The only reason I still use Ubuntu is that their font smoothing is superior to everyone else straight out of the box. I tried to recreate the steps on Fedora, but couldn't come close.
This gives me a flashback to university. We was tasked with writing some Java swing desktop app. I developed it on Windows. The lecturers would run it on Ubuntu to test and mark it. One of them tried to deduct a point for the text being clipped by a couple of pixels on Ubuntu even though that didn't happen on Windows.
How was I, as inexperienced as I was at the time, supposed to know that a "cross platform" GUI framework was going to render a tab or a label (can't remember which) slightly wrong on Ubuntu compared to Windows? A very frustrating experience.
Keep in mind that "good" UX/UI wasn't even a requirement (or even taught) and mine was honestly one of the better looking programs that were made. Some looked as you can imagine a bunch of students made.
Social media has caused a lot of people to shift their world views, and re-examine their identities. Not necessarily in ways that benefit themselves or society.
The insinuation/assumption that social media somehow had an obvious negative effect on people's beliefs world wide compared to the past. A statement in the form of a post on HN social media and an often propagated popular opinion on other social media. An opinion thay I completely disagree with, discussed/questioned on this same social media. Freely.
There's also a plugin for Wordpress (SimplyStatic, I believe) that creates a static copy of your site. I use it in conjuction with bitbucket and netlify, and it works quite well.
The living world is not currently in a state of equilibrium. The populations of humans and the animals and plants we keep are growing extremely quickly; almost every other population of living thing is shrinking quickly.
“Rich” refers to the variety and abundance of living things. The total biomass of living things has declined (there’s less overall) and what is left is concentrated into far fewer species than previously.
Just taken as a store of information, the loss is staggering. But from a practical perspective we are less rich; it’s far harder today to catch fish than it used to be, for example.
He means something that would be interesting for a biologist like him to hang out in and observe.
I know some biologists, and they often wish that the world should be "rich" from a biologist's perspective even if the biologist isn't there to observe it.
It's a curious perspective to me. If you don't exist, why would it matter whether the world is (a) green and buzzing with insects, or (b) reduced to grey goo or strange matter? Why would your aesthetic preferences be relevant in a world that you don't exist in? It's not like you're going to get to watch this universe through a viewport.
Aesthetic preferences exist in our minds independent of our direct experience. That’s why people can have aesthetic opinions of things the instant they experience them.
An aesthetic preference is essentially an ideal against which we compare our experience. Whether we expect to meet that ideal does not diminish its power. In fact if it was easily met, it would not be much of an ideal.
A modern day equivalent of this rich state of equilibrium can be observed in Chernobyl. The place was decimated by nuclear radiation a few decades ago. Initially it was believed that the place never support any large life forms for many centuries. However wild life is currently thriving in Chernobyl including large mammals and birds [0].
The notion of equilibrium is something I always disagree with when I read environmentalists. The ecosystem is never in equilibrium. If it were it would be dead. If it reached a meta-stable state evolutionary change would halt.
An icy comet circling way out beyond Neptune is an example of a system somewhat near equilibrium.
This is the kind of thing I find Archive.org and openlibrary invaluable for.
In this case a quick search didn't reveal it, but Google books has a scanned copy which you can use snippet view on so I wouldn't be surprised if there's a copy somewhere on archive.org
edit: hackernews regular gwern appears to have a digital copy of the book.
Considering that Walter appears to have not sold even the first printing of it (which is why copies of it are incredibly scarce - my guess is that most of it was pulped and only a few score copies ever sold, I still don't know how FH got one), I can assure you that you are not going to find anything better than my scan, and also that it's a lot better than nothing. (Someone needs to go through it & GEoD carefully, the influence is a lot greater than Dune critics previously realized.)
Oh yeah. I had to wait somewhere between 5 and 10 years before a copy finally surfaced online for <$120. I was terrified as I spent the $28 that the seller was going to realize what a huge pricing mistake they had made and would cancel my order (which happens occasionally), or that I'd get a different book (also happens occasionally...). Still, I scanned it myself just because getting another copy would be so hard.
The day they turn off old.reddit.com reddit is dead to me. I've been on reddit 10 years and it was hard to understand why they chose this new disastrous design.
What is it with modern UI and the tendency to be slow, to have a ridiculous amount of whitespace, and to have a copious number of round button-icons that are not intuitive? It's fucking insulting.
Several years ago, I went to a tech roundtable hosted by a well-known company, and this topic came up.
Half the devs in the discussion sincerely didn't believe the new sluggish UI trend found on various social media and news sites was slow at all, because their metrics (presumably which measure some sort of server compute time) said they were not slower. It's some sort of religious fervor.
"Who are you going to believe? Me(trics) or your own lying eyes!?"
That's their objective, to get rid of users who they can't monetize. Including veteran users with ad blockers who refuse to use the new site or any of its features.
