s3thi

s3thi, 12 days ago to random

magical realism is just fantasy, rebranded for people who think fantasy is for children

science fiction is just fantasy, but magic is explained away as "technology"

horror is just fantasy with extra spicy monsters, and the protagonist goes mad at the end

css, 1 month ago to SEO

#SEO / #a11y #accessibility question:

Suppose I have a home page and its content is nothing but different blocks (image + text) that link to internal pages. Does that count as a navigation and I have to use the <nav> element or It counts as the main content and a simple <ul> listing is enough?

s3thi, 1 month ago to random

sometimes i completely forget that October is a month that exists. it feels made up.

s3thi, 1 month ago to random

hi chat. is it weird to edit every single blog post you wrote since you were a teenager just to add Oxford commas to everything?

totally normal, right?

s3thi, 1 month ago to wordpress

there's a lot of useful information out there about migrating #wordpress blogs to static site generators, but is there any information about going the other way?

my blog runs on Hugo. it's ... fine? it's certainly cheaper and easier to manage compared to WordPress. but i miss the ability to quickly jot down a post using my browser or phone without having to open a terminal or deal with my nemesis git.

i might just migrate back to WP if there's a simple, reasonably automated way to do it.

s3thi, 1 month ago to random

is it really artificial intelligence or just sparkling labor exploitation?

s3thi, 3 months ago to random

i’ve realized i don’t really need a fancy note-taking app to get things done. i’d be perfectly happy using Apple Notes or whatever else came as default with my computer.

the only problem is Apple Notes doesn’t have a version history for notes, so there’s no way to go back to an old version of a note if you accidentally mess it up. that’s the one thing i definitely need from a notes app.

this is why i still pay for Obsidian Sync. it makes it super easy to look through old versions of notes, and even restore deleted data.

for some reason, very few notes apps have a version history. it seems like an important feature for a note-taking app, where you spend more time updating existing data than creating new data. i don’t think Bear, Notion, Roam, Evernote etc. have a history feature either.

s3thi, 3 months ago to apple

one reason i'm not super excited about the Vision Pro (yet!) is that it's a continuation of Apple's decade-long trajectory of building devices that exist almost entirely for consuming information.

if you want to make something on a computer, your best bet is still a Mac. (or a Mac + iPad Pro if you're a digital artist, but even then you need to rely on a Mac for a large part of your workflow.)

i love the Mac, but after all these years i'm ready for something different. the Vision Pro doesn't seem to be that thing, at least not from what i've seen so far.

maybe it'll become that thing 5 years from now. in 2024, though, you still need a Mac if you use your computer to do creative work.

#apple #visionpro #macos

abnv, 3 months ago to random

My life got 1.4x times better since I learned that I can have my orange juice alongside my coffee.

s3thi, 4 months ago to apple

really loving the fact that Spotify, YouTube, and Netflix have refused to launch their apps on the Apple Vision Pro. i hope other companies follow suit.

i own and use pretty much everything Apple makes, but they really need to be shown that their anticompetitive behavior is no longer acceptable in the industry.

developers and tech companies should refuse to build apps for the Vision Pro unless Apple allows them to use their own payment providers, circumvent the 30% App Store commission, sideload apps, and allow browser engines other than WebKit.

i’m tired of Apple having complete control over so many modalities of computing. i don’t want them to own VR/XR/spatial computing too.

#apple #visionpro

s3thi, 4 months ago to emacs

i just learned that pandoc not only converts Org files to Word files cleanly, it also maintains semantic style information in the output!

gosh, i really love this little tool. it lets me keep all my writing in Markdown/Org, and export to PDF, HTML, and Word depending on who i need to send it to without mangling the output in the process.

#emacs #pandoc #haskell

s3thi, 4 months ago to random

i sometimes have an urge to replace my MacBook with a Windows laptop, based entirely on my experience with my custom-built Windows PC.

then i remember how bad Windows laptops are in terms of performance, battery life, heat dissipation, reliable sleep/wake, trackpad quality, audio quality, and pretty much everything else that makes a laptop a laptop.

Windows works very well on this large, power-hungry PC that plugs right into the wall and rarely ever gets shut down. but that one time i owned a Windows laptop for a year, i was miserable every second i was using it.

if somebody made reasonable Windows laptops that could compete with MacBooks, i don't think i'd be a macOS user for long. or even a Linux laptop, for that matter.

s3thi, 4 months ago to random

there are so many double standards in the AI industry.

if ChatGPT hallucinates incorrect facts and figures, it’s just beta software that will improve with further training.

if i hallucinate incorrect facts and figures, i need to go back home and get more than 2 hours of sleep before i’m allowed to show up to the daily standup.

s3thi, 4 months ago to react

even though React has been my bread and butter for the last 5-6 years—and will continue to pay my bills for a long time—i wouldn't recommend starting a greenfield frontend project with in 2024.

the framework now has too many bugs, too much legacy, too many fundamental design flaws (e.g hooks), and is growing in a direction that nobody except Vercel cares about. the core team doesn't care about real-world scenarios, and is focused on building a product that's too clever for its own good.

i don't know what the alternative to React is, yet. but there's one thing i can say confidently: invest in HTML, vanilla JS, Web Components, and plain old CSS. they will outlast every frontend framework in existence.

#react #webdev #javascript

s3thi, 4 months ago to random

i’m so old the only drip i have is postnasal

baldur, 4 months ago to random

Began writing up my end of year review a few days ago and, of course, it’s ballooned into a multi-year strategic analysis and planning document where I apply the ideas of Professor Sarasvathy on the problem of being an indie programmer and writer.

I’m pretty good at narrowing down software project scope and sticking to it, but when it comes to writing? Scope creep all the way and in all the ways you can imagine 😅

s3thi, 5 months ago to javascript

NextJS is an ambitious attempt to turn React into a full-stack Web framework, sort of like Rails. but i've been using it on and off for several years now and it's just … okay? not great, just okay.

Django, Rails, and Laravel are so productive, mature, and well-designed that choosing NextJS makes zero sense in most contexts. unless you have a team of developers who only understand React and nothing else, NextJS feels like a liability.

yes yes, i know it lets you render your React app on the server. but if your app needs to be rendered on the server, you shouldn't be building it in React in the first place. it's the wrong tool for the job.

🧵 1/3

#javascript #react #webdev

s3thi, 5 months ago to windows

how do people type special characters (em dash, the Rupee symbol, ellipsis, the trademark/copyright symbols, and so on) on Windows? it's pretty simple on macOS using the Option key, but it seems like there's no equivalent to that key on Windows?

i'm currently using AutoHotKey expansions to deal with this, but it would be nice to have a built-in way of doing this that doesn't involve memorizing a bunch of Unicode codepoints.

#windows #macos

s3thi, 5 months ago to golang

so i was super sick last month and had too much free time, so i picked up Alex Edwards' excellent book Let's Go and learned me some #golang.

i was put off from learning Go for so many years because of That Blog Post From Three Years Ago -- you know the one -- but turns out a lot of complaints in that blog post are just not relevant to what people do with the language.

also, you can build an entire web application with Go using just the standard library and one or two third-party libraries for crypto and DB connectivity. that's very cool! you can't even do that with #nodejs.

and that web app will continue to work for like 10+ years, because Go never breaks backwards compatibility. also very cool!

skinnylatte, 5 months ago to random

My favorite cuisines in the world are the ones where there’s coconut and chillies in everything