The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created.
I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty.
OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.
The grandeur of early 17th century English prose really is something quite special. Charles Rosen gave a memorable account in his review of Burton:
>The first part of the seventeenth century was, for Samuel Johnson when he compiled his dictionary, the moment when the English language reached its ideal state. One would have thought that he would have preferred the clarity that was achieved a half century later in the prose of Dryden and Swift, but he was evidently conquered by the Baroque exuberance of the time of Burton. in the seventeenth century English prose came into its own, and reached the distinction previously held only by verse. With the exception of William Tyndale’s translation of the Old Testament (which seventy years later became the basis of the King James version), English prose in the sixteenth century has nothing to set by the side of the contemporary power, variety, and subtlety in France of Rabelais, Calvin, or Montaigne. English prose remained a somewhat awkward, provincial mode of expression. At the very end of the sixteenth century, however, prose suddenly took on a new vigor in the prose sections of the plays of Shakespeare, Middleton and Dekker, and in Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity of 1594.
>Unfortunately, much of the magnificent eloquence of the early seventeenth century lacks a considerable readership today, even in academic circles, perhaps because it deals largely with religious matters in sermons, tracts, and prayers. The prose of Thomas Browne and John Donne still finds a few readers, and Lancelot Andrewes was taken up by T. S. Eliot. But Thomas Adams, so much admired by Coleridge and lamb that he was compared to Shakespeare, is almost forgotten, Richard Hooker is read only by specialists in the history of religion, Thomas Fuller recalled only for a few quaint details, and Jeremy Taylor, previously revered, is now neglected, as his suavity does not recommend itself to modern taste.
The portrait modes on these are getting really good. The blur is pretty convincing looking. The only open-source software I know that does similar stuff is body-pix which does matting, but I don't think it generates a smooth depth map like this thing. It would be cool because then you can do a clever background blur for your Zoom backgrounds with v4l2-loopback webcam.
By the way, I decided to also quick summarize the usual HN threads that have the trigger word iPhone in it:
- No headphone jack
--- Actually this is good because ecosystem built for it
----- Don't think ecosystem is good. Audio drops out
------- Doesn't happen to me. Maybe bad device.
----- Don't want to be locked in. Want to use own device.
------- That's not Apple philosophy. Don't know why surprised.
--------- I have right to my device
----------- cf. Right to Repair laws
------- Can use own device with dongle.
--------- Don't want dongle. Have to get dongle for everything. Annoying.
----------- Only need one dongle.
------------- If only audio, but now can't charge.
----------- Use dongle purse.
--- Apple quality have drop continuous. Last good Macbook was 2012.
----- Yes. Keyboard is useless now. Have fail. Recalled.
------- I have no problem with keyboard.
--------- Lucky.
------- Also touchpad have fail. Think because Foxconn.
------- Yes. Butterfly? More like butterfly effect. Press key, hurricane form on screen.
----- Yes. Yes. All Tim Cook. Bean Counter.
----- Yes. Many root security violation these days.
------- All programmers who make security violate must be fired.
--------- Need union so not fired if manager make security violation.
----------- Don't understand why no union.
------------- Because Apple and Google have collude to not poach. See case.
------- Yes. Security violation is evidence of lack of certification in industry.
--------- Also UIKit no longer correctly propagate event.
--- Phone too big anyway. No one make any small phone anymore.
----- See here, small phone.
------- Too old. Want new small phone. Had iPhone 8. Pinnacle of small beauty.
------- That's Android. No support more than 2 months.
--------- Actually, support 4 months.
----------- Doesn't matter. iPhone support 24 centuries and still going. Queen have original.
--------- Yes, and battery on Android small.
--- Will buy this phone anyway. Support small phone.
----- No. This phone is also big. No one care about small hand.
------- Realistically, phone with no SSH shell dumb. I use N900 on Maemo.
--- Who care? This press release. Just advertisement.
----- Can dang remove clickbait. What is one-eye anyway? Meaningless. Phone no have eye.
--- Also, phone not available in Bielefeld.
--- Phone only have 128 GB? Not enough. Need 129 GB.
----- 64 GB enough for everyone.
------- "640 KB enough for everyone" - Bill Fence, 1923
Zlib is great. I used to use it all the time ~25 years ago. I don't directly use it much now but only because it has been a long time since I worked on anything where I had to deal with compression myself.