It's not just the design, it's the fact that it's buggy and frequently unresponsive. If it was well done I might be able to forgive them, but my phone tells me I have messages I can't see on the desktop even after I refresh the page.
The post-view in compact mode is actually denser than before (thought it has some ugly spacing issues at the top). It’s amazing. Sadly, there seems to be no compact mode for comments, so those look horrible.
And well, considering how slow it is to use, I wouldn’t even use new Reddit then. New Reddit is really only for people who have a high tolerance to slow sites.
Reddit has had 5 second page loads for over a decade. Extremely embarrassing of them to be honest. I can understand them not fixing their search because that increases engagement, but you always want your site to be fast. I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors.
>I guess they don't because they know they have no competitors
There are lots of clones, but they typically become havens for the ones who get the boot from reddit (remember the chimpire?), who proceed to drive away the users who don't agree, or they are either trying to lure reddit's current demographic (i.e. not very technical) or are super niche and could easily be served by a traditional forum.
The worst part of reddit killing so many forums is that there used to be plenty of places to go to discuss fairly niche interests. Now that they're gone, many communities have no fallback if their userbase is mostly old reddit users aside from trying to migrate, and that will inevitably result in many just leaving the community entirely.
I may be alone, but I prefer the new design. On the old reddit I didn't like how I had to click into a post to view its contents. On the new design most of the post contents are right there on the list page.
I exclusively use new Reddit. The increased friction around every single interaction is great for limiting the amount of time I spend there: it raises the bar for deciding to actually view a discussion, and the incomprehensible nesting-collapse algorithm keeps me from going down rabbit holes in threads unless it's something that genuinely interests me.
It's similar to my YouTube usage. All the pre-roll ads ensure I only start videos I'm reasonably sure I'll want to watch, and mid-rolls are a perfect reminder to bail if I'm not fully invested in what I'm watching.
Sounds like how I like my afternoon coffee, bitter without any additives. It reminds me I need to leave work if I've finished the important stuff for the day. A much needed kick in the guts that makes you purse your lips as you drink it down that puts the rest of the day in perspective.
What I've noticed is a few of the newer things breaking on it (unsurprisingly). I think over time it'll get to a point where there's enough of these new things where they'll just pull the plug, which is really too bad. Also love it much more than the "new" experience.
You can just uncheck "Use new Reddit as my default experience" in settings and get the old experience without an extension, if you have an account anyway.
If you click the button to get rid of the cookie prompt on the bottom of the site while on old.reddit.com, it redirects you to new.reddit.com. Amazing.
Yeah, for all its faults, I'm going to be really sad when "old reddit" dies.
The main pages are garbage, but I'm in some truly great niche communities that are going to be hard to replace. And even if I do, they'll be spread over a dozen websites instead of organized in a single place.
I suppose cobbling together a replacement on discord is the future, which I've really tried to avoid.
Agreed. What Reddit provides is akin to what Medium tried to do for journalism/blogging and what PHPBB used to do for online forums: create a standardized, administratively curated platform for community engagement. The value it provides is the uniformity, not much more, and users will absolutely flee if they're treated too badly for too long.
Just the other day I was having a nice little discussion with a stranger about drive exhaust in The Expanse universe. And it turns out that my initial position was likely very wrong. While there might be other SF boards where this kind of discussion is possible, it is much more convenient for me to join a few smaller communities of interest on reddit instead. I also like hearing about the latest developments on the RISC-V processor architecture. There actually is some discussion of this here on HN, but there's more over on /r/riscv.
Bad moderation can also drive away good people and good discussion.
I still tend to keep up with most Android news on /r/android but the mods there went super full crackdown on moderation the past several years, constantly removing threads for minor infractions of the rules, and breaking up good discussion in the comments section of a post because the OP was breaking some rule or another.
I'll tell you the reason that sometimes stuff gets removed for "minor infractions" is because if you don't people keep doing it and referring to those things that are minor infractions. "why can they do it but not I?". It just causes drama and I think the majority of the moderators are doing it for free on their own time.
/r/AskHistorians like /r/AskScience are and retain a high quality due to the moderation efforts by the volunteer moderators. Deleting unsourced claims and jokes is for me a good thing.
Most subreddits would be better as things like HN in my opinion, a lot of the negative things to do with Reddit are down the way the platform is run rather than the format itself. A decentralised network where each subreddit is hosted independently and controlled wholly by its volunteer moderators rather than the (grossly incompetent in my opinion) side-wide administrators would solve many of the issues the Reddit format faces in my opinion.
But then you lose the network effect. reddit is so valuable because it brings together so many people from so many walks of life that would have never interacted otherwise.
Yes, I feel they've done that bit, AskHistorians is a brand in it's own right now. Seems like contributors could form a coop, have a subscription model, use it to fund research, etc..
