Safari and Text Rendering

Posted on May 17, 2021 by David K.

I take font rendering pretty seriously. Back in my 19-year Linux phase, I’ve changed dozens of machines from one Linux distro to another based on nothing more than font rendering on my main machine.

In my current 7-year Mac phase, I use my MBP on an external, 4K monitor, in high-DPI mode. At least, I think that’s what it’s called. It’s where the UI elements are the same size as in high-def, but the fonts are rendered in (technically, almost) “retina” resolution. I’ve had this monitor for several years, but, every once in awhile, I still catch myself thinking, wow, this desktop is beautifully rendered.

Stack Overflow is a site I use basically every working day. Recently, every time I go to the site, I think to myself that the fonts look a lot better, for some reason. I finally dug around a little, and found that they changed their default font to use your system’s default a week ago. On macOS, this default is San Francisco, which I have loved since Apple first introduced it. I’ve even gone so far as to try to put a free version of the font on Windows, but this works about as well as you’d expect, which is to say it’s almost good.

This looks amazing to me. The meta discussion about the change is filled with hate, but I freaking LOVE it. It makes me want to look around for a theme on this site that will render fonts in San Francisco too. (UPDATE: I just switched it back to a theme I had already customized to use it. It looks great on macOS, of course, but it just doesn’t look very good on Windows. Maybe I need to hook my work laptop into the external monitor before I really judge it.)

Looking at the site on my work laptop, I will admit that the fonts don’t look all that great on Windows, under Firefox, or even Edge, so I can understand why all the Windows users are griping, but that’s not Stack Overflow’s fault. I installed Tampermonkey, and the Q+A-linked Roboto+RobotoMono script, and the site looks pretty good now, not that I use it on my other machine much.

It just goes to show how much Windows defaults are terrible. I recall that it would take me many minutes of screwing around with a fresh install of Linux to get things working to taste, but it took hours for Windows. (It takes mere seconds on macOS. There’s, like, 3 things to change: natural scroll direction, double tap clicking, and folders first in Finder.) Some things just don’t change, because they’re not accidental. They are the result of purposeful planning for the benefit of corporate computer fleet owners, instead of end users. Windows users feel this all the time they use the OS, but they hardly ever seem to realize it.

Randomly, since the Roboto font is being referenced, and Mr. Roboto just came up in my music feed, I just want to state for the record that Mr. Roboto is literally one of the top-10 songs ever recorded.

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Valve’s Gabe Newell hints at vague console plans coming “this year” | Ars Technica

Posted on May 12, 2021 by David K.

Or maybe Newell was suggesting that Valve plans to revive its Steam Machines program, getting behind a line of SteamOS-powered living room consoles once more. Given the quick market death of that effort, though, this is probably the least likely bit of speculation at the moment.

Source: Valve’s Gabe Newell hints at vague console plans coming “this year” | Ars Technica

I think that Valve will, indeed, make a serious go at a console, running SteamOS (née, Linux), and I think the launch will coincide with the reveal of Half-Life Episode 3. I think they’ve been sitting on that pent-up demand to launch their console. I just think they had no idea they’d be sitting on it for 13 years and counting, now.

UPDATE: I just stumbled across a recent talk by Linus Torvalds, where he points out that he is already on record that Valve might be the one organization that could make “Linux on the desktop” a reality, because they will be obstinate about making a distribution that doesn’t make ABI-breaking package updates every few months. It looks like SteamOS is being updated — about once a year, but that sounds suspiciously as if plans to produce a proper SteamOS-based device has been discussed with him. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. I’m very happy with my PS5, but I would love to see a Valve console come to market, for a lot of reasons.

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How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

Posted on May 12, 2021 by David K.

For decades Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google gobbled up their competition to become behemoths of the tech industry, which has drawn attention from Congressional leaders and other critics who claim they’ve stifled innovation in the industry.

Source: How Big Tech got so big: Hundreds of acquisitions

If the government had said, “You know what, guys? You’re big enough already,” most of those acquired companies would probably have continued to offer a nice living to their founders and employees. And the employment market for talent would be richer for it. And taxes would have been paid. But, no, the government bends over, and lets these vertical monopolies accrete ALL the profits in their sector, while they stick out their hand for the next campaign contribution.

I had written this as a draft, and then watched The Laundromat. Not as entertaining as The Big Short, but just as approachable in its treatment of what us arguably one of the most byzantine, global subjects in modern history. I can’t find the final scene online in order to link it, but Meryl Streep’s last line is a powerful summary of the problem I’ve been complaining about here for some time.

“Now is the time for real action. It starts with asking questions. Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes, relative to any other segment of the population. These political practices have come full circle and are irreconcilable. Reform of America’s broken campaign finance system cannot wait.”

