perardi

Now the iMac G4. That was a computer. I realize that design wouldn’t scale to larger displays…and it barely scaled to that size of display, given the issues they had with the monitor arm…but oh man, what a machine for a computer lab. Set whatever angle and height you want, then just swing the whole monitor around to show a classmate.

Fantastic work. Absolutely critical for taming the weirdness of my LG 5K display.

https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a38537243/electric-car...

There's a lot of Tier 3 supplier…stuff…in a car that was architected for 1978 and has never had a thorough re-think, because the profit margin is like nothing.

Maybe it’s time for us to dial up the cynicism a few more notches.

If you're working with EPS, you are working in specific non-Apple applications that work with EPS. You're in InDesign or Illustrator, neither of which use the system libraries for EPS parsing.

The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-...

> To sum up the story as far as I understand its convoluted depths: diehard paranormal believers scored 22 million in Defense spending via what looks like nepotism from Harry Reid by submitting a grant to do bland general “aerospace research” and being the “sole bidder” for the contract. They then reportedly used that grant, according to Lacatski himself, the head of the program, to study a myriad of paranormal phenomenon at Skinwalker Ranch including—you may have guessed it by now—dino-beavers. Viola! That’s how there was a “government-funded program to study UFOs.”

And contrary Americans’ vague impressions of some snow-swept utopia…yeah, Canada is shockingly lacking in innovation.

It’s a place of US-designed and Chinese-made products, moribund government-backed private industry like Rogers and Bombardier, and a population that really did seem complacent and rather go-along get-along. People didn't seem to look past going to the cottage on the weekend, and whistling past a lot of increasingly decrepit infrastructure.

Read some actual economic data.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01672...

Labor is nowhere near the only factor that makes Chinese sources cheaper. It’s the ecosystem. There’s an entire industry that can do every possible thing, and they’re doing it all the time, so they’re flexible and configurable and can quickly spin out a variant on your standard-issue smartphone like it’s nothing.

(Well, assuming Xi’s recent megalomania hasn’t slowly started to destroy all that…)

But…maybe that wasn't a bad thing?

I feel like the iPad, despite alllll the efforts to seemingly make it a pro device, is an iPhone, but bigger. It's great for messages, browsing Facebook, and watching video, and that's just fine. Because that serves a lot of people's needs, and trying to add in a bunch more stuff just overloads the touch interface paradigm. (Ugh, the number of times I activated the split screen thing when they first introduced multitasking…)

Hello from up here in Edgewater.

I realize there are huge problems with the finances and liabilities of Uber…but taxis before ride shares were a pure nightmare, from a UX perspective.

Uber brought us…

* Deterministic pricing (for the most part)

* Flawless ubiquitous credit card transactions

* The ability to point to a random location on a map and just magically have a car take you there

I know Uber’s finances are shit…but you know what? I would gladly pay more, because you get a car right to your door that delivers you to an arbitrary location with nobody extorting you for extra physical cash.

And then they throw in this dynamic viewport unit stuff, and I realize…oh, I am guilty of hubris. I have angered the CSS gods, and they have struck me down for my arrogance—because this is complicated stuff.

https://blog.logrocket.com/improving-mobile-design-latest-cs...

But…

…it’s hard not to mythologize and over-analyze Kaczynski. He had what appears to be a totally average suburban upbringing, he was unambiguously wildly intelligent, and yet he done broke bad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Kaczynski

But Diamond’s work, and other authors that are in this middle-brow reviewed-in-The New Yorker mold, deals with really complex sociology and psychology, which aren’t reducible to equations. (There’s no Lorentz transformation for colonialism.) Malcom Gladwell really comes right to mind here—lot of pop-sci stuff which gets in all the right publications and then ends up being just wrong in all the ways.

We basically have a caste system for the military, so outside certain geographic regions and economic classes, military stuff happens [gestures vaguely] over there. People will posture about it, but nah, nobody will actually cut spending, as the military-industrial complex is everywhere, and “cutting military spending” actually becomes “we can’t shut down that base or stop making that engine part, because jobs”.

