I think in these extraordinary times, it’s nice to see the government proactively trying to do more to counteract the worst pandemic the country has ever seen. As much as we might all cry foul over the curtailing of freedom, there is a lot to be said in this current environment about contact tracers immediately knowing who a known covid carrier has come in contact with, which in turn means a speedier response from the medical teams.
That being said though, the app is absolute garbage on iPhone. Obviously not really their fault, but needing to have the app actively on for it to work is absolutely going to lead to people not bothering to turning it on.
I agree this is bad, but I don't understand why it is. Not an iOS developer but I was under the impression apps can run in the background to maintain Bluetooth connections.
Assuming Apple's policies are in fact preventing them from running in the background, does Apple have a mechanism to grant them an exception for this use case? Does someone have a contact at Apple who could reach out to them?
The tooling around upgrading has definitely gotten a lot better, though if you’re carrying around a relatively older codebase there’s a potentially thorny deprecation coming up in the future
The article was kinda meh but the blog it's on is actually really interesting if you're into medieval books. Lost quite a bit of time today just browsing.
I think it does have to do with the topic, because it answers the headline question "why do fantasy novels have so much food"; I literally came to this comments section to remark that the answer is likely to do with the fact that engaging all of a reader's senses is a common literary trick to make the reader feel like they've been transported into a world. Turns out, eating food is one of the most common ways to engage the sense of taste. :P The author of the OP is probably being a bit narrow in that this isn't something confined to just fantasy, but if one were to somehow prove that this is a trope that's uniquely prevalent in fantasy (which the author doesn't), then the further answer would probably just be, like many other fantasy things, "because Tolkien did it". But really, when Rowling describes a Hogwarts feast it's not because she's trying to check off the I-wrote-a-fantasy-book checklist, it's because eating is a familiar sensation that helps the reader establish a firm relationship with a setting that is often otherwise deliberately alien and mysterious.
I remember learning about this. I wonder if Earth was enveloped in such a burst, if we'd go out quickly, peacefully, like a heart attack in our sleep. Most life wiped out on our planet in an instant. It makes you wonder how many world out there contain the empty structures of civilizations that went out in an instant, with a whisper.
I think that on average, there's a GRB close enough to us to matter once every billion years or so. However, it'd still need to be aligned perfectly to hit us, making the actual extinction event far less likely.
That being said though, the app is absolute garbage on iPhone. Obviously not really their fault, but needing to have the app actively on for it to work is absolutely going to lead to people not bothering to turning it on.