voussoir

I wrote this a few years ago. I like to re-read/re-listen to it every once in a while to check if my beliefs are still the same, and they pretty much are. I never posted this to HN because I think it's too long to ask people to read, but... today I feel like it. Enjoy, thanks

Relevant: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42342382

Neat, I did one of these too :)

https://voussoir.net/writing/css_for_printing

If Google's customers are the advertisers, maybe the correct answer is "attention".

This is beautiful man, congratulations. I love how much personality there is in the animations!

It's funny, I was just thinking about this recently. I noticed that a lot of electric cars or PHEVs use cyan accents to signal that they are EVs, yet I also think yellow is the more obvious color for electricity.

I've been a Purelymail customer since July 2021. For the most part I have been very satisfied. However, in July 2024 I sent an email to Scott for support because I have been getting too much spam. He said that the spamassassin auto-learning filter was broken and he was working on a replacement. In the time since then, I think maybe it is doing a little better, but I still get quite a lot of spam.

But for $0.40/month I have not had any inclination to switch providers.

https://voussoir.net/spam

This might not be quite as strong a rebuttal as you were hoping for!

Wow, these letters are extremely pathetic and unbecoming for a government agency. I would have expected the BBC to have more self respect than this mafia LARP.

Funny seeing these headlines come back around. Here's something from seven years ago with the same kind of problem:

[OSM-talk] Beware Pokemon users https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2016-December...

Your comment is phrased as a disagreement, but it's not. The GP post said the IRS can't do everyone's taxes, and you replied that they can do most. I think we're all on the same page that people would benefit from having available information autofilled while still having the opportunity to review and make corrections as needed.

I feel like I'm seeing an effect where some people don't want to say the word "AI" because they don't want to look like a normie, so they stick to "LLM" which sounds smarter and more technically adept. Then they complain because the LLM lacks a knowledge graph or self reflection. It's no surprise that a language model models language, not facts, especially not trivia facts which can't be deduced from anything.

If you want something to have a worldly knowledge graph and the ability to answer "I'm not sure", you'll have to ask for an AI, not an LLM.

Here's Matthias Wandel doing something like that with his microwave: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkqpNI7q1Dc

The other video you're referring to is "Games as a service is fraud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

Here's his other video from 2019, "Games as a service is fraud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUAX0gnZ3Nw

> If you want to preserve a game, you have to decide what parts are important to preserve [...] you might be able to do it but you then don’t get the real game experience

The author of this website is aware of that. Everyone will come away from a game with a different favorite part, of course, but for him it's mainly about preserving the worlds and art assets, even if some of the more fancy functionality is lost.

With games as a service, your game client already has the vast majority of the assets it needs locally. The world, models, physics engine, and the ability to move through the world are already handled by the client. But they remove that online authentication lynchpin, and you're left with tens of gigabytes of assets that you can't even open to view.

In his words:

> The comparison is between a less functional game versus nothing. It's the difference between putting grandpa in a wheelchair or taking him out back and shooting him in the head.

> Battleforge https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmvcJuBOaQE&t=1168s

Plus, most of the "it's too hard" would be obviated if the publishers would plan for this eventuality from the beginning. Providing a bare-minimum experience that lets you navigate the world in singleplayer should not be "too hard".

I have been making these generators for my workplace, so the project scope is very narrow. You can follow the idea with any dimensions you need.

If you want to use these techniques on a global site, I think you could use multiple @page styles and switch between them with a dropdown like I did with portrait/landscape. Although A4 and letter are very close in size.

There are way more length units than you'd expect!

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/length

Wow, great use of the attr function, thank you!

Oh, I see, thanks. I did figure out that thead automatically repeats across pages, but I also had to repeat other stuff outside the table, like letterhead.

I also made this sample file that shows thead repeating, but since it's a single continuous table it doesn't preview very well and spills out of the 8.5x11 article element. I'm not sure how I would take advantage of the browser's automatic thead/tfoot repeat while also accurately previewing the result in the browser, especially with more elements below the table.

https://voussoir.net/writing/css_for_printing/sample_longtab...

But I'm open to suggestions that would spare me from splitting the table after a height threshold!

I'm sure there are smarter ways to do some of the things I'm doing. Could you let me know what fancy tricks you're referring to, perhaps ::before and ::after with content properties?

These generator pages already rely on javascript to put our database data onto the page, whether by URL parameters or API calls, so once I'm in that mode, yeah I'm generating everything with article.innerHTML = '...' to get a bulk template on the page, and a series of createElement/append to make smaller elements like table rows.

I realize you're working on the software side rather than the hardware side, and you mentioned you're trying to support existing printers, but your comment reminded me of something I'd like to throw out there:

I would like to have a thermal printer that plugs into the computer via USB and appears as a mass storage device. When you drop an image file (PNG, BMP) into it, it prints it out. A config file would tell the printer what paper stock you have loaded. This way the computer does not need any special drivers, and it would be so stupidly easy to write programs that generate image files to be printed. I think more hardware should take advantage of filesystem operations as a control method.

If someday you ever think about producing a first-party thingybase printer...

Thanks for your feedback, I've added it to the footer of each article and made it more distinct on the main page.

Thanks for taking the time to write out your system!

Thanks for the comment! I like black for myself but I bet your notes look beautiful.

I agree with buying heavier paper. I recently bought some 100gsm paper for my notetaking at work, whereas I was previously stealing whatever they had in their printers. It makes a big difference in the enjoyment of writing, and now that I'm printing my own graph pattern on top of it I feel very liberated to use good paper stock. The graph paper I bought throughout school was never my favorite stuff.

Thanks! Here's the link, it's at the bottom of the article list but I suppose it doesn't stand out well enough.

https://voussoir.net/writing/writing.atom

Hi, this is my article. I think it's silly that newspapers dress up ordinary criticisms and disagreements with this overly dramatic, violent language, so I started compiling them and the list just goes on and on and on. It's kind of an art piece critiquing headline trends.

In my head I imagine all these spokespeople bodyslamming each other at every opportunity. Now that would be news!

Thanks for finding my page interesting enough to post and let me know if you have any questions.

They're big Ricoh brand scanners at my workplace and I used the top document feeder which was able to handle big stacks at once. 600 DPI, 1-bit tiff.

We have a scanner at home but it's only got a glass bed, that's why I hadn't gotten around to doing this for so long.

I agree that I will probably never use these notes to go back and actually learn anything. I did this scanning project because I wanted to shred the paper and be rid of it, but I felt I should keep it digitally because it's so cheap and easy to. It seems sad to just discard work, even though the actual knowledge is still contained in the textbooks and, hopefully, my brain. But the doodles are worth more than the lecture notes from a nostalgia perspective.