What will actually happen is superficial cuts to programs that don’t contribute meaningfully to the debt, but are nice culture war targets. Past that, we’ll engage in some gross race and class cuts to Medicaid. But we are not going to cut military spending, because, again, it’s a jobs program that’s protected by a vague sense of patriotic duty.

Is there really? There’s some grumbling online, and the recent debt ceiling fight did involve a cap on spending. But they still increased spending, and it’s entirely possible and probable that cap is going to get uncapped in a supplemental, as Republican and Democrats in the Senate are still quite into spending on this.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/mcconnell-says-mil...

The US populace may get grumbly about spending on Ukraine, although realistically most people are just bored and have tuned out that news. But I think there’s about a 0% chance we won’t still increase military spending, especially given even more posturing and escalation about Taiwan.

They have provided really quite good Sketch UI kits up until now.

https://developer.apple.com/design/resources/

Depending on how much Kremlinology you want to indulge in, this is either…

(a) Apple recognizing what tools its users use, and providing useful assets

(b) Apple is giving in by not promoting the platform-native Sketch app and accepting they are being washed away by the tide of cross-platform Electron apps†

(c) Apple is engaging in a Big Corporation conspiracy with Adobe, the probable new owners of Figma, to lock you into proprietary subscription software forever and ever

† yes, I know Figma is not Electron, it is a wild cross-platform browser runtime unto itself, but you know what I mean

The iOS 17 assets for Figma are new. Which, whew, thank you, Apple.

But also: yes, Canada is big. Canada will also kill you real good and hard in most places. There’s a tremendous amount of land, and a lot of it is very very cold, and you really, really don’t want to live there.

https://www.ft.com/content/85241de6-981c-433a-9ab8-6518021d0...

Trump was a bigger bump and a bigger hangover, but it’s a known pattern.

Which is my real “big media conspiracy”, which is barely a conspiracy: it’s hard to imagine substantial electoral when TV news is so dependent on this election year gusher of money. Especially at the local TV news level.

This is a good-faith, non-trolling question. Rust is way out of my wheelhouse, but it’s obviously gained enough momentum that even I’m aware of it. Is there some language or community issue?

…anyways, arguable. What’s inarguable is that the iPhone 4, which came along only 3 years later, was a damned miracle. Beautiful design, Retina screen, something approaching a “real” camera—just remarkable progress in that time.

I’m unsure if Apple is going to be able to pull off that hyperspeed progression this time. The Vision Pro seems to have truly wild capabilities, but for a lot of money and with very little battery life. Are we going to have a big leap in price/performance soon? I dunno.

This is yet another example of the crypto boom going bust, which has been a series of unregulated and utterly opaque exchanges collapsing. Over and over again, the entire ecosystem has been snake oil salesmen, who are selling snake oil to other snake oil salesmen.

And the crypto purists will cry “oh, but Bitcoin, it would work if we all held dear to the purity of the concept and kept our relevant info in lockboxes in our panic rooms!” And the cynical, but also correct, among us will mutter “well that’s cool, but no normal human is going to do that, and the valuation of whole thing is based on mass uptake, and that’s contingent on having middlemen do a lot of the ugly gruntwork, because otherwise it’s far too difficult for normal users to ever bother with.” And those middlemen are, again, invariably, snake oil salemen who will cut and run.

I did not deny there are some objects out there acting in ways we can’t explain.

Now explain why we should immediately jump to aliens.

…but c’mon, people. Occam’s Razor time. There are a lot of options to exhaust before to we get to extraterrestrial intelligence. Just because we can’t explain this doesn’t mean its aliens. It’s a hell of a leap, bordering on religious faith, to credit this to some alien species crossing the vast lightyears of space and time to bounce around some metal spheres.

I cut it with Diet Coke, and a splash of lime, and drank it to help sanitize my system of coronavirus particles.

Kept me COVID-free. I think. I don’t really remember much of the past 3 years for some reason, drinking that every day…but no nagging cough!

Creating a robust, well-tested emergency satellite comms system that nobody uses day to day costs a lot of money to develop and maintain…and nobody wants to pay for that.