idreyn

> Even though it was far from ready, SvelteKit was the only framework that matched our esoteric requirements. (Anyone who has worked in a newsroom and done battle with their CMS will know what I'm talking about.)

I would be interested to hear more about the esoteric requirements; whether they're performance-related, have to do with what's representable in the CMS, or something else. At any rate, those NYT covid tracker pages are great and I have (sadly) spent a lot of time with them over the past year.

It is maybe not such a bad thing that now and again a woman secures the financial independence she needs to look beyond the life she was born into in her tiny rural community.

I (presumably along with GP) am using Firefox where the background shows up white and the contrast ratio weighs in at 1.43:1. But it looks fine on Chrome.

No doubt FB is preparing to A/B test dozens of variants for maximum "conversion" :)

The dialog I am constantly seeing is this one, which seems to come from the OS: https://i.imgur.com/7JGotq3.png

Now that iOS allows you to share only some photos with apps (which is great) I see this before practically every photo selection dialog in third-party apps. My choice here doesn't affect my ability to share a single image with the app in that moment; they just want to suck my whole library of photos in for background processing. I'd very much like to not see this dialog more than once a month.

That's true, I forgot about that. I appreciate that those prompts don't highlight a particular option which tends to force you to read them.

I wonder how often Apple will allow apps to re-request this permission when it's been denied; I have a handful of iOS apps that are constantly asking me to grant permission to see more of my photos, and I wish they'd rate-limit that kind of abuse.

I'm a simple man -- if I see a button with a primary intent color standing between me and my content I've been conditioned to press it, often before I realize what I'm doing or reading the accompanying text. Probably tens of millions of people will do the same here.

I just finished reading The Name of the Wind, a fantasy novel where the organizational scheme of the library at a magical University is a minor plot point. Every time the school gets a new Master Archivist they come in with bright and ambitious ideas about how the catalogue should be organized and abandon their predecessor's scheme, with the result that centuries later there are dozens of overlapping and even explicitly competing systems extant in the library and many books are basically impossible to find. This, too, reminds me of basically every large codebase I've ever seen.

Was just coming back to this thread to say I use the Multi-Account Containers extension to isolate my Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Google Search sessions from the rest of my web browsing, and I highly recommend it.

The terminology is a little confusing: Containers or "Container Tabs" is a session-management tool that's baked into Firefox, while Multi-Account Containers is an extension on top of that that allows you to automatically sort specific domains into containers, so when I open e.g. a YouTube link it automatically appears in a YouTube container, which knows nothing about my Google account. IMO the functionality of the extension (which was written by Mozilla) should be added to the browser itself.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-GB/firefox/addon/multi-account...

Thanks for sharing.

I'll share one reaction I had — these sorts of things are normally narrated in professional, glossy, somewhat saccharine voices, and it was a fun and surprising moment of human connection to realize, hey, this is just some dude talking into his laptop mic! While I imagine you might consider investing in professional VO at some point, there's something really nice about the way it is now.

I wonder what it's like for you to hear your own voice asking these questions of you — is there any value in that specifically?

The distribution of outcome in one generation is, rather explicitly, the distribution of opportunity granted to the next one. Policies like progressive taxation and universal welfare programs that can be cast as equal outcome initiatives are, in the minds of their proponents, often about checking this runaway feedback loop that might otherwise leave all the opportunity (wealth, by another name) piling up with fewer and fewer people.

A year ago I needed a min-heap to build a priority queue at work.

So first I grabbed 'heap' from npm (272k weekly downloads) and set it to work. But a few days later I realized my code was executing slower than expected because it sometimes needed to clone the data structure, and the clone instantiation would break the heap invariant in the array internals. It turned out there's been an issue open about this since early 2017.

Then I went for the 'collections' package (35k weekly downloads) and brought in its heap implementation. That worked like a charm for about six months until a bug came in that made it seem like a completely different package was breaking. After almost a whole day of debugging, it turns out that 'collections' silently shims the global Array.from function (scream emoji) without mimicking its behavior when dealing with non-Array iterables presented by the other package.

