feifan

This is totally understandable! Thanks for pointing this out.

I think I fixed for Firefox — let me know if you're still seeing 1.4 contrast/super-light text.

The future's already here, just not evenly distributed :) I wrote this in part to surface these ideas to new people!

Yep, that's it. Turns out, Safari/Chrome change the page background automatically based on your OS setting. FF seems not to.

Geez, have you heard of being nice? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26161659

> author here — sorry about that. I don't use/didn't test with Firefox, but it looks like it's not setting the page background properly in dark mode. I'll get that fixed!

Hey, author here — sorry about that. I don't use/didn't test with Firefox, but it looks like it's not setting the page background properly in dark mode. I'll get that fixed!

FWIW, I actually prefer those 90s UIs, not because the borders and shadows are "pretty", but because they're dense. Flat UI also came with big gobs of whitespace and padding … to me it feels like bubble-wrapping everything.

Sorry, I don't use/didn't test on Firefox. I'll fix that.

Sorry, I don't use/didn't test on Firefox. I'll fix that.

I could've been more clear: the "using the computer" part (what you might call incidental/accidental complexity) should be effortless. The problem itself can be as challenging as you'd like to tackle :)

IMO high-level, low-tech DSLs are under-explored. Lots of possibilities there. I don't think you're necessarily limited to just text-based DSLs though; there's interesting opportunities when you pair with a UI. For example, see Pharo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOuZyOKa91o

Oooh this looks cool! I'll check it out, thanks

Thank you :) While I personally haven't gotten into board games, I love that Adama exists as a stake in the ground towards "better". And yeah, I agree with that closing sentiment too. This post is meant to be a rallying point for inventing new, better things.

You might be right on the first part, but I'm young and optimistic enough to reject the second part.

Hahaha fair :) I mean it more in a "flow state" sense — I usually have things I want to get done, and I feel good when I can flow through them effortlessly.

Perhaps, if you view it through my ostensible lack of interest in new computing technologies. From my perspective, computers have always been a tool to augment what I can do — gather information that my senses alone can't; crunch data that I can't do by hand; automate repetitive tasks; etc.

Most of that 1) relates to web development in some way (i.e. you get the data from a website), and 2) has gotten harder over time as software gets in the way.

Hello! Author here :)

It depends on your definition of fun. This is my blog, so I'll use my definition — "fun" to me is being able to get my computer to effortlessly do things I have to and want to do. Flow state and all that.

To me, I don't find most of these areas "fun". Interesting, worthwhile, valuable? Yes. Fun? Nah. None of these areas reduce the friction of using a computer for the things I use it for — tracking my budgets, life metrics, doing research and tracking my notes/thoughts, and ideally a bit of digital and IRL automation. Most of that (along with my day job) falls squarely in the realm of web development.

Computers and software are tools; they're means to an end relative to my interests. Tools should at least not get in the way, and ideally they'd be a joy to use.

Hello! I'm the author of this post wave This is part of my point — the majority of software time and effort is spent on web-and-related software.

> executed on a paired phone

One constraint around this is the sheer bandwidth required to do any sort of live processing (either for viewfinding purposes or autofocus) — the latency (and even bandwidth) of anything less than a direct raw feed into the processor isn't gonna be good enough.

Intel is likely planning to purchase some fab capacity from TMSC already: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/27/tsmc-shares-jump-as-intel-fa...

"…U.S. chipmaker Intel said it faces delays for its next-generation chips and could outsource some of the production.…While Intel didn’t name potential third parties, analysts see TSMC as being a contender."

$10m seems … relatively cheap for anything in space?

Having spent about a year (so far) building personal projects with both Clojure and Elixir, I think Elixir exposes/requires you to know much less of the underlying Erlang/BEAM than Clojure does for Java/JVM.

Elixir seems to encourage simple data structures — everything is made up of basic data structures, and since there's no encapsulation, libraries seem to be built with an attitude of "developers are gonna inspect everything so we might as well make things clear and simple". I only noticed this in contrast to libraries in popular OO languages (most recently Python) where everything is done through objects that often have inscrutable instance variables and "missing" methods/methods that library authors simply haven't gotten around to implementing.

Having a small library of functions operating on a small number of data structures makes programming a lot more intuitive than a large number of classes, each with their bespoke set of things you can do to them.

I'm not sure there is a business model or a quantitative framework for measuring its value. I imagine it's just a cool thing they built and put it out there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I imagine the above was a joke

A monitor arm with rotation support helps with this! Useful if you're planning to have a long read session, since there is a bit of setup cost (physically rotating the screen and then updating your OS's display settings).

An iPad and an app like GoodNotes or LiquidText is a great alternative.

Same! Good thing we have ethernet :P

The difference is you breaking consistency for your use cases, vs some product designer somewhere breaking consistency for all of their users for whatever reason without the end user having any say in it.

Pithily, the cost of a product designer’s novel portfolio piece is externalized onto their captive users.

Finda’s architecture[0] is great for this discussion.

On the one hand, you can say “look, an Electron app that’s actually fast!”

On the other hand, you can say “wow web apps are slow; it takes ~50x longer to render a basic list than to regex search across tens of thousands of strings”.

From a performance perspective, the JS part of the stack certainly isn’t helping.

0: https://keminglabs.com/blog/building-a-fast-electron-app-wit...

IMO desktop apps aren’t quite equivalent to native apps. Native apps look and behave in a consistent way. They have

• Familiar UI primitives: - Controls and chrome are in the same place - Font sizes are the same across apps - Consistent icons and button shapes

• Support standard keyboard shortcuts (including obscure ones that developers re-implementing these UIs might not know about) - All the Emacs-style keybindings that work in native macOS text fields but are hit-or-miss in custom web text fields - Full keyboard access (letting me tab and use the space bar and arrow keys to interact with controls)

• And consistent, predictable responsiveness cadences - Somewhat contrived example: In Slack (browser or Electron app), switching between channels/DMs (via ⌘K) has a lag of about 0.5–1 second. If I start typing my message for that recipient during this lag, it actually gets saved as a draft in the channel that I just left and my content in the new channel gets truncated. I don’t think that kind of behavior would happen in a native macOS app, which renders UIs completely synchronously by default/in-order (so it might block the UI, but at least interactions will be in a consistent state)