Even if you believe the previous administration switching fonts was virtue signaling, then by the same logic you have to also believe this is just virtue signalling.
Just guessing from what is written in the article: Calibri once was chosen by the former administration for accessibility reasons. Maybe the virtue signaling being that Calibri isn't great with respect to accessibility (and IMHO wasn't even designed for it in the first place).
> fonts like Times New Roman have serifs ("wings" and "feet") or decorative, angular features that can introduce accessibility issues for individuals with disabilities who use Optical Character Recognition technology or screen readers. It can also cause visual recognition issues for individuals with learning disabilities.
> On January 4, 2023, in support of the Department's iCount Campaign on disability inclusion (reftels), Secretary Blinken directed the Department to use a more accessible font. Calibri has no wings and feet and is the default font in Microsoft products and was recommended as an accessibility best practice by the Secretary's Office of Diversity and Inclusion in collaboration with the Executive Secretariat and the Bureau of Global Talent Management's Office of Accessibility and Accommodations.
In 2023, the US State Department signalled how virtuous it was, by moving from the previously-default MS Office font to the then-currently-default MS Office font. The current MS Office default font is Aptos, place your bets on what the State Department is going to switch the font to in 3 years time.
As far as I know, font choice has no zero effect on screen readers, which ask compatible software what words are on screen and read them out. There is evidence that serifs cause visual recognition issues for some individuals, but there's also evidence they aid recognition for different individuals.
It probably helped everyone to choose 14pt Calibri over 12pt Times New Roman, as the font is more legible on LCD screens.
The virtue being signalled by the current administration is that everything their predecessors did was wrong and they're literally going to reverse everything out of sheer pettiness. If anything, they should acknowledge the president's long friendship with Epstein and pick Gill Sans as the default. That would be the ultimate "anti-woke" move I think.
Calibri is a Sans Serif font and because it has been the default Microsoft Office font for more than a decade, it is fake email job haver coded (i.e. it appeals to young and middle-aged women who work in HR, this demographic being predominantly Democrat). Times New Roman is a Serif font which looks old and official to cater to boomers and has Roman in it to appeal to Zoomers who want to RETVRN with a V to tradition.
(I didn’t read the article as this is a non-story, but I’m definitely right).
Yep, I've seen what craziness happens when the admin is woke, and I've seen the craziness when it's "anti-woke" and I preferred woke. At least woke didn't kidnap people into unmarked vans for writing a college newspaper article. I don't agree with woke, but they won't send me to Guatemala torture prison bc I don't agree
There's a reason Star Trek teleporters have a "Heisenberg compensator", we cannot record both the position and momentum of a particle precisely. Scanning the "configuration of particles" to transmit to this theoretical printer is the first impossible roadblock. The human you scan can never be the same exact person printed.
The reason Trek has it is likely a common misunderstanding of QM: it's not only that we cannot record both position and momentum, the information does not exist in the first place.
TLDW: an infinitely long wave does not (cannot) have any definite location, but it does have a definite periodic wavelength; conversely, a single impulse noise (a shockwave from e.g. a bullet or an explosion) has a definite location (in the direction of motion and at any given point in time) but no meaningful wavelength.
The more you constrain the possibility space of one, the looser the other becomes in a physical sense, not just the information you have about it.
That said, we definitely don't have the means to 3D print even relatively simple tissues, last I checked we are still limited to structures thin enough to be kept alive by oxygen diffusion.
One of my open questions on this topic is: given we can cryopreserve small tissue without the freezing-damage problem, why can't we do a repeated process of:
1. cell culture tissue sheets that are ~1mm (or whatever) thick
2. cryopreserve each sheet
3. then assemble those sheets, still frozen
4. then thaw out as per normal procedure for cryopreserved organs
Caveat: I have minimal knowledge of biology, this may be a stupid idea for a whole bunch of reasons I don't even know the names of.
Simulations still need to run on something & need energy to power them. The better, more stable, higher fidelity simulation you want, the more mass & energy it will need. And that needs to come from somewhere - a thing many infomorphs tend to conveniently forget far too often.
