mcrider

I’m speed-running a bunch of new hobbies to teach myself how to make a physical game (basically its a ping pong paddle that tracks how often you hit a ball — like a “keepy uppy” game with scorekeeping):

- Arduino dev and circuitry

- 3D printing

- PCB design

- Woodworking

Its all a lot of fun and IMO a lot more approachable than it has been thanks to the assist from LLMs.

Same, I recently got into Arduino so i could build a toy idea I had for my kid (a sort of "keepy-uppy" paddle game). I've always avoided Arduino projects because I don't like to code in my spare time (its my day job) and also learning how to wire things seemed daunting -- LLMs solved both of those problems for me (Claude's wiring tutorials are awesome and the code is simple enough that it can one-shot it).

I also bought a Bambu A1 3D Printer and it is unexpectedly way more fun and useful than I thought it would be. I designed the toy in TinkerCAD and it printed out beautifully (I also have been printing out lots of other toys and yes, useful things for around the house and for other projects).

Next steps are learning Fusion 360 and figuring out PCBs -- That also seemed daunting to me but its nice to see other amateur hobbyists are seemingly picking it up with not much difficulty.

There’s a good recent book series about this by Daniel Suarez called Delta V (in the first book they process regolith from an asteroid; in the second book its on the moon; presumably the unreleased third book is on Mars).

We use a Figma plugin called Tokens Studio, which stores its source of truth a (a big JSON file) in our github repo. Designers manage all of the token values there and push updates to a branch and create their own pull requests which developers then do a minimal review on. Long story short, the tokens are converted to CSS variables, which we consume in our styles (we use Vanilla Extract which makes this very nice). The tokens in Token Studio can also be used in the Figma designs, but its a little clunky.

Figma recently launched their own native solution (called Figma Variables) which is more slick and better integrates into the design tooling, but it is mostly locked behind an enterprise-level plan (which lots of folks aren't happy about)

For us the killer feature is being able to build the UI once with design tokens and then transform it radically into different themes. In our case the themes serve different brands (of the media company I work for) but more commonly this is a great way to build out light and dark modes.

Our tokens are integrated into the designer’s tooling and we have a build pipeline that allows them to update the frontend with minimal developer supervision, which has been a huge time saver and QoL improvement for both developers and designers.

It definitely does but not completely. You are probably going to be totally smitten with your kid and spending time with them, even if its something "boring" is going to be really enjoyable. Unfortunately, your kid can sometimes be a brat (or at least mine is sometimes, but I'd guess a lot are!) and then these activities that are good for them can feel like a chore.

I definitely like having my own space and at least with one kid, I'm still getting plenty of it. But the time I spend with her is incredibly rewarding (most of the time ;)

I think the one time I responded to a recruiter and went through the process was because they told me the company up front. Unless its an internal recruiter, I never get that info. I was interested in the company and I figured they could help speed me through the process (which I believe was true). I didn't take the job but I appreciated this person not BSing me.

I think its because the user is newly created (i.e., green username).

I haven't seen beer that low, but here in Ontario a number of breweries started offering beer around the 3% mark. I really can't handle anything much above 5, and these are good breweries offering a nice alternative from their usual boozy, hoppy IPAs.

Of course, a lot of American beers are around that percentage point, but the ones I'm talking about are a bit higher quality in my opinion :)

Me too man -- It is isolating. My superiors are generally helpful but my reports (who were previously my peers that I got along with personally) expect a lot from me now and it's hard to figure out exactly what/how I should deliver.

My daughter had the same score and experience two months ago. Scariest moment of my life -- But all is well now thanks to some amazing, fast moving doctors.

Yes this is more interesting to me than AMP being demoted (I usually automatically ignore AMP anyway as they have that 'seems like an ad' feel that my subconscious automatically bypasses). The interstitials/popups to e.g. sign up for a mailing list that appear on so many sites these days are so much more annoying as I have to hunt for the close button every time.