So finally I wrote my own heap -- well, I cribbed from Eloquent JavaScript [0] but I did have to briefly remember a little bit about how they're supposed to work. So while I don't totally buy the "Never..." rule in the post title, thinking more carefully about writing versus importing a dependency would have saved me a great deal of headache in this case.

[0] https://eloquentjavascript.net/1st_edition/appendix2.html

Well, yeah. You have one thread to work with in the browser, and if you tie it up with a synchronous XHR your application freezes until the request finishes.

The "ambient sound" mode on my Sony WH-1000XM2 headphones works very well for this. I find it useful for video calls; without the feedback of hearing my own voice I tend towards shouting.

I think a variation of this comfort-optimized route planning tool would be really useful for cyclists as well. I've found that Google Maps favors streets with bike lanes when planning bike trips, but those are typically main thoroughfares where the bike lane is a last line of defense against aggressive drivers, delivery vehicles, and "dooring". Often these are paralleled by quieter streets where cars drive at careful speeds and a bike lane is not really necessary for safety.

I maintain a web app that would really benefit from an E2E suite, but we don't have the developer capacity to write one right now, so this looks like it hits a potential sweet spot for me. To use Reflect, I think we would need to understand the plan for what happens if the SaaS goes under -- ideally, we'd be left holding our test definitions and some open-source version of the test runner that we can instantiate on our own VM.

Presumably as a nod towards scalability, on the assumption that in aggregate it ought not take more than the entire town's property tax revenue to keep the town's roads in good condition.

> They common quality is that the experiences sound disconnected from reality. They try to explain the experience and are fully convinced they learned some fundamental truth but can't explain it in any way that makes sense.

$0.02 — psychedelics help you understand the way the world is by allowing you to temporarily experience the way the world isn't. most of these fundamental truths just get verbalized as platitudes because, well, they're widely-understood fundamental truths. the benefit is in examining them with a new parallax.

> there seems to be a lot of downside in breaking critical thinking in a lot of people's heads.

agreed inasmuch as psychedelics sometimes do induce long-lasting, harmful delusions. but...the upside of breaking critical thinking for a little while is that you get to experience its limits as a mode of engaging with the world. and you get to put it back together from its constituent parts, and occasionally find that one of those parts might not belong in there.

I went on a wiki-binge on this topic a few days ago and so I recognize this as a magsail[0]. It would be an attractive addition to an interstellar craft since it obviates the need to carry propellant for deceleration.

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

I am trying to follow this supposed implication but I don't see the jump from "the valley" to "everyone who disagrees" and also from "dragging feet" and "making vapid appeals" to "idiotic and evil".

Are you open to a couple of feature suggestions from someone who uses Audacity for scientific applications?

1. An port of Audacity's "Noise Reduction" filter. I have done this once [0] (with some difficulty and no doubt with errors) and I am so tempted to just translate it to JavaScript and put up a PR, but I'm slammed right now.

2. It would be very useful to be able to view the spectrograph as an alternative to the waveform, rather than having it live in a separate "spectrum analyzer" pane. Especially if zooming along the frequency axis were implemented, this would make it much more useful for, well, spectrum analysis.

Thank you for making this. It's impressive in its own right but doubly so as a web application.

[0] https://github.com/robin-labs/robin/blob/master/noisereduce/...

this is maybe my least favorite bit of transit-related pedantry, but it's officially designated the 'L' (in single quotes) by the CTA.

Clicking to zoom is giving me a React-style white screen of death and the error "bearing is required for transition". FF/Chrome latest, macOS 10.14.6

IMO, the big factor that explains why a minimum-wage worker with a smartphone is impoverished but a 16th century king is not, comes down the psychological burden of poverty.

If you're poor in America you live with constant fear of minor financial catastrophes because they will further constrain your opportunity, perpetuating a downwards spiral. Integrated over time this background anxiety drastically reduces one's subjective quality of life, and also leads to physical health issues down the road.

