Madeleine.Cool

Archive

  1. the more your typography responds to the viewport, the less it will respond to user preferences

    One action (zooming) changes the size of a pixel, while the other (resizing) changes the size of the browser itself – but both change the number of pixels across the width of the browser. As the window gets smaller, or the pixel gets larger – there are fewer pixels in the viewport.

    That disconnect makes responsive typography unreliable. If your text is set to resize based only on a viewport or container, then the user zoom will have no effect! Similarly, neither 1vw nor 100vw accounts for the user default font-size.

    —Stephan Schwab

    This whole video from Oddbird was worth watching to see Miriam work through the reasoning. In addition to giving me much to think about in terms of writing good css for website visitors to have good experiences, I'm left wondering if it is possible for AI to have this sort of wondering. Can an LLM ask "hmm, I wonder how this approach to font sizing actually impacts with user preferences and zoom?"

  2. Rachel Andrew - Generative AI has broken the subject matter expert/editor relationship

    Generative AI has broken that contract. Increasingly writers receive content that looks polished, yet contains inaccuracies. This can be because the SME, while polishing their content using AI tools, has missed the fact that the tool has also modified some code or changed the meaning of text. It can also be that the drive for productivity with these tools has meant that people are being asked to cover broader subject areas, so are relying on AI tools for research rather than their own knowledge. AI can be very confidently wrong, and if the text seems clear, it’s possible to miss that it’s clearly nonsense.

    —Rachel Andrew

    Whether productivity gains have broadened who we ask to be experts or experts are missing the polishing effect of an AI "edit", the human editors have to do much more to ensure good content is good and true.

  3. Software development is thinking made tangible.

    "Each advancement addressed a real friction[…] Yet the fundamental challenge persists bc it’s not mechanical. It’s intellectual. Software development is thinking made tangible. The artifacts we create[…]are the visible outcome of invisible reasoning about complexity."

    —Stephan Schwab

  4. One line of CSS for responsive colors

    The title is a little misleading, as it requires a couple pieces be in place, but, if you're using css custom properties ("variables", colloquially), to set your background color, it only takes one line of css to change the foreground to either black or white.

    More to come by way of an explanation and more strategies, but here's the code as I'm using it now:

    color: hsl(from var(--c) 157 54 calc(18 + round(nearest,calc(100 - l),100)));

  6. Revolution, maybe

    But it’s very striking that at the end of that section I had with her [Laurie Tisch], she said: At the end of the day, it’s hard to convince someone like me to give up power.

    So I said: Then how do you change this kind of thing? How could this kind of thing ever change?

    And her words were: “Revolution, maybe.”

    —Anand Giridharadas on the Ezra Klein Show

  7. The Stakhanovite movement

    The Stakhanovite movement (стаха́новское движе́ние) was a mass cultural movement of workers which originated in the Soviet Union, and encouraged socialist emulation and rationalization of workplace processes. The Stakhanovites (стаха́новцы) modeled themselves after Alexei Stakhanov and took pride in their ability to produce more than was required by working harder and more efficiently, thus contributing to the common good and strengthening the socialist state. The movement began in the coal industry but later spread to many other industries in the Soviet Union. Initially popular, it eventually encountered resistance as the increased productivity led to increased demands on workers.

    —Wiktionary

  8. Lily-livered etymology

    The first known use of lily-livered was in 1605. From the medieval belief that the liver was the seat of courage, and the pale color of the lily flower. A person who had no blood in their liver would have no courage and would thus be a coward. Equivalent to lily + livered.

    —Wiktionary

    lily-livered apparently means cowardly and just comes from the color of lilys being pale and thus not courageous.

  9. The joy

    For a kid watching TV in the 1980s and '90s, seeing grown-ups get weird meant that adulthood might not have to be a drag.

    —NYT

  11. AI as intern

    He told me that AI right now is like having a little assistant to boss around and make you some stuff so you can say, 'Most of this is garbage, but I can use this part, and you’ve given me something to work with or against.'

    —Austin Kleon, AI as intern