Although I have had rechargeable batteries in gadgets for decades, I would not like to have an EV parked in a garage beneath my bedroom, juicing up with many kilowatts, every night.
No amount of fire exits would help, I mean, what about my stuff?!?
No amount of insurance would cover personal belongings that could get lost, so that means stress from the stupid EV.
The technology might be generally proven (the EV could be a Toyota Prius variant) but the current iteration could be another Note 7, there is no knowing for sure.
I assure you it is not propaganda or TikTok that makes me wary of EV batteries, or any grudge, it is just that I have a different set of circumstances to the guy with a separate garage for housing an EV a safe distance away.
It took an extra decade for hospitals to allow mobile phones on their premises, they just had a different risk assessment. It wasn't propaganda that made them enforce such a ban.
Hence, although it is tempting to blame 'enemy propaganda', there is a whole spectrum of risk assessment, based on different people and different circumstances, so it will take a while, with battery chemistry essentially static for a decade before some get won over.
But imagine if you were fantastically rich and you could pay people to do leaf blower things at the crack of dawn. That would be true luxury, bossing around 'little people' that depend on you for a job waving around a leaf blower, or else they will starve, and die.
If it was your slave doing the leafblowing then I am sure it would be music to your ears. You could imagine your place to be Mar-a-Lago. You would also have people washing your many cars at an absurdly early hour, so they looked shiny and leaf-blown.
Your problem is having a poverty mindset. If you had a billionaire mindset then you would see that noise to utility ratio very differently, it would be proof that you had so much money.
I wish I was joking, however, I have had bosses lord it over me where leaf blowing and car polishing is what matters most to them.
I like your reading material. I do think the foundations are to be found in the old texts too, but there are limits to it. Take web development, I honestly think that what Tim Berners-Lee conceived has to be understood because the design goals are in there, however, nothing from the era of IE6 hacks should ever be learned because all of it has to be unlearned if you are to understand the newer toys such as the grid layout that we somehow lived without for so long. That too has fundamentals, design goals and specifications that need to be understood if you are to truly get it.
But now you would have 'how to do grid layout with Claude' or something equally daft. And you can bet your bottom dollar that the book would itself be written with AI.
I have just been looking for a book on O'Reilly, of an existing tech, but I am not sure that tech really matters because AI has taken over in ways that do not interest me.
With printed books for web development you want a recent book. I am sure there is much to be learned from the 2002 book, but I want 2024+.
The list of titles starts out strong, with titles such as 'Web development with XYZ' but the 2024+ titles are 'web development with AI and XYZ'. Which is probably jolly interesting, but I want the fundamentals of XYZ, not AI + XYZ.
Dunning Kruger springs to mind.
Some of the 'egging of the pudding' is most interesting, I have a friend in scientific publishing, and, with the yearly performance review and 'strategy meetings', the friend, who manages a vast department, said to the boss how the plan was to go all-in on AI. This was music to his ears! The performance review went extremely well, the right things were said and yet nothing specific was committed to, just this smearing of AI everywhere.
Does this friend or the boss, or the team, have a clue what they are going to use this magic AI for, or what the results will be? Who cares, bossman can now present 'his' AI strategy to the board, with the press release going out and the share price going up.
This was almost a year ago and I daren't ask about how the AI thing is going for them. I suspect the ship is still sinking (open publishing is eating the industry) and that the magic band aid that is AI might not be working for them.
After coming away empty handed from my book search on O'Reilly, neither wanting an out-of-date book or an AI-centric recent title, I am wondering where this is going. Presumably at O'Reilly they also decided to go all in. Maybe there was a manager like my friend, telling their boss over-confidently that this was to be the strategy.
In tech we are always dealing with unknown unknowns. AI just makes it easy to gloss over this, meaning that we have a lot of Dunning Kruger going on. The further up the management chain one goes, the more Dunning Kruger there is.
DRY applies, even in SVG. Draw one horizontal line and then reuse it for the other horizontal lines. Same for the vertical lines. The advantage of this technique is that you can clone the master lines without having to repeat yourself with the stroke-width and other attributes. You can also specify just the x or just the y of the cloned line, thereby needing to specify x1, x2, y1 and y2 just once per master line, with x (or y) in the use elements being just the offset.
Why bother? DRY. That is it.
If you put the master lines in a 'defs' as symbols, then they can inherit some attributes from a 'g' (group), therefore enabling you to specify stroke-width just once. Non-scaling stroke widths can also be specified, meaning that you can scale up an A4 to an A0 without having fat lines.
