dimal

In seven weeks, there may be no way to restock. Six weeks inventory probably seems fine when there’s a constant inflow.

It goes deeper than that. All publicly traded corporations are morally obligated by the Friedman Doctrine [0] to do stuff like this. If something returns value for shareholders (and monopolies do) then a CEO must do it. This is how the whole system is supposed to work. Of course, there's no reason that capitalism must to work this way, but this is the toxic form of capitalism that we've unwittingly chosen. Thiel just gave a playbook for implementing this in the tech space.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine

> Pure vision instead of error prone "set-of-marks" system (the colorful boxes you see in browser-use for example)

One benefit not using pure vision is that it's a strong signal to developers to make pages accessible. This would let them off the hook.

Perhaps testing both paths separately would be more appropriate. I could imagine a different AI agent attempting to navigate the page through accessibility landmarks. Or even different agents that simulate different types of disabilities.

I like it, but the best modules already have knobs and jacks for everything. When you have CV going into the jack, the knob acts as an attenuator or attenuverter. This means that the modules are generally larger. Make Noise generally does this and their modules are consistently bigger than everyone else, and they're also some of the most popular. Look at Maths. It's a slope generator and a mixer. It's fucking huge. But everyone has it because it's patch programmable. The problem in Eurorack is instead of making things patch programmable, they try to fit in a ton of functionality into a small space, so you have a lot of modules that have multiple modes where buttons and knobs all have different meanings depending on what "page" you're on. Fuck that. Almost every time I try a module like that, I end up selling it.

He's right about the interface being the point of Eurorack. Plugging things into other things is the whole point. When I have a module that has hidden state, I forget what state it's in or what the knobs mean. I end up avoiding those modules. With cables and knobs, I can see the state of the whole system. I need good cable management to make sure it's not spaghetti, but I already do that in code already, and it's not that different.

That’s an interesting argument. I looked it up. Looks like it’s from Thomas Paine in Agrarian Justice.[0] It’s essentially an argument for universal basic income. Crazy, radical stuff, and it’s hosted on a government website!

[0] https://www.ssa.gov/history/paine4.html

I’ve gotten into this mode too, but often when I do this, I eventually find myself in a rabbit hole dead end that the AI unwittingly lead me into. So I’m slowing down and using them to understand the code better. Unfortunately, all the tools are optimized for vibe coding, getting the quick answer without understanding, so it feels like I’m fighting the tools.

I hope you didn’t think I meant to imply that this is only bad for autistic people. I know that many other people have the same issues. But when I mention these problems to people that don’t have difficulty, sometimes they assume it’s just me and a tiny minority.

I agree that they are beautiful and detailed, clearly illustrating the point. I really, really love them. I'd love to have them on my wall.

That's not my problem. My problem is that they never stop animating. For me and many other people, when something is moving in our visual field, it is very, very difficult to read the text next to it.

Full disclosure: I'm autistic. I was wondering whether I should mention that. All the issues that I mentioned exclude me from using this resource. So maybe we could call these accessibility issues instead of usability issues. When I disclose that I'm autistic, it tends to evoke two types of responses:

1) Oh, sorry, we'll make it accessible. But they do it out of shame, which I don't like. I'd rather it's out of empathy.

2) You're too small of a segment to care about.

But I'm beginning to think that the only difference between usability and accessibility is the size of the population that's being excluded by the design. I chose to keep my autisticness separate to see how people responded when I presented this as a usability issue instead of an accessibility issue.

I'm only asking that designers have empathy for all possible users of their media. That's all. That's what good design is supposed to do.

Agreed, it's aesthetically beautiful. It should be a coffee table book. But for the web, it has terrible usability. Really, really terrible in multiple ways. My comments will be harsh, but since the creator is obviously very skilled, he should know better.

Why multicolumn text? So it looks like an old printed manual? At first view, it's not clear where the first column ends. This is not something we see on the web (because there's no need for it), so it's not clear that the content flows from one column to the next. When the viewport is sized to two columns, I need to scroll down to finish the first column, then scroll back up to read where it continues on the second column.

Justified text is bad on the web. We're starting to get some better features to make it usable, but it's not widely supported, so right ragged text is always more readable.

