"because there just wasn't any free or paid font that I found both readable, effective and elegant"
and I can think of several, including the ones I listed.
I'm not saying not to do projects like this! Scratching your own itch and sharing your solution is great. I'm just skeptical, as someone who has obsessively tried just about every programming font out there, when I read that a new font does something better than the handful of fonts I always end up returning to. What is that something?
Why is this better than Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Consolas, SF Mono, Pragmata Pro, and Operator Mono? The reason can be anything, but what is the reason?
I don't find that this font outperforms any of those fonts on any of the metrics listed on the website (crispness, legibility). Is this, like, a subjective thing? Or do I have bad taste?
I downloaded it, connected a bunch of apps I use (Twitter, Google Drive, Gmail, Messenger, Slack) and played around. Sincere question: what's the benefit of using my apps this way?
It seems like it just puts each webpage in a different tab and lets me put the tabs side by side. How is this paradigmatically different from my browser, aside from removing a bunch of browser features? Is it organization? Why do my apps need to be organized? Why is this better than workspaces? Is it because workspaces are too janky? (I hate the sliding animation on macOS.)
Initially I thought Stack was a productivity tool, with keyboard shortcuts, quick search/jump, etc. The only thing I've found is ⌘+1/2/3/4, and 1Password integration doesn't work anymore. And what do I do if I need to use ⌘+1/2/3/4 to navigate an inner app connected to Stack?
Put another way, what is the vision here that I'm failing to understand?
The article takes issue with Stallman commenting callously on a sensitive topic, having a view the author finds offensive, and directing those comments insensitively toward the wrong people. She never presents an argument why what he said was problematic. This makes me believe that regardless of the correctness of what he's saying, the mere fact that he's "defending" this side of the issue is itself offensive to her.
Suppose Stallman suddenly wanted to optimize himself to offend the author of this post as little as possible. Having a more correct point of view would hardly move his metrics. Having more tact would, drastically. That was my point in bringing up the tact article.
You're entirely right; everyone gets offended by something. I should've been more precise.
I know she thinks that, but it's not what her post is about. She quotes Stallman, assumes the reader will agree that what he said was problematic, then spends the rest of the article discussing how we shouldn't tolerate problematic people.
Did he try to absolve Minsky of guilt? I thought the thesis of his defense of Minsky was:
"Whatever conduct you want to criticize, you should describe it with a specific term that avoids moral vagueness about the nature of the criticism."
"The injustice is in the word “assaulting”. The term “sexual assault” is so vague and slippery that it facilitates accusation inflation: taking claims that someone did X and leading people to think of it as
Y, which is much worse than X."
He's not wrong that "sexual assault" is used ambiguously to describe a wide range of behaviors, some worse than others. If a guy does something that's 7/10 bad, and everyone's saying it's 9/10 bad, what's the right way to point out that it was only 7/10 bad?
That's my whole issue here. The author's post makes it sound like her problem is with his lack of tact. She complains about his "choice of words," about how it wasn't "appropriate" to send an email to undergrads, how "shocked" she is.
If the problem is that his viewpoint is morally reprehensible, why not just say that, and let's hear some arguments in that direction?
Fair point, but the expected norm in society, the one that posts like this draw from, centers around outward tact. Like, the whole moral injunction the author is trying to establish here is that he's saying tactless things.
I've noticed that people who write posts like this like to quote their subject, and then go, oh my, how shocking! what an appalling thing to say! without addressing the thing that was said, which in this case was (among other things):
“I think it is morally absurd to define “rape” in a way that depends on minor details such as which country it was in or whether the victim was 18 years old or 17.”
He was responding to a student, who said "Giuffre was 17 at the time, this makes it rape in the Virgin Islands." He was addressing her specific point. He brought up the 17-18 thing because the student herself specified Giuffre's age as the condition of her being raped.
Like, if the student had said "Giuffre was raped because she was coerced against her will," that'd be different. But you can't yourself bring up the technical definition of rape to make your point, then get mad when other people point out that the technical definition makes no sense. If what you really want say is that rape is wrong because it's wrong, just say that!
Of course, the author cares about none of this, because what Stallman said was "problematic." What does that even mean, by the way? This whole post consists of the author repeatedly asserting that various things Stallman said were problematic without explaining why.
