b450 (u/b450) - Readit News

b450 commented on Antirender: remove the glossy shine on architectural renderings antirender.com/... · Posted by u/iambateman

b450 · 9 days ago

I ran it on the "society if..." meme lol

https://imgur.com/a/nFQN5tx

b450 commented on Why I Love Cheap Coffee alieniloquy.bearblog.dev/... · Posted by u/nabbed

b450 · 13 days ago

It's funny reading this take, because I went through a fancy coffee de-conversion myself about a year ago. I have a burr grinder which can produce the appropriate grind for the brewing method. I have a dedicated coffee canister with a one-way air valve for storage. Both have been relegated to storage. I buy cheap cans of pre-ground coffee and make them in the french press, which I decide is done steeping after some indifferently measured while.

This blog articulates some of the reasons well. Many people claim the "ritual" of brewing coffee correctly is calming or grounding or something. I myself realized that the rigamarole was born of a sort of neurotic desire to live up to a stupid social expectation to have the correct tastes. In fact, I like the taste of cheap coffee - thin, vaguely burnt... yum (due to nostalgia? Maybe, who cares). In fact, I often dislike the lighter roast and terroir and whatever of "good" coffee - my wife and I often joke that it tastes like vegetable soup. I take my coffee with cream anyway, which I imagine blows out the subtle tasting notes anyway. It's how I like it!

Saving money is great. Though I'm still very much afflicted by the nagging worry that the cheap stuff, not being organic, shade-grown, fair trade, etc. is brought to me by African slaves toiling in a cloud of nasty herbicides. I hope not though!

b450 commented on White House alters arrest photo of ICE protester, says "the memes will continue" arstechnica.com/tech-poli... · Posted by u/wmeredith

loudmax · 14 days ago

Arguably, that's the point. For post-truth politicians, the objective isn't to present a narrative as objectively factual, but to bring the entire notion of factual objectivity into question.

It's not "This is the truth." Rather, it's "The truth is unknowable." If nobody knows what's true and false anyway, there's no reason to concern yourself with "facts" that disturb your preconceptions.

b450 · 14 days ago

> White House Deputy Communications Director Kaelan Dorr defended the post after criticism of the image manipulation.

> “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” Dorr wrote.

The banner image on Dorr's X account reads: "oMg, diD tHe wHiTE hOuSE reALLy PosT tHiS?"

You're right, and I'd add that the agenda goes well beyond muddying the waters. This administration is deliberately normalizing bad faith, lying, and trolling. Discrediting critics as humorless, pathetic pearl-clutchers. I don't believe that their supporters strictly "believe" in Trump's alternate reality - they know that Trump and his cronies lie non-stop, and they like it. Accepting these lies serves as a shibboleth and lays the groundwork for discrediting fair elections, bogus prosecutions of political opponents, and everything else this administration is doing to corruptly hold on to power and demoralize their opponents.

b450 commented on The Dilbert Afterlife astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/rendall

nearbuy · 22 days ago

You're (understandably) confusing rationalism the philosophy from the Enlightenment with the unrelated modern rationalist community.

For what it's worth, the modern rationalists are pro-empiricism with Yudkowsky including it as one of the 12 core virtues of rationality.

b450 · 22 days ago

Oh! :) I saw "philosophy" and "rationalism" in the same paragraph and went into auto-pilot I suppose.

b450 commented on The Dilbert Afterlife astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/rendall

card_zero · 22 days ago

Well empiricists think knowledge exists in the environment and is absorbed directly through the eyes and ears without interpretation, if we're being uncharitable.

b450 · 22 days ago

Sure. The idea of raw, uninterpreted "sense data" that the empiricists worked with (well into the 20th century) is pretty clearly bunk. Much of philosophy took a turn towards anti-foundationalism, and rationalism and empiricism are, at least classically, notions of the "foundations" of knowledge. I mean, this is philosophy, it's all pretty ridiculous.

b450 commented on The Dilbert Afterlife astralcodexten.com/p/the-... · Posted by u/rendall

jchw · 22 days ago

I don't really identify with any particular movement, but it's important to note that there are plenty of people who legitimately oppose the core concept of rationalism, the idea that reason should be held above other approaches to knowledge, this being put aside from other criticisms leveled at the group of people that call themselves rationalists. Apparently, rationalism isn't obviously correct. Unfortunately, I don't really have enough of a background in philosophy to really understand how this follows, but looking at how the world actually works, I don't struggle to believe that most people (certainly many decision makers) don't actually regard rationality as highly as other things, like tradition.

