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As hairy as it is, COM is an example of a cross language API/ABI. It's workable from C, C++, C# etc etc and even accessible in MacOS as "NSPlugin".


Also the design macOS drivers use.

However on Windows, given its prevalence, especially since Vista, one would expect that by now Windows team would have bothered to make it less hairy, but elas it has never been a priority, when when they actually did something (WinRT) is was woefully mismanaged and now no one cares.


>As hairy as it is, COM is an example of a cross language API/ABI

I think the reverse will also be true. Any cross language API will get issues.


Indeed, example all the languages that target JVM, CLR and WebAssembly, and the missing bits between what the platform can do, what the "systems" language exposes, and what everyone else is able to expose or consume.


I was messing around with Bing's image generation recently and found it was very sensitive towards the usage of the word "Jesus".

It did not object to me using other gods names such as Krishna or Vishnu.

I managed to skirt around what appeared to be censorship by asking "generate an image of a man wearing a white toga while standing on a small hill, handing out bread and wine to its disciples". This resulted in a Jesus-like image.


Scrum is a sad joke. But corporate loves feeling "safe", with estimates in hand, even if they readily blow out. Usually it ends up with "watergile", a total mess.

You can just time kanban tickets vs estimated size (all the forecasting, tracking, etc, should be done by a manager, without wasting the team's time) combined with pulling from the right hand side and vigorous action towards blockers. Optimise for throughput.

During the best version of this, as I experienced, we spent about 5 minutes in the morning as a team, and occasionally visited the board throughout the day (not as a team, sometimes as a pair, to discuss something and add/move tickets). My manager at the time spent some time at the end of each week by himself collecting cards and doing the tracking to make the higher-ups happy.


This is rather clever!

What immediately came to mind was perhaps you want to hide a secret key from entering memory. If this was done in kernel mode, you would be able to disable interrupts/task switching execute the "secret" stuff, and continue on your merry way...


My wife is Malaysian, but I am not. Here is my outsider's perspective:

* Street food is very tasty, but often laden with gular (palm sugar) or rock sugar (case in point: Sambal). You don't notice because it's spicy!

* Sweet drinks (milo, teh tarik) often accompany the spicy food.

* The street food is so cheap, and available pretty much everywhere. People avoid cooking at home[1]. Fresh fruit and vegetables are not that cheap.

* Because the weather is so hot and humid, people avoid walking.

* People like to eat white rice, as opposed to brown rice (high GI)

* Society has transitioned to office work rather than manual work

* People can afford larger portions because they are wealthier

* The weather is hot and humid, so people avoid walking outside during the day! AC office to AC car to AC shopping mall, etc, etc.

[1] One fascinating thing I have noticed is the concept of a "wet" and "dry" kitchen. The dry kitchen is inside the house, and is almost a show-piece. The wet kitchen is where the real action happens (albeit by the maid), but is typically a lean-to adjoining the back of the house.


Over-obsession with carbohydrates/sugar intake is a health fad. One simply can't expect health fads to be uniformly distributed across the planet.

People like to eat white rice, because they've been doing so for thousands of years with no ill-effects. The question is how can we improve nutrition education in the west so that people don't think that they are going to get diabetes from eating rice.


> People like to eat white rice, because they've been doing so for thousands of years with no ill-effects

As pointed out, human society is wealthier and we're eating more white rice than ever. Since its considered 'superior' to other cereals, we eat it to the exclusion of other cereals. In Japan, for instance, eating too much white rice almost sank the Japanese navy [1]

[1] - https://medium.com/war-is-boring/eating-too-much-rice-almost...


Exactly, people in the US have taken this to the extreme.

Just because everybody's been stuffing themselves with over processed bread, donuts and fries and have gotten obese doesn't imply that carbs are evil point blank and you must never eat them. That's just insane.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the atlantic and in the rest of the world, people in France eat their baguette everyday, Italians eat pizza and pasta all the time, most of the Asian continent lives on white rice every meal, etc..., and these are among the thinnest populations you will find.