Not really; If you have an in-demand skill set you get extra 'points' on the PR scoring chart, but you need to demonstrate many other things to reach the threshold required to get status. I went through that process and was denied because my work experience was through contracting (which for whatever reason didn't count). This was 10 years ago though, so things may have changed (also after three applications I finally got PR and then citizenship as of last year).

Could you elaborate on that last point or share a source? I don't doubt you but I don't understand the legal basis behind that move (but sounds interesting)!

Whoa -- Speech to bash commands? That's a pretty novel idea to me with my limited awareness of NLP. I could see this same idea in a lot of technical applications -- Provisioning cloud infrastructure, creating a database query.. Very cool!

Do you mean the weather in the northeast, or Philly in particular?

Huh, I'd be curious to see that source. I know he somewhat recanted the idea of a Dyson sphere, as it is completely impractical even with unimagined technology (re: tensile strength of the materials, and preventing such a megastructure from falling into the sun whenever a rock hits it). But he later proposed the idea of a Dyson swarm, an extremely large array of solar-sucking satellites orbiting the sun as an idea that's theoretically possible even with today's technology.

Me too -- This is a real quality of life improvement for developers that work with picky designers :)

Are oyster farms good business? I would think at the price you pay for them it would be a pretty sustainable venture. I just watched the episode of The Chef Show where they visit the California oyster farm and talk about how oysters filter up to 50 gallons of water a day. It didn't seem like there was a ton of labor cost, and obviously incredibly beneficial for the environment. It would be great to see them subsidized by the government but I'm curious why they don't exist in greater numbers already. I for one love oysters and would very much like to see more west coast varieties here in Toronto :)

I use the term DRM loosely (possibly incorrectly!). What I mean is that most font foundries make you include a CSS or JS file that only loads the requested fonts for a domain or domains you specify in their backend.

I've been doing this for years -- Its a PIA dealing with each font foundry's DRM system and getting it to work on my local dev environment. When I go live, I deal with it but its also such a hassle to get clients to pay for a font, give me the required info to use the foundry's DRM, etc. I bet if a foundry used an honor system (give fonts away for free, charge a per-site license for commercial use) they'd still make a profit and not have to deal with complex DRM systems (and make it more likely for designers and developers to use their fonts).

OS level doesn't have enough metadata. I remember tirelessly starring and categorizing my music to make smart playlists -- AFAIK you can't do that in the OS without some weird file naming schemes and a lot of extra work.

Odd side effect -- I've received three duplicate 'Github Explore' emails about every hour this morning.

And the screenshots (which are 3000px+) can't be zoomed in on or clicked? And you can't scroll the text unless you're directly on it? Weird implementation decisions for this site.. The WM looks awesome though :)

SEEKING FREELANCER | Toronto (no remote)

Looking for an intermediate-level for a three-month contract. Must be based in Toronto, Canada. See https://gist.github.com/typewriter-software/bb6e7ced5ae54bce... for more info.

I thought it was funny that Bezos, who isn't a super frequent tweeter, responded to Bernie Sanders' congratulations to him on the same day that this was announced.

[1] https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1047152109508997121

Its a fun book, and a good intro to Stephenson (it was my first book I read of his, and now I've read four others). But if you've read his other stuff first or are a more hardcore sci-fi nerd, its easy to think that its a little closer to a blockbuster thriller than science fiction.

I've been following Dynamicland since its inception, and the work is really cool. But it seems like all of the interface work is rather two-dimensional (i.e. using paper). Isn't the underlying theory that this is all based on that humans are better suited at working with three-dimensional objects (like doorknobs and cutlery and what not)?

I think it would be really cool if the Dynamicland UI technology (projection and object recognition) could work with e.g. 3d printed objects, especially if they could be embedded with motion tracking sensors in the case that your hand occludes the computer vision trackers. Is anyone working on that sort of thing?

My favorite is when my hands naturally come to rest near the top of the keyboard at least once a day they land on the brightness control in the touchbar and dim my screen to black.

I think its a well thought out design language, but anyone who thinks its anything but Google branding is deceiving themselves. I couldn't imagine using it for anything other than a proof of concept or internal tool.