This brings me to my next point. Here's an article about "tact filters," a term describing how different people deal with the issue of tact:
People like Stallman don't get offended, so they assume other people won't either. People who do get offended try hard not to offend others, and expect the same courtesy. These two groups of people have difficulty getting along.
Neither point of view is invalid, in the sense that both sides get along extremely well with other people who are like them. But people with outward tact filters happen to be the majority, so Stallman gets seen as the bad guy. But I could imagine an alternative universe where inward-tact-filter nerds were the majority, and people like this author were expected to e.g. have the mental resilience to not let other people's words hijack her emotions.
So I guess I'm offended that people like Stallman are made to feel bad for being who they are, just because they're a minority.
If anything, MBTI helped me assimilate the meta-fact that there are lots of different types of people out there, many of whom I'm simply never going to really click with.
Because you would have to have dozens of such operations, at which point you have to filter through them, at which point it’s faster to just type what you want to do.
Seriously, the best thing I ever did was learn to type 140 wpm.
You realize Vitalik Buterin invented Ethereum when he was 19? The guys who did the Manhattan Project were disgustingly young. Newton invented calculus when he was 21. Hell, Nas released Illmatic when he was 21.
The world has a few winners and lots of losers. Like me, you’re probably a loser. This is just part of the tragicomedy of life. For most of history people were born farmers and died farmers.
The best thing you can do is to focus on being better than yourself yesterday.
Also, envy isn’t a bad thing. If someone has something you don’t, do you want that thing? If yes, envy motivates you to try harder. If no, who cares?
I understand the point you’re making here, but having done webdev for about five years now this has just not been the experience of me or anyone I know. Admittedly, limited sample size and all.
The simple act of repetitively designing many hundreds of websites and then getting feedback from actual people as to how they work with those sites, that is mastery and it does take careful thought. So, yes, they're constantly looking up "recipes" to combine into code.
If I were at a party I would appreciate my job being described this way, but the reality is that webdev is mostly applied common sense + having a lot of the kind of knowledge that is googlable. Like, I’m successful career wise and I’m regarded as being quite good at my job, yet I don’t feel like I’ve mastered anything per se.
Whereas for my side project, an IDE for Golang, I feel I’ve actually had to learn difficult concepts that couldn’t be re-learned from a blog post.
I take back what I said about webdev not requiring thought, which was an exaggeration.
This just shows how shallow web programming is in intellectual content. If your expertise consists of stuff that can be looked up on the fly, all you need to join the field is a high enough IQ to comprehend those ideas at all. There’s no need for deep thinking or mastery.
In what other technical field can you simply google everything? And is that because other fields are merely more obscure, or because they’re actually harder? Could one be a mathematician or physicist by googling things?
This general movement has a “screw the system, man” vibe that I think steers it away from reality.
It’s already possible to own your platform. The problem that no one else will use it. Facebook/Twitter/YouTube are where everyone else is. That’s where audiences are, hence that’s where all the creators are, hence that’s where all the audiences are. These companies spend millions in research to make their apps as engaging as possible. Sometimes that takes the form of unhealthy Skinner box type psychological manipulation, but sometimes they are actually pretty good at suggesting content people want to consume.
Building up network effects and an engaging user experience takes a lot of money, labor, resources, research and executive organization that open source projects generally lack. We should work within the constraints of reality, and figure out policies that dictate what Facebook should/shouldn’t be allowed to do.
You are right that large-scale things happen as the cumulative effect of many small things, but the difference is that in your example the smoker is responsible for all of those cigarettes, whereas I only get one single vote.
Incidentally, I do vote; I just don't do so thinking my individual vote matters. It matters that lots of people all vote, but this reinforces my original point that some kind of structural incentive or policy is needed to get lots of people to all do something.
"because there just wasn't any free or paid font that I found both readable, effective and elegant"
and I can think of several, including the ones I listed.
I'm not saying not to do projects like this! Scratching your own itch and sharing your solution is great. I'm just skeptical, as someone who has obsessively tried just about every programming font out there, when I read that a new font does something better than the handful of fonts I always end up returning to. What is that something?