rsch

Yes.

- Parked cars on the street. - Drive somewhat fast. - Avoid killing people.

Pick two.

A human driver travelling at the same speed would have hit that child at exactly 17 mph, before their brain even registered that child was there. If that driver would also have been driving a large SUV that child would have been pushed on the ground and ran over, so probably a fatality. And also functionally nobody would have given a shit apart from some lame finger pointing at (probably) the kid’s parents.

And it is not the child’s or their parents’ fault either:

Once you accept elementary school aged children exist, you have to accept they will sometimes run out like this. Children just don’t have the same impulse control as adults. And honestly even for adults stepping out a bit from behind an obstacle in the path of a car is an easy mistake to make. Don’t forget that for children an SUV is well above head height so it isn’t even possible for them to totally avoid stepping out a bit before looking. (And I don’t think stepping out vs. running out changes the outcome a lot)

This is why low speed limits around schools exist.

So I would say the Waymo did pretty well here, it travelled at a speed where it was still able to avoid not only a fatality but also major injury.

I can’t be the only one who has ever read https://practicaltypography.com/hyphens-and-dashes.html

At least it is not as bad as on Windows 11. There the resize area is inside or outside the visible frame depending on which side and which corner of the window.

Oh for the time when chairs were still for sitting and PDFs were still for printing.

Restaurant websites mentioned — the majority of restaurant web sites I’ve encountered were much more annoying and difficult to read than a PDF, even on a small phone screen. Or should I say, especially on a small phone screen. Some would make a 32 inch monitor feel cramped.

That planned obsolescence thing on light bulbs isn't the entire story. Light bulbs will last longer if driven less hard, due to the lower temperature. But that lower temperature also means much lower efficiency because the blackbody spectrum shifts even further into the infrared. So some compromise had to be picked between having a reasonable amount of light and a reasonable life span.

But yeah agree, this subscription thing is spreading like a cancer.

Auckland has an almost finished through running project in its city centre, which will greatly improve its railway network. It currently has only one terminus in the city, but trains from one side (the west) have to do an awkward dog leg around the city centre, including a reversal.

Brussels got its through running project in 1952, a 6 track tunnel under its city centre between North and South (aka Midi) stations. That was back when disruption and demolishing things were just things that happened, and it is one of the reasons why ‘brusselization’ is a word. By now operates near its max capacity of 96 trains per hour.

PHP was blamed for a good reason: for a long time it did not by default support prepared SQL statements. You could install the mysqli extension to gain such support but that was almost never available on shared web hosts.

Today in “typesetting before we had typewriters”: …

At least we have dedicated O/0, and l/1 keys now. But we still see a lot of "straight" quotes instead of “those smart quotes Microsoft Word likes to generate”. And dashes. Did you know there is a dedicated ellipsis character? This is often set with slightly more space between dots than ..., and it by definition never wraps across a line between those dots. You still see (C) instead of ©.

It is one of those things that doesn’t really matter for readability, but although they can’t necessarily put a finger on why, people may still notice that some documents or pages appear to be set with more care for details than others.

(edit: I guess if you don’t have to search on Google what the hell a ‘Microsoft Word’ is, then you’re officially old)

Yeah one wart about Windows is that you always have to lookup these weird registry hacks after getting a fresh install. Disabling this automatic reboot was one of them. Otherwise that would make your computer completely useless for things like

- gaming - watching movies - presentations - anything where you want to let some calculation run unattended for a few hours - anything where you really don't want your PC to shut down unexpectedly while you’re working…

Well that covers pretty much everything I guess.

And to add insult to injury, Windows 10 for a while took away the ability to Update & shut down. It’d go into some sort of hybrid sleep so you’d keep getting a reboot prompt right after starting up again.

That looks rad.

One bit of feedback: don't move the camera if someone clicks one of the circles, that is super disorienting. There is also a bug that if a drag to move the camera happens to end on a circle, the popup opens.

One of those project is the OG — GIMP.

It is quite confusing because there are strong points in favour of either POV.

Point: you can ride a bicycle without hands. That would be completely impossible without gyroscopic effect. Or you can push a bicycle forward without a rider.

Counter-point: kickscooters exist, with tiny little 6″ tyres which have almost no gyroscopic effect, and yet you can balance those in the same way as a bicycle.

Oh yes it may very well over half your kid’s weight. These things are ABSURDLY heavy.

This makes starting hard (an already hard problem when learning), it makes falling off worse because there is so much weight pulling down, and then they get pinned under all that weight so it can be hard to get up again. It makes walking the bike uphill physically impossible so if it is hilly you can't actually go out for a ride.