Global mega corps like Apple can no longer hide behind the excuse that “everyone is doing it” when it comes to using essentially-slave labor in the orient, and a offshore tax havens to avoid paying corporate taxes, while they accumulate… <checks Google>… two hundred billion dollars (give or take) in their cash on hand. I predict, at some point, they will be pressured to change both of those practices. Maybe that will lead to a domino effect, and to laws being changed. I’m not holding my breath, but I can envision a scenario, even if it’s one in “fourteen million, six hundred and five.”

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Mystifying

Posted on May 11, 2021 by David K.

“Engineer Man” must have neck muscles of steel.

All this thought and effort into a screen setup, and then having Amazon Basics keyboard and the cheapest Logitech mouse made.

Just goes to show that it takes all kinds.

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Sony is working to integrate Discord into PlayStation consoles

Posted on May 3, 2021 by David K.

Coming “early next year.”

Details on what that would actually entail are slim, and Sony’s announcement just says that the two companies are “hard at work connecting Discord with your social and gaming experience on PlayStation Network.” Whether that means a full-fledged Discord app coming to PlayStation consoles or a more limited integration (like connecting PSN and Discord accounts to more easily chat with friends off platform) has yet to be announced.

Source: Sony is working to integrate Discord into PlayStation consoles

Sounds like the first shoe to drop in the disastrous situation I described in the last couple of paragraphs in this rant. Maybe they are going to get serious about integrating the system with more and more-interesting services…

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Mosaics of positions

Posted on April 30, 2021 by David K.

How many people do you think would agree with me on everything I’ve ever written? Nobody, that’s how many.

Source: Mosaics of positions

This is DHH, creator of Ruby on Rails (my favorite programming stack), amongst many other accomplishments. I follow him pretty closely, precisely because I happen to agree with (almost) everything I’ve ever seen him write. I agree with all of his statements in this article. I’m not on Twitter, and have it blocked on my network. The only reason I’d change that right now is because I’d want to follow his tweets. Luckily, he blogs his longer thoughts on a site that has an RSS feed.

Why? Because of this line:

If I end up in a debate with an employee at Basecamp that hits identity bedrock…

That’s such a good phrase: “identity bedrock.” It perfectly encapsulates why controversial topics are so controversial. Like “core memories” in Pixar’s Inside Out, opinions about things such as, say, abortion, or health care, are literally the values we hang our metaphysical existence on. How we find our place in the world around us. How we navigate conflicts. How we ground our thinking in the face of confusion.

When you look at it like that, how could it not be contentious? How could discussing these things not be taken personally?

I think DHH (and Jason Fried) are onto something about making these social issues taboo on internal company communications platforms. This has made one side, in particular, very upset, and this is telling, but not surprising. The social justice warriors have valid points to make, and I actually support most of them, but it’s their collective effort to shove it all down everyone else’s throats — and badger anyone who dares to object to that approach — that has led to Basecamp’s decision to limit internal company discussion about these things. They have only themselves to blame for this turn of events.

FOLLOWUP: It occurs to me that I would bet actual money that the people offended by this are the same people who would have lavished praise on Twitter, Cloudflare, and Amazon for collectively cancelling Parler from the entire internet. Like, not the kind of people; the literal people.

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Google Is Saving Over $1 Billion a Year by Working From Home

Posted on April 29, 2021 by David K.

With Covid-19 restrictions lifting, more people are booking trips and hotels online, which is very good for Google’s advertising business. Google’s employees, however, are working from home and not traveling as much on the company dime — and that’s also good for its business.

Source: Google Is Saving Over $1 Billion a Year by Working From Home

As I said before, homeshoring™ — my word; my trademark — is saving companies a lot of money. I want to see a note in the annual report about how much Cummins has saved.

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Unicomp, Inc.: Mini M

Posted on April 29, 2021 by David K.

The Mini M buckling spring keyboard has the same mechanism, feel and general layout as the original IBM Model M (SSK) keyboard. With the much-loved buckling spring key design these keyboards have been prized by computer enthusiasts and robust typists because of the tactile and auditory feedback of each keystroke.

Source: Unicomp, Inc.: Mini M

I always said that when Unicomp made a tenkeyless version, it’d be a day-1 purchase. I just noticed last night that they started shipping in February, and I ordered one on the spot. I had a Model M on my 486DX2 on my first engineering job, and I still miss it. Now I will no longer have to.

I just hope I can put up with the noise. Measuring with my Apple Watch — which is pretty close to the calibrated decibel meters we have at church — my office has a background noise level of 32 dB. (Like the Geiger counters in Chernobyl, which maxed out at 3.6 Roentgens, 30 dB is the lowest level the Watch can read, so I wonder if it’s actually lower.) Typing on my WASD, with Cherry MX blue’s, produces 55 dB of noise, measured by my ear, and that’s with 0.4 mm o-rings on the stems, dampening the impact with the board. It will be interesting to see where the Unicomp comes in at.

