473 karma · joined July 23, 2011
Consider, for example, RSS/Atom feeds. Certainly there are <link /> tags you can add, but since none of the major browsers do anything with those anymore, we're left dropping clickable links to the feeds where users can see them. If someone doesn't know about RSS/Atom, what's their reward for clicking on those links? A screenful of robot barf.
These resources in TFA are another example of that. The government or regulatory bodies in question want to provide structured data. They want people to be able to find the structured data. The only real way of doing that right now is a clickable link.
XSLT provides a stopgap solution, at least for XML-formatted data, because it allows you to provide that clickable, discoverable link, without risking dropping unsuspecting folks straight into the soup. In fact, it's even better than that, because the output of the XSLT can include an explainer that educates people on what they can do with the resource.
If browsers still respected the <link /> tag for RSS/Atom feeds, people probably wouldn't be pushing back on this as hard. But what's being overlooked in this conversation is that there is a real discoverability need here, and for a long time XSLT has been the best way to patch over it.
I'm sure we've all had an experience at least once where we've bought something in a larger container from the grocery store thinking we were getting a deal, only to find that we didn't get through it as fast as we thought we would, it started spoiling, and we got to scrape our savings into the trash can.
And many of us have had an experience where someone higher up in the company has insisted that we use a tool that isn't very good "because we've already paid for it", so it's clearly needed advice, even if it's not groundbreaking. Everyone sometimes needs "obvious" conclusions pointed out to them, I think. It's a quirk of our mental processing as humans.
(I don't think this detracts from such sites, to be clear; they're adopting new technologies where they provide practical benefits to the reader because many indieweb proponents are pushing it as a progressive, rather than reactionary, praxis.)
Adam Ragusea has a video[2] on the topic that goes into more depth, though the same information is repeated across a lot of sources of varying quality if you do a quick web search.
I agree that there's potential here, though, and do genuinely hope that we find ways to make human intelligence better as we're going about AI research. Even pessimistically, I think we'll at least surface approaches that people use without thinking about, which is on its own a good thing, because once you know you're doing something, it becomes a lot easier to train yourself to do it better.
That said, the Great Pyramid is a historical site, not an active worship site, and modern archeological sensibilities prioritise conservation. A restoration like that might make it hard to answer future questions about the pyramid.
If you send the HTML table over the wire, you can use it as the datasource for the other visualisations, same as you would with JSON. You can extend it with `data-` attributes if necessary to get some extra machine-readable information in there, but I have not needed to do that yet.
On the application I'm currently working on, we do this and then have a listener on the htmx event to turn the table into a d3.js graph. It works pretty well, and has the advantage that if someone is using our application with JavaScript turned off, they still get the table with all the data.
It's not a hugely risky thing. My biggest concern is/was the bioproofing on the magnet becoming damaged.
- the transformer in my laptop charger
- the electric motors in laptop fans and my hair clippers
- the closure magnets on my laptop
- the magnet in Arc mice that holds the dongle on
- the cyclotron in microwave ovens
That kind of thing probably happens less in developed countries due to higher awareness. [citation needed]
The other image format that's worth knowing is TIFF, because it's an insanely simple and flexible format to write out if you don't have access to a library. It lets you re-order the image data by tiles or scan lines, and lets you put various tables almost anywhere in the file, which makes it great for outputting large images from a parallel renderer: you can chop it up however is suitable for the algorithm, write out the parts to disk as you get them, and then write out a table at the end describing the order at the end of the file, without having to seek.
To be fair, Superman locks himself in a closet because his powers are too scary, but yeah, this is totally a different case.
There's this trope that people with mental illnesses—like John Nash, or Rain Man, or Sheldon Cooper, or all of these people who can paint perfect landscapes because they're on the autism spectrum or have brain trauma—are more advanced than people who aren't. And yeah, these people can do things that the rest of us would have a much harder time doing. But it also comes with the fact that the world is going to be a much harder place for them. For people who do have brain quirks that they can take advantage of, it can be a really empowering narrative. It can also be harmful for people whose brain quirks don't fit well into a role that's valued by society.
There's a difficult line to find there; what kind of neuroatypical behaviour should or shouldn't be treated? Most people can agree that depression needs to be treated, because it's harmful to the sufferer with no benefit. Or if someone is hearing messages from aliens and running away from home and wandering about alone in altered mental states, it's fairly uncontroversial to put them on antipsychotics, even with the negative side-effects.
But on the other hand, the idea of medicating ADHD kids is massively controversial, because the argument can be made that for many people diagnosed with it are either misdiagnosed, or are just bored or learn differently. But I also know ADHD people who legitimately cannot function if they don't take their medicine. What should be medicated or what shouldn't?
Or here's an even more borderline case: what if someone is convinced that they're hearing messages from the beyond, and decides to spend the next ten years writing a book about how to live at peace with the world? What if the book doesn't make sense? Should they be medicated, because they've clearly broken with reality? Or should they be let alone, because there's a remote outside chance that maybe we're all wrong and they're on to something? Should they see a psychiatrist or a counsellor, who they can talk to and can keep track of how well they're doing? If so, should that person take an authority role, or should they be someone to be worked with to reach a mutually agreeable course of medication (which may be none at all)?
Hence movements centred around neuroatypical people, and this narrative that they're potentially a next stage in human evolution. Certainly, there are plenty of neuroatypical people who have desirable traits because of it that could very well become the norm, but there are also plenty of people whose traits are simply going to be selected against. It's an incredibly attractive narrative for those people, though, because society doesn't tend to value them as people as much as 'neurotypical' people, which is absolutely terrible.
I personally think that there are three big takeaways for this:
1. People are people, and should be valued as such. 2. Not everyone has a special talent that is valued by society, and that's okay. See #1. 3. Medication isn't fire-and-forget. It's something that needs to be constantly re-evaluated and carefully managed.
My friend who is finishing up his novel is currently in the reading-aloud stage. He's had various friends in and out of his house to listen to chapters as he does it, too.
As for myself, I've been caught by my friends standing in back stairwells reading papers aloud thirty minutes before class more times than I care to admit.
*I am not a UX engineer, YMMV
If you're committed to bcrypt, you could make an argument in favour of digesting the password with something like SHA384 first. That reduces entropy, but (a) it's strictly better than straight SHA, which is what a concerning number of people use already, and (b) it means that you're not messing up the user's pattern/mnemonic if they've got one going.