How this argument is never considered is beyond me.


There is nothing particularly wrong in eating white rice, if your energy expenditure is matching up to the intake.

But as societies change, manual labour is replaced by machines and people move on to physically less demanding work, diets have to adapt.


Roughly...

Cup of cooked white rice: 205 calories.

Single cup of milo and milk: 100+ calories for milo, 100+ calories for milk.

So they're about the same in energy, however that is not the whole story. Firstly, the glycemic index[0] or how fast sugars are released - rice is good (low and sustained energy release) whereas Milo is bad (fast). Secondly, the overall eating habits encouraged... Milo is encouraging time-poor, less considered, more commercial/productised single-serving consumption and provides little additional nutrition, whereas rice typically accompanies and encourages more natural foods with a more complete nutritional profile (not just "massive energy hit plus incidental protein"). Obviously the environmental overheads with respect to packaging and transport are also far worse for Milo than rice.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glycemic_index


According to the link you provided, most white rices are in the high-glycemic category. According to the "International table of glycemic index and glycemic load"[1], Jasmine Rice has a Glycemic Index of 109, which is actually higher than even pure glucose, which has an index of 100. Milo, on the other hand, depending on where you buy it and what you mix it with, has a GI of between 36 and 55.

[1] http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/76/1/5.full.pdf


As a European who lived in Malaysia for a few years I do agree. Malaysia is terrible trap.

First the amounts of sugar and carbohydrates like white rice is completly devastating. There is very little alternative like fresh fruits or protein in diet.

Milk is pretty bad and not tasty - usually low lactosis milk. There is no real cheese or real, good yoghurt etc. Food is of poor quality mostly - think junk food rather then freshly made and freshly cooked. It is tasty due to spice and sugar but not something you would like eating daily.

But more devastating then the diet is the lifestyle - due to climate mostly. There is very lityle outdoor activity in cities like KL - in this climate jogging, cycling or even walks in the park are out of question for most people.

Malaysia also has sub-par 3rd World city infrastructure - cars rule the cities and the pavements are terrible and dangerous to walk.

On the streets one can see a lot of Malayi people who due to lack of activity and carbohydrates intake are overweight and with symptoms of type II diabetes.

It is quite suprising that not that far North in Thailand - addmitedly better climate - cycling is as popular as in Italy and people exercise much more outdoors and look healthier.

I love Malaysia and they are sweet people there. Just it is a difficult place for me regarding sugar intake and lack of outdoor activity.


I'm not sure where you went to eat, but I found the food in KL to be of lower standard as compared to Melaka (which is famed for its hawker food) and Penang. In KL, I had to be shown to the good places[1], but in Melaka you'd be pretty set where ever you rock up!

But the fruits are amazing! There is so much variety of tropical fruits! But my comments about the pricing were based on my observations at the supermarkets -- it felt like the costs were quite high for fresh fruit & veg compared to simply eating out.

[1] Shout out to Klang Bah Kuh Teh. It's been my first stop many times once I've arrived in M'sia!


I would love to go get some good roti and kopi susu but I have left Asia SE a month ago for good.

I have pretty much enjoyed the food but it just isn't the kind of diet that you would recommend to anyone for health and and loosing weight.

Penang is a little better then KL because of more food diversity there and some really nice Indian, vegetarian restaurants. And the climate is also better then KL so there is more people jogging along the waterfront. But still it isn't a good city for biking.


For cheap fruit & veg, do what the locals do and shop at the wet market. Far cheaper than the styrofoam packs at the supermarket.


It's hard to find good dairy products in a country whose population mostly can't tolerate lactose? Who would have guessed that.


Wet kitchens are a very sensible idea, for the kind of cooking that is done in them. Just hang around a hawker stir fry cart, and imagine 20 years of that smoke and oil mist raining down in your living room.


