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jfax

930 karma · joined January 30, 2020

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jfax··on Don’t use “click here” as link text (2001)
I'm reminded of this post I read regarding links that read "I forgot my password". I thought maybe wording it as "click here if..." would improve that but I somehow intuitively knew that's not right either.

> Ignoring the garbage on Web pages is a skill that some people don't have, and I don't know how to teach it. I'm reminded of this each time I try to help someone who doesn't have my background, use the Web; there are users who look at the literally first thing on the page and think about it carefully, even if it's "Please enable notifications," before they see the second item on the page at all.

> With Google searches now offering multiple screenfulls of garbage before the actual results, well.

> A related issue is failing to understand the epistemic status of different kinds of text on a page. E.g. the user who sees a clickable link with the text "I forgot my password" and believes that that means it's telling him he did forget his password (and it somehow knows this?), rather than just being the place to click if he forgot his password.

> The death of UI standardization, of course, makes this issue much worse.

https://mstdn.io/@mattskala/113188291223682980

jfax··on Dilbert creator Scott Adams says he will die soon from same cancer as Joe Biden
Scott Adams is basically a sort of older version of Chris Chan. A cartoonist whose unreliable narration of own life became part of the whole performance.

But thing is—boy who cried wolf—not sure if he actually has the prognosis of cancer he says he has? It sounds mean, I reckon he does have it, but his past descriptions of health problems were confusing enough that I wouldn't be surprised if he recovers next year and spins it into a story about how he found a cure.

jfax··on Path Isn't Real on Linux
A few others are saying, "well yeah, duh!", but this to me demonstrates a mental fault that arises in calling GNU+Linux, "Linux".
jfax··on BYD sales soar as Tesla continues to struggle in Europe
Except China actually keeps their ultra wealthy in line.
jfax··on Why can't we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?
A newborn's eyes are not focussed.
jfax··on The Curse of Markdown
The first example website given here is described "just text with minimal styling." It's not just text though, it's hypertext? Since when did everyone lose sight of what hypertext is.
jfax··on Trump wins presidency for second time
I object to the statement that a Black woman is a woman. This is a distortion of language and science.
jfax··on Shaken Baby Syndrome Has Been Discredited. Why Is Roberson Still on Death Row?
They're saying it doesn't amount to a syndrome.
jfax··on Bangladesh imposes curfew after dozens killed in anti-government protests
The UK House of Lords has a quota of 92 hereditary peers, descendants of Norman conquerors.
jfax··on Julian Assange has reached a plea deal with the U.S., allowing him to go free
This is beautifully articulated. I myself thought for a long time that if the day ever came that Assange walks free, I'd cry, but instead I feel a strange emptiness inside. The world isn't the one I'd imagined for this day.
jfax··on Researchers identify major driver of inflammatory bowel and related diseases
[flagged]
jfax··on Japan's clothes-drying bathrooms
We have airing cupboards in the UK. Cupboards with shelving that keep the hot water tank, so it's built around using waste heat from that to now and then dry damp clothes. It's not a one-to-one replacement for full clothes drying, but it's a nice complement to it.
jfax··on Surrealism Is 100
Same!
jfax··on Frutiger Aero
I couldn't find independent use of the term "Frutiger Aero" outside of this article when it first blew up, so I guess this coined it. Why "Fruitger" Aero. This basically smacks of being a forced meme by underageb& zoomers. But that's only half the reason this hits me as being frivolous and tiresome, I also echo the other comment here that's beginning to find "hyper-specific genre-mania" boring now.
jfax··on Google sues two men who weaponized DMCA notices to crush competition
I agree, it's a bit disorienting.
jfax··on The cottage industry of YouTube obituary pirates
Agreed. Astounded how stretched the word piracy is nowadays, I've been seeing it used for even stuff like using an ad-blocker. My policy is to only use it to refer to actual at-sea piracy.
jfax··on The death of a public intellectual
This article refers to "public intellectuals" as only being men.
jfax··on Marcel the Shell
When I watched that in cinema I couldn't help divert my attention to a family of two adults and two children in the rows ahead of me who left a third the way through. Wonder what they were expecting.
jfax··on Vespa.ai is spinning out of Yahoo as a separate company
No relation to Yahoo in the US. Spun off from a previous incarnation of Yahoo in that doesn't exist anymore. In practice, they're two companies that confusingly share the same name.
jfax··on ‘I just assumed it would happen’: the unspoken grief of childless men
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...
jfax··on Vim Boss
That's what birthdays are for. I like to think, anyway.
jfax··on Paperlike Color: Color E-Ink Monitor
I'm laughing that the demo video features an adult in a suit sitting down at the computer to browse computer generated nursery rhymes on youtube.
jfax··on Nanosecond timestamp collisions are common
This was realised in the development of imageboard software (futaba.php, later yotsuba.php that runs 4chan) in the naming images, which is a unix timestamp + random 3 digit number because just the timestamp often causes clashes.
jfax··on Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is a beautiful relic – and the end of an era
Plenty of English-language articles about this film have already done a proper job of reporting on this (before the English language title was given), by noting that Miyazaki's next film is "tentatively" titled how do you live.
jfax··on Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is a beautiful relic – and the end of an era
For the article.
jfax··on Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is a beautiful relic – and the end of an era
Yes, I've read the book.
jfax··on Hayao Miyazaki’s How Do You Live is a beautiful relic – and the end of an era
>titled How Do You Live in Japan and renamed The Boy and the Heron for the international market

This might sound pedantic, but neither of those statements are quite right. It's not called "How Do You Live" in Japan, it's called Kimitachi wa Dō Ikiru ka. And it wasn't "renamed" for the "international" market, it was given an English name that it didn't have until then.

I'm irked by this because this is something I've been constantly correcting people with, mainly to indirectly challenge English-language exceptionalism (anything not Japanese is English - we don't know the French or German titles yet), but also a reminder that any publication worth its salt up have emphasised that "How Do You Live" was a tentative title.

jfax··on Dril is everyone. More specifically, he’s a guy named Paul
You got filtered
jfax··on Stop trying to make social networks succeed
Better than what?
jfax··on Tell HN: Twitter switched temporarily to rate limited mode
If you gave someone with a severe learning disability $100billion the first thing they would do is start commissioning rockets and race cars.
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