What does Gandi provide wrt DNS that is worth a premium? What do they offer that at-cost domain registrations & free DNS management from Cloudflare do not?
One could argue the polish of their UI/UX is worth it, but not to me. I moved to Porkbun and found the difference a bit frustrating when trying to migrate from Gandi, but that was one time pain.
The distinction between using “a” vs “an” is one based on the immediately proceeding syllable sound rather than the letter. If it’s proceeded by a vowel, then use “an”, and if it’s proceeded by a consonant, use “a”.
Because “LLM” is pronounced “el el em”, the first syllable sound is “eh”—a vowel.
The same letter may need different “a”/“an” article based on how the word is pronounced. For example “an LLM” vs “a layer”.
As someone with a photographic memory as my main (because it's most the "performant" one I have) learning tool, I strongly feel that somebody should make a really long list of most commonly used words which should use "an", and conversely, a list of words which should use "a" of a similar length (both as two columns of text). I'm not really eager to "run" the check (mentioned under the link) in my head every time I need to choose an article, and the biggest problem, and the reason behind some of the mistakes in choosing the right article I sometimes do, is that I don't really see some the less common words which should use "an" (despite starting with a letter which suggest otherwise) this often, or actually, often enough.
And when I'm reading a text for any other purpose than memorizing article choices (so, 99,999% of cases), they don't get enough of my attention to get remembered - it's the meaning of other words which get it, and big part of which will get remembered, not the articles used before them.
Being able to look on such a list every few days for say, a month, would definitely help to remember most of these cases.
"Almost" can make a big difference when writing stuff where formal style is expected. For instant messaging, yeah, probably one doesn't have to care.
When writing, you put articles before a letter, but they're based on what phoneme they precede. Therefore, when purely classifying letters, there's much more combinations than 26. In hundreds or lower thousands, possibly. Or more.
That's the difference, and for me it's frankly to memorize a big look-up table of most commonly used words (and which articles should precede them), because this doesn't require any effort to me, than to run an "algorithm" translating to phonemes every time I write something. In a quick reading (not reading out aloud, or even mentally mimicking reading something out aloud), wrong article being used won't necessarily get easily picked up. It's the sheer laziness, I guess.
Such a table can't exist. Pronunciation is varies, so your choice of articles adds character to your text in much the same way your accent does for spoken words.
Take "herb," for example. In some dialects, the "h" is vocalized, while in others, it's silent. Both "an herb" and "a herb" are valid. Your choice in your writing conveys identity. An author who opts for "a herb" helps paint a vague picture of the individual behind the words, perhaps someone from England.
You could make your own personal table, but it would be for you and only you.
Also, although there is a concrete rule, it's not something we're thinking about as we talk--using the wrong article just feels wrong. Most of us aren't consciously "running an algorithm," as you put it; the correct article just comes out.
Most people will find that they develop the same skill with writing over time. The subset of people who have trouble developing that skill and learn best by memorizing a table of words is going to be quite small. I would never write "a LLM" in the same way that I would never say "an history" out loud.
That's a really good comment! Thanks. By the way, pronunciation of articles also varies. With some variants "a" would get much more universal (but also making it harder to notice when it's used wrong), while with others it would be almost impossible to use "a" where "an" should be used without exposing yourself to a major tongue-twister.
And yeah, I'm aware that the subset of people mentioned is quite small. On this subject, it's that memorization requires close to no effort for me, and is close to instantaneous and long-lasting (as long as I run through it several times and the things learned aren't ending up being completely unused), while developing the intuitive feel of the right article, as you rightly put it, takes time (however, can also be close to effortless to some)... and lots of writing.
The parent comment referred to "keyframes" instead of just "frames". Keyframes—unlike normal frames—encode the full image. That is done in case the "delta" you mentioned could be dropped in a stream ending up with strange artifacts in the resulting video output. Keyframes are where the codec gets to press "reset".
Along with the other commenters, I'd be interested to know what you used. When I built my home, I took hundreds of photos of all wall and ceiling surfaces. I then later annotated those photo file names to the right places on the blueprint/schematics. Now I look up the photo file name from the schematic and pull up the right photo.
I would love to be able to just "walk through" and look around in 3D my house before the insulation & drywall went up. I wouldn't want to pay for those 3D house tours that realtors are using now if I built another house and wanted to do something similar.
For my house, I bought one of those 360 cameras, Rico Theta something, it is about 3 years old, and took pics through out the remodel. There is free software to set those up like a 3D house tour, although not as flashy. I did that a few different points in time, but having the pics annotated to be searchable by room name or "wiring" or "duct" is more helpful.
The 360 camera was hugely helpful because I could take one picture of a room instead of 5-15. I could walk through 3K square feet and take pics of everything in about 15 minutes.
I tried to do the same thing using the free matterport app for iOS, but it failed terribly at stitching everything together before the drywall was up. I think it got confused by all the wide open spaces and lack of walls.