There are numerous animations that never stop. This is highly distracting and makes it very difficult to read the text.

I'm sure there are more issues but the site is so unusable for me, I won't continue trying.

So, yeah. It's gorgeous design. I love it. But it's for the sake of aesthetics, not for the user's sake. It's completely unusable to me. Since this is the first installment, I hope the designer will keep the aesthetics but improve the usability in future installments.

It's shareholder capitalism. Capitalism can be a great thing, but shareholder capitalism defines profits as the only reason for a corporation to exist. Humans are simply resources to extract work or profit from, and destroying the future of the country is an unfortunate externality. CEOs are obligated to behave like sociopaths. Lying, cheating, stealing, and subverting democracy are all good business if it returns value to shareholders. We see this over and over again, and wonder why our society is so fucked up.

And since every major corporation is behaving like this, even if a CEO wanted to give a shit about the country, they can't do anything about it because someone else will be more cutthroat than them and eat their lunch.

I think you’re overestimating how much needless animation helps sales and underestimating how many people are negatively affected by it.

20% of the population has high sensory sensitivity. Many of these people have issues with needless animation. Some people with ADHD also have issues. When you add them all up, it becomes a significant customer base. And even for neurotypical people, excessive animation is distracting. They’re able to tolerate it, but it’s still adding cognitive load.

And it’s been shown through usability studies that carousels are terrible across the board. Marketing people like them for some reason, but there is almost never a good reason for a carousel on the web. Marketing people and some designers like animation because it grabs your attention, and it gets a “wow” in a presentation to executives, but I’m not convinced it actually increases conversions.

But really, 4chan-style bullshit took over the rest of the internet. At least in the old internet, it was self contained there. If someone spouted nonsense they read on 4chan, you could easily dismiss them as a crank. Now everyone is posting and reposting bullshit on a multitude of microblogging shitsites.

I used to be like that and I’ve completely flip flopped. I decided that people really need to know the problems they cause, and needless animations are absolutely rampant.

I was watching a conference talk yesterday on SVG, and the speaker had an endlessly repeating dumb meme gif on their slide. I couldn’t focus on what they’re saying at all. So, I’m excluded from the information they’re sharing. Fuck that. This is a very experienced web developer who probably cares enough to make things accessible, but they don’t realize the harm they’re doing. So, at least on places like HN, I’m going to be vocal.

Looks interesting. I’m a bit confused about how it knows the codebase and the custom rules interface. I generally have coding standards docs in the repo. Can it simply be made aware of those docs instead of requiring me to maintain two sets of instructions (one written one for humans, and one in the mrge interface for AI)? I could imagine that without being highly aware of a team’s standards, the usefulness of its review would be pretty poor. Getting general “best practices” type stuff wouldn’t be helpful.

I think I like the idea, but I have to ask a favor: Please stop the animated banner text!

I'm getting tired of how many web developers don't realize that endless, unstoppable animation is a huge accessibility issue. My brain apparently has some deep programming to follow anything that moves, so I can't actually read anything about the project without straining my brain. For reference, I'm autistic. Many neurodivergent people have similar issues. So, unintentionally, you're excluding people that might enjoy this.

I agree with the 100% rule. The problem with Typescript is how many teams allow “any”. They’ll say, “We’re using TypeScript! The autocomplete is great!” And on the surface, it feels safe. You get some compiler errors when you make a breaking change. But the any’s run through the codebase like holes in Swiss cheese, and you never know when you’ll hit one, until you’ve caused a bug in production. And then they try to deal with it by writing more tests. Having 100% type coverage is far more important.

Makes me think of The Sorcerers Apprentice.

Of course not. You’d have to pay for the product, just like we do with every other product in existence, other than software.

Software is the only type of product where this is even an issue. And we’re stuck with this model because VCs need to see hockey stick growth, and that generally doesn’t happen to paid products.

> “We are concerned because the movements you see point to something else other than a normal sell-off,” said a European bank executive in prime services, a division that facilitates leveraged trading for firms including proprietary traders and hedge funds. “They point to a complete loss of faith in the strongest bond market in the world.”

