perchard

I wouldn’t expect nuanced takes on typography from HN. As a long time user the comments are entirely expected - and actually skew more positive than I would have guessed. Respectfully.

perhaps Y is harder to solve than you are assuming

check out SnoreLab (https://www.snorelab.com/), i've used it and can recommend it

Elegantly alludes to the way in which LLMs are constrained to our existing body of knowledge.

“Ian pointed out that whereas our culture openly invites us to be aware of birds and historic churches, it places no comparable emphasis on pylons, despite the fact that that they often rival, for ingenuity and beauty, many of the more established objects of our curiosity. He cited as an example Loch Awe in Scotland, a famously picturesque and romantic tourist destination dominated by the ruins of the fourteenth-century Kilchurn Castle, whose grounds are nevertheless crossed by a run of 400-kilowatt pylons linking the hydroelectric power station at Ben Cruachan with the Glasgow suburbs. On postcards of the loch and its castle, however, the electricity lines are almost invariably airbrushed out, so that the scenery pretends to a fictitious innocence, the bare hills and unsullied lake being symptomatic of what Ian (having grown increasingly garrulous under the influence of brandy) condemned as the garden-gnome mentality of sentimental Luddites.”

— The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work: t/c (Vintage International) by Alain De Botton https://a.co/1CjMq1u

there is a theory along these lines. something like: the defense against the unconscious is so strong in autism that the person becomes rigid and shut off. the defense against the unconscious is so weak in schizophrenia that the person is overwhelmed with phenomena. but both have something to do with intense unconscious objects.

    Whenever you’re called on to make up your mind,
        and you’re hampered by not having any,
    best way to solve the dilemma, you’ll find,
      is simply by spinning a penny.
    No—not so that chance shall decide the affair
      while you’re passively standing there moping;
    but the moment the penny is up in the air,
      you suddenly know what you’re hoping.

Although this doesn't turn off animations completely, you might be interested in the 'reduce motion' preference: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202655

Just my interpretation (of the Pascal quote), beginning with the full quote.

When I have occasionally set myself to consider the different distractions of men, the pains and perils to which they expose themselves at court or in war, whence arise so many quarrels, passions, bold and often bad ventures, etc., I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege a town. A commission in the army would not be bought so dearly, but that it is found insufferable not to budge from the town; and men only seek conversation and entering games, because they cannot remain with pleasure at home.[139][#201908302349]

This quote is often summarized roughly as: "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." (i.e. the title of this post). Taken out of context, this would seem to suggest (to me) a belief that if we could simply meditate and avoid external distractions (a commission in the army, conversation, games, Pascal suggests), we might find happiness.

However, a reading of the full passage reveals that "on further consideration" he thinks the reason for this is that if we were to sit with our thoughts, the "natural poverty of our feeble and mortal condition" would drive us to despair.

He thinks that someone who truly understands the human condition would do everything they could to avoid sitting alone with their thoughts ("there is nothing they leave undone in seeking turmoil") . We seek diversion because if we didn't have any distraction, we would end up dwelling on the miserable human condition (selfish, pre-occupied with self-gratification, sensitive to the opinion of others, judgmental, etc. - basically, 'sinful').

In the end, he suggests that we should look for happiness externally, in God, which he then talks about a lot.

[#201908302349]: Blaise Pascal (1958): _Pascal's Pensées_, New York: E.P. Dutton.

A Synology NAS + https://www.synology.com/en-us/dsm/feature/active_backup_g_s... is an easy way to back up mail and drive.

i found the following useful when i was getting started:

https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook...

https://zettelkasten.de/posts/overview/

https://luhmann.surge.sh/communicating-with-slip-boxes

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

this is awesome! i see the 'zettelkasten link fixer' in the markdown format importer ("Fixes [[UID]] links to full [[UID File Name]].") - any plans/thoughts on just supporting [[UID]]? this seems less brittle to me in that you won't break all of your backlinks if you change the (non-ID) part of the filename.

Roam is awesome but this and other reference management software serves a different purpose (for me, at least). I use BibDesk (like Zotero and other examples mentioned here) in conjunction with a plaintext (markdown) Zettelkasten[0]. BibDesk to save references (papers etc.) and copy formatted citations; which are then pasted into Zettels (c.f. a page in Roam).

[0] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

Thanks for your productive contribution to the discussion

for:

https://www.amazon.com/SuperBetter-Living-Gamefully-Jane-McG...

https://tim.blog/2015/07/28/jane-mcgonigal/

against:

https://mental.jmir.org/2019/6/e13717/

Not made for storing 'all the facts [of our] lives' - but an interesting example of a robust physical system for knowledge organization is Niklas Luhman's Zettelkasten Method[1].

It translates well to a digital medium. The general idea is a collection of granular information (notes) interconnected in a non-hierarchical way using tags.

[1] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/NfdHG6oHBJ8Qxc26s/the-zettel...

Figma's recently released Autolayout is somewhat analogous: https://www.figma.com/blog/announcing-auto-layout/

You can deeply nest Autolayout frames.

Also check out Sky Guide[0].

It's an iOS app that (among many other awesome things) tracks 250+ satellites - and can send a notification before they pass over your location[1].

[0] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sky-guide/id576588894

[1] https://www.fifthstarlabs.com/support#satellites

Context: https://design.lyft.com/re-approaching-color-9e604ba22c88

It has this. For example, the default 0 value:

19.32b (on black)

1.09w (on white)

I enjoyed TFS but tend to agree with this review:

Thinking Fast and Slow is my runner-up for “book most overrated by investors” (with Klarman’s Margin of Safety the champion.) People who pitch this book as “required reading” simply haven’t read broadly enough about cognitive biases: while the content is certainly useful and I don’t take anything away from Kahneman as a researcher, his writing/communication/worldview leave much to be desired, and the same lessons can be learned far more effectively and enjoyably via a variety of other books (many of which are suggested below).

http://www.askeladdencapital.com/daniel-kahnemans-thinking-f...

Awesome. It looks like the scale model discussed in the video is free to visit at the Bay Model Visitor Center in Sausilito.

"The dirty secret:

We’re all just building CRUD apps."

https://twitter.com/iamdevloper/status/455409190505562112

Type designers are not faceless corporations. They are mostly individual designers who invest incredible amounts of time and energy into what they make.

usa PHP, this is false.

Like to get a font to use in your app, you need to pay $5,000+ for any decent looking font.

There are many high quality open source fonts available. For example:

https://github.com/IBM/plex

http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/

Many foundries such as Grilli Type have free trials (https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials) and reasonable pricing for very high quality typefaces (https://www.grillitype.com/shops/gt-america <$1k for desktop + web)

This is enabling the piracy of typefaces. It takes significant skill and time to create a typeface, and creators should be paid for their work.

Instead of pirating typefaces, please see:

https://fontstand.com/

https://fonts.adobe.com/

https://typographica.org/on-typography/my-favorite-font-sour...

Many foundries also offer trial versions of their typefaces. For example:

https://www.grillitype.com/free_trials

If you don't want to pay for a typeface, there are many very good open source options available. For example:

https://github.com/IBM/plex

http://www.latofonts.com/lato-free-fonts/

"Anyone can contribute to make a Standard Ebook better for everyone!"

https://standardebooks.org/contribute/

Improve it then.

Income/wealth inequality always happens and probably always will - it's trivially easy to show how this happens using game theory even if trade is relatively fair.

Do you have a reference for this? Interested to read more (game theoretic basis specifically).

a spectacular failure

Perhaps Columbus and Broadway: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lilvia/5140456220/