[flagged]


I think it's a bit silly to request someone to edit their comment. If you have a good point, then your comment will stand alone without the demand.

But I've reread both comments and I still can't spot the outrage.

It seems to me that you think "society has transitioned to office work" somehow means that all people not working in an office are not part of society. Not quite sure yet though because you seem to want everyone else to draw the final conclusion for you as if it were self-evident after linking to google image search for a lean-to.


I am more than happy to address your concerns.

You are absolutely right about the wealth inequality. There are also deep inequalities within Malaysian society not just along socio-economic lines, but also racial lines. It's a complex, multi-faceted issue.

My comment was intended to be a simple set of observations about diet and the broader society of Malaysia, relating to the one of the article's points: Rising obesity.


[Withdrawing this comment after huge criticism in replies]


I hope you are trolling, because this comment sounds like it was written by someone with some sort of mental issue. OP isn’t “required to edit” anything just because you say so.


The tone and attitude of this post is so obnoxious it almost seems like satire.


You have entirely too much time on your hands.


Malaysian here. FYI in most households the "wet kitchen" is indoors -- in fact it's THE kitchen. The "dry kitchen" is little more than a countertop with a microwave and maybe a sink.

Example pictures: https://www.propertyguru.com.my/property-listing/usj-20-reno...


That looks like a pretty good house... what level of income would one need to buy such a house? Like an office worker or manager, etc?


I suppose it's attainable for office workers. A house like this could cost around RM300k (74k USD), although for the specific property I linked prices would be much higher due to the location (it's an affluent district located very near the heart of the capital city). Median monthly income in Malaysia is around RM5.5k (~1.3k USD) [1].

Unfortunately property prices have been rising 5-10% year on year while income has stayed mostly stagnant.

[1]: https://www.imoney.my/articles/middle-class-malaysia


I am not sure how the parent comment is not sensitive enough? I am a Malaysian. Please do enlighten me on how the parent comment insulted me in any way.


I want to give thanks to all the SqlAlchemy devs!

I am a huge fan of the custom column types -- they have allowed me to have code that works against SQLite as well as a production databases with ease!


I'm running OpenWRT on a TP-Link TL-WR841N/ND v8 and the LuCI interface that comes out of box is vastly better (cleaner and more feature-full) than the majority of consumer router interfaces I've encountered. In particular, the realtime graph of current connections!

You can likely set your ADSL modem into "bridge mode" and put a user-flashable device between that and your network. Once you get NBN you just connect the WAN port to the NBN termination box and you'll be getting DHCP from your ISP.


I'm on the NBN now. Configuring OpenWRT had been a pretty steep learning curve but it's worth it in the end.


I'd like to mention another local success story. Hidden away in Fisherman's Bend in Melbourne is Blackmagic Design (http://www.blackmagicdesign.com). 99% of sales are overseas and they compete with the likes of Canon and Sony. The company was grown organically without any external funding, and does engineering and industrial design in-house. This is not an easy thing to do (hardware is expensive to develop!) but it can be done.

disclaimer: I used to work for Blackmagic


I have always been impressed by Blackmagic. Yes the key to success here is to bootstrap. If you go down this path Australia is one of the better places in the world to do it.


Some other bootstrappers from Melbourne:

* PayDirt - http://paydirtapp.com/

* Cycling Analytics - https://www.cyclinganalytics.com/

Other products developed in Melbourne (I am unsure of the levels of VC):

* Aconex construction workflow - http://www.aconex.com/

* Redbubble - http://www.redbubble.com/

* Realestate.com.au - http://www.realestate.com.au/

I don't always understand the hype about investment. If someone is giving you their money, you are giving up sovereignty. If you can build something that earns enough to continue growth, then you can afford to make some mistakes.

Edit: Formatting


Don't forget FastMail! https://www.fastmail.com/ - we don't make a giant deal about being from Australia since most of our business is from overseas as well.


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