"Why does ACPI exist" - - the greatest thread in the history of forums, locked by a moderator after 12,239 pages of heated debate, wait no let me start again.

Web Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20231102020052/https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/68350.html

Other archive: https://archive.is/dBJ3P

Pretty nice font if I say so myself.

(in JavaScript)

When AI slop drowns out the signal in an endless sea of noise

https://lobste.rs/~emk wrote:

Similarly it can make bad code that looks really good.

I think the thing that bothers me the most is that LLMs have changed the relative price of quality.

Imagine this in terms of houses: Before, a shitty McMansion with a leaky roof and bad foundation cost 1000X. A really good house with no lurking headaches cost 2000X.

Now with LLM technology, a skilled practitioner could hypothetically reduce the price of the good house to 1500X, by having it do some of the more mechanical and easily verified construction tasks.

But the shitty McMansion? That has now dropped in price to 100X.

And so the shitty McMansions are likely to drive out the quality work in ugly ways. I don't like this at all. Personally, I'm not going to hassle the craftspeople who reduce the price of the good house from 2000X to 1500X. But I don't see what prevents the crappy 100X houses from driving anything better out of the market, creating a "lemon market", and causing customers to become much more suspicious about software in general. Lemon markets are ugly, for the reason you described: buyers have no way to distinguish quality from garbage. In software, the most famous example of a lemon market was the great video game crash of 1983, where a wave of absolute garbage video games burnt a huge number of customers and made them stop buying.

An archive of various Windows 10 and Windows 11 builds.

Article: https://ratfactor.com/ascetic-computing

In other words, revisiting the code you've already written and making it more concise could improve its readability (and also why code review is a thing).

This also aligns with the "Writing code that is easy for others to read" chapter in the Programmer's Brain book.

Good code examples with screenshots showing what the UI looks like. Apple's documentation usually lacks screenshots showing what particular SwiftUI components look like or how they function – it's up to third-party developers to provide this information.

Just ffmpeg in the browser, useful

Just a simple demo of transforming one iOS app design to another where upon using an app we try to ask to the following questions:

- Where am I?

The app should make it clear right away, so Im not left wondering where I am or how I got here

- What can I do?

I shouldn't have to guess – actions should be clear and easy to understand

- Where can I go?

A clear sense of next steps to keep the flow going and helps me avoid hesitation or second-guessing

I wish some professional software answered those questions. As well as mine, really. Should rewatch it from time to time.

The language models’ greatest feat is also their most significant drawback—by absorbing the personal voice from every piece of content they have ever encountered, they produce a whole bunch of nonspecific, generic, mean-reverting Whatever that manages to say much but convey very little. All it can ever be is a circumlocution machine. It won’t tell deeply embarrassing tales of its youth, wear its grudges on its sleeve, passionately hold an unpopular position, or tug at threads without knowing ahead of time what the other end might be attached to. It doesn’t wander off onto interesting tangents that bring the reader along on a little shared journey of discovery. It has no discernible soul, no passion for its work, no real ability to justify the screen space it has filled up—let alone the time and attention the reader is now giving it. We can tell when it’s genuine. God dammit, we can tell.

And some talk about SQL and relational models.

Site of a dude that owns 70+ drawing tablets and shares his experience. Nice.

“Structuring your theory into a story makes it more compelling.”

The latter consequence of low expectations is the more serious one. It's something that some people may never recover from. The average career of a paramedic is 6-8 years because of the physical and psychological strain the job puts on a person. The career of a physiotherapist is about the same, mainly because they become someone's personal psychologist 8 times a day while treating back pain or a sore knee. The trajectory of a data or software engineer seems to be a bit different: they burn out from the mental stress of working in dishonest and fraudulent cultures that produce unsatisfying work, but the engineer stays in the profession. Only they're a shell of a human. How many developers or programmers do you know who are a little sad all the time? I wonder what caused them to be like that.

So much of building tech stuff is a figurative conversation - between you and the machine, you and the abstraction, you and the people who will use what you build, you and the people who will maintain it, you and those who came before you. To understand such a varied audience you need to anchor on your understanding of yourself. Improve the one tool you can never replace - you.

Jeff Geerling

Eventually (about 12 hours into the ordeal), the TeamYouTube account on X mentioned they were looking into it (after the appeal had been rejected).

After there was some coverage on /., Hacker News, and a few tech news sites, I was contacted by the YouTube Creator Liason (Rene Ritchie, great guy who often has to be the go-between for creators and whatever internal machinery spits out these decisions) and he said they would be restoring the video.

Almost exactly a day after I got the initial strike/warning, the video was restored.

But the rejection notice still shows up in my YouTube Studio dashboard, go figure :D

I wouldn't care too much about a single video like this... except the exact reason for why it violated community guidelines (and survived the first — and for most creators who don't have the social media reach I do — only appeal) still hasn't been given.

This kind of rejection can have a chilling effect on certain types of content. Like was it a mention of Kodi, or LibreELEC, or just the idea of having a local media library? Or was it triggered by showing the playback of a movie outside (legally acquired on physical media, mind you) of some movie studio's boutique streaming service?

Who knows...

Designing for UI density goes beyond the visual aspects of an interface. It includes all the implicit and explicit design decisions we make, and all the information we choose to show on the screen. It includes all time and the actions a user takes to get something valuable out of the software.

So, finally, a concrete definition of UI density: UI density is the value a user gets from the interface divided by the time and space the interface occupies.

Speed, usability, consistency, predictability, information richness, and functionality all play an important role in this equation. By taking account of all these aspects, we can understand why some interfaces succeed and others fail. And by designing for density, we can help people get more value out of the software we build.

It seems that Linux distributions were more accessible for blind people in 2012 than in 2025. It hurts my soul. Accessibility is not a question of "if", it's about "when" - you and me don't get any younger with each passing day - our vision might get blurrier, our programmers hands will get tired pressing those keys every day.

I hope my projects doing a little bit better in that regard.

FediIndex data on Betula. Very interesting! 1.3.0 is still used by some, 1.2.0 has ceased to exist. Third of all instances are hosted in Russia.

I wish it knew more Betula instances though.

A Minecraft clone made with pure HTML & CSS – no JavaScript.

NetBSD-based Nintendo Wii that serves static content using HTTP, proxied by Caddy to the whole world wide web. Beautiful.