Indeed, it's a pity that the author placed so much focus on a cool looking font that they forgot to take basic properties like "good readability" into account. Form should follow function, not the other way around.
> According to whom? It's their personal website, they're allowed to place value on whatever they want.
It's a well-known design principle to not impede the intended function of things by giving them a form that distracts from it. Of course you can deviate from that, especially if you want to make a point of some sort.
However, I presume they publish their writings so they will be read by others. Making this hard will reduce their audience.
If they are making this trade-off willingly, good for them, I suppose. But maybe they're so smitten with the style that they do not realize how hard to read it is.
There's also a point at which the form gets so bad that it starts to disrespect the audience. Again, that can be on purpose, but it might be unintentional.
This being a personal blog, it's not unreasonable to expect that a main purpose of it is communication. I think it's warranted to draw attention to the fact that its design gets in the way of that goal, big time.
It's not normal to wrap all opinions in "I prefer". The average opinion statement looks superficially like a factual statement, without intent to actually claim it's a fact.
Interesting idea, let's see if they confirm they were talking facts. I'll be very surprised.
I'm the worst person to take issue with this. This has been my biggest pet peeve for the longest time as well. Right until my frame of mind flipped randomly, and I recognized that by getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person, and upsetting myself on purpose.
You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire. For example, this may have very well been a perfectly cromulent alternative reply:
> Sounds subjective, and indeed, I disagree. Not a fan of dogma like this anyhow.
There is no ambiguity that needs further clarification, I am talking about the words as written. Their entire message clearly conveys they believe there is an objective design standard that everyone should strive to adhere to, and they are criticising a website for daring to deviate from their ideal standard as though it were an objective flaw and not a matter of personal preference.
> getting upset over blatantly subjective matters being discussed with zero cushioning like this, then I'm doing little more than intentionally misreading the other person until I upset myself. You're reacting to the smoke, not the fire.
It's not about cushioning. They are explicitly criticising the website ("pity", "forgot to take basic principles into account"), and saying broadly that everyone should do X, where X is their own preference. That is the fire. That will invariably rub people the wrong way. It is inherently not an amicable way to communicate about differences in design opinions.
That's not to say you can't give critical feedback. "I'm not a fan of the font, I prefer fonts that are easier to read" would be perfectly reasonable. It's specifically the assertion that there is a way that things ought to be done, as though there are not trade-offs depending upon what each person values but rather one objectively superior way, that causes friction.
Subjectivity is implied. You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made. Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.
And as has been pointed out, you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact (i.e. that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)
I will give you credit, you have an art for writing absolutely infuriating comments. How is it that you manage to so perfectly encapsulate the exact thing you baselessly accuse one of doing?
> You’re shadowboxing against a claim that the person you replied to never made.
You start with this, and then immediately lead into:
> Communication is more than the simple dictionary definitions of the words being written.
> that you should always make it denotatively clear to readers when you’re going your opinion and when you’re globally asserting something)
Neither of which are claims I made. At no point did I engage in the dictionary-definition pedantry that plagues this site. I was specifically highlighting how the sentiments they expressed in their message come together as a whole. An accusation that one "forgot to take basic principles into account" cannot possibly be construed in any way other than insulting. That phrase denies the possibility that the OP considered readability but consciously chose to make a trade-off in alignment with their own values, asserts the author's view as a matter of principle, and denigrates the person who "forgot" to consider it.
> you are yourself asserting your opinion about subjective communications as fact
Insofar as words have any meaning whatsoever, I am observing a fact about how they chose to communicate. If you really want to play the stupid game the people of this forum love where you play at the margins of language endlessly redefining everything into meaninglessness to score points in an argument, you can count me out.
This is far from meaningless, because if you are too far below those 3.5%, you'll fail to make a change for the better, despite having a good cause with no real opposition.
Those 3.5% are encouraging for all social movements, who suffer (and/or have friends/family who suffer) from some issue in the system, have perhaps developed a good plan out of it, but think they are too small to make a difference.
This is an incorrect summary of the placebo effect. The placebo effect does require the patient to either believe it is effective, or at least not knowing clearly it is ineffective.
This is why clinical studies don't tell neither group (neither the treated group nor the control group) who is in which group, to not spoil the results.
And also, this is why homeopathy puts so much effort into spreading the belief they are effective despite all odds, up to the point of trying to convince people to abandon basic scientific principles.
GP is actually correct according to Wikipedia[0] (for what that's worth): There seems to be evidence that "open-label placebos"—i.e. "where the patient is fully aware that the treatment is inert"—still have positive effects.
Contrast this with advertisement, which actually does work even when people know that it is ads, and which still does work on people how know how ads work.
Also, contrast this with psychotherapy, which usually does work even better if the patient understands how it works, because it enables them to become an active and more effective part of the therapy.