Since you want to make graph paper accessible to all, you can put a few words together in the 'desc' for that, and give the paper a 'title' specifying what it is, e.g. A4, 5mm spacing, with your URL.
Nobody will ever care for these small changes, however, if you branch out into making paper for composers or other specialist use cases, these techniques might come in hand.
Regarding buttons, or rather 'buttony' (which used to mean the craft of making buttons), the UK has many regions that have historical claims to being the former button capital of the world. First it was Dorset, thanks to the sheep, then Yorkshire stole that business, then the Black Country (Birmingham) brought the full weight of the Industrial Revolution to the product.
This American/German story is just one Johnny-come-lately part of the epic story that is button making, albeit without a 'Cadillac Desert' grade book to put the story together for you.
This was my starting point, a belief that other languages were 'better' at expressing different things. However, I have done a few projects requiring translation over the years and I have found European language speakers, notably Italian and German, preferring the freedom of English to the relative straightjackets of their respective mother tongues.
As a Brit I am biased, however, there is a crucial difference between 'free range' British English and 'simplified' American English. Superficially, American English seems the more 'free', with liberties taken to create cool words and brand names. However, American English is constrained by the work of Webster, with there being a definitive dictionary, very much cast in stone, with changes such as 'no u in colour' made purely because of a rejection of everything English, including tea and spellings.
Currently we have something more extreme going on with the language that Ukrainians are expected to speak, with their 'government' seeking new and improved ways to move the language away from Russian. If this was OG English then it would be like getting rid of every French sounding word, so 'beef' becomes 'cow meat', 'mutton' becomes 'sheep meat' and so on. These changes can be made quite easily since it is not a whole new language has to be learned (or unlearned) at once. The lists of banned/allowed words changes all the time, much like Newspeak in 1984.
This won't be the last attempt to determine what a language is by decree, however, the result of such efforts is that languages get stuck in time. Hence the observations of my translation 'helpers', preferring English to their mother tongues.
IMHO American English is British English, stuck in time for 250 years, or whenever Webster got his special dictionary to schools. Meanwhile, OG British English has evolved in its own way, a form of direct democracy, where words change based on how they are used in the here and now.
I don't believe there is such a thing as an actual English word, all of it is 'stolen' from various colonial adventures of the past, or inherited from invaders of the past, notably the 'old enemy', as in the French.
French used to be the language for arts, diplomacy and the aristocracy. But they lost out, in part due to the fixed dictionary. Had they allowed their language to accept English loan words, chances are that French could still be the language it once was.
Currently there is an existential threat to English as the language for science and technology due to the rise of China. It gets worrying when data sheets for Texas Instruments components are released first in Chinese, to be followed up, months later with English translations. Therefore I am rooting for en-GB rather than en-US, due to that minor detail of there not being a 'Webster' dictionary of the past, casting a shadow on our future.
At the start of WW2, the UK was struggling to make enough planes the hand-crafted, coach built way. A deal was done for US automotive concerns, notably Ford, to make British planes under license, en-masse.
Note that this was to be done without Weingarten and other German presses, which were the EUV machines of the era. This was also to be done without the 'Black Country', which was the British industrial heartland centred around Birmingham.
A big problem turned out to be the British blueprints, which were ill-suited to precision mass manufacturing, where fettling is not allowed. Everything had to be redesigned for mass manufacturing.
This redesign for mass manufacturing was evidently outside of the competencies of the Brits but an easy task for the guys at Ford.
Until 2014, China and Russia have genuinely sought trade and cooperation with the West. The deal was hydrocarbons and labour in exchange for luxury goodies, specialist machine tools, avionics and much else, including jet engines. It was win-win, mostly.
However, in 2022 the gloves truly came off. Economic cooperation between Russia and China became necessary. Thus far, there is no evidence of Chinese war material on the front line, other than dual use items seen on both sides such as the ubiquitous DJI Mavic drones. However, there is a deeper partnership going on between the two nations, with aerospace being extremely important.
Already Rolls Royce are making gas turbines in China, for non-plane things. Naturally they hold back the true trade secrets, and the US government absolutely makes sure that is the case. However, you know it is only a matter of time before there are several Shenzhens for aerospace growing like mushrooms in China, blueprints from Russia, re-engineered for mass production.
I happen to need the inspo, some of the decorative details 'need' the SVG treatment.
