MarkLowenstein

Perhaps a nice short summary would be "facts you can rely on". Because the benefit comes from reducing the cognitive load juggled by the programmer. The more possibilities you can eliminate by identifying invariants, the quicker you'll arrive at a working solution.

It makes things in the foreground have very sharp edges and seem brighter than the things in the background. They call it "soap opera effect" because it reminds you of the way those sets and people are lit.

But also--never seemingly noticed--the technology leads to very crisp changes in direction of the camera panning. So you see a very smooth pan, stopping with no deceleration period, and then a quick new pan in a different direction, with no acceleration. It's disorienting and makes everything look fake. IMO this is the most annoying part, but it's hard to identify and articulate.

This presumes that a very large fraction of Roku users asked for motion smoothing/soap opera effect. I would be surprised. (1) Most people I've pointed it out to say "I can't tell the difference". (2) None of those people had ever known that this method even existed--even a lot of people on this thread didn't know about it before today. (3) As for profitability, is there a single person in the world who would buy a Roku because it had motion smoothing?

I don't have a good solution for that. Perhaps we're finding out why people have come up with weird terms like "naughts" or saying "aught-five".

Could make the convention to say "the twenty hundreds" when referring to [2000, 2100), and "the two thousands" for [2000, 3000).

A lot of this runaround is happening because people get hung up on the fact that the "AD" era began as AD 1. But that year is not magic--it didn't even correlate with the year of Jesus's birth or death. So let's just start the AD era a year before, and call that year "AD 0". It can even overlap with BC 1. BC 1 is the same as AD 0. Fine, we can handle that, right? Then the 00s are [0, 100), 100s are [100, 200), etc. Zero problem, and we can start calling them the 1700s etc., guilt free.

It's also a logically trivial statement. There is no threshold for "best"--food quality is a matter of degree. So you can cite any date at all and justifiably say the food is "best" before that date.

2023: fascinating We really live in a new world today It's crucial that we look ahead to the threats of tomorrow

2024: cyber attack on a ship? Conspiracy theory Grow up Live in the real world

I would not be able to tell if these slider toggles were saying "yes" or "no" without them going from gray to green. How do colorblind people deal with them?

That the whole world adopted these abominations, when there was absolutely nothing wrong with checkboxes, is immensely frustrating.

PDQ Bach is funny to young people and musical neophytes, and even funnier the more erudite you are. Every time I read or hear another PDQ score, book, or record, I find jokes that I wouldn't have gotten even two weeks before.

Hilarious writing by the Kingdom of Nouns guy. Dave Barry-esque.

Interesting contrast. No question that Windows wastes a lot of one's time. Probably most people guess that Linux will waste more of their time, because they may not be able to learn easily enough what you've learned about how to configure it and keep it running smoothly. They may suspect that even if they put in a little time, they will nonetheless make fatal mistakes or be left with a system they must replace with Windows after all. So their perception or misperception of the time cost they will pay causes them to choose Windows, and maybe a lot of them are wrong in the long term.

Whatever you don't pay for in money, you pay for in your time.

I was pointed to this phenomenon by the book Suburban Nation thirty years ago, and it continues to explain so much.

Anything subjective that doesn't fix an identifiable execution problem must be explicitly labeled as a suggestion. You don't get first choice over the code because you are asked to be the reviewer. You are there to (1) catch mistakes and (2) teach the other coder if they appear to not know something useful that you do know. If you have a preference about a simple stylistic matter that is not covered by your style guidelines, either put it in the guidelines, or hold your tongue.

More like eliminate everything except Daylight Savings Time.

Voice assistants do have a lot of potential due to the fantastic ergonomics. "Voice command line" is used as a pejorative here but it's true and a good thing. The original visionaries were right to pursue this idea.

To me where it's gone wrong is that like many other things the A team conceives it but the B team is responsible for its development. The A team will ask "what will users want to say to it"? But Team B says "well if they say 'blah' how do we know that they mean 'blah'"? Mediocrity creeps in.

As an example, here is a typical dialog between me and my Alexa.

"Alexa, play Brahms C Minor Piano Quartet."

"Playing: music like Coldplay."

"NO"

[music like Coldplay]

"Alexa NO"

[music like Coldplay]

"STOP"

[music like Coldplay]

"ALEXA STOP STOP"

Great point. People still confuse primary colors and click-and-drag with easy learning.

But here's how everyone understood a computer would work, before they saw anything else:

GREETINGS PROFESSOR FALKEN.

Hello.

HOW ARE YOU FEELING TODAY?

This C64 simulator is proof that there is a legitimate need for the Caps Lock key.

Or just tax the original sugar production or importation and be done with all the complexity of chasing down a million food companies across thousands of jurisdictions. (Or let people eat whatever they want and stop being a busybody.)

Great article. Hits the best points without wasting time on minutia.

That is the other heuristic when describing a problem and reporting what you already learned, that makes the whole process an art: keep it short!

It's a deceptive title, but it comes straight from the blog post. It's not going to teach you about straws (thankfully...are straws that interesting?). It tells you about the sources of plastic waste in general and justifies the most efficacious solutions to avoid plastic pollution. It is a short article focused on common sense, appropriate pictures, and well-chosen data.

I believe the major advantage of lists is that they make it easy to block out all the chaff from the rest of the prose, allowing you to comfortably concentrate on the current item. That's the same advantage provided by well-chosen taxonomies. Also I think the best UIs are defined by how well they help you identify the areas which you can ignore. I wish this were an explicit priority for designers.

They were saved only by an emergency captive-breeding program. I'm hoping liberalism doesn't require the same intervention!

Very few people understand why free speech/assembly is valuable anymore. That's why it is going extinct faster than the California condor.

The intelligence of the people is the security of the nation. --Daniel Webster

This is why I haven't let my Firefox update itself for the last 1.5 years. The kids are in charge; you can't trust the product.

Was that really the point?

When people anxiously awaited their chance to get the vaccine in January 2021, were they thinking "ooh I can't wait to free up hospital beds"? Or was it "great now I can be immune and be done with COVID"?

Have you ever hand-written a word but want to hide it? One cross-out line doesn't do the trick. In fact, a full minute of trying to hide it with an ugly darkened-in box usually doesn't even do it. But if you just write a couple random letters over each existing one, people have basically no ability to recognize your original word.

That is my one insight. Take it for what it's worth.

Also PRQL/Prequel is a great name. Just that can take you far.

IMO you are at the forefront of where query languages need to and will go.

Some programmers like you see that SQL ordering is backwards to human thinking, except in the simplest cases. But many people with practice and sunk costs in their SQL expertise will be resistant. The resistance usually wins the day.

But sometimes, a useful tool gets created by one person, and a rift is created in that resistance. Think John Resig creating jQuery, leading to LINQ and many other similar patterns. You could be that person for database query languages, but how do you ensure that?

Maybe imagine what made jQuery easy to adopt and indispensable for programmers: easy availability as a simple .js download; solved the problem of DOM differences between browsers. Good luck to you, and thanks for sharing.

This is often the opinion of people who don't see a cost to them. I'm going to guess that

(1) You don't live near one of these tracks where violence may occur and violent individuals are congregating.

(2) You don't know if anything you buy travels along these tracks.

(3) You are wealthy enough that a 0.1% increase in price doesn't bother you.

(4) You don't have kids growing up in that area who notice that it's more profitable and easier to rob trains than to go through school and produce something.

(5) You aren't on a train crew whose lives are being threatened.

How am I doing so far?