While I hear this argumentation a lot, I still struggle with this:
If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
And from an ethical point of view, the idea of financing a whole (homeopathic) industry that uses your money to produce fake science, even with a single cent, should make one shudder, shouldn't it?
But then, why prescribe the most expensive placebos where you co-finance societal harmful behavior, rather than just prescribing the "harmless" placebos that are not homeopathy, which are usually even cheaper and don't have any ideological overhead?
I think it comes from our animistic roots. Magic that calls for the sacrifice of a goat is stronger than magic that calls for the sacrifice of a flower because the former requires more dedication from the caster. It would be the same with money.
There is a lot of over-the-counter and even some prescription medicine that don't do much at all for what people take them for, and homeopathy is cheaper and less harmful for the same placebo effect. Cold medicine in particular is known for its dubious efficiency.
No medication is even cheaper, but the placebo effect works, so if people were to take something, might as well have them take something cheap and harmless. In my opinion, it doesn't justify supporting homeopathy, but health insurances may see it differently.
Placebos are an interesting ethical issue. Doctors are not supposed to deceive you, they are people you trust with your life and very personal issues and they are therefore held to very high standards. But even if it is for your own good, the placebo effect is based on deception, so is it ethical for a doctor to give you a placebo? And is fake science that still help people ethical? The consensus seems to be "no" for both and I tend to agree, but I still think it is worth debating.
> If you have "mild problems, which would normally heal on their own", buying no medication at all would be even cheaper.
American culture loathes the idea of not treating a disease. Problems are expected to be dealt with, even if it harms society (see overprescribing antibiotics or opioids).
When confronted with people that don't understand the impacts of medicine, it's easier for an insurance company to give them fake medication than nothing at all.
You'll quickly find which parts of the manual are interesting to you and which ones just repeat what you already know (or could have guessed on your own). Since the manual is very well structured, skipping those parts is very easy.
Look at that, there's an entire section on internals. Honestly, I didn't even consider looking there, I just assumed it would be all about syntax and never bothered to check. Thanks!
The Postgres docs are great because of that. They are kept on top of pretty regularly compared to most open source projects, and document things in an understandable way.
> "We will continue to improve this new solution and are already working on an IPv6 only solution for cloud servers, too."
I'm eagerly waiting especially for this! The cloud servers are pretty cheap, but costs for IPv4 addresses make a significant part of the monthly cost. The Hetzner cloud server would be much more interesting if they weren't each tied to a public IPv4 address.
It took a while for me to fully appreciate the OpenSSH approach to portability:
They primarily develop OpenSSH purely for OpenBSD, using all (including non-portable) facilities of OpenBSD, including crypto and whatnot.
Then, a separate team manages the "portable" version of OpenSSH, which add stubs and does everything else needed to make OpenSSH compile on as many operating systems as possible.
I'm aware that OpenSSH is not the only project using that approach to portability. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say this is an unusual approach used only on a minority of projects.
I was always puzzled on why they are doing this. This always struck me to be "just" a side effect of project politics and historically grown project structures.
But over the years I started to see some interesting benefits of that approach as well. I'm still not convinced by this model, but I have to admit that, more generally speaking, the OpenBSD project does many things against the mainstream, but quite often they turn to be right.
Can you name one? OpenBSD-affiliated projects like OpenSSH are the only ones I know of that do fully separate releases where one is just for one OS, and the other is the “portable” one
Not really, that is how the games industry has worked since forever and one of the reasons why AAA game studios couldn't care less about 3D APIs portability.
The game idea is developed with one specific platform in mind, and if the game actually gets a publishing deal, the publisher onboards studios whose main skill is to port games into platform XYZ.
To me the "natural way" has always been to write portable code in the first place. From time to time, you'll find that parts of it are not portable, so you fix it, and along that way to learned something new about portability and apply it to future improvements on your code as well. Over time, you'll find fewer and fewer portability issue as you get better and better at writing portable code in the first place.
I'm not saying that this is the best way to do this, but to me this was always the obvious thing to do. As a somewhat extreme example, I'd never write a graphical user interface in pure Win32 API and expect it to be even remotely portable by some additional layer. I'd rather use Qt (or GTK, or Dear ImGui, or whatever) for native UIs even for programs that are (for now) meant to be only run on Windows.
To me personally, this has the additional benefit that I can do most of the development and testing in a non-hostile environment (e.g. Debian), then running a cross compiler (e.g. via MXE) and only do the final testing on Windows (well, usually first Wine, then some Windows VM), but at that last stage surprises are extremely seldom.
Be aware - that is an extreme minority of projects in the real world.
Historically, most of the time the development team only knows a specific platform specific language or way of doing things, and doesn’t have the background or experience to even know that what they would be doing in a specific place isn’t portable.
Languages and cross platform toolkits have developed a lot, but I still would question if most development folks would even recognize something like an endianness issue was a potential problem on some random project.
If someone is doing HTML/js/web dev, they’d never need to worry though I guess (barring something really weird).
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