The only time I ever had a problem with it was on a project to implement a virtual CD-ROM drive for a client. The CD-ROM images needed to be compressed, and the client wanted the user of the ripper to be able to choose between more compression and more speed. Zlib supports different compression levels, but the speed increase from less compression wasn't as much as the client wanted.
I found an implementation of zlib that purported to be faster due to hand optimized assembler code. I tested that and it was faster, perhaps enough that the client would find it acceptable. But we would need a commercial license for it, and it was open source.
I contacted the author and he was willing to sell a commercial license to allow us to use it in all our products (generally utility software for Windows and Mac). We had an acceptable price worked out and were about to conclude the deal when he got cold feet. He started thinking that since we wrote Windows software and were a small company, maybe Microsoft would decide to acquire us, and then Microsoft would have a commercial license for his zlib.
He wanted to do a contract where the license would terminate if the company changed ownership. That would require getting my boss (the founder and CEO of the company) involved to work out the details and he didn't have time for that. I tried doubling the amount of money we were offering for the license to see if that would change the library author's mind but it did not.
My boss told me to find another solution, and to find one quickly because this was an urgent project for the client (for a completely stupid reason [1]). I found one.
25 years later I still can't decide if this was the most awesome hack I ever did or the most profoundly shameful thing I've ever written.
I added a slider to the ripper UI that went from 0 to 100. As the ripper ripped sectors, it either stored the sector in the image compressed with zlib at maximum compression level or it stored the sector uncompressed. The slider controlled what percent of the sectors were compressed.
The client was thrilled with this.
[1] The client was a major software company in Japan. Call them X. There was a small software company Y whose products did not overlap with those of X. X thought that a press release for a new product of Y's plagiarized one of X's press releases, were greatly offended by this, and so decided that they wanted to smash Y by directly competing with one of Y's best sellers. That was a virtual CD-ROM, so X told us to put the several other things we were doing for them on hold and quickly provide them with a virtual CD-ROM product and make it better than Y's.
It's odd that in the whole course of this very long article, Moser doesn't use the word "power" in describing the relationship of English and its literature to the rest of the world, or the relationship of the language and literature to its own speakers. Most of his laments and descriptions of decline, the fraught and tricky questions of bringing books and authors into English, boil down to a question of power -- economic and geopolitical power -- and yet he never quite comes out and says that.
Mizimura's "defense" of her writing against English; the elevation that occurs for a non-English writer when they are translated into English; the perceived "universality" of English; the resultant cultural guilt of English speakers: these are manifestations of power.
Likewise, the deracination of English, its divorce from specific place and people, is a result of power. He seems to think it is a result of a change in the culture: "I began to wonder if the culture that threatened other languages was hollowing out English, too. That culture goes by many disparaging names. It was called “corporate,” “capitalist,” “neoliberal”; it was taught as “Business English.” It was the vehicle of the infrastructure, for the most basic communication: for checking into a hotel, sending an email, participating in a sales conference."
But this is not a cultural problem, it is a power problem. Power in our current (American) society is inherent in the infrastructure he mentions. It exists within the movement of capital, within corporate law, within lobbying, within international trade. Language becomes hollowed out and denatured in this situation, because there is no culture, culture is not required to run the machines of power.
Likewise the observation that the international literature that we're comfortable with (I say "we" here, as I am also a white, middle-aged, middle-class, American literary translator) reads much like our own. We seek out foreign literature that feels like it was written for us: it feels that way because it was written by and for an equivalent socioeconomic class, one that simply hails from a different country. Moser says we might benefit more from reading literature from Paris, Texas than we would from Paris, France: that is because this putative literature from Texas comes from a world that does not have power. It is more educational to reach across power boundaries than it is to reach across language boundaries -- if all you end up finding in the latter case is your international peers.
He describes a language as an old city, and says very emphatically that what is needed to keep that city in good repair is people, the participation of people and their community. But that is exactly what we don't need in middle and upper class America. We do not have culture. We have structures of power, and culture is surplus to its purposes. The English language as we speak it now seems flat and vacuous because it is not strictly necessary; it is providing no vital function. Tweets and memes are sufficient for us, because almost nothing that matters in the system we live in depends on the skillful, thoughtful use of language. There's no sense in mourning young people's lack of reading habits. Nothing they find in those books will tell them how they might live in the world. The books are no longer necessary to them in a way that they might have been necessary to earlier generations.
