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AprilArcus

724 karma · joined April 9, 2014

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AprilArcus··on Metric Time
>There will be an exact point at which a certain molecule has interacted with another molecule marking the exact point of perfect sleep.

I have some terrible news for you about statistical mechanics.

AprilArcus··on Empires of the Steppes: The Nomadic Tribes Who Shaped Civilisation
From about 3000 BC (the fall of the Cucuteni–Trypillia farming culture to the Yamnaya nomads) to about AD 895 (the conquest of the Carpathian basin by the Hungarians), each nomad community that settled down could count on eventually being conquered by one or another of their distant cousins who stayed on horseback.

I question whether the agricultural lifestyle is a better lifestyle for humanity than pastoralism in some kind of utilitarian or consequentialist sense, provided the conquest of and parasitism upon agricultural peoples could be factored out. Pastoralists had generally taller stature and better dentition than agriculturalists until the industrial revolution. Pastoralists maintained smaller populations, and avoided the negative externalities of settled agriculture, e.g. soil exhaustion under intensive irrigation, pests and disease from close-quarters living.

AprilArcus··on React Server Components made our site a lot faster
I also maintain a JVM which we run some backend JS libraries on via custom Nashorn builds. It's slow and drinks memory. Setting up a façade in front of a pool of ScriptEngine objects mitigates some of the startup cost, but I super don't like the idea of running React for server rendering. I would suggest standing up a NodeJS rendering microservice instead; we'd do it if arcane deployment reasons didn't preclude the possibility.
AprilArcus··on Memory-efficient enum arrays in Zig
All you need is a way to branch and a way to loop, so anything with conditional types and recursive types will be Turing Complete
AprilArcus··on Arm IPO to kick off today
Apple holds a rare Architecture license to the ARM ISA due to their role as a founding partner, and can make original implementations without incurring licensing dues, as they do with the A and M series CPUs. I understand why they would want to switch to homegrown designs instead of licensing ARM reference designs (which they do have to pay for), but why migrate instruction sets too when RISC-V doesn't save them any marginal cost over novel ARM designs that would be binary compatible with the existing firmware?
AprilArcus··on Where did the QWERTY keyboard come from?
Yes! And the home row is mostly in disemvoweled alphabetical order: "d_fgh_jkl", another hint at the layout's origins.
AprilArcus··on Accessible Palette: stop using HSL for color systems (2021)
Have the errata been collected anywhere?
AprilArcus··on Thoughts on Flash (2010)
My read is that their APIs weren't ready in time, so "make a web app" was a stop-gap they tossed out to developers while they were preparing UIKit for its 1.0 release.
AprilArcus··on Monster gravitational waves spotted for first time
>The Higgs mechanism affects electrons, not quarks

It effects both. The LHC produces Higgs particles through the annihilation of top-antitop pairs, which works because the top quark couples strongly to the Higgs field.

AprilArcus··on Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default
The pre-iOS 7 graphics have black text over a non-uniform background color as compared to white text over a uniform background color. This gives us ranges instead of a single value, but even in the worst case, black is a vastly more legible foreground color:

           | iOS 5-6     | iOS 7+ |
  ---------+-------------+--------+
  SMS      | 11.3 - 13.4 | 2.2    |
  iMessage | 11.8 - 14.1 | 3.8    |
AprilArcus··on Outlook now ignores Windows' Default Browser and opens links in Edge by default
Green has higher luminance than blue at equivalent saturation. The values for SMS and iMessage background colors are, respectively and in sRGB, #00CC46 and #0080FF, corresponding to relative luminance values of 0.436 and 0.227 according to the WCAG 2 formula.

With white foreground text, this gives a contrast ratio of 2.15:1 for SMS and 3.79:1 for iMessage. WCAG 2.x AA level compliances requires a contrast ratio of at least 4.5:1 for normal text and at least 3:1 for large text.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/WCAG21/Understanding/contrast-minimum...