Ended up just taking a video as I walked throughout every room of the house which has generally proven to be helpful a number of times. In retrospect I probably should have looked into picking up a 360 degree camera.
Always nice to see Apple Music Classical mentioned on here. I was one of the lead engineers building things before the acquisition and to my knowledge they still use tooling I built around automation of audio ingestion. Streaming music was a fascinating industry to work in
I was using Apple Classical happily for ~1 month, then it stopped working. It would load all the metadata and let me browse around but when trying to play a song it wouldn't progress.
I restarted my phone, reinstalled the app, went through several iterations of iOS updating, the problem never went away. No other app, including Spotify, has this issue on my phone. After a month of paying for Apple Music without Classical working I shrugged and unsubscribed. Big loss for me, and for them, since I am exactly their target audience with Apple Classical.
Does any other brand have something similar to Apple's support? I was kinda surprised to see that you could get called back as easily as I did. Or that their stores could quickly fix e.g. a bricked bootloader. The Windows/Android devices I had before had nothing like that.
Also not fantastic, how Apple handles multiple devices. I forgot how they call it, but registering new devices is a pain, especially if you have multiple Macbooks, iPads, iPhone, there’s an edge case where you have to wait 90 days before it starts streaming to your brand new iPhone.
You better reach out to their support, where they never acknowledge the issue but always fix it in 5 minutes.
Yeah, Apple has a remote app but you need to be on the same local network and connect to the remote library and then can't add stuff from Apple Music. It all feels so antiquated and inelegant.
Some people are complaining about Spotify UI/UX but at least they provide a lot of features and it works pretty well most of the time. I find the app more responsive and just overall better has a streaming player.
I subscribed to apple music for 5 years but then I just switched back to Spotify this year. It is just better.
That's the thing I loved most about Spotify. Unfortunately their "radio" sucks. It generates a 1 time playlist of 50 songs. Pandora has the shittiest interfaces ever, but it does a damn good job DJing for me. Most of the time, I just want to turn it on, pick a genre and let it go. I don't want to listen to the same 50 songs over and over in the same order.
I am quite steeped in the Apple ecosystem, but Apple's crude syncing behaviors and runaway AMPLibraryAgent bugs/invasiveness, has me quarantining Apple media software. Use of Spotify does not mangle my private music library.
It's noticeable that they're working with a much much smaller team than their competitors, and they occasionally roll out new bugs. On the other hand, they seem really dedicated and listen to the users. I've switched to Qobuz about five years ago and while I've had the occasional issue, I don't plan to move away from it. I usually get a personal reply to my bug reports (usually from the same guy -> small team! :D) and that tends to make me much more willing to support a company.
MacOS has had a host of these types of issues with their network stack over the last few years. They are almost always related to some "Magic" technology Apple is introducing such as AirDrop (raw wifi frames), Siri (multipath tcp) et. al. Essentially Apple have been introducing these new components with special elevated privileges which allow them to bypass or have priority access to the network stack in order to implement whatever brand of cross-protocol hoodoo they may require to function. At best, it's maddening, but at worst its a huge red flag that Apple seems ready and willing to accept these compromises into the functionality of their system. It is impossible to achieve total software control over the network stack in MacOS today.
Not publicly that I have seen, but I can assure you networking and cybersecurity companies (and others) saw this pretty quickly when the bug was first released. I was just glad to see a relatively big company calling out this rather egregious issue.
Security companies should be much more open about these issues, rather than quake the notion that if they go public, they’d lose their hush hush secret contacts at Apple that give them private entitlements for private functionality. (Source: first hand experience)
Those are public capabilities that require explicit approval from Apple in the form of an entitlement. That’s not what I am saying.
I’m talking about capabilities Apple officially denies having, or only gates to “partners”, and vends them using private header files and entitlements. One example is VPN service, which, before the NetworkExtension, were limited to the “Cisco”-branded user UI in Settings and MDM configuration files. Unless you had the (legacy) network manager private header files and a super private entitlement in you provisioning profile, allowing you to create VPN on-device without any MDM or configuration profile (or user consent), there was no way for an App Store app to create a VPN tunnel. We used to get these by mailing a contact inside Apple, asking for the latest headers before each major and minor iOS release. Before NetworkExtension, any public inquiry about creating VPN tunnels was denied by Apple and only officially supported by the Cisco app at the time.
Over the years, I’ve heard of many other such “features” only available to big “partners”.
This might come off as quirky or weird but one of the things I miss the most about "iCal" (Calendar.app in macOS) is the infinite scroll (year, month, and week views). Fastmail's calendar has the infinite scroll on the month view, but not any other views.
I usually hate "infinite scroll" on say a timeline feed, but for calendar, it is exactly what I need as I very often move between months when I'm looking at my calendar.
Is there an extension in Firefox that'll bring the infinite scroll to calendar? Anything on the roadmap officially for that UX?
My absolute favorite is KNOW -- the news channel of the Minnesota Public Radio network. I think it's just about as perfect as you can get for a news channel.
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