pixelgeek

Ouch. Why did I leave my petard there?

I think there is some overlap and so you are probably correct to chasten me.

The audience that I am discussing in that piece is a direct audience though. Clicking through to a blog post and reading it is a very different sort of interaction than clicking a "repost" button or clicking a "like" icon.

That post was also one of an early set of posts about the issues of trying to find content online in a sea of SEO generated bullshit. Something that I have written about quite a few times since.

My thinking on the topic has changed a bit since that post and I think that I have a) resigned myself to not being able to wind the clock back to the 00s before Google and SEO killed content discovery and b) to just posting content that I find interesting and not worrying about who reads it and what they think.

I, showing my age, joined Compuserve for the sole purpose of getting to download all of the Kai's Power Tools documents. Our local group of pixelweasels had a few of them but not all of them.

When the KPT plugins were released they were quite divisive. Most people just looked at the UI and thought that they were toys. Once you understood the way the plugins flowed you realised that they were "toys" but in a very critical sense. They allowed you to create visuals that were done through an iterative visual process. The Ui was a visual inspiration to let your mind out of the confines of a computer screen and just enjoy and play until you made something wonderful.

His plugins also helped make a market for other companies like Alien Skin Software [1] (now called Exposure) and their Eye Candy series of plugins.

I wish there were tools today that had the same sort of power and create the same visceral joy of creation while you used them.

[1] https://exposure.software/eyecandy/

Joel is not wrong. Sometimes using a tool that Kai had input into was troubling at first. The KPT and MetaCreations tools were always about creating an intuitive way to create and iterate and the UIs attempted to do that. The dialogs etc did look weird but then most UIs back then looked like hell to be honest. Or at least boring.

Back then we would talk about UI when we meant UX. The KPT plugins had a very odd visual design but the way that you could iterate patterns and processes on an image was unheard of.

People also look at the designs that the filters made and didn't think about how they could be used as selection channels and other ways of manipulating an image. Kai's original work was about using selection channels in Photoshop to create stunning effects and while you could use his tools to create a background or a texture they could also be used to manipulate the colour and tone in images in really incredible ways.

I would hope that in some point in the future people would stop caring about how much/far their posts were shared. The "social graph" is a polluted concept that ad-fetishists at Facebook came up with to try to track and monetise all our contacts online. That we still get some sick thrill out of using it as an internal metric to gauge our self-worth is something that should be stamped out with all haste.

Very nice work.

I wouldn't worry about the quality of the code. You get better by seeing other people's work and seeing alternative solutions to the problems you had.

Also, as I mentioned in another comment, this could easily be built into a quick trouble-checking app for POD work. Posting it would also let people fork it to make more task-specific apps.

So I don't know what your intended audience was but there are elements of this that would be handy for people trying to trouble check PDFs for Print on Demand projects. I'm going to repost the link to a few groups I am in that do this sort of work. Definitely not for everyone but it might be handy for some.

The devs haven't updated the app in quite some time and appear to be working on an AI based writing tool now. I'd look elsewhere for a Markdown editor.

The SarahR review from the bottom of the page was written by someone who seems to get around a lot

https://tineye.com/search/e642d054c7b7f94841fdbdf9e4196f4275...

Helpful links. I will be doing the same this evening

I often am confused by people using it. Especially for groups that have long conversations, need good search or an ability to look through content based on threads.

Doesn't Amazon own Goodreads? I think its decline is an example of enshittification.

The recommendations from Goodreads are quite bad. This is for two reasons, I think. The categories that are used can sometimes be quite broad and so the programmatic recommendation pages can be quite useless. Far too many books in a broad category that don't give recommendations that are really related to a specific book that you read.

Secondly, people are not really the best at reviewing content. Taste is particular, of course, but many people can't differentiate between 'I didn't like this' and 'this is poorly written'. I am currently reading 'The Cold, Cold Ground' [^1] by Adrian McKinty and I doubt I will finish it because it is utterly bleak. It is a very well done book but it isn't for me. I would say that in a review but many people don't. So you get enthusiastic reviews for books that are utter shit as well as similar reviews for good books and it is difficult to tell them apart.

[^1]: I can't read the title without thinking of the quote from the Tasmanian Devil. "What for you bury me in the cold, cold, ground". https://youtu.be/CzDtYJLfA9Q

My question as well. Discord is a chat system. It can't handle even small communities.

Well that is one way to harvest LinkedIn data. An AI twist on those Facebook quizzes.

Moving to Discord? Talk about cutting off your own nose to spite your face.

First DnD and now Fortnight

It isn't a new trend. It has just started to affect almost every app they make.

Shortcuts isn't even beta quality on the Mac. Podcasts, as mentioned, is awful. Music is a PITA to use unless all you want to do is stream random songs. I can't think of a single Apple app that I enjoy using.

Don't get me started on Books.

Apple seems to focus on one use-case for their apps. Anything other than that suffers.

The Podcast app is particularly horrible. If it was the only podcast app available I would stop listening to them

In lieu of Red Hat and Meta saying why they cancelled, it would be pure speculation.

I just assume that they are all fake. Along with most of the products.

I didn't phrase that well. How much of the Python community is writing code that would be positively affected by the removal of the GIL?

The entire debate seems to be for code that strikes me as being far and away from the typical Python programmer.

I am curious how much of the python community the GIL affects? And is Facebook's interest related to AI performance?

Don't explain to me that I'm holding it wrong.

Where are they doing that?

I suspect that this isn't a big issue for them considering how small the userbase is that will be going through the steps you did to sign using your own keys.

Almost all of these articles always have several caveats in place about features that aren't supported or libraries that are added to include missing features.

So its not really 'replacing' JQuery is it?

(no knock meant to @franciscop who didn't write the article or the title)

So I understand the desire to write your own libraries and use them. But isn't the author just replacing one third-party library with another? How is that really any better?

Aside from the size which really seems to be a bizarre thing to be commenting on. I've seen png files used for buttons that were larger than a compressed JQuery library

I had this same experience trying to find some good science magazines for my 14yr old. They are quite interested in genetics and I looked and looked and none of the available magazines were any good.

I think that looking at the advertisements in the magazines tells you what part of the problem is. They are aimed at a fairly old demographic and probably the one remaining that still buys magazines.

The other significant issue is ads. No-one wants to spend ad money on ads that do not provide the type stats that Facebook and Google do. Before the internet the relationship between an ad campaign and increased sales wasn't causal. Maybe the ads worked. Maybe they didn't.

Now advertisers have far more information about the success of their campaigns and much, much more control over how ads are targeted.

So why would anyone do print or newspaper ads?

So magazines and newspapers are left with a diminishing pool of advertisers who target a declining demographic.

Probably just speaks to who their target audience is

What is magic is that this link appears to have pushed a ten year old article to #3 on their 'Most Popular' list.

I wonder if you could glean information about the traffic patterns of a site by how much a link from a single social media site influences a list like that?

Maybe the squirrel sent in a DMCA takedown?