> Falling doesn't have to be dangerous. You can fall a lot without getting hurt, if you learn to fall safely. With inline skating, you have protective gear (helmet, knee/elbow pads, wrist guards) which protect you, and you have techniques for falling which let you use this gear to its fullest potential.
Is that actually true? Is it possible with enough protective gear, that falling can be safe, even for older people? Doesn't your own body weight come into the picture, despite helmets and knee pads? (Genuinely curious!)
IME yes, it absolutely can be. I am approaching middle age & still comfortably enjoy pushing myself in physical activities where falls are likely, with zero significant injuries aside from a couple sprained ankles from playing basketball (& technically the ankle rolling came before the fall in these couple mishaps; letting my body roll/fall out of it just helped reduce the severity). Also it's more about technique & familiarity/reflex training than safety gear, although I do wear a Zamst ankle brace on my weak ankle whenever I play basketball & started wearing a helmet for snowboarding a few years ago. Jackie Chan & Buster Keaton were even better at this, although they pushed it a lot farther & did sustain major injuries in their stunt careers.
However, there's a big caveat: I've been practicing falling safely since a young age & really mastered it in my teenage years practicing martial arts & snowboarding. I'm sure it's much harder & more dangerous to learn if you first start in middle age, although I'd imagine it's still possible with the right training & appropriate caution.
Thank you. Yeah given the caveat I think it's probably hard then, unfortunately. (For context, I'm someone who's generally very uncoordinated, didn't play any sports growing up, etc, and a few months ago at 39 I fell from kitchen-counter height or possibly even just footstool-height and somehow managed to fall awkwardly on my side and fracture my hip (acetabulum), which took a couple of months to heal. I'm told that this kind of fracture is unlikely in people this age unless there's high-speed impact or osteoporosis involved, but well, I have a talent for awkwardness.)
The broader point of the post I actually agree with though, but the lesson I'd take away is to engineer environments such that it's ok to fall/fail safely.
The issue is not of low resolution exactly, but font format.
Knuth uses bitmap fonts, rather than vector fonts like everyone else. This is because his entire motivation for creating TeX and METAFONT was to not be reliant on the font technology of others, but to have full control over every dot on the page. METAFONT generates raster (bitmap) fonts. The [.tex] --TeX--> [.dvi] --dvips--> [.ps] --Distiller--> [.pdf] pipeline uses these fonts on the page. They look bad on screen because they're not accompanied by hinting for screens' low resolution (this could in principle be fixed!), but if you print them on paper (at typical resolution like 300/600 dpi, or higher of typesetters) they'll look fine.
Everyone else uses TrueType/OpenType (or Type 3: in any case, vector) fonts that only describe the shape and leave the rasterization up to the renderer (but with hinting for low resolutions like screens), which looks better on screen (and perfectly fine on paper too, but technically one doesn't have control over all the details of rasterization).
Prediction: Android will roll out a flow for “experienced users” that they promised in November with “in the coming months” (https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de...), which will allow “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn't verified”. And even then people will still complain Google is being too controlling by making the warnings too scary / the process too onerous, etc. (I don't expect installing apps from source via adb connected to laptop to go away!)
- From April 2025 there's https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-gl... a blog post from a “VP, Government Affairs & Public Policy”, which mentions “people in Asia Pacific feel it acutely, having lost an estimated $688 billion in 2024” (I think this may be across all scams?) and ends with “Combatting evolving online fraud in Asia-Pacific is critical” after listing a bunch of random things (unrelated to Android) Google is/was doing. This suggests to me that Google was under some criticism/pressure from governments for enabling scams, and eager to say “see, we're doing something”.
> In early discussions about this initiative, we've been encouraged by the supportive initial feedback we've received. In Brazil, the Brazilian Federation of Banks (FEBRABAN) sees it as a “significant advancement in protecting users and encouraging accountability.” This support extends to governments as well, with Indonesia's Ministry of Communications and Digital Affairs praising it for providing a “balanced approach” that protects users while keeping Android open. Similarly, Thailand’s Ministry of Digital Economy and Society sees it as a “positive and proactive measure” that aligns with their national digital safety policies.
This shows that it was a negotiation with the governments/agencies in Brazil, Indonesia, Thailand that were breathing down on Google to do something.
- And the most recent https://android-developers.googleblog.com/2025/11/android-de... from November 2025 (which promised the “students and hobbyists” account type and the “experienced users” flow “in the coming months”) also has a “Why verification is important” section that mentions the “consistently acted to keep our ecosystem safe” and “common attack we track in Southeast Asia” and “While we have advanced safeguards and protections to detect and take down bad apps, without verification, bad actors can spin up new harmful apps instantly”.
The overall picture I get is less of “Google to suddenly abandon these iterative security improvements” but more like: under pressure from governments to stop scams, Google has been doing various things like the things you mentioned, and scammers have also been evolving and finding new ways to carry out scams at scale (like “impersonating developers”), and the latest upcoming change requiring developer verification on “certified Android devices” is simply the next step of the iteration. It sucks and feels like a wholesale lock-down, yes, but it does not seem a jarring disconnect from the previous steps in the progression of locking things down.
I remember when I was 6 or 7 teaching myself Applesoft BASIC and writing programs with funny (to me) little print statements all through them - when computing was just exploding with possibility.
I wouldn't have had a clue what a Fibonacci sequence was though ;)
The whole program is an Easter egg :) “sorry, he wasn’t born yet! try again” vs “no, he is already in heaven, try again”, and that cute goodbye routine.
> The symbol ∈ only is a viable solution in a portion of the use cases. For instance, an assertion such as O(n)⋅O(n) = O(n²) would not be correctly describable as O(n)⋅O(n) ∈ O(n²). Perhaps O(n)⋅O(n) ⊂ O(n²) would be defensible, but now one has to devote a non-trivial amount of thought into deciding which of the connectives =, ∈, ∋, ⊂, ⊃ to use in a given context. For instance the assertion “Since sin(y) = sin(x) + O(|y−x|), we have sin(x+O(1/n)) = sin(x) + O(1/n)” would now become “Since sin(y) ∈ sin(x) + O(|y−x|), we have sin(x+O(1/n)) ⊂ \sin(x) + O(1/n)”. Using the equality sign for all of these use cases instead is more intuitive and corresponds more closely to how the verb “is” (“to be”) is actually used in mathematical English.
and
> … Nevertheless most of us still often think in mereological terms rather than set-theoretic or first-order terms […] without requiring translation to set theory or first order logic; indeed, such a translation would only serve to slow that mathematician down as he or she would usually have translate it back into mereological form in order to wield it effectively. Because of this, I think it is worth adjusting our notational conventions to more closely align with our actual thought processes… I don’t see much advantage in interpreting each instance of the O() notation in the exponential type bound f(n) = O(\exp(O(nᴼ⁽¹⁾))) or the calculation (1 + O(1/n))ᴼ⁽ⁿ⁾ = \exp(O(1/n)⋅O(n)) = \exp(O(1)) = O(1) (for n sufficiently large), in terms of ideals.
> Falling doesn't have to be dangerous. You can fall a lot without getting hurt, if you learn to fall safely. With inline skating, you have protective gear (helmet, knee/elbow pads, wrist guards) which protect you, and you have techniques for falling which let you use this gear to its fullest potential.
Is that actually true? Is it possible with enough protective gear, that falling can be safe, even for older people? Doesn't your own body weight come into the picture, despite helmets and knee pads? (Genuinely curious!)
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