b450 · 22 days ago

Rationalism in philosophy is generally contrasted with empiricism. I would say you're a little off in characterizing anti-rationalism as holding rationality per se in low regard. To put it very briefly: the Ancient Greeks set the agenda for Western philosophy, for the most part: what is truth? What is real? What is good and virtuous? Plato and his teacher/character Socrates are the archetype rationalists, who believed that these questions were best answered through careful reasoning. Think of Plato's allegory of the cave: the world of appearances and of common sense is illusory, degenerate, ephemeral. Pure reason, as done by philosophers, was a means of transcendent insight into these questions.

"Empiricism" is a term for philosophical movements (epitomized in early modern British Empiricists like Hume) that emphasized that truths are learned not by reasoning, but by learning from experience. So the matter is not "is rationality good?" but more: what is rationality or reason operating upon? Sense experiences? Or purely _a priori_, conceptual, or formal structures? The uncharitable gloss on rationalism is that rationalists hold that every substantive philosophical question can be answered while sitting in your armchair and thinking really hard.

b450 commented on Impeccable Style impeccable.style... · Posted by u/noemit

lelandfe · 24 days ago

The Form UX one is hilarious. It took a streamlined form used to convert and added enormous marketing copy that's more attention grabbing than the form itself. If you look closely they ran the `/simplify` command, haha.

The dashboard might even be funnier, though.

And this is what the creator chose to demo.

b450 · 24 days ago

This is the most egregious one in my eyes, too. I've run A/B tests on a few signup forms and without fail it validates the standard practice: the lowest drop-off rate comes from removing every possible obstacle and distraction. I'd bet a few dollars (which is as much as I'll ever bet) that design update would perform worse. The tool is almost intriguing as a _reductio_ of certain design practices.

The "after" designs all replace the rather generic "SV startup with a tailwind UI" with this serif font, parchment color look. It looks very similar to Anthropic's branding. I guess it looks marginally more distinctive? Though it seems to replace one knock-off visual identity for another. But the claim is that the tool here is implementing best practices through a sophisticated "design vocabulary", and in that sense the examples strike me as manifest failures. I find the general legibility of the "before" designs to be much better.

b450 commented on CSS sucks because we don't bother learning it (2022) idiallo.com/blog/learn-cs... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

bena · a month ago

I think it's the "cascading" part that makes it laborious.

If I have an element with a class on it, there are multiple selectors that can affect it.

It can be because it is contained within another element, because it is an element, because it has a class, because it is an element with that specific class, because it is next to an element, and many others.

And deciding which rule gets applied is work.

b450 · a month ago

Web frontends have trended towards various forms of isolation (CSS scopes, shadow DOM), namespacing (CSS modules, BEM), or composition (tailwind etc.) because CSS cascading and inheritance cause more trouble than they're worth. So while you're correct, there are lots of available frameworks and patterns that provide a better dev experience, though of course there are tradeoffs involved in all of them.

b450 commented on Stronk.app – open-source gym lifts journal · Posted by u/apatheticonion

b450 · 2 months ago

Neat, have you considered linking to exrx or anything for the exercises?

b450 commented on The Rise of SQL:the second programming language everyone needs to know spectrum.ieee.org/the-ris... · Posted by u/b-man

petcat · 2 months ago

I've loved and used Django ORM and SQLAlchemy for many years. It got me a long way in my career. But at this point I've sworn-off using query-builders and ORMs. I just write real, hand-crafted SQL now. These "any db" abstractions just make for the worst query patterns. They're easy and map nicely to your application language, but they're really terrible unless you want to put in the effort to meta-program SQL using whatever constructs the builder library offers you. CTEs? Windows? Correlated subqueries? It's a lot. And they're always lazy, so you never really know when the N+1s are going to happen.

Just write SQL. I figured this out when I realized that my application was written in Rust, but really it was a Postgres application. I use PG-specific features extensively. My data, and database, are the core of everything that my application does, or will ever do. Why am I caring about some convenient abstractions to make it easier to work with in Rust, or Python, or whatever?

Nah. Just write the good SQL for your database.

b450 · 2 months ago

ORMs come with a lot of baggage that I prefer to avoid, but it probably depends on the domain. Take an e-commerce store with faceted search. You're pretty much going to write your own query builder if you don't use one off the shelf, seems like.