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patternMachine

172 karma · joined October 29, 2020

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patternMachine··on Creatine uptake enhances antitumor immunity
Craze? People have been taking creatine for decades. It's really well studied and is quite safe.
patternMachine··on Automattic's board forces CEO Matt Mullenweg into leave of absence
Barring truly bad behavior this is how executives get fired.
patternMachine··on Unions Can Save Tech Workers and Tech Work
This article is really about IT support, not "tech" workers.

What tech workers need, if they need anything, is a professional organization like lawyers, doctors, and architects have.

patternMachine··on You can't solve computer use by ignoring the interface
You think this blog post is advocating for good UI?
patternMachine··on How we built the v0 iOS app
This reads more like a portfolio case study than a blog post for a company. Who is the audience of this post? Isn't one of the main value props of Vercel that you don't need to know technical details like this to launch a product?
patternMachine··on Spending time with the material
Physical objects get added to our body schema in a way that digital documents do not. When we hold a book in our hands, our brains incorporate it into the subconscious of our bodies[0]. Digital artifacts can never hope for this level of connection, so it takes much more conscious effort to engage on the same level.

0. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10538...

patternMachine··on This map is not upside down
The moralizing that always accompanies (not) upside down maps is so tedious. It's a genuinely interesting example of how something can look so wrong and yet not be wrong at all. To try to extend that "wrong" feeling to some kind of moral failure on the viewers part is just silly. You (or society) are not a bad or prejudiced person for thinking this way, it's just that nearly all maps produced have chosen a different arbitrary orientation.
patternMachine··on Googler... ex-Googler
It seems to me
patternMachine··on Amazon plans to lay off 14,000 managerial positions to save $3.5B yearly
1. Amazon announces new IC to Manager ratio target. Meeting this target would mean an overall reduction in the number of managers.

2. Someone at Morgan Stanley assumes that lay offs will be the mechanism used to reach the target ratio and does some math that says this'll save $XX billion, based on the number of employees at Amazon and the average manager salary.

3. Business Insider reports on the Morgan Stanley memo.

4. This trash article re-reports on it for some reason.

In reality, teams were re-org'd, managers became ICs. Maybe some were PIP'd. No large layoffs though.

patternMachine··on Mercator: Extreme
Essentially the plot of The Inverted World.
patternMachine··on Researchers find high levels of lead, mercury and arsenic in Beethoven's hair
I am not a composer but I do have a similar memory for sound. I can "listen" to music in my head very vividly. It can go on for quite awhile almost subconsciously and when it ends it often feels like someone else turned the music off, leading me wondering what happened.
patternMachine··on Learn CSS layout the pedantic way (2015)
Learn page layout and graphic design principles. A lot of CSS is spec'd to support these disciplines and it will make a lot more sense if you are familiar with them. The main reason developers have so much trouble with CSS is that they don't understand the problems it is trying to solve.
patternMachine··on Figma and Adobe abandon proposed merger
Remarkably ignorant comment, and bitter too. You might as well blame MS Word for all the poorly written books out there.
patternMachine··on Reddit Sans
It's cheaper. Many fonts require ongoing licensing fees based on views or some other metric. Creating your own font means you own it — no more fees.
patternMachine··on Rules for developers to design beautiful UIs without a designer
The contrast ratio for the body text is 7.57:1 (or 7.25:1 if the text is on the light grey background), which meets AAA accessibility standards (which is 7:1).
patternMachine··on I’m going to miss you, but I am taking a sabbatical
Is it possible that running a blog is not as easy as you think?
patternMachine··on Software should convey a sense of calm
Pointlessly reworking software is the hallmark of a poor (or green) contributor. Designers can redesign features that work fine, engineers can refactor code that doesn't need optimization, PMs can come up with features that nobody needs. Designers might do this more often since there is a somewhat lower barrier to entry than the other two disciplines, but that doesn't mean the whole profession should be ditched. A good designer knows when to pull out the big design guns and when to leave em holstered.