I find it a bit sad that contextual pointers aren't nearly as common as they used to be.
They can certainly be overdone or done poorly, but done well they give a really nice indicator that can account for some combination of context of what's under the pointer to be operated on, any modifiers active, and any ambient state.
Pick-A-Brick sounded like such a good idea on paper, until you realize that the economics of it end up being a handful of brick size/color combos and then bin after bin of minifig accessories.
I thought so too at first. My local toy store owner scoffed and called it “floor sweepings”. I think of that every time I visit a Lego Store and look down.
Through user groups, I’ve had access to direct ordering. I could order off the same list as Lego Store managers see. It truly was a random hodgepodge. Manager said sometimes they don’t even get to choose. Somewhere are warehouses of stockpiled parts, some of which are surplus after a set is retired.
For example, I chose a box of sand blue 1x2, and a box of 2x2 low slope red roof peaks. Imagine those languishing in a Pick a Brick wall. Myself, I had a lot of roof to build but I still have a thousand unused.
If Lego took consumer or store orders at random, it would complicate their planning which allocates production for sets, months in advance. Only the Model Shops got anything they asked for.
Even if the TEMPEST were easier, it's significantly less powerful, as it's not going to get you the ability to write malicious firmware to the audio device nor a persistent connection to the host device when the audio device isn't connected.
According to the details in their whitepaper, firmware is signed, but the management protocol allows reading arbitrary memory, so you can read out the keys and sign your own payload.
I'm not sure anyone intentionally did this, but there were several poor decisions involved. It sounds like the upstream vendor shipped sample code without auth, assuming implementers would know they needed to secure a privileged device management interface, and said implementers just copied the sample and shipped it.
This kind of insistence that their way is "better" and thus justifying removing agency from the user is the exact same thing that's kept me away from signal, too. Even their own blog post acknowledges a perfectly good current method for supporting what they want to do without any of this, yet they reject even allowing it as an option because they don't like the ux.
This arguably is more interesting than yet another closed messaging platform, but still not gonna use it with this requirement in place.
You say "for every unicode symbol", which I guess is true if you search by code, but for anything that isn't in your curated set I'm unable to even find it if I paste the literal character or use the "official" name.
eg ℝ "Double-Struck Capital R" won't show up at all unless I search it as U+211D.
You’re right — the main index is curated.
I added a /codepoint/… fallback so pasting a literal character or U+XXXX always lands you on a dev-friendly encoding page, even outside the curated sets. I also clarified this in the UI copy.
I'm really sad this one couldn't be "Slop Direct"
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