FormFollowsFunc

It’s a problem with Windows. I’ve a dual boot MacBook Pro and I run into that issue only when I put the laptop to sleep when running Windows. I don’t have the issue when running MacOS. You would think after 30 years Microsoft would figure out how to keep a computer asleep.

It seemed to me that the XD team was always quite small. I found it interesting that Adobe never put that much resources into UI design. Maybe the market isn’t very profitable. You would think it would be huge because so many companies need to design UIs.

I’m in the same situation. Signed up in the UK and have got no email from Google about it yet.

Unless it’s having a knock-on effect on your work I would keep it to yourself. It’s not as bad as a Spanish civil servant who didn’t turn up to work for 6 years and no-one noticed. He spent his time reading philosophy. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-35557725.amp

I had the same experience - they’re incredibly addictive, far more than your standard Instagram.

I think this media is different because of the short duration of each item and the endless novelty. You say to yourself you you will just watch another YouTube video - it’s just a few minutes long and before you know it you’ve wasted half an hour. Where as with a TV programme you have to commit to 30-60 minutes.

There is a bit of a problem in the AR space - the lack of cheap 3D modeling software. Maya is $1,700/year compared to Sketch at $99/year. If Apple releases an AR headset/glasses, developers will need an affordable way to create 3D models.

Nowadays employers aren’t interested if you’re over 40. They definitely won’t keep on employees past 65 even if there is a shortage of workers.

Outside of Wordpress, I don't think the PHP ecosystem is in a great state. I worked with it recently and the availability of 3rd party libraries wasn't great. A lot of them were abandoned. Python and JavaScript have healthier ecosystems.

It's one thing to exploit adults as platform tech companies do but it's fairly low to exploit kids.

Ireland. Without private health insurance you would be waiting many years before you would get to see a consultant in the public system. To even get an appointment in a public hospital in a reasonable amount of time you need private health insurance.

I used carry a paper map and compass a lot more but not so much anymore, especially not for a day hike. I probably would for a multi-day hike as a backup. Ben Nevis is quite a touristy mountain with a very clear wide busy path up it if you go the tourist route so no map is needed - just follow the person in front of you.

Irish regulators are told by the Government to take a soft touch to regulating businesses. It's up to British regulators to step in when an Irish airline Ryanair breaks the law. The Irish counterpart would never do it. [1]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/jun/09/ba-ryanair-...

There is now selection.join() [1] which means you don’t have to use selection.merge() anymore.

[1] https://observablehq.com/@d3/selection-join

I’ve figured out how to go the other way - from a JS framework to Observable. I put all the D3 code in a reusable chart [1] which can be copied and pasted into an Observable cell. And have the JS framework handle things like loading data which is modified slightly when transferred to Observable. I don’t want to be too dependent on a proprietary service but it’s nice to share your work on it occasionally.

[1] https://bost.ocks.org/mike/chart/

I think that's the crux of it. Society has got more complex with industrialisation and globalisation. There's those at the top who have autonomy and are well paid and then you have an army of workers at the bottom who have no say in anything. Capitalism is fundamentally about exploiting labour - you have to extract more value from the worker than it costs to hire him to make a profit. Exploiting labour has become a lot easier in the last 40 years with developing countries joining the labour pool.

I kind of questioned Graeber's thesis but I do think he was onto something. I think most management jobs are bullshit jobs in that they don't contribute very much but are easy and well paid. You then have a whole underclass who actually do the work. It's not too different from ancient Greece where the society depended on slavery to function. The pandemic showed that very few of our jobs are essential. A large proportion of the population in the west could be not working yet society still functioned. It's only when things slow down in the east (where things actually get made) that it causes problems.

I've been looking for something like this for data vis exploration. Compared to Observable accessing local data files is more convenient. Currently I use a Jupyter notebook along with Pandas and Matplotlib. I'm not a huge fan of Matplotlib so I would prefer to use Plot or Vega Lite API and Pandas could be replaced with Danfo.js or Arquero.

Beats writing 20 lines of D3 code to show a simple bar chart! It looks similar to Vega Lite API. One thing that annoyed me about Vega Lite is that it has it's own expression language rather than leveraging JavaScript. I know it's meant to be language agnostic but leveraging existing web technologies is what makes D3 so powerful.

I think it's been there for the last year or so. You can skip it by pressing the close button in the top right of the blue dialog.

Prolog was the first programming language I was taught at university. I’m not sure it was the best introduction to programming as it’s quite different from most other languages. I think it expressed the high-brow attitude of the lecturer.

I moved from London to Manchester and my experience wasn't positive. While it might be cheaper there wasn't a lot of jobs. You are better off sticking to the South East.

Wagtail is built on Django so it's easy for a developer to customise it for their own needs. It also allows you to easily create a website/webapp hybrid. There is not a lot of good CMSes built on popular web frameworks.

Wordpress has very little base functionality in it's API. Plugins consist mostly of vanilla PHP, so it's more difficult to extend. It's like what web development was 20 years ago. On the other hand it's great for non-developers because of the amount of the plugins and themes available.

For EU VAT the minimum threshold is €10k (excl. VAT). You register with a mini one stop shop within your country which distributes the VAT to the other countries. If you're not selling to consumers in other EU countries the threshold is a lot higher.

Here's two I came across:

Programming Graphics 1, 2, 3, Joshua Davis, skillshare.com

Creative Coding with Canvas & WebGL, Advanced Creative Coding with WebGL & Shaders, Matt DesLauriers, frontendmasters.com

I always found it strange that Apple so early in it’s history setup a factory in a provincial town in a small country on the edge of Europe. I would love to the know the backstory how Ireland attracted American tech companies in the 80s. Henry Ford setup a factory in Cork because his father came from the county.

It reminds me of Delorean (Back to the Future car) setting up a factory in Northern Ireland because the British government gave them a lot of money to do so. Though that didn’t last as long.

EDIT: Looks like they got a 10 year tax holiday (zero tax). They were the last to take advantage of it because the EU wanted it stopped. After 10 years they found a way to work around EU rules otherwise they would have moved to Singapore.

I remember they had something similar 15 years ago. It was called tagged PDFs. It was useful on low resolution devices like PocketPC as the full page view wasn't readable. You had to convert your PDFs before loading them onto the device. Probably went out of favour when the iPhone came along and screen resolution increased. Looks like it’s an upgraded version of this with added ML.

These countries haven’t reported any COVID-19 deaths yet: Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, North Korea, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Vanuatu.

Mostly tiny islands in the Pacific.

There was an IDE for ActionScript called FDT built on top of Eclipse.

Larger architectural firms like Zaha Hadid and Foster and Partners have developers in-house who work on internal tools for designers. Though I don’t know how many firms there are like this. Though I think architects in general have been lazy when it comes to tooling. The CGI industry has been far more involved in tools and open standards.

I pre-paid for a hotel with my debit card. The hotel cancelled the booking because of the lockdown in the UK. They refused to provide a refund, instead offering me to reschedule the booking some other time. As I was unlikely to visit that city any time soon I tried to get a chargeback through my debit card but I discovered that Government lockdowns are not covered by the Visa chargeback process.