> especially when talking about code or other stuff that benefits from more richer formatting
Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)
I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)
And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.
If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)
In one of the early releases of animated emoji on Telegram (I want to say the very first one), it did. Then Apple objected and it stopped. Then shortly afterwards like half of the rest started doing something suggestive but not the eggplant. A lot of fun was had on the Internet imagining the product meetings for all of that.
(Not that any of it is particularly relevant to the quality of Telegram’s UI, which is indeed unmatched.)
…but with intentionally weird semantics picked for its humour rather than legibility.
It might not be a challenging language, but it is designed more for art than utility.
This firmly makes it an esoteric language.
Whereas Purrtran has conventional semantics. The cuteness of Purrtran is in the documentation rather than the language design. The esoteric part is really more in the story telling rather than the language semantics.
A few deprecated characters, including the Kelvin and Ångström symbols, are in fact canonically equivalent to their replacements and not just compatibility equivalent, so plain NFC/NFD is enough. (It’s generally better to avoid NFKC/NFKD normalizations unless you fully understand the implications, as they do lose meaning and at the same time do not account for all possible confusables.)
Why oh why isn’t 'uecker still pushing his GCC patch[1] enabling -fno-trampolines (i.e. function descriptors) for C. I know it’s an ABI break, but it would be so nice :(
(I think this is my personal record wrt the relative number of errors in a short code snippet. You get the idea, and I’m frankly afraid to try and post a fixed version at this point :) )
A year ago, Framework-branded memory for DIY laptops cost, IIRC, 2x Amazon for equivalent specs (not the same modules—the ADATA ones that Framework puts their stickers on are theoretically available retail but in practice complete unobtanium in most countries). Not Apple pricing, but they definitely have some margin to eat into.
I see exactly the same assembly from x86-64 GCC 15.2 with -O2 the first example in the article both as is and without `static`, which makes sense. The two do differ if you add -fPIC, as though you’re compiling a dynamic library, and do not add -fvisibility=hidden at the same time, but that’s because Linux dynamic linking is badly designed.
Reflecting sunlight from orbit is an idea that had been talked about for a couple of decades even before Znamya-2[1] launched in 1992. The materials science needed to unfurl large surfaces in space seems to be very difficult, whether mirrors or sails.
The article is largely about layout shifts caused by flexbox during loading, and while networks have indeed gotten faster, they haven’t gotten faster uniformly across situations and people. Being able to show things properly while they are still downloading remains useful.
Is the 8087 related to the FPU of the 432 in any way? I’ve always suspected the former’s stack nature was due to the latter being entirely stack-based, but precisely no sources mention that, so is it just a coincidence that Intel did two stack-based architectures essentially at the same time (and then never repeated that mistake)?
Yes, the iAPX 432's FPU is related to the 8087. I think they took the 8087 design and redid it for the 432, but I haven't been able to nail down the details. I should take a closer look at the dies and see if there is any similarity.
I looked at the iAPX's 432 floating point more closely; it uses the same floating point model (which became IEEE 754), but the hardware is completely different. In particular, the iAPX 432 doesn't have nearly the same hardware support for floating point that the 8087 does. The iAPX 432 uses a 16-bit ALU both for integer and floating-point math, so it's much slower than the 8087's specialized 80-bit datapath. The 432 also doesn't support transcendental functions like the 8087 does; it is much more limited, supporting arithmetic, absolute value, and square root.
Telegram has GFM-style fenced code blocks including language indication for syntax highlighting (e.g. ```python), what else could one want for code? (I guess syntax-highlighted inline monospaced blocks, it does indeed not have them.)
I wouldn’t say Telegram is perfect. The polish and the actual experience of using it are great. Yet when you look closely, it’s as rickety as you’d expect given the insane rate of shipping features that they’ve sustained until quite recently. (For instance, there were a few weeks where porn spambots in public chats would post single—thus animated—emoji, seemingly because the UI didn’t allow you to open the context menu on those in order to report spam, because the usual single-tap handler for that was overriden by the handler that would play the emoji animation.)
And the discoverability is in the toilet. Did you know that you can preview a chat without marking its messages read by long-pressing on the image? That works on Android—except on a tablet where your screen is large enough that you get the two-pane view; I thought for weeks they had removed that feature until I realized the tablet was the problem. And the only thing that mentions its existence is AFAIK an item in release notes from 2018[1,2]. Did you know that you could pop out individual chats into their own AIM/ICQ-style windows on desktop? I don’t think it’s documented anywhere, but it’s in the context menu.
If it were the 2000s I wouldn’t have given Telegram any HCI design awards. But everything else is considerably worse, with the possible exception of (indeed) Discord. (I prefer Telegram’s abundant tools for scrubbing through history though, it’s one of the few things in that category that’s actually better a calendar of posts like blogs used to have.)
[1] https://telegram.org/blog/unread-replace-2x#and-three-more-o... (it didn’t even make the headline!)
[2] Just found out (via the comments in https://bugs.telegram.org/c/52) that this actually exists on desktop too: Alt-click the chat. Argh.
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