Wouldn’t that… just make me stop visiting YouTube instead of making me stop using Firefox?

I mean, my first reaction when a website is slow is not exactly “maybe I should change browsers”. It’s closer to “maybe I’ll visit a different website”.

You know, that’s an interesting question. It looks like the answer is probably 1, but it might be 2.

It’s not entirely clear to me, but it looks like Ulysses S. Grant may have been arrested in 1872, while he was still in office. For speeding. On horseback. The practice of taking mugshots on arrest began in the 1850s, but the officer apparently did not take the president into the station, so while I bet no mugshot was taken, I haven’t been able to completely rule it out either.

Then after traveling for some time, Grant did attempt to run for office again, but failed to obtain the number of required number of votes for nomination, and a compromise candidate was chosen (Garfield, who got assassinated), but he did technically run.

Apologies if I’ve used the wrong terms or gotten some bits wrong. My knowledge of the US political system is vague at best, I’m nowhere near you guys, I’m just having a terribly slow day and work and wondered if this particular situation actually had happened before. Then I found an unexpected rabbit hole of weird historical half-truths.

Yeah I was pretty impressed by how awful the air was in Beijing some years ago. Glad to hear it’s getting better.

Suddenly, living in a sprawling Asian metropolis doesn’t seem so bad. Today’s AQI was mid 50s, which is pretty good for my city.

Right now it’s rainy season so it’s not that smoggy. Gets worse toward the end of dry season though.

The first time I flew over a vast expanse of red dust that was once part of the Amazon, I wept.

Perhaps ironically, I live in a nominally Communist country that went through decolonization quite a number of times. It doesn’t change much in my daily life (I’m not really political), although I arguably own some tiny slice of the means of production these days. So maybe in retirement I’ll provide public access to those for working class people. That would be really fun, I think. Who knows what we might create together? Certainly if the machines are sitting unused in my retirement, they are creating nothing, and I would feel sad for the machines.

I don’t do the whole 9-5 thing. That would stress me out! I work as long as I feel like, any day of the week I feel like. Generally, this is really nice for both managing stress (there’s always tomorrow!) and steamrolling over any competition.

I’m just a mercenary (and a bureaucrat) though. You pay my fee in filthy lucre, and the job gets done – legally, and reliably. If someone annoys me with politics at a client, I just try and replace them with a computer program. The result is that several of my best coworkers are machines these days. I foresee that trend increasing with time.

Yeah… I couldn’t cope with that unfortunately (I’m a bit jealous, it sounds nice). I need to work long hours and make things, it’s a compulsion. “Taking it easy” can stress me out to the point where I end up in a hospital.

So I sold all my worldly possessions and immigrated to the developing world on an investment visa (where things are made). My timing was a few years early, but I had no path to a decent life left except having my own company in a growth economy – my entire industry vanished twice overnight in my home country due to changes in legislation.

Nowadays, looking at the local economy, there is no path to home ownership except for people who own companies, and maybe senior executives or senior software engineers. An average university-educated couple would have to save 100% of their income for their entire adult life to afford a nice home – if they don’t have kids. I think this kind of cruel equation is slowly coming to the West too – although you guys have more land so I guess it takes longer.

One of the sad aspects of my job (in IT) is building tools to eliminate less stressful jobs, especially ones that pay well (usually management or accounting, in my case). Design has definitely been a specific target in recent years though – off the top of my head I could at least imagine two approaches to writing a tool that automates color and font selection with results comparable to human expertise.

This is one reason it’s a good idea to regularly study new things (IT or otherwise). I have to retool every few years as whatever I know becomes obsolete – this used to mainly be a frustration in IT, but is rapidly becoming a necessary process in other fields. It won’t be necessary to become an IT expert, but I would keep up-to-date on how to use the new tools technology provides… especially if I wanted to keep a job in say, graphics design or copywriting!

(Incidentally, my first job in this country was in marketing! It was high-stress and I did not earn 130k. I recall font and color choice processes vividly :D)

For some of us at least, the solution was just… to move on to another country. If there had been problems with guns and socioeconomic divide in Canada, I would have exited even earlier! (I actually left for the fairly boring reason of career progression)

Although spoiler alert: immigration is difficult, miserable, and a pretty massive commitment overall.

Looking at the one in the top left… imagine if that was for an amplifier. Like, you have to pass through maximum to reach off. That would be the worst to live near.

Haha, you got me there. So I guess you could more correctly say ‘a font with serif for titles only’.

