Shouldn't public documents by the government use a free and libre font? In fact, the mentioned Public Sans developed by the US federal government seems to be a great option, as it actually distinguishes the lowercase l and the uppercase I, something that, ironically, all suggested sans-serif alternatives fail to do.
Times New Roman is available at no cost under the Microsoft Core Fonts for the Web. (Microsoft no longer distributes this, but the license allows redistribution and redistribution is popular). AFAIK, Apple explicitly licenses the fonts and most open source OS distributions have a package for these fonts.
It's not libre, but font copyright is weird anyway, and the federal government doesn't always need to follow copyright.
Public Sans seems like a good candidate for a new "web safe" font. Perhaps one new web safe font per twenty five years is not too much. From there, it can percolate to the word processor and pdfs, and finally: government standard for government workers who just want to open their word processor and get to work, where sourcing even a free font to meet standard is just a snag to annoy.
Further, Public Sans was developed by the US govt under the first Trump administration and appears to be an excellent font. That seems to be a wise choice against TNR or Calibri on multiple angles.
You would hope, but changing this font isn't about making anything better, it's that Calibre was apparently a DEI font and had to go. I can't imagine these people thinking highly of an open source (Oooh communism) font that's also designed with accessibility in mind.
Are we still doing the communism thing? I thought the bogeyman is socialism now.
In any case, it would be nice to have some consistency across the government, and if they want to make a change, at least take prior works into account like what the Congress or SCOTUS are doing in their official texts.
China made its first computer in 1958 and its first 1 megaflop computer in 1973, so yes, their nascence of computer programming preceded the Cultural Revolution, about 10 years after the West.
And if your database is 99% reads 1% writes, the difference probably doesn't really matter.
And tons of database indexes operate on randomly distributed data -- looking up email addresses or all sorts of things. So in many cases this is not an optimization worth caring about.
Lots of distributed, NoSQL databases work (or partially work) this way too (e.g., HBase rowkey, Accumulo row ID, Cassandra clustering key, DynamoDB sort key). They partition the data into shards based upon key ranges and then spread those shards across as many servers as possible. UUIDv7 is (by design) temporally clustered. Since many workloads place far more value on recent data, and all recent data is likely to end up in the same shard, you bottleneck on the throughput of a single server or, even with replication, a small number of servers.
FWIW it looks like Cassandra doesn't belong on this list, and DynamoDB only with qualifications.
Though Cassandra is more like quasi-SQL than NoSQL, the bigger issue is that actually the clustering key is never used for sharding. So Cassandra (today) always puts all data with the same partition key on the same shard, and the partition key is hashed, meaning there's no situation in which UUIDv7 would perform differently (better or worse) than UUIDv4.
In DynamoDB, it is possible for sort keys to be used for sharding, but only if there is a large number of distinct sort keys for the same partition key. Generally, you would be putting a UUID in the partition key and not the sort key, so UUIDv7 vs UUIDv4 typically has no impact on DB performance.
i think the standard recommendation is to do range partitioning on the hash of the key, aka hash range partitioning (i know yugabyte supports this out of the box, i'd be surprised if others don't). this prevents the situation of all recent uuids ending up on the same shard.
AWS CodeArtifact can act as a proxy and fetch new packages from npm when needed. A bit late for that though but sharing if you want to future proof against the yearly us-east-1 outage
Same. I switched from Windows to macOS three years ago, and I tried my best to only use cross-platform softwares (or none at all, in many cases where websites suffice). Thanks to Electron many apps work on both Windows and macOS nowadays.
While the current climate is not comparable, I find the actions and general attitude of the current US government similar to that during the McCarthy era.
In it, the author described the attacks on specific personnels and public villainification of Harvard. More tellingly though, the author wrote the article for students in the 60s, who, growing up a mere decade after, most likely considered the events "an aberration which could not have lasted", and that, "the whole [McCarthy] period has an air of unreality".
Those who did not know history are bound to repeat it. Unfortunately, no amount of textbooks and historical resources seems to be sufficient to impart lessons to subsequent generations, and we are bound to repeat it after a few cycles.
Assuming lack of knowledge is the reason authoritarian tendencies show up periodically dismisses the fact that a lot of people think it’s a good thing. There were neo nazis right after wwii. They didn’t forget — they wanted it.
Yeah that worries me. The Nazi party ended on paper, the flags were taken down, but there is no military defeat that really changes the minds of the losing faction. They just went covert, stopped saying the quiet part, and waited.
