https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blame/f6217f8...

https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu/blame/f6217f8...

But yes, “assert” in most languages is debug-only.

Out of the two claims, the only one that made it to appeals court was about whether it was fair use for Bleem to use screenshots of PS1 games to advertise its emulator (which was compatible with those games). The Ninth Circuit decided it was. But that's not relevant here.

The other claim was more relevant, as it was an unfair competition claim that apparently had something to do with Bleem's reimplementation of the PS1 BIOS. But the district court's record of the case doesn't seem to be available online, and the information I was able to find online was vague, so I don't know what exactly the facts or legal arguments were on that claim. Without an appeal it also doesn't set precedent.

If there were a lawsuit over OpenTTD, it would probably be for copyright infringement rather than unfair competition, and it would probably focus more on fair use and copyrightability. For fair use, it matters how much something is functional versus creative. The PS1 BIOS is relatively functional, but a game design and implementation are highly creative. On the other hand, despite being creative, game mechanics by themselves are not copyrightable. So it might come down to the extent to which OpenTTD's code was based on the reverse-engineered original code, as opposed to being a truly from-scratch reimplementation of the same mechanics. Visual appearance would also be relevant. Oracle v. Google would be an important precedent.

Precedent in the US is that courts do in fact have jurisdiction over a foreign website's owner if the owner "purposefully availed itself of the U.S. forum or purposefully directed its activities toward it", a test which is less demanding than it sounds. [1]

And US has taken advantage of this to go after foreign websites such as Megaupload, BTC-e, Liberty Reserve, etc.

Therefore, if there were a US law requiring companies to follow free speech rules, it could potentially be enforced against foreign website owners. But no such law currently exists. The First Amendment itself only applies to the US government (and to companies working on behalf of the US government). There is also the SPEECH Act, which, among other provisions, creates a cause of action where if someone sues a US person in a foreign court over their speech, they can sue back in US court. But only for declaratory judgement, not damages or an injunction. The goal is mainly just to prevent US courts from enforcing judgements from the foreign court in such cases.

[1] https://tlblog.org/how-to-find-personal-jurisdiction-over-fo...

It's possible but rare for systems to have 64-bit GPRs but a 32-bit address space. Examples I can think of include the Nintendo 64 (MIPS; apparently commercial games rarely actually used the 64-bit instructions, so the console's name was pretty much a misnomer), some Apple Watch models (standard 64-bit ARM but with a compiler ABI that made pointers 32 bits to save memory), and the ill-fated x32 ABI on Linux (same thing but on x86-64).

That said, even "32-bit" CPUs usually have some kind of support for 64-bit floats (except for tiny embedded CPUs).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abNygtFqYR8

If you just want the optimizer to be able to constant-fold a value, then yes, either of those will work.

If you want to be able to use the value in the other contexts the parent mentioned that require constant expressions as a language rule, then you generally need constexpr. As an exception, non-constexpr variable values can be used if they’re const (not ‘happens to not vary’) and have integer or enum type (no floats, structs, pointers, etc.). This exception exists for legacy reasons and there’s no particular reason to rely on it unless you’re aiming for compatibility with older versions of C++ or C.

Even if you don’t need to use a variable in those contexts, constexpr evaluation is different from optimizer constant evaluation, and generally better if you can use it. In particular, the optimizer will give up if an expression is too hard to evaluate (depending on implementation-specific heuristics), whereas constexpr will either succeed or give an error (depending only on language rules). It’s also a completely separate code path in the compiler. There are some cases where optimizer constant evaluation can do things constexpr can’t, but most of those have been removed or ameliorated in recent C++ standards.

So it’s often an improvement to tag anything you want to be evaluated at compile time as constexpr, and rarely worse. However, if an expression is so trivial that it’s obvious the optimizer will be able to evaluate it, and you don’t need it in contexts that require a constant expression, then there’s no concrete benefit either way and it becomes a matter of taste. Personally, I wouldn’t tag this particular pi/2 variable constexpr or const, because it does satisfy those criteria and I personally prefer brevity. But I understand why some people prefer a rule of “always constexpr if possible”, either because they like the explicitness or because it’s a simpler rule.

However, if it did become a problem, it might be solvable with something like CGNAT.

In reality this isn't much of a change. For decades it's been a given that mainstream CPUs have vector instructions. RISC-V was the odd man out in _not_ mandating vector instructions. Even so, most CPU code doesn't use them.

And this is unlikely to change anytime soon. Yes, ML workloads are becoming much more popular, but CPUs are still not parallel enough to do a good job at them. Only occasionally is it a good idea to try anyway.

Edit: Note that there is something novel about the approach that RISC-V and ARM are now following, namely being vector-length agnostic, but this is unlikely to have much impact on how much CPU code is vectorized in the first place. It improves scalability a little, but also gives compilers a little harder of a job. It is not something that's going to fundamentally transform the extent to which CPU code uses vector instructions.

In this respect, Apple got pretty lucky. Most users were not using reduced keyboards in 1987 when they originally decided to add the Control key separate from Command. Plus, Mac OS didn't even have a native terminal at the time; I assume there were terminal emulators for networking/serial use but I can't imagine that was top-of-mind for Apple either.

Regardless, Cmd-C is definitely a more convenient shortcut than Control-Insert, even if you do have the keys for the latter.

Whatever the cause, LLMs have gotten significantly better over time at generating SVGs of pelicans riding bicycles:

https://simonwillison.net/tags/pelican-riding-a-bicycle/

But they're still not very good.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47176209

Opus would probably do better though.

It is offering to install Apple's developer tools package which includes Python. The download is ~900MB, much of which consists of large Swift and C compiler binaries. That's pretty large if you only need Python, but in practice you probably do want the full dev tools because Python packages often compile C extensions when installed.

> Except, that non-blessed python could not access the internet because of some MacOS "security" feature.

There is no such security feature. Perhaps a TLS issue?

> Another "security" feature requires all apps on Apple computers to be notarized, even the ones I built myself. This used to have a relatively easy workaround (right click, open, accept the risk). Now it needs a terminal command.

You can also do it from System Settings. Or if you are actually building on the same machine, you can avoid the problem as described at the bottom of this page:

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/catalina-executables.htm...

> On some Apple systems, this fails to show any audio devices, "for security reasons".

While the implementation is somewhat janky, there are real and valid security reasons to require consent for using the microphone.

> There is no indication anywhere that the hard drive is getting full.

Not proactive warnings (does any OS do that?), but there are plenty of ways to see how full the disk is, including the newish System Settings -> General -> Storage, which breaks down storage use and offers some ways to save space.

> There is no simple way to reset the computer to factory conditions.

System Settings -> General -> Erase All Content and Settings.