This is an overly pessimisstic statement of the situation! And I am only partly Marxist -- I do not believe that it's all down to economics. But I believe we've created a machine, which we live inside of, which requires us to exercise very few of our human faculties in order to sustain its operation. It is no surprise if we start to lose those faculties.
I absolutely adore the positioning of the table of contents. The design looks clean, utilitarian, and overall well executed.
That being said - and this is more a critique of modern design - I absolutely hate the suffocating roundness of the element corners. It's an aesthetic that drips with overfamiliarity and a patronizing attitude. It's the visual equivalent of being put in a padded room, or having a distant relative who you have nothing in common with and have not seen in years trying to relate to you with anecdotes about your childhood that you can scarcely remember.
I like this stuff because I think things like Ancient Aliens are the Subgenius and Discordianism of our time. The genius of it is that it is a note for note send up of ideologies of every kind, literally, the logic of an idea, where when you project it on something, the reflection doesn't illuminate the object so much as reinforce the underlying idea itself as a lens. If I could coin a term for it, I would call it "profound comedy," where the genius of it is that when you apply its structural absurdity to other ideas whose logic people iterate into funhouse mirror beliefs, it shows how equally dumb they are. The laughter is involuntarily revealed truth. This is what makes it so dangerous and subversive, and the people who react to it do so because they know they are being mocked with impunity.
I would seriously consider donating to a cryptozoology scholarship fund.
We achieved a near ubiquitous consensus with the x86 PC. Then APPLE said, Behold, the programmers are one, and they can build portable binaries with one machine language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their machine code, that they may not run each other apps across platforms. So APPLE scattered them abroad with M1 processors from thence upon the face of all the Internet: and they left off to rebuild their open source.
I've found the best way to handle this problem is a variation on "lift the state up", but instead of binding synchronous listeners to state changes in the model, have these state changes mark any involved views as "dirty". Then, after all events have been processed for the current run loop, go through all the dirty views and call a single update function on each.
For the example given in the article, the update function could look something like
def View.update():
if model.lightTurnedOn:
self.backgroundColor = red
else:
self.backgroundColor = ibmGray
This way, all view property changes happen in one place, where you can read the code and understand how the view will appear in each possible state. Circular listener loops are impossible, and view properties for animations can even be computed by calling update twice (once before and once after the state change).
It's physics, not perception. Just make your website fast.
Am currently consulting big ecommerce bussiness on how to improve page load. I made them this 'fastest page in the world' demo:
https://turboeshop.com/fastestpageintheworld/ - kindly please check it out. And here is fastest page with Google Analytics:
https://turboeshop.com/newstackonly/. 325 ms for fully loaded time CSS + images + HTML + JS + GA loaded + Measurement Protocol hits sent.
This is what fast website is: a) inline purged css; b) everything loaded from one domain, 100% cached. c)inlined js(vanilla + web component if you need one); d) inlined images up to 4kb; e) larger images loaded from cache from same domain. f) gtag.js and analytics.js -> from cache; g) Measurement protocol hits sent from async proxy on edge. h) 100% cloudflare cache hits; i) Cloudflare workers for dynamic bits; That's all what it takes. Don't read articles- just make it fast, it's really that simple :)
And as svelte was mentioned - if you want to improve a website that is bigger than your personal blog, you don't use svelte, react, gatsby or any other of that breed as it's impossible to do serious marketing with a website that's hydrated (svelte's web components is a wonderful thing though and is totally nice addition to marketing stack). I mean no insult to anyone with my strong opinions and would be glad to have discussions in comments.
UPD: Added note on Cloudflare & Cloudflare workers.
I think there's some merit in looking at what the effect of "x-punk," movements have on culture. The idea of punk itself was the DIY music aspect that moved into clothing and zines, and built an aesthetic that spawned a network of cafes and bars and really is a subculture. The idea of an anti-establishment movement is one that is really just vying for establishment influence by defecting from it instead of negotiating within it, but it's still very much a part of it.