Plain old static HTML is fine, and you can host it on a potato! Here are some design tips to keep it easy to read. None of them are objectively correct, and you are already doing some of them. They are just some suggestions as you move forward:

1. Don’t use dark-on-dark fonts. Use near-black on off-white or at least something high contrast.
2. Break up content using horizontal rules <hr> and various headers <h1 to h6> You can style both of them in css. This keeps things easy to find and read.
3. Generally, do not center-align text if it is more than one line. If you need to display blocks of text side-by-side, put each in a container then left-align the text within those containers.
4. Use a bigger font than you think is strictly necessary.
5. My preference is to use sans-serif fonts. Google makes some good free ones. Sometimes I’ll go back and make titles serif only.
6. Resize and compress your images. A bit higher resolution than you need but with lower quality is usually better than the reverse (for jpegs)

This struck me as super weird too. It still ‘feels’ wrong to use a whole CPU instead of a few logic gates or a 555.

It took some getting used to. Maybe soon I’ll dive into the world of one-time-writeable Chinese MCUs (the ones I normally use have rewriteable flash). Those are 9 cents a piece!

If they get any cheaper I’ll start using them as ballast!

Yeah know what you mean. However these days I can generally get a microcontroller for a lower price than a cds photo resistor, and with a 100 year expected lifetime – also usually it consumes less power too.

I could do it with a phototransistor more easily than a photo resistor. That would be a solid competitor to using an MCU in terms of cost, performance, and power consumption in a simple system!

Anyway in practice I rarely get to use analog or discrete components professionally. The MCUs are just too damn good.

Sure – and that’s an easy way to do it. However if I’m going to make it automatic, I like the elegance of using an LED as it’s own sensor for how bright it should be. It also uses up fewer microcontroller pins – for example, I can use pulse width modulation to give the LED a default brightness. Then during the OFF part of the cycle, reconfigure the pin to act as an ADC and make a measurement of the ambient light and adjust the duty cycle as needed.

It’s the kind of optimization I enjoy! Another neat trick is using the watchdog timer and counting CPU cycles to allow really low duty cycles for lights you want to keep very dim, without using a resistor to limit current (you are instead using the IV curve on the datasheet and a little math). I use this plus magnets and coin cells to make little lights I can stick to things to avoid hitting my head on them, usually doorframes (I’m very tall and live in Southeast Asia). They run for 3+ years off the cell, and have configurable brightness!

There’s a whole amazing secret world where our devices come from! I’m glad just to have a little window in on it.

I design electronics sometimes. Generally, people want an indicator light on their product, since it’s a cheap way to show the state of a system.

The main problem is, the human eye adapts to darkness. You can still clearly see an LED in a dark room when a few microamperes pass through them, but then they are useless in brighter light in that case. There’s no specific amount of current that produces light that’s bright enough in a lit room, but isn’t too bright in a dark room.

I can fix that by occasionally turning off the LED and measuring voltage across it (LEDs detect light in addition to emitting it), then dimming it if I’m in a dark room. However, this is quite complicated to do and requires a capable microcontroller and a pretty ninja embedded systems programmer. Most product developers I know won’t think of specifically doing this.

Finally, I can save 0.1 cents (plus board space plus assembly complexity, which cost more) by connecting an LED directly to the pins of a microcontroller instead of using a resistor to limit current. Some microcontrollers specifically allow this, up to 10 or 20 milliamperes, which is enough to be too bright in some contexts already. Margins on hardware manufacture are extremely thin, so optimizing even 1 cent off a board is pretty important.

All of this together leads to a lot of LED proliferation, which I’ don’t like either. The stuff I build for myself often has a way to control the LED brightness, although this would be too expensive to add to a consumer product as a general rule. For small devices, there’s a tilt switch inside that turns off the indicator LEDs if you turn it upside down and hold it for a few seconds. That way you can just reach over at night and fix it without fiddling for switches or controls.

It probably is at that retailer – although that’s not that good of a price for a good pan locally.

The Vietnamese market is super demanding when it comes to these things, it really drives price down and quality up. I bought a large, quite good, enameled cast iron pot recently for less than this pan costs :D

Yeah just jpeg. Always comes out perfectly legible.

Oh, it’s common in my country to use a smartphone to ‘scan’ documents by actually just taking a lousy photo of them. It’s so prevalent that when you tell someone to do a scan they usually do this instead.

I bought a cheap canon scanner for 50$ and it’s pretty perfect for legal documents. A little slow maybe. I use SANE, then do lossy compression too.

In rare situations I’d then post process the PDF to even worse quality using ghostscript, for example when a foreign visa application form requires a scan of a really long document, but doesn’t accept sizes over 2MB.