The tools we have shape our graphic design and sometimes a look back through history, when they had different tools, provides a rich seam of inspiration. Thanks for the post!
As a connoisseur of SVG, I like the approach, the results, the use of Zint and WASM. That said, there are a few opportunities.
The version string isn't needed these days, nor the XML header or the doctype.
The code/url/page title can go in the SVG title, to make it show on mouseover.
The id=barcode is also superfluous. Since id codes should be unique, this could be a problem when many QR codes exist on a page.
The background rectangle does not need x=0, y=0 since that is implied.
The 'hard coding' of the black and white is what you want to avoid any dark mode issues, however, I would still use currentColor and transparent rather than black, just to put myself in a world of dark/light mode pain, fixed in CSS.
Recently I put some 8-bit graphics in SVG using lines and stroke dash arrays. I also got them animated, in a space efficient way, by keeping the lines that do not change from frame to frame. (I now have Maria and Willy from 'Jet Set Willy' for the wait after a form is submitted, plus a few Space Invaders. I am resisting the urge to do Pac-Man ghosts, but I will invent a need for them...)
Since an SVG can be a mystery box full of CSS, SMIL, Javascript and 'foreign object' imports, I am tempted to give it a go, so that a CSS variable is passed to the depths of the shadow DOM in a URL fragment or query string, to magically return either a barcode or a QR code.
This will take a little while, but I am keen to give it a go. In some ways, SVG is like 'Duplo LEGO' with the Libre Barcode as a font more like 'LEGO Technik', requiring vastly more skill.
Just because you can doesn't mean that you should, plus there are many barcode libraries that I know well, so why reinvent the wheel?
The typical barcode library usually comes with fluff, formats and libraries that I don't need. Hence 'qr.svg#upc-number' with it just being one file has appeal.
I am not yet up to speed on the latest AI toys, however, given the problem space is well defined, could I just ask AI chat bot to churn out the code for this in a matter of seconds, for it to encapsulate the logic in an SVG? Would it know how to specify 'crisp edges' and what the deal is with aspect ratio?
Similarly, could I also ask the AI nicely to create my own barcode font?
These seem manageable problems for todays trillion-dollar wonder tech, it is not as if I am asking for a cure for cancer or anything hard, yet I lack confidence in an AI solution, and feel I might as well work it out myself, given my goal is learning SVG rather than prompting.
My lack of confidence is the AI solution is due to the scarcity of people writing online about doing cool things with CSS variables, URL fragments and code in SVG. A Google search does not show 'stroke dash array' things for QR codes and online QR code generators create lots of fully fledged rect-angles, that lack the space efficiency or human-readability of my prefered approach, even if gzip doesn't care.
Sorry for bringing AI into everything, I just have my doubts that the new toys are that capable when it comes to novel solutions.
Sometimes I look at dystopian futures from literature and wonder what the problem is.
I suspect some might prefer 1984 for the stability, some might prefer Brave New World for the Soma and some might prefer Wall-E because life looks good with B+L.
The helmet business is amazing, and proof that one is born every minute. It deserves to be shown how many logical fallacies there are. Top of the list is anecdotal evidence, everyone with a mouth can tell you about someone that had their life saved by magic styrofoam.
There is a grain of truth to the anecdotal claims. But, even then, this is very much an imagined grain of truth. What makes it fun is if you work for a specialist bicycle shop or up the chain, distributing thousands of helmets. With customer interaction at the showroom level, fitting hundreds of helmets, then selling gazillions at B2B, the question has to be asked, where are the broken ones, the one sent back for money off, as a replacement discount?
Indoctrination into the polystyrene club is also very easy. Customer buys new bicycle, customer gets upsold a helmet, as an easy win. The far more practical high vis jacket costs $5 and you make no profit on that, whereas the $50+ polystyrene is just money for the taking.
The testing was originally to a SNELL standard, but the helmets were too heavy. So manufacturers switched to the lame self-test consumer testing, 'trust us bro'. This became the new benchmark, anything aiming at SNELL or other meaningful test just did not survive the market.
Hence I keep it simple. If cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes (fitness, racing, stunts) then get the helmet and make sure the straps are tight. You will need it for organised events so you might as well get used to wearing it.
If not cycling for conspicuous leisure purposes, but merely for transport, whether that be the commute or errands, then you don't need a helmet. Get the lights, mudguards and high vis instead.
