It seems like there's a newer build option to explicitly disable the "Fine location" permission prompt while still being able to scan for Bluetooth devices, but such beacons are somehow filtered from the list if it's enabled, and it's only available for builds targeting newer Android versions.

Dates are a mapping from human-readable labels to instants in time; critically, this mapping is not a total function (there are dates that map to no instant in time in a particular calendar, such as October 5-14 1582 in the Gregorian calendar, or 2:30am March 8 2026 in US timezones due to DST), nor is it in fact a function at all depending on how you define your inputs (1:30am November 1 2026 in US timezones is ambiguous if you don't specify DST/ST).

Furthermore, the mappings (both for past dates and future dates!) can themselves change over time (changes to DST, timezones, and calendars such as in TFA), and you need to keep track of these changes in perpetuity, as well as at which instant in time they were implemented, and we don't necessarily have that information for some of these historical changes, we only have the date as written down, which itself can suffer from the ambiguity problem (is it the date pre- or post- calendar change?).

This makes dealing with past dates tricky, and dealing with future dates speculative at best. For instance, what's February 28th + 1 day? The answer depends on the calendar system and the year; we can answer it definitively for past years but not necessarily for future years (maybe in 2040 we'll move the leap day to December 32nd). This is why it's important to immediately convert past dates (and sometimes future dates, depending on the use case) to unambiguous instants in time, and only convert them back to dates for display purposes.

"Wednesday, August 12th 2026" and "8 days from now" are also semantically distinct for some purposes: if have 8 doses of a daily prescription left, I'm still going to run out in 8 days even if tomorrow the government decides to repeal the Gregorian calendar, thus changing the name of "8 days from now" from "Wednesday, August 12th 2026" to "Sunday, August 2nd 2026". My medication doesn't care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, I'm going to run out either way. The pharmacy, on the other hand, very much does care what the government decides to call 8 days from now, because perhaps they're closed on Sundays. The calendar change means that "8 days from now" went from being not-a-Sunday to a Sunday, affecting their operating hours.

It's really just another instance of one of the two hard problems in computer science: naming things.

I write a lot of Terraform to manage internal infrastructure with dependencies on other internal and external infrastructure that's outside of my control. I define a module parameter for each dependency (usually with a default value that points to the real service URL) and then create a second module that uses Docker to spin up and configure local instances of each dependency and overrides the corresponding parameter.

This makes local testing very straightforward: `terraform -chdir=tests apply`

I also chafe whenever I run into artificial restrictions on things like characters in names of things, because there's no good reason for them besides the laziness of developers or the limitations and inertia of existing systems that might be used under the hood, like DNS for instance.

So ls would actually match the behavior and accept the flags for Get-ChildItem, not dir.

I have some bad news for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47000041

I definitely agree returning a sum type is ideal.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/InterPlanetary_File_System

Terraform doesn't have a built-in deep merge function, but it will merge `.tfvars.json` files in the order given on the CLI, if you specify multiple `-var-file` arguments. For what it's worth, as of Terraform 1.8, you can also use functions from third-party providers like isometry/deepmerge [2] to perform a deep merge.

[1] https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/parameter... [2] https://registry.terraform.io/providers/isometry/deepmerge/l...