To the extent what they’re suggesting isn’t bunk, it’s in being able to transmit genetic information and then print it to a womb. Then have a generation of psychopaths raised by a robot.
As with many topics, the Orions Arm Universe project has you covered - the Engenerator[0]!
Originally developed in-universe when a bunch of immortal cyborgs got bored on a colonization ship & decided to instruct a precursor probe to print a machine that prints a machine that will print their bodies on site. :)
The engenerator technology is completely safe[1] and can't be misused in any way.
The policy began as a direct response to the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt in December 2001 [1]. This was as America was still reeling from 9/11, and full body scanners weren't standard at airports yet. Now they are, and they've improved explosive detectors too [2].
It indeed seems like it was always something of an overreaction, but an understandable one that's now fully overlapped by superior modern scanning.
Every time an article about airport security is posted the comments are the same.
To prove that I'm sane and my memory has not been corrupted by time or cosmic rays I google "airline hijackings by year", I look at the graphs in google images, and I briefly wonder what happened in early 1970s and 2000s before remembering what happened in early 1970s and 2000s.
Then I murmur "that's some fantastically effective theater".
can you find any stats on yearly hijackings that are limited to only flights where hijackers made it through american security, though? all I can find are global aggregate stats and its a bit unfair to credit TSA with preventing the hijacking of a flight from Heathrow to Dubai
Most TSA, FAA, and airline operator policies and procedures are harmonized with ICAO and IATA policies and procedures. Of course, there are regional variations and differences between international and domestic flights within those regions, but for the most part things are consistent among all of the members of both signatories of Convention on International Civil Aviation (ICAO members) and IATA members.
The whole shoe thing was proposed someone who wasn't the US (I think the UK, but my memory is fuzzy-- damn cosmic rays), submitted to ICAO, voted on, and enacted by the US as a signatory.
Why not? Comment thread is about TSA. Article is about TSA. The policy is a TSA policy. Why expand the discussion to include things no one else is talking about, and why do it surreptitiously?
I don't doubt that the screenings are security theater, but it is impossible to know whether anybody was scared off from even trying. A 10% or even 5% chance of getting caught is deeply concerning. It risks not just you, but everybody else in the plot.
It could well be zero: the turrurists aren't dumb and they also know it's security theater. But I have to admit that I genuinely do not (and cannot) know.
Certainly in the UK it was linked to this attempted attack [1] but seemed very specific like banning laser toner cartridges as they were an attack attempt.
IIRC the modern "raise your arms" scanners had not been rolled out in 2006 when the shoe policy was instituted. perhaps the TSA has realized there's no point in making people take off their shoes when explosives/contraband within are easily picked up by the new scanners.
The article implies that passengers who opt out of the "raise your arms" millimeter wave scanner and go through the magnetometer instead will not have to take their shoes off unless the magnetometer alarms:
> Passengers who trigger the alarm at the scanners or magnetometers, however, will be required to take their shoes off for additional screening, according to the memo.
I have opted out of the scanner at numerous airports over the past 20 years, without fail (dozens of times), and not once have I been asked to go through a 'magnetometer'. It's been a manual pat down every time.
It's been a few years since I've flown (and opted out of the MMW), but I recall being directed through the magnetometer first, then receiving a pat down on the other side. Maybe that was nonstandard.
Genuine question not from a judgy space but from an interested one.. what motivates you to do this? I feel like I would find the pat down far more invasive than someone seeing a sort of nude picture of my body.. again, I’m asking because I would like to understand, not because I’m judging the choice. Appreciate your insight!
Heh, cannot give it a rationale answer. I mostly started as the most minor form of political protest against the security theater. Then there were the few inevitable scandals: instances where images were saved, some of the machines were miscalibrated and delivering far too much energy to people, whatever. Sorta some justification, but I really do not have much to point. I can just say that it has never been a huge inconvenience to opt out.
I am also a boring white guy so the pat downs have always been perfunctory -never feared being groped by a thug.
Let me start by saying I'm no fan of the TSA having been traveling for business for 20 years. But we do know exactly why it was originally enacted. Which is that someone tried to hide a bomb in the base of their shoe to blow up a flight.