I am learning the counter-logical-fallacies, so I can counter the life saved anecdote with quality nonsense that has the same logical fallacies. For example, "I know a true Scotsman that has been cycling every day for fifty years without a helmet. Once he got hit by a car and his life was saved because he was not wearing an ill-fitting helmet, he would have been strangled by the straps had he been wearing a helmet, plus the driver would have given him less room, so the accident would have been far worse."
I digress, as for the article, the helmet is excellent for conspicuous leisure cycling. Now give me your money!
Ah, but it is new to Claude. Claude has main character vibes, so it is always about Claude. Isn't he clever?
Claude can stay in his own lane, I want to know how I can use this during development to simulate uploading photos, so Chrome only is okay for my purposes. But I want to know how to do it, not how much better Claude is than me, forever able to do anything I can do but better.
Context matters, and a big country house in England is not the same thing as a McMansion, unless it is an American inspired newbuild, and plenty exist.
In former times the servants lived in the top floors and worked in the basement floors of a city town house, with 'mews' nearby for the horses. A land owning family with servants was more like a 'small village' than a big house.
The big country house and the estate generally was built from the profits of slavery, so it was 'slavery all the way down', with the English 'slaves' called servants.
Every chunk of stone had to get there by train, canal or by horse power. Irish 'navvies' did the work, so another category of slaves.
Upkeep on these properties was a never ending task, so there was also a requirement for untold amount of handymen, gardeners and the rest of it. Just think of the lawn, which was beyond what the common man could dream of, most peasants did not have gardens as every inch of whatever land they had would be growing crops. The lawn, was a display that the landowner had that much land that he didn't need to have crops on it. With no lawnmowers or RoundUp, a lawn was quite a challenge, whereas today it is just an easy cop out, since RoundUp kills everything that is not a grass.
The whole point of America was 'no kings'. So why the McMansions is probably due to the lack of a class structure, since, if everyone (white male, northern European) is supposed to be equal, the only way to flex status is with a big truck and a McMansion with extra toys. Nobody is getting a medal from the king with a peerage in the House of Lords, are they?
Also, before WW1, in England there was a tradition of craftsmanship. All the guys that could do beautiful work in stone, wood and topiary died in WW1, taking their craft with them. This was not a problem as mechanisation meant that machines could make a lot of this stuff.
In today's world a very large townhouse or a OG English mansion is not going to work as a home. There is too much to clean, heat and maintain, plus, it actually is like a prison being that isolated. The scores of servants made sure these places were hives of activity, and viable as a community of sorts.
The McMansion is a very different beast. They are not good.
As for the article, it is useful in the context of the dreaded ballroom. Clearly there is a proportions issue. But look at the White House and how that works, with lots of people calling the place home and work. The original English Mansion was more like that, not just this stupidly vast space for two people to 'live' in.
My home town was famous for the red cloth that the British Army used to wear. This same red cloth was the main 'trade cloth' for the East India company and native peoples, the world over, just wanted it. The East India company wasn't paying for stuff in silver, the red cloth was worth more than that.
As for why my home town dominated the red cloth trade, well, there are reasons. The 14th century plague is part of the story as that is when sheep took over the land. Thanks to the British weather, the sheep developed a hard wearing wool which was perfect for the armies of the world and for clothing the slaves of the world.
Then geology came into play, with an abundance of Fuller's Earth, important for getting the wool clean. Coupled with that were teasels, necessary for processing the wool. Even the water comes into it, since the Industrial Revolution started with water wheel power.
Eventually competition came from Yorkshire for this particular broadcloth. Many aeons later, WW1 came along and charging into battle with red tunics became somewhat fatal. That was it for the product.
Sure, this particular red is one of the billions of colours out there, so it is of no surprise that it is omitted, however, the history is awesome, but you need someone that knows their history to tell the story.
LLMs lack passion and the ability to interpret varying sources in the way that a historian can. Notionally there is depth of knowledge with LLMs, since everything ever written is known, but then there is no depth of knowledge. You read, and read and read, to learn very little.
We have an interesting 'just because you can, doesn't mean you should' aspect of LLMs. I appreciate that, superficially, this website looks awesome, but who is it for?
As a HN person, I need P3 OKLCH colours and I have an expectation that the colour in question will stay on the page, at least as a sticky header. I would also expect a 3D-modelling style 'sphere', showing the specular highlight, diffuse and ambient lighting to be showing how the colour works. I appreciate that my art friends have no idea what I am on about here, so what do they get?
