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Little rant about GNOME's file manager (a.k.a. Nautilus)
A few thoughts you're free to ignore
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 1,666 posts.
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What Le Corbusier got right about office space
A century ago, the father of modern architecture, Le Corbusier, was commissioned by a French industrialist to design some homes for factory workers near Bordeaux. The resulting development, Cité Fr…
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Design of This Website (2021)
Meta page describing Gwern.net, the self-documenting website’s implementation and experiments for better ‘semantic zoom’ of hypertext; technical decisions using Markdown and static hosting.
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An elegant bamboo structure in Vietnam
Vo Trong Nghia Architects designed this resort welcome center on Phu Quoc Island in Vietnam out of approximately 42,000 pieces of bamboo, rope, and bamboo pins.
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Abstraction: Not what you think it is
What abstraction really means in programming, from PL theory, by Jimmy Koppel: why functions, interfaces, and indirection are not abstraction.
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An Apple Original on DVD: The Definitive Unboxing and UX Review
In front of me is something that feels impossible: This is a legal, officially sanctioned DVD of the movie CODA, an Apple Original (Apple Inc.’s name for their exclusive original movies on th…
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The end of the nice GTK button
A look into my favorite Adwaita button and why I'm not happy it's going away
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Photography is not Objective, Art is a Set of Choices
Art is not perception
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Why dark and light is complicated in photographs
Choices in photographic tone reproduction
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AVIF has landed (2020)
AVIF is the first browser image format we've had in 10 years. Let's see how it performs…
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How does perspective work in pictures?
Why don’t photographs make distant objects big enough?
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What made World of Warcraft's environments so compelling?
Texts on this and that.
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Aspect-ratio is great
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like a lot of the time learning new CSS features doesn’t involve just learning a what a single property does, more like getting to grips with a collection of properties and how they work together — even learning a whole specification. That’s certainly not a complaint from me: it makes…
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My mental model of how alpha opacity works is wrong (2020)
When plotting overlapping elements with a defined alpha (opacity), I had always thought about it as an additive process with results clamped to not exceed 1.
648
A UX designer walks into a Tesla Bar
I borrowed a friend’s Tesla 3 yesterday. About 5 minutes into the ride, the windshield started fogging up. I couldn’t find the defroster on the large control screen Teslas are so famous for. In desperation, I tapped the CAR icon but that took me to the settings screen which ended up being a dead end. Frustrated, I…
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There’s No Such Thing as Clean Code
Everyone seems to be striving for ‘clean’ code at the moment. You can’t read a blog post without the author telling you how clean their approach is. Engineering teams get together and discuss which of the possible solutions is the cleanest. Other developers assure you that they practice ‘clean code’.
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Stop Brainstorming
Why brainstorming doesn't work - and why to do nothing instead
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AirPods don't “just work”
AirPods are a fantastic product. However, the small annoyances that occur when using them don't allow it to fall under the category of Apple products that "Just Work".
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Designing for a right to repair
Designing from cradle to grave is no longer good enough. We need to postpone that grave as long as possible. This is how to design for a right to repair.
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GPS
Interactive article explaining how GPS works.
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Losing our product to button syndrome
Fighting a pandemic in the world of software
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CSS Gradients that avoid the “gray dead zone”
Have you ever noticed that gradients tend to look a little gray and washed-out in the middle? This happens because of a mathematical quirk with RGB colors. Fortunately, we can work around this quirk, and create beautiful, lush, saturated gradients.
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Making nice-looking and interactive diagrams for your PCBs
I have always liked pinout diagrams like this: Arduino Nano Pinout. Source: http://www.pighixxx.com/test/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/nano.pngThey work quite well, there is all the information and they look nice. However, they work only when you have pins on two sides of the PCB and once you squeeze too much information…
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How to design a house to last 1000 years
At last, we’re finally ready to put together the design for our house. A fully specified design, with every detail and system described, is well beyond the scope of this newsletter (not to mention the scope of my knowledge). But we can give a high-level schematic design, laying out the basic building systems and how…
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Grok {Shan, Shui}*: Advent of understanding the generative art
I spent 24 days digging into the code of {Shan, Shui}* Chinese painting generator and lived to tell the story.
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