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Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing

Posted on April 28, 2021 by David K.

We’re excited to finally unveil Mighty, a faster browser that is entirely streamed from a powerful computer in the cloud. After 2 years of hard work, we’ve created something that’s indistinguishable from a Google Chrome that runs at 4K, 60 frames a second, takes no more than 500 MB of RAM, and often less than 30% CPU with 50+ tabs open. This is the first step in making a new kind of computer.

Source: Mighty’s master plan to reignite the future of desktop computing

What a joke. This is just a cagey attempt to track user ALL behavior across ALL sites, without even needing cookies or web bugs or other such hacks. Even Facebook can’t track you across sites that don’t load their script. I have Twitter blocked on my network, but the famous VC investor Paul Graham is apparently all about it. Given the completeness of the tracking information you could get from this, it’s no wonder. The potential upside here has probably made it trivial to get the money to run in stealth for 2 years on this thing.

User DaveV1.0 had a good comment on Slashdot:

The modern browser is wicked stressful on computers.

TL;DR: We are doing it wrong.

This is because:

  • Web pages are now the size of entire operating systems.
  • We are asking web browsers to everything an operating system does on top of an operating system.
  • We are using web browsers to do things that should be done with other applications.
  • We are using a stateless protocol to do tasks that require states.
  • We are doing things that require high security in an inherently insecure environment with an inherently insecure protocol requiring bolt-on extensions.

We are doing it wrong.

I mean, yeah, there actually is a use for “Mighty.” We’ve made HTTP do things that Tim Berners-Lee never even imagined in his wildest dreams, thanks to building a Javascript runtime interpreter into every browser, and downloading an entire application with each page of markup. Even in my current Rails app, where I use very little Javascript, webpacker warns me about the size of my current bundle: 249 KB. For comparison, the page is only 30 KB. Thank God for caching, I guess.

User Perseids on “Hacker News” asked the CEO of the company about issues of security and privacy:

I can’t help but ask: As a security conscious person, how can you justify creating the service? You’ll have the data and access of everything your customer does online, which for your target audience is everything your customer does on a computer. For the individual customer this is worse than Google, Facebook, Twitter combined. Also, you’ll have an effective backdoor into every two-factor authentication, be it online banking, valuable Twitter accounts or AWS admins. There are massive monetary and political incentives to hack or infiltrate your service. Given your scale, you can’t have comparable security measures to the big players. And given your location (US) you’ll eventually receive national security letters forcing you to secretly sip off anything secret services or law enforcement wants you to.

He didn’t respond.

People with M1-based Macs aren’t going to care about the performance of their browser. There is so much extra computing power in those things, they’re begging for something to do. Might as well be crunching media-heavy web sites. Maybe there’s some hope that poorly-ported video games will smooth out with the extra cycles…

Whatever. The joke’s on them, anyway. At $30-$50/mo, by the time “Mighty” could reach any sort of serious market penetration, users will interact with apps rather than web sites anyway. With an i9-based MBP, Imgur can make even my computer wheeze, but that’s because they load, like, 50 thumbnails on EVERY page view, and half the posts on the image sharing site are now video. Like Reddit’s execrable web site, I can only guess this is a move to push people to their app.

No, the next big shift is not to centrally-hosted web browsers. It’s to get rid of browsers entirely. Watch for one of the big sites, like Amazon, to introduce an “app” for their site, which will be based on Electron. Either that, or they’ll just go with Apple’s new thing where you can run their iOS app on macOS, and dust off their hands. (Poor Microsoft, with no mobile, and poor Google, with no (real) desktop!) Web sites for the places big enough to make apps will eventually just be a pointer to their app.

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Doorbell video captures police officer punching and throwing teen with autism to the ground – CBS News

Posted on April 26, 2021 by David K.

A Ring doorbell captured footage of a police officer in Vacaville, California, throwing a 17-year-old to the ground and punching him in the face on Wednesday, according to the teen’s father.

Source: Doorbell video captures police officer punching and throwing teen with autism to the ground – CBS News

I think these kinds of incidents have always happened, but now that people can record and use surveillance footage to document them, and have platforms like Twitter and Facebook to post them publicly, we’re getting multiple, national stories every week about out-of-control law enforcement. I’m just wondering: Is there any point at which people who defend the police will ever stop saying that there are “just a few bad apples” in police departments, and start admitting that there must be a systemic problem with how America hires and trains the police?

Obligatory: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens This was originally written about mass shootings — and it is more applicable month after month, year after year, since it was first written — but it works just as well for policy brutality.

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