montag

There's a pretty advanced Mac OS speech markup language, I wrote about it here: https://www.mattmontag.com/personal/mac-os-x-speech-synthesi...

Going back further, there was also a prosody markup for Sound Blaster speech synthesis (Dr. Sbaitso, anyone?).

Yes! I remember running my finger down the column of electrical contact switches and changing the channel at 60 fps. "brrrrrrip!"

Eventually, we will rely on machines to help us understand software code. Think "fill in missing code comments with GPT-3." Now add 10 years of focused research to make this more reliable and intelligible. It must be inevitable, right?

Brilliant explanation and walkthrough of some problems encountered along the way. Thank you for demystifying Blink/Skia a little bit.

Beautiful story. Incidentally, we now have Twitter rebranding Birdwatch as Community Notes…

Today I learned "toot sweet" is an eggcorn for "tout de suite" (very quickly).

How do you like the miniDSP? Thinking about getting one - room correction definitely seems like a job for hardware; i.e. easy enough for a DSP, more portable and hassle-free than setting up software on one computer.

I accidentally implemented this behavior in a number input recently. Felt stupid after fixing it. This stuff can happen so easily when people don't use the stuff they build.

This has got to be some kind of vestige from Windows 3.11, when the spinner control was about 3x larger - relative to the common screen sizes of the time, that is.

Yes, I love that the entire fix is a 5 byte change.

Absolutely, 100% this. Also, I really appreciate how candid the author of the article is. Why is it so hard to admit our human foibles?

Another pet peeve: The effect of gun ownership on suicide rates goes totally ignored. Suicide accounts for 21k out of 33k annual gun deaths in the US[1]. If we're outraged by school shootings, we should be apoplectic about facilitating suicide.

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/gun-deaths/

I have to disagree with you. The site went from a basement project look-and-feel to something much more slick and credible. I'm with you right up until the point where people are paying for TinyPilot out of the business account; then the brand credibility really matters.

"I don't have a horse in this race, but (impassioned rant about what the horses should do, which ones should win or lose, and why...)"

As consumers, we do have a horse in the race. I would cheer for the horse with fewer regulations, but that's just me...

In my opinion the Samsung Q7C is the best 4K TV for desktop computing:

  - it's curved
  - it can do 1920x1080 at 120 hz
  - it does 4:4:4 color

That said, I still like multimonitor setups. The built-in partitioning is a nice feature for most work.

The actual PR looks so poor that I can't imagine it was submitted in good faith.

It’s a great serif, introduced with macOS Catalina I think.

Back in my day, if you had Helvetica installed on Windows, it wasn’t made for screen rendering and looked terrible. I remember putting Windows-friendly fonts higher in the stack for that reason

I didn't say _perceptual_ watermarking, which, as you point out, is at odds with perceptual audio compression... :)

The Universal watermarks story is mostly in the past. The Spotify catalog has been cleaned up to the point where I rarely come across it. Here's a playlist I used to share at Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZbRKMGb8nqXqZziwtC5ZY Seems they've all been cleaned up except for the Elton John track.

Any source for this? Interested to read more. I feel the whole AOL saga would make a great Netflix documentary series. Lots of interesting wrinkles, like the acquisition of Winamp.

If nobody knows the difference, I'd consider the problem solved. But in order to get to that state, search engines need to exert continuous pressure.

Or maybe you’re one of us whose car and microwave clock is an hour behind for 6 months every year…

Reminds me of when we removed the “Previous Track” button on the Rdio player controls. The data showed that users skipped to previous only a tiny fraction of the time. Lasted about 3 days in production.

Underlying this fallacy is the assumption that usage should somehow be uniformly distributed across all features. In reality, a power law distribution is more natural.

Not just work. Deep Work.

This guy is my favorite Forbes clickbait artist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/

It does feel like a bargain, all things considered. Plus you get YouTube Music.

I'd place a very small bet that a few of these trickle back online after the furor dies down...

Yeah, definitely a user-hostile experience. You can see this dark pattern everywhere. Amazon hides items that are out of stock by default, which is especially annoying if you attempt grocery shopping on Amazon Fresh.

If I can boil it down to a UX maxim, it would go something like, "The absence of a positive is no substitute for a negative".

You might appreciate this: https://mmontag.github.io/chip-player-js/browse