It's a good article, but I think you could sum it up neatly by saying "photographic masses search for photographic rules, come up empty." I've been doing amateur/hobbyist photography, as I suspect many here have as well, for quite some time.[0]
For a while, I followed the rule. But as a physics professor of mine once aptly put it, "Stop trying to look for a formula all the time. You have the tools to derive the formulas yourself." The rule of thirds, golden ratio, golden mean, golden doodle, whatever, are just hodge podge tools used by people who want to take a better pictures than the standard iphone eye-level shot (or the old Kodak 35mm point-and-click).
The image is interesting because of the curve of the street, the Escher-esque staircase, and the fact that a bicyclist in motion happens to be moving past the only dead area of the image.
And that gets to the main point: is the image interesting? If it's not an interesting image in the first place, no magic formula is going to fix it. That's where the creativity comes in. Find the non-obvious angle that gives the shot some interest, find a subject that's a little less obvious than the influencer instacrap wingspan shots, find a location that's a little off the beaten path. Do that 10,000 times and you'll train your eye and develop a unique style that can last you through life.
Burk Uzzle is famously quoted as saying "Photography is a love affair with life" and I wholeheartedly agree. Life is beautiful, so just get out there and shoot it. You don't need a formula to find the love in a good shot.
The site is a bit more enjoyable imho once you realize that even the satire is self-reflecting satire.
(And checking html for comments in 2024? We've forgotten more than we ever knew.)
On a more serious note, it pains me a bit that our legends are slowly passing into obscurity as surely as they will soon pass away. Donald Knuth deserves a presidential medal of freedom or some other high award for his many accomplishments and gifts to the field.
I highly recommend doing this. I also highly recommend not doing it digitally.
I recently came across an email I'd sent to myself a decade ago. It was a serendipitous find and could've easily been lost for all time among the 100K emails floating around. But the process of writing it is worth it, and the reading of it some time later can be deeply rewarding.
Great point, I wish I'd mentioned it. The expense of the printf dwarfs the log / log (double divided by a double then cast to an int), which itself is greater than some repeated comparisons in a for loop.
It's key to be able to recognize this when thinking about performant code.
In other words, the entire exercise is silliness because the eventual printf is going to blow away any nanoseconds of savings by a smarter/shorter routine.
Processors are inherently awesome at branching, adding, adding, shifting, etc. And shifting to get powers of 2 (i.e., KB vs. GB) is a superpower of its own. They're a little less awesome when it comes to math.pow(), math.log(), and math.log() / math.log().
Why 300K+ people copied this in the first place shows some basic level of ignorance about what's happening under the hood.[1]
As someone who's been at this for decades now and knows my own failings better than ever, it also shows how developers can be too attracted by shiny things (ooh look, you can solve it with logs instead, how clever!) at the expense of readable, maintainable code.
[1] But hey, maybe that's why we were all on StackOverflow in the first place
Ahhh fonts, where everyone gets an opinion and they're all super important.
If you're designing a font not just for legibility, but primarily for safety, then it seems extremely important that each glyph is uniquely distinguishable from other glyphs. Although this font has different characters for 1/I/l, at a quick glance an uppercase i could still be confused with a pipe (|), and 0 (zero) and O (capital o).[1] I'm sure there are more. So from that standpoint, this font fails for me for legibility/safety.
Also a nitpick, but assuming Chrome is using 60pt B612 font for the title (../fonts/B612-Regular.woff), the "B/6/1" glyphs are hideously formed (that "1" puke) and make me doubt the rest of the character set.
Mostly agree with the other posters here. To add my own anecdotal piece, I had a majority of the 12 symptoms[1][2] defined as long covid. Got covid immediately in Northern Thailand, Dec 2019. Over the next 24 months I went from a healthy (perhaps hyper fit) 40-something male to someone who could barely drag himself to the gym, struggled to complete workouts, went through bouts of mental fog, heart arrythmias, chronic exhaustion, etc. Power outputs were down ~20% on pre- vs. post-covid tracked workouts. Doctors were unsympathetic, prescribed vitamin D for lack of sunlight.
But it's impossible to know if "long covid" is causal vs. ancillary. I'm also 3 years older now, and who knows, maybe that's just part of life and the aging process. I'll say that what helped me the most was just consistently getting out of the house and getting exercise. I started small but it had its own compounding effects. I'm up to about 4 - 5 times per week now. Whether that's walking, running, lifting, or a even a Murph, every bit of exercise seems to have helped me down the (long) road to recovery.
I'll probably never be back to my old fitness level, but things are at least better now. Long covid is as undefinable as it is real, but it can be beat imho. ymmv of course.
Good luck to all who are struggling with this.
That was one of the ostensible reasons, although the real driver likely had more to do with commercial than technical reasons.
There were probably some AOL types who accidentally opened toolbars and couldn't figure out how to close them. But no one who knew how to use Word launched two dozen toolbars as in that infamous image. Keep in mind toolbars (plural) arose from a single bar of tools that was limited with the width of the screen. Someone who knows more than me may want to comment, but my guess was that product groups didn't like seeing their features buried in three layers of flyout menus and used by no one. (Tools...Options...) At some point some PM declared that every menu-accessible function needed a corresponding toolbar icon and the carnage started.
The best explanation of the ribbon I can remember comes from Jensen Harris's old blog[1]. Unfortunately much of his goals and designs were dropped to make the original ship date, leaving the ribbon the mess that it was, and not much better today imho.
The biggest loss was for keyboard users, for whom correctly chorded toolbar mnemonics (win32 parlance: accelerator keys) were dropped for nonsensical ribbon chords where the keyboard letter had almost nothing to do with the desired feature. And to add insult to injury, menu operations that used to happen in milliseconds took nearly full seconds to do the same thing on capable machines of the time (and even today).