That feels oversimplified. A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it. This is the problem that politics is supposed to solve, and then the problem that the electoral college was supposed to safeguard against. How do we avoid the tyranny of a demented majority? Aligning to a specific moral code? … like a theocracy? I can’t think of any way that doesn’t immediately instill the tyranny of a minority in its place.
We in the US have been very arrogant in assuming we’ve found the solution to all this when all it took was a few decades — a flash-in-the-pan, really — of consistent, strategic bad faith by the political rulers to undermine the whole thing.
> A lot of people would think people that oppose Nazis are the ones with the ideological problems. Who defines what a problem is in our society? The majority or some skewing of it.
Provable moral facts have nothing to do with this because humans aren’t philosophically consistent, and societies are ruled by humans. Defining them and getting enough people to agree to those definitions to enforce them is the problem democracy is supposed to solve, but in the end, flawed leaders will be ruling a flawed populace. No matter how cut-and-dried those moral facts are through rigorous philosophical analysis, societies always navigate through the lens of perception, which can be swayed.
ARC-AGI is one of the few tests on which human can complete easily while LLMs still struggle. This model scores 45% on ARC-AGI-1 and 8% on ARC-AGI-2, the latter is comparable to Claude Opus 4 and GPT-5 High, behind only Claude Sonnet 4.5 and Grok 4 Thinking, for a model about 0.001% the size of commercial models.
On Android, long press home button activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen and translate immediately. Unironically one of the only two features keeping me on Android until now.
On iOS 26 you can do basically the same thing. Take a screenshot (power button + volume up), click the thumbnail of the screenshot that appears. You'll see the screenshot full screen and there is a 'translate' button (along some other AI stuff).
Unless the App Developer has chosen to blanket deny screenshots. This is common on view accepting payment information but blanket application is also common.
macOS does this, too, along with other text manipulation features in screenshots and arbitrary image and video files opened in Preview, QuickTime Player (and apps using an embedded player), and Safari. High quality, local, system-provided OCR is a godsend sometimes.
Like with all things Google, this feature wasn't available in Gemini (or only available on some devices) last I checked. With Gemini going to replace Google Assistant in the future, this is yet another useful feature that Google will be taking away from Android.
Nah man, trigger the "circle to search" feature (on my phone I use gestures and I hold down on the bottom center of the screen) and you can draw a line over ANY text to highlight it instantly, even text within an image. Perhaps the best feature I've ever been given during an update.
Circle to Search is not available for all devices. My Fairphone 4 doesn't have it and there are plenty of other devices where it's not allowed by Google yet.
If you open an image with Google Lens (or select the image in the Google Search app, which seems to result in the same thing) Google does by default an image web search and shows you similar pictures, but it also displays a blue "translate" button on the right, which activates OCR and text selection, and optional translation. Though it doesn't seem possible to avoid it doing the image web search first, which might be problematic for private pictures.
Interesting. I screenshot then send to Google Lens which is obviously more of a hassle than what you're describing. But I have gestures enabled and so no home button. I wonder what is the gesture-equivalent of long-pressing on home.
On my Pixel 5, if you swipe from the bottom bar up (as if you are gesturing to close the app), near the bottom some options will appear: Screenshot or Select. The Select mode is an OCR enabled text selection.
This just takes me to the horizontal scrolling list of apps displayed as screenshots of the app.
I can swipe from the bottom corner to bring up "Gemini" but that doesn't have an option to OCR the screen. Android is so diverse - people always end up talking about their unique and differing experiences, unfortunately.
yeah definitely my favourite feature on android too that I use multiple times per day. Unlike the people saying taking a screenshot is basically the same on iOS - no it isn't. This moves the whole display into an ephemeral screenshot and you can copy text, translate, all kinds of things, without the delay of taking a screenshot, or worrying about that file hanging around permanently after.
Super ironic that often images are the most accessible way to share text data these days but that's what enshittification brought us.
> activates Google Assistant that can OCR the current screen
=>
> activates Google Assistant that can copy a bunch of your personal data for eternal storage with Alphabet, building your personal profile there - with your permission, instead of them having to find some kind of excuse to obtain it
I prefer this easy solution: Print the website (with a printer), take a photo of the printed page, run the photo through OCR software. As simple as that.
I prefer this easy solution: Take a photograph of the website, develop the film, send it off to a transcription service, received the printed copy in the mail, take a digital picture of the document, run it through OCR software. As simple as that.
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