AprilArcus··on Chrome still hasn't changed its opinion about dropping JPEG XL support
WebKit (Safari's rendering engine) is open source. WebKit is a fork of KHTML and Blink (Chromium's rendering engine) is a fork of WebKit.
AprilArcus··on Apple unveils new Mac Studio and brings Apple Silicon to Mac Pro
NVMe wouldn't give you the best latency, but a 16x PCIe card loaded with DRAM and addressable as a scratch disk doesn't sound bananas. I wonder why Apple didn't market something like that as a first party solution.
AprilArcus··on The EV Transition Is Harder Than Anyone Thinks
I like to describe it as an iPad strapped to four cordless drills.
AprilArcus··on Is Babylon 5 secretly the most influential TV show of the past 25 years? (2021)
It's not terribly unusual for a show to get dropped by a network and picked up by another; some other heavily serialized genre shows that have changed networks include Buffy (started on the WB and moved to UPN), Stargate (started on Showtime and moved to Sci-Fi) and The Expanse (started on Sci-Fi and moved to Prime Video)
AprilArcus··on Linux is Making Apple Great Again
It's not fun, it's scary and tacky. Those red hats represent a movement that really wants to hurt people like me and my friends.
AprilArcus··on Wittgenstein's Ladder
This Is Just To Say

  I have kicked away
  the ladder
  which transcends
  these propositions

  and which
  you were probably
  climbing
  to see the world aright

  Forgive me
  whereof one cannot speak
  one must pass over
  in silence.
AprilArcus··on Framework announces AMD, new Intel gen, 16“ laptop and more
Joining the chorus clamoring for this <3
AprilArcus··on General Relativity and Solar System Stability
You might be interested in the "Five Planet Nice Model": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-planet_Nice_model
AprilArcus··on JavaScript and TypeScript features of the last 3 years
Template literal types (a) have nothing to do with tagged template literals, and (b) are a game-changing feature, allowing you to write compile-time string parsers.
AprilArcus··on JavaScript and TypeScript features of the last 3 years
thanks, fixed
AprilArcus··on JavaScript and TypeScript features of the last 3 years
`*` is the namespace object. `default` is a special named property on the namespace object.

someModule.js:

    export default 'foo';
    export const bar = 'bar';
namespaceImport.js:

    import * as SomeNamespace from './someModule.js';
    console.assert(SomeNamespace.default === 'foo');
    console.assert(SomeNamespace.bar === 'bar');
defaultImport.js:

    import foo from './someModule.js';
    console.assert(foo === 'foo');
namedImports.js:

    import { default as foo, bar } from './someModule.js';
    console.assert(foo === 'foo');
    console.assert(bar === 'bar');
AprilArcus··on The <Dialog> Element
Try this:

  body:has(dialog[open]) {
    overflow: hidden
  }

  body:has(dialog[open])::before {
    content: "";
    position: fixed;
    top: 0;
    left: 0;
    width: 100%;
    height: 100%;
    backdrop-filter: blur(4px);
    background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0, 0.5);
  }
AprilArcus··on If you're happy with OpenBSD, probably any computer is good enough
Would love know more about the "dire state" of ppc32 linux
AprilArcus··on Ask HN: Which products you find best designed from UI/UX perspective?
The original iPod was an absolute triumph. Scrolling with acceleration, great use of animation to transition between hierarchical views despite minimal graphical capabilities, auditory feedback. It did very few things (playback stored music and playlists curated on a larger and more capable machine), and it did them perfectly.

The end goal of UI/UX should be to make the job-to-be-done not just easy, but delightful. Great UX turns work into play.

AprilArcus··on History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today (2022)
They are probably referring specifically to Servo parallel layout.
AprilArcus··on PostgREST – Serve a RESTful API from any Postgres database
Graphile (https://www.graphile.org/) and Prisma (https://www.prisma.io/)
AprilArcus··on Nushell: Introduction to a new kind of shell

  `template${Math.random() > 0.5 ? 'strings' : 'literals'} have beern part of the language since 2015!`
AprilArcus··on Remix web framework aquired by Shopify
Your code calls a library; a framework calls your code.
AprilArcus··on Remix web framework aquired by Shopify
"just"
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