This issue was related to an old macOS optimization called "detached mode" or FSLP (fullscreen low power). There were related bugs in Chrome and Firefox:
macOS skipped compositing when only a single fullscreen surface with a black background was being rendered, but there were many ways for that render path to misbehave.
It only ever affected integrated graphics on dual GPU Macs, as far as I can remember.
Not suggesting an alternative model here, but I think that Google et. al (based on my own time working on Chrome) don't take that responsibility quite as seriously as they should. Being responsible may be an accident, but being dominant in any given area is not. The forces inside Google which take over parts of the world do so without really caring about the long term commitment.
It is so possible to preserve XSLT and other web features e.g. by wrapping them in built-in (potentially even standardized) polyfills, but that kind of work isn't incentivized over new features and big flashy refactors.
Generally speaking yes, they are different. One pattern is that you do something to create a source of audio, and the layer below you starts handing you buffers to fill. With each buffer you send back you can indicate if you want to keep getting called with fresh buffers — if not, the calls stop until you poke something to resume them.
Another pattern is that you push buffers to the layer below you and there’s backpressure to keep you sending at the same rate they’re being played out. In that case you can just stop sending buffers when you have nothing to play.
Your reasons are correct. There are so many layers between an app (or web page) and the physical layer of sound which all burn power; phones and earbuds owe quite a bit of their battery life to shutting down bits of hardware when unused.
EDIT: this reminds me of a WWDC many years ago — Apple got really excited about timer coalescing and added parameters to all the low level timer APIs which let you indicate how much slop you want to allow for each individual timer. Ideally then the OS can keep the CPU asleep for longer and wake it up to do work in batches. Code that deals with real time sound has tight timing requirements and can’t be delayed as easily, so in a timer-coalesced world distinguishing between playing silence and playing nothing has an even bigger power impact.
I've had an issue with my phone for the past few months that could be solved by erasing it and restoring from backup, but I use Signal a bunch and I'm not currently feeling risky or motivated enough to migrate my whole Signal state to a spare phone and do it.
Lack of backups is not a retention/deletion policy. Signal chats can, in fact, have a deletion policy set. Instead it directly ties retention to "how long can I last without losing or erasing my phone", which is not a useful proxy.
Anyone sufficiently motivated to keep messages forever can (a) set up the desktop client and back up its data store or (b) set up signal-cli and save everything that comes out of it.
No backups doesn't defeat this, it just makes life harder for everyone who relies on scrollback. Imagine if email worked this way.
Plus, successful couples are great advocates for the website that introduced them. You lose two customers in the immediate term but gain more as time goes on. (Also OkCupid, 2012-2015.)
A PDF doesn’t represent a responsive/resizable version of the page so it will look awkward on most screen sizes even if the original would have handled it.
A PDF doesn’t capture scrolling behavior, so a nested scrolling element will lose most of its content, and a page with a chat prompt or cookie notice might have part of its content covered.
A PDF won’t capture even simple interactive elements like image carousels, lightboxes, and collapsible sections, so content may be lost (“oops, I saved it on the second slide of the image carousel, but I really wanted the first one”).
As far as I know, a PDF won’t include embedded audio/video.
Many PDF exporters chunk the document into paper-sized pages (but, to be fair, some don’t).
Not sure if this tool nails all of those cases, but those are reasons why I’ve saved local copies of pages in the past.
The top-level comment you replied to doesn’t mention malware.
In any case, both hardware and software keyloggers exist which would be thwarted by an onscreen keyboard. If I recall correctly, mouse keyboards became popular when keyloggers started being more known, and the following generation of malware took screenshots every time you clicked.
It’s a very obsolete security measure but did make sense briefly.
I think what the author's getting at is that the function you pass to JavaScript .sort() just returns a number — not special sentinel values — which represents the relative order of two items in the array. By calling that function strategically from a loop, .sort() can sort the array.
Similarly, an SDF returns a number that represents how far a point in 3D space is from an object's surface. And, by calling that function strategically from a loop, you can draw a 3D scene using only that function.
You can, but note that as a user you have to open System Preferences and check a checkbox to allow said malware to do this. (Apple locked down the accessibility APIs that let apps easily manipulate each other a few years ago.)
Yes, exactly. I'm sure there are more elegant answers — plus watching events so that it can hide the window right away instead of running in a loop — but I haven't used the accessibility APIs much lately and this is the first working approach I found.
EDIT: As far as I know, the best long-term answer here is for apps that present visuals full screen to "capture" the external display for exclusive use using an API (https://developer.apple.com/documentation/coregraphics/14562...), but that's not super common right now.
Apple has support statuses for discontinued products which kick in five years ("vintage") and seven years ("obsolete") after the it stops being sold.
It's disingenuous for Google to start counting when the product is released. As the buyer, I don't care when it was released, I care when you sold it to me as new. I could buy a Chromecast Ultra (the current-generation 4K Chromecast, released November 2016: https://store.google.com/us/product/chromecast_ultra) and, by this standard (which may not even apply to Chromecasts, FWIW), they could discontinue it and drop support for it tomorrow.
This loses something important about Keybase sigchains: on Keybase, a sigchain represents an identity and not a single key, which makes it possible to add separate keys for different devices and to seamlessly replace and revoke keys over time. (Non-key-specific sigchains let the Keybase client do interesting things like automatically re-encrypting shared data when someone revokes an old key.)
Tying sigchains to keys seems limiting, and I'm curious if there's a reason for it. Otherwise, I like this a bunch.
This is cool! I have some things like this around my house but via a different approach that I'd like to share: each one is just an old-ish e-reader from eBay or Craigslist, a mix of Kobos and Kindles. Both brands can be made to show a full screen web browser (Kobo: by editing a config file from a computer, Kindle: by jailbreaking and installing Kindle-Web-Launcher), so I have them display a page from a web server on my LAN.
Since the browsers support JS and some mix of WebSockets, EventSource, and, at the very least, long polling, it's possible to send messages out to them to update data in real-time or refresh the entire page when I change it. The screens are sharp and the browsers do partial updates, fast enough that I have some touch-draggable sliders that follow your finger.
They cost me from $16-50 each, depending on model. They tend to be cheaper if there's a lot of wear/damage to the case, but if you put it in a shell or cover the whole thing with gaffer's tape, that's not a problem!
- https://issues.chromium.org/issues/41359717
- https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1747999
macOS skipped compositing when only a single fullscreen surface with a black background was being rendered, but there were many ways for that render path to misbehave.
It only ever affected integrated graphics on dual GPU Macs, as far as I can remember.