There will be at least some people out there whose road bike weights less than their toddler’s bike.

That is a common fallacy, I suspect it comes from having enough budget to not having to think about being able to afford something decent.

It is like photographers with $5,000 worth of equipment in their camera bags telling you that equipment doesn’t matter. I mean, there is a reason why they spend all that money right? Of course a good photographer will be able to get good results with a cheap camera, but only in situations where that cheap camera can actually capture the scene. For example, if it is not sensitive enough to capture enough light at night time, you are not getting night time shots, period, no matter how good you are. (this very much used to be a thing 10 years ago)

If you employ programmers, you will buy fast workstations because it will make them MUCH more productive. A slow computer will interrupt your work by making you wait.

I think it is in fact the exact opposite, the better you are at something, the more likely it is that you become limited by your equipment. I will probably not be able to cook better if I get very expensive knives. But I would speculate that an actual professional cook or butcher will be able to work better with sharp knives that keep their edges well.

It is a legitimate thing now, if you can type more than a word per minute you'll notice that many apps are not able to keep up. The most common offenders seem to be Electron apps. IDEs sometimes struggle as well.

For bonus points, some menu web sites also do that on their desktop web sites. I have seen many of them that show like 10 items on a 27″ 1440p desktop monitor.

Haha yes I remember that.

Pros and cons of using DIVs and CSS:

+ hipster cred

- DIV soup

- CSS back then was wildly, W I L D L Y unsuitable for what people where trying to do (I think it boils down to it being designed to format documents, not web apps or on-screen layouts)

Pros of using TABLE:

+ Actually works

There are good reasons why the next generation just looks up videos.

The idea of a web search engine is disappearing into the mist of time. Text search engines worked well 10 years ago, but they are now completely overwhelmed by content farms.

If you underexpose too severely, the JPEG compression will eat up all the detail in the shadows.

There are obvious downsides to many of these CSS hacks. Pay close attention to the usage notes.

An example not on the page are menus powered by the CSS :hover pseudo-class. It seems smart, until you realise the diagonal problem exists, and it is quite hard to select an item in your menu without accidentally opening one of the sibling menus.

Unfortunately, software development seems extremely poor at passing knowledge on to the next generation so you see these problems being “rediscovered” over and over again.

Steamboat Willie is from 1928, almost a hundred years ago. And it is still under copyright.

So you can make that “the lifetime of their grandparents” too.

Ah I remember the experience of just dropping files on a server from a long time ago.

I had one web host where magic_quotes_gpc was enabled. Good luck figuring out what the hell is going on with all these extra quotes in your variables.

And I kept looking up how to do prepared SQL statements in PHP, finding the mysqli functions, and then eventually figuring out that mysqli wasn’t available on your average web host with PHP back then.

(Yes it was that long ago. I also think a lot of the hate comes from that era)

I remember the documentation as well, with usually all the gotchas in the comments. Which is great, but there were a lot of gotchas. like, A LOT.

I started reading it, saw the first photo and went oh my gaaaaaaaaad wear gloves.

And not just for the goop inside the thing, people had this thing in their mouth.

The next paragraph confirms the author came to this conclusion too.

Yes there was this one day where you open Facebook and literally every other post is Sponsored. And this Reels thing with some random videos from whatever.

But yeah anyway, do you still know people who actually post on Facebook?

Windows 95 didn’t use the HLT instruction because it didn’t work reliably on many PCs back in the day. It would sometimes freeze instead of just halt.

There was a post on the oldnewthing blog about this but I can’t immediately find it.

A big issue is how “parenting” has changed in recent decades.

Even a couple of generations ago it was much more of a group effort. Now it is just the parents versus everyone else either not caring or kicking down on them (for example, some comments over here).

If only.

GIF is still the only format that supports animated frames, and is supported in most applications that support images. I sometimes create some animated WEBP to post somewhere, but the outcome is always the same, I have to go back and convert it to GIF or it won’t display.

I think this is a consequence for our generally nonsensical arrangements for raising children.

The 2 parents (or maybe 1 single parent) are supposed to do it mostly by themselves in what is called a nuclear family. That is a quite recent development. Earlier it was common to live in larger groups (like extended families) so the work of raising kids was spread out over more people.

The other thing is that is is no longer culturally acceptable to let kids roam by themselves. You always have to have them at arms length when they’re out. If you like to criticize parents for too much screen time, well, what are those kids supposed to do instead?