentation level
The very first thing I would look at is the indentation if I got an error like that. You hardly need to "spend an hour trying to debug a nonsensical error" when you see an error like that.
"Indentation error" screams "fix the indentation", and code is indented with whitespace, so yeah.
When something tells you "indentation error", where's the first place you would look, if not the indentation? When you know you have a problem with the indentation, what do you think you have to change, if not the whitespace? There isn't a lot of opportunity to go in the wrong direction here.
Don't get me wrong, Python definitely has unexpected, difficult to debug behaviour for newbies (e.g. mutable default arguments). But this in particular isn't one of them. This is 2+2=4 level stuff.
This is a strange response. The only thing I can say is that "indentation issues" does not imply "mixed whitespace issues". Your responses are implicitly conflating the two.
>what do you think you have to change, if not the whitespace?
Note that the same error shows up when you have an inconsistent number of spaces to indent a block.
Anecdotally, from several sources teaching in tech, it’s the significant white space that makes python much more approachable to non-nerds. For some reason matching nested braces isn’t palatable to them. I attribute Python’s wide adoption in the non-nerd world in part to this (the other part being the ecosystem).
The point is that if you open a file with a different editor it was created with, its very easy to mix tabs and spaces without any kind of indication that that's what is going on.
But doesn't the whitespace issue gimp Python's lambda syntax? AFAIK you're limited to one expression or function call, to get around the fact that you can't just inline a completely new function (with its associated control flow structure).
And what about one-liners, a la Perl? Stack Overflow answers seem to imply either embedding newlines in your string, or using semi-colons (as a Python newbie... you can use semi-colons?!)
> AFAIK you're limited to one expression or function call, to get around the fact that you can't just inline a completely new function (with its associated control flow structure)
On the other hand, if your function needs a flow structure that's more complicated than a single line, should you really be inlining it?
And I think any such use case that you really want to inline can probably be accomplished with list comprehensions
Why should code in a REPL be indented correctly? What if you copy from your own terminal (which may only support spaces) to your codebase, which may be in tabs? It doesn't make sense for a language exclaiming the principle of we're all adults here to not allow you to schedule irrelevant formatting fixes yourself.
I find some take-home assignments to be completely reasonable and preferable to whiteboard interviews.
For example, Klaviyo in Boston (no relation, I just interviewed with them at one point) has a take-home assignment listed here [0]. It is simple enough that I can finish it in the same time as phone technical interviews and applies to the company's product and job requirements.
Though I am certain there are companies that have unreasonable take-home assignments.
> Utter nonsense. John DeFrancis debunked your interpretation of this drawing back in 1989. This is not a letter at all. It was a prop in a parlor game played by Yukaghari girls: one girl would sketch a drawing and the others would take turns trying to guess the story behind it.
> Geoffrey Sampson helped to propagate this myth in his book on writing systems first published in 1985. Sampson published a retraction in 1994.
While I could not find any verification in a cursory search, maybe we should take this with a grian of salt
> DeFrancis’s argument to this effect turns on examination of an example quoted in Sampson (1985: 28‑9) of purported complex semasiography, the ‘Yukaghir love letter’. I had taken this example from a well-known book on writing, Diringer (n.d.: 35), and I retailed Diringer’s explanation of it without trying to check this. DeFrancis has done the discipline a considerable service by investigating the history of the example in detail, and it turns out to be something rather different from what Diringer and I described, and arguably not an example of ‘communication’ at all.
It seems nearly certain that this image is not what it was presented to be.
Good find. I did some more research on John DeFrancis and found his writings on the topic. Pg 32 discusses the "love letter" being part of a semi-ritualized party game. [1]
John DeFrancis was an amazing thoughtful and insightful linguist and was, as you can see from this example, very happy to look into what he considered bizarre claims (which he sometimes discovered were true). I'm a huge fan of his work.
Very impressive indeed; I only clicked the 'Visible Speech' link thanks to reading your comment; the diagram illustrating the lineage / spread of the the 'Yukaghir Love Letter' is worth the click alone.
Indeed, it's a very nice story, but appears to be fake. I won't duplicate what other commenters have added in this thread, but one other approach to investigating is to see whether any other images of Yukaghir semasiographic letters can be found online.
Perhaps this wouldn't be foolproof (given that the Yukaghir population is very small, and their materials might not have been published and indexed widely online) but the absence of any other examples certainly seems a little suspect.
Thanks so much for pointing this out. I thought the letter's interpretation was beautiful, and I'm tremendously disappointed now, but I'm glad that I know.
So this whole article was, roughly speaking, like attempting to interpret the meaning of a scrap of paper used in a game of Pictionary, given only that piece of paper?