Anyone British that has an artist's studio and a brush will have many, many Winsor and Newton colours, they are a major brand and truly storied, at least in the UK. Clearly they put some effort into 'evergreen content' by writing up their various colours.
As for whom they are writing for, they have customers! They didn't pay people to write blog articles just because they could, they did it because they should. They have product to shift.
I am sure they did a little bit of keyword stuffing with their blog articles, as was the fashion, and all of it is 'marketing', but still, it is much better writing than anything LLM.
Getting back to 'should' and 'could', the crux of the matter is if you have something of value. True value, according to some economics people, is a product of human labour, with machines not really cutting it, unless you count the human effort needed to design, make, maintain and calibrate the machine.
It is a bit of a controversial opinion, however, I think the only value of doing things the LLM way is just that, you can prove that you can do things the LLM way. This is legitimate in a job marketplace that demands AI with everything. But, once that novelty has worn off?
We will see what survives the test of time. Maybe Winsor and Newton will sack their content creators and just get an LLM to churn out blog articles. But, would any of that have any value?
Nope.
Would any of it survive the test of time?
Nope.
An added aspect to LLM use is criticism. Humans deserve respect and you can't just go around dissing the hard work of others because that just is not nice. But, use an LLM and you can basically say 'that is a load of rubbish because you cheated'. Painful.
That aside, you do have something that could be really good. But you can't leave the reader underwhelmed or else they won't be back or signing up for more. Writing original content is hard. If I had to write an essay for school homework on my hometown's special red colour, it would take me all week to do research. Even then I would have barely scraped the surface. Writing a compelling essay would also require skill at writing, plus I would need someone else to proof-read, edit and fact check for me.
For the next colour I would be back to square one, and if this colour took me far from the history and culture of my home town, I might be way off the mark with assumptions made. Note that Winsor and Newton would not hire me, if writing that slow, unless I was a 'distinguished fellow' at some art place of note.
Actually, American roads are excellent for cycling. Same for public transport.
After Vietnam, many accessibility features for folks in wheelchairs were mandated, this also favours the bicycle.
Grades in America are excellent for cycling. If you a mere mortal, going over an Alp in Europe will take all day and leave you pretty much unable to do much the following day. Meanwhile, in the USA, you can cycle over the major mountain ranges with considerable ease, when compared to the Alps.
Grid patterns are also most welcome on a bicycle. I know suburban McMansion land doesn't have grids, and getting lost in those places is cycling hell because the houses all look the same, however, Big Auto made these absurd developments possible, along with some white flight from cities where the black man dared to move to.
As for long distance commutes, what a waste. And for what? Many service sector jobs just don't warrant people driving two hours each way just to earn a crust. It all comes at a cost to community.
Although there is cradle to grave car dependency in the USA, one true fact about American people is that they are the best when it comes to hospitality. This matters on a bicycle and, sadly, in Europe, there just isn't the same hospitality.
All considered, warts and all, America is excellent for cycling, at least in the nine Westernmost states. The roads generally come with a handy 'edge' which serves as a cycle lane and the people are fab.
Bring back the streetcar, the broadway railways and Main Street. Kick the corporations to the kerb and the job is a good one. The richest country in the world got to the moon many decades ago. The roads already exist, the space for railways exists, what doesn't exist is the mindset, which has been reduced to cradle-to-grave car dependency.
Too easy. In the UK there are far more torturous roundabouts, for example, Five Ways in Birmingham, notable because you have to inch forward up a hill, always in traffic, typically with a manual gearbox, to finally get to the roundabout where the three lanes of traffic seems to already be doing 50 mph, meaning that you have to channel your drag racing skills to just get on there, without slipping backwards, damaging the clutch or coming a cropper.
London has some specials too, including the traffic around Hyde Park Corner, which is like a roundabout in vacuum form. Should so much as a square foot of tarmac become vacant then it will magically suck in four taxis, two double decker buses and a dozen UberEats delivery guys, making any progress tough.
Chiswick roundabout, where the M4 motorway, gateway to the West, begins is also not for those lacking testicular fortitude, my mum got stuck going round and round that one, we weren't quite dizzy by the time we got off, but it was getting that way.
All is nothing though. You have got to do France, Arc de Triomphe. Cobblestones, many, many lanes, every car with dents in it and priority given to those entering the roundabout rather than those on it already. No American in an American vehicle would be able to make it through that one!
Poe's Law applies.