What I call "punk privilege," is that almost no punks were ever really poor, and it was a way for the poor to elevate themselves into an anti-middle class that was appendent to the middle class. In the 80's and 90's, punk and other subcultures were actually a path out of the underclass and into (the almost exclusively white) bohemian culture, and a way for technocratic up and comers to signify their skills. (e.g. "I'm so good the establishment tolerates my green hair") It's been through generations of co-opting, where now old punk aesthetics are a signal of membership in the new establishment, with pink and green haired people operating the administrative layers of academia and government, and the "real punk," that is, the independent creative networks that diverge from this new establishemnt are attracting outsiders and creating a primordial soup for the next wave of culture and innovation. What is surely true is that it will be a divergent reaction to the current establishment. I don't think this particular Solar punk aesthetic has enough grit to survive, but not being a part of it, it's not for me, it's for the people who do it and participate, which is ultimately what makes it punk.
If you're interested in recent innovations on this front: (rather than just retreading the same Web as before)
* Beaker (https://beakerbrowser.com) the peer-to-peer browser just released their beta release - and it has some exciting features. Particularly the built-in editor, meaning you can edit, serve and read your pages all from the browser. (Blogging in Beaker is as simple as visiting: hyper://a8e9bd0f4df60ed5246a1b1f53d51a1feaeb1315266f769ac218436f12fda830/. And the posts are stored locally.)
* https://special.fish/ This completely low-tech social network has taken off. The innovation here is that it's all just focused on profile pages - not feeds of random posts.
* There's a growing subculture of public Tiddlywikis (philosopher.life, sphygm.us, etc) - rather than focusing on protocols and APIs, they are much more focused on how to organize and style personal hypertext.
* As for RSS, well, as HN custom insists, I am also commenting to plug my own fraidyc.at. See, you knew it was here.
* There's also a forum on tiny personal link directories that's been forming at https://forum.indieseek.xyz. The idea here is to use Yahoo! or DMOZ style link directories at a smaller scale, to catalog corners of the Web. (Note that this whole comment itself is a kind of small 'directory'. Rather than an algorithm stepping in to show you 'related' stuff, I have.)
People here seem a bit skeptical, but after reading every single point I have to say, I agree with nearly all of them; but not in relation to Wikipedia. With relation to the internet as a whole.
The one that stings the most:
>70. It is impossible to love again anything you have truly ceased to love.[14] Editors who return after retirement, or after a wearied or bitter departure, may edit again, but never with the same passion they once brought to the project. Each successive return will be with diminished dedication and shorter duration.
Wow. It actually hurts to read this, because it perfectly explains why I’ve left most social media and forums I’ve been a part of, and failed to ever return for more than a month or two at a time.
My love of the internet has largely faded, and is relegated to being a tool and a way to waste time when bored. It’s not exciting. I can’t reattach to it.
>Many people leaving the project blame either the project or the people working on it for their departure, rather than recognize that it is normal in life for one's enthusiasm to wane. It does with all things that we once found exciting.
> The answer boils down to three T’s: technology, taste, and terrible pay.
I don't think technology has much to do with it. Digital illustration has been around for decades now, and technological improvements have made it easier to make complex, sophisticated art and reproduce all traditional techniques. So, neither the timeline nor the trend match.
The pay, sure, everyone always wants to make more money. I believe it's a factor. But it's been half a century since the 1970s. The style transition seems to have been too abrupt to be driven by long-term salary trends. Besides, it's hard to believe that the people making Corporate Memphis for, say, Facebook are so severely underpaid that no other style is feasible. In fact, if you have the money to pay your designers more, wouldn't you want to have them do something different, to stand out?
So it's taste, then. But I don't think it's a pure accident of fashion. This style aligns very well with the cultural moment: the infantilization of academic/corporate/consumer culture, the triumph of safety and risk-aversion, an antipathy towards the (conventionally attractive) human form, and an ever more homogenized culture facing an ever more heterogeneous public. If you were a designer trying to capture the zeitgeist, could you do better?
The issue is the ego. Ego has a lot of ideas about itself and others. Ego has such high opinion about itself it only can do great work. Which prevents it from doing anything. It's kind of a way of avoiding failures. Because failures will break the grant ideas about himself OP has created.
I accidentally went through a spiritual awakening which diluted ego. I have no problem in doing any kind of work now. Whether it's great or petty.
OP needs to work on the ego. Or figure out a situation where OP has to ship things no matter what. Which is hard unless you are jobless and can't figure a way out apart from building useful things that people pay for.