While we don't know why they've stopped, it could be any number of things: from they have other ways of detecting explosives that don't require your shoes going through a scanner, to they just don't think it's an issue anymore.
While a lot of what TSA does appears to be security theater, saying "it never made any of us safer" is a claim you have no way of backing up.
The problem with this theory is that plenty of times (not just for PreCheck flyers), they arbitrarily decide you don't need to take your shoes off. It's not a technology thing, because they change it back and forth at the same gate at the same airport-- I fly enough to know. And whatever they've changed it to, they bark at you for not knowing, as though you could've known about whatever RNG generates TSA policy this week.
>The problem with this theory is that plenty of times (not just for PreCheck flyers), they arbitrarily decide you don't need to take your shoes off.
At what airport? How do you know it's "arbitrary" - do you have some additional information the rest of us don't?
>It's not a technology thing, because they change it back and forth at the same gate at the same airpor
What airport? Because I fly enough to know they don't do that at LAX, SFO, SJC, or ORD.
>It's a power play, nothing more.
By WHO? The guy who implemented the policy hasn't worked in government since GWBs term. The random TSA worker has literally 0 say in the policy of taking your shoes off.
Doing something at random half the time is definitely better than doing it 0% of the time, or predictably half the time. From a security standpoint it's certainly worse than doing it 100% of the time. If you're randomizing day-to-day its pointless though. If you had something in your shoe, you could just walk away once you saw other people taking off their shoes. You're not obligated to continue. If anybody asks then you forgot your phone in your car.
Sure, randomly pulling people over or demanding access to their bank records might reveal patterns, but we supposedly have rights in western countries.
The claim is the old machines had issues with detecting and on the ground.
First time I went through Heathrow after the incident. You had to take your shoes off and went to a separate machine. The shoes were scanned then you walked back... Plenty of time to put something back on the shoe.
It’s always risk/reward. The risk isn’t only physical; it can also be intangible. For now at least, it looks like they’ve reassessed and decided it’s not worth the inconvenience.
That seems like a childish and unreasonable assumption. In addition to the technology changes everyone mentioned, it could also have to do with other factors, like the actual threats the country faces, or the relative weight the powers-that-be place on the different sides of each tradeoff. It's not like this is a controlled experiment where every other factor is held constant.
The 120Hz shadertoy works on the Pixel 8 (and hopefully other 120Hz Android devices) if you go to Developer Options and enable "Force peak refresh rate"
I wonder if there's a way to ask Android Chrome to ask for 120Hz.
Ah, the non-developer option setting to enable 120Hz on later Pixels is under "Settings"->"Display & touch"->"Smooth display". With that enabled, Chrome will use 120Hz if power and temperature settings permit it to.
As someone who ordered the previous licensed version that never ever delivered and that company is currently being taken to court by the state of Pennsylvania, I'm not touching this.
I've backed most of GeekClub's previous KickStarter campaigns and received everything I had put money towards including an extra set of kits for one of the campaigns for some reason. The kits are generally pretty good although the instructions are less great in my opinion. From what I can tell in the comment sections, a lot of the people the complain about not getting items are people that never filled out the surveys with their shipping information. Of course, with it being KickStarter, buyer beware is always the rule.
| As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.
According to Maggie Astor, news is not behind the picket line -
NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
News coverage — including election coverage — is NOT behind the picket line. It’s okay to read and share that, though the site and app may very well have problems.
> NYT Games and Cooking are BEHIND THE PICKET LINE. Please don’t play or engage with Games or Cooking content while the strike lasts!
If I pay for a service, I expect it to be available.
It’s not my job to track the status of labor disputes - it’s the job of the NYTimes (the organization) to ensure they deliver that service.
If they can’t, because they are dealing with ongoing labor disputes, then I’ll probably complain and cancel. The threat of those cancellations seems like plenty enough leverage for a striking union.
I don’t understand why I would need to preemptively refrain from a service I’ve already paid for.
It appears that one of the things the tech workers are striking for is to not force remote workers to RTO including folks who were originally hired fully remote.
It's good to see in office workers choosing to strike to support remote workers.
reply