By contrast, if you're a monarch of a medieval European kingdom, you might be dying of syphilis at 43 but with the knowledge that everything possible is being done to save you, and you can call for a roast pheasant or the execution of your meddling cousin on your deathbed.

It's completely subjective, and thus very easy to dismiss, but it contributes the "missing term" for me in thinking about this question.

PubPub | Boston/Remote | Full-time

The Knowledge Futures Group is hiring a software developer to help us build PubPub[0], a collaborative and open publishing tool for the academic web. We want an internet full of publishing tools that empower researchers rather than preying on them and more fully capture the research process in the final product — so we're building one. PubPub already hosts over 500 books, conferences, and journals, from annotated editions of public-domain works[1] to cutting-edge German theology[2] to the Harvard Data Science Review[3]. Right now we're hard at work building features focused on editorial review, data portability, and institution-level scalability.

We are a small team looking for a full-stack web developer ready to work with a React frontend and a Node/Postgres backend. Lots of our engineering problems are related to performant, collaborative rich text editing and marshaling a pile of the publishing industry's tools and standards into a coherent user experience. The larger challenge of PubPub is to invent new, healthier social dynamics around publishing while meeting practical needs, so we're looking for folks eager to contribute to design- and product-level decisions toward that end as well.

As a member of the team you will also be a member of the Knowledge Futures Group, which is loosely based in Boston/Cambridge. But the PubPub product team spans the UK, the US, and India, and we are interested in honing a remote-first culture. If you're interested, please drop us a line: hello@pubpub.org

[0] https://www.pubpub.org/

[1] https://frankenbook.org

[2] https://cursor.pubpub.org/

[3] https://hdsr.mitpress.mit.edu/

A longer version of this job description: https://www.knowledgefutures.org/jobs

I have less of a problem with the product itself than the way it's marketed, with completely unsubstantiated claims about improving employee retention. The message I get here is "your employees are like small children that need to be managed with Slack trinkets", which is too bad, because I think the bot itself looks kinda neat.

Self-driving cars cannot plan an entire exchange in a dense urban areas because there will always be actors like pedestrians, cyclists, and stray plastic bags that do not participate in planning and act adversarially to their shared model. Optimizations will be highly local, spatially and temporally, and I suspect they will end up looking a lot like humans trying to coordinate on the same problem. And even if AVs can technically plan and execute faster, their actions will need to be artificially slowed to be legible to humans. Likewise with their raw speed — cars, self-driving or not, are already moving too fast in urban areas. Reaction times might improve but braking distances will not.

So if AVs can't increase the throughput of city streets, I'm skeptical that they can increase the throughput of off-ramps which are bounded by city streets, or urban freeway segments which are bounded by the off-ramps. And even imagining that significant (2x?) throughput is achieved, it's not going to meet the induced demand ceiling; there would be the same amount of congestion, only with more cars.

L5 is dead on arrival as congestion-mitigation technology and I hope at least some of the billions earmarked to be spent on researching and deploying it are redirected towards better walking, cycling, and transit amenities instead.

I would argue that the automobile is a brilliantly designed tool for making flexible, medium-long distance trips quickly and cheaply. In America, this tool has been stretched far beyond the use cases where it shines. We've tried to make it "the only mode you'll ever need" for almost all Americans, deploying it where transit, cycling, and walking would be far more appropriate. It is great that many low-income people can technically afford to own a vehicle; it is not great that the layout of our cities _forces_ them to own and maintain one.

Thanks for sharing, I'm glad you found a diet that works for you.

How did your reasoning about the ethics of eating meat evolve over this time?

The armchair planner in me was a little taken aback at first by the description of the flea market as "amazingly good urbanism" -- good urbanism looks like bike lanes and trees and mixed-use development, not parking lots! -- but of course that's falling into the very thought trap illustrated by the post.

Parking lot flea markets are exactly 'tactical urbanism' in the same mode as pop-up bike and bus lanes -- the repurposing of car storage for more economically valuable and human-centric use, and (us) urbanist types should talk about them more often!