That sounds bad. Real bad.

What’s a PMC?

The problem is the microblogging format. No microblogging site can be a good town square. It’s not designed for discussion. It’s designed to allow people to shout into the void, hoping that someone hears them, so that they feel for a moment that their lives have meaning.

Ok, maybe a more accurate statement would be that the ratio of goofy shit to angst-generating bullshit was much higher in 2008. Maybe it was 70/30 in favor of goofy shit and now it's 1/99 in favor of bullshit. We had Facebook and Twitter back then, but neither had been weaponized against us yet. Both had a very different flavor than they have today.

Remember when the internet was all goofy shit like this instead of algorithmically optimized social media angst?

It seems like the models are getting more reliable at the things they always could do, but they’re not showing any ability to move past that goalpost. Whereas in the past, they could occasionally write some very solid code, but often return nonsense, the nonsense is now getting adequately filtered by so-called “reasoning”, but I see no indication that they could do software design.

> how the hell is it going to develop metrics for assessing the impact of AIs when they're doing things like managing companies or developing public policy?

Why on earth do people want AI to do either of these things? As if our society isn’t fucked enough, having an untouchable oligarchy already managing companies and developing public policies, we want to have the oligarchy’s AI do this, so policy can get even more out of touch with the needs of common people? This should never come to pass. It’s like people read a pile of 90s cyberpunk dystopian novels and decided, “Yeah, let’s do that.” I think it’ll fail, but I don’t understand how anyone with less than 10 billion in assets would want this.

I agree, but I think news was always unreliable, but the difference was that there were only a few news networks and newspapers, and they all basically said the same thing. Everyone believed the same lies, so the system worked. But thanks to the internet, we gave people the ability to create highly individualized bullshit at scale.

Amazon and Meta did too. Then Bezos changed the Washington Post editorial page policy that they could only write about personal liberties and free markets (subtext: not Trump). I wonder what Meta got in return. It seems like this relatively cheap $1M payoff was a subtle “kiss the ring” of the emperor. Good business. Shareholders would approve.

This is a cynical take, but I’m increasingly becoming tired of studies like this. Is this is where our science funding is going? It’s clever, trite, and probably meaningless. I keep reading about the publish/perish problem in academia and how it encourages research that safe, slightly interesting, but not too interesting, and doesn’t move anything forward. This study seems to fit that criteria.

And since it’s behind a paywall, I can’t really determine the how the study was designed, how well powered it is, how they defined statistical significance, and exactly how they justify their conclusion. But it got clicks and comments, so I guess it served its purpose, only to be quickly forgotten in endless churn of popular science news.

I’m sad to say, I’m beginning to think that a lot of current science is bullshit. As a very pro-science person, this is very depressing.

This is great. That said, I think that unless Apple and Google install something like this by default, it won’t get much traction, because you can’t download the app when you really need it, and most people won’t think to download it before then.

I just went through Helene in Asheville last year and it was painfully obvious that our cloud overlords have overlooked the offline disaster use case. Basically, when you’re in a situation where you desperately need technology to help, you’re on your own. I was imagining that tools like this would be great, but without the cloud, I was helpless.

Maybe instead of trying to get users to install this, it could be a proof of concept to show what’s possible, and to say to Apple and Google: install this basic lifesaving tool on every phone by default?

I prefer types over tests everywhere. If I’m passing props to a component and I get a TypeScript error, that’s a test I didn’t need to write or run. I love finding errors like this at compile time instead of at runtime. Just because HTML and CSS are untyped by default doesn’t say anything about whether types are useful for them. Does Nue have any way to protect against those kinds of errors or does some other architectural decision obviate the need for this kind of protection?

I’m not hating on Nue. At first glance, there’s a lot to like here, but I have to disagree on this point.

This ship sailed in 2000. We've been hacking custom select boxes since then, so we may as well pave the cowpath. And besides, as a user, I want stylable select elements. Seeing an ugly old select box in the middle of a site where everything is styled consistently is jarring.

And it doesn't get the job done. You can't put stuff like SVGs or complex DOM elements in them, which is a valid use case. Most of the time, when people create custom select boxes, they ignore accessibility. This will fix that issue.