I’m a technical kinda guy, doing technical kinda stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: September 27th, 2023

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  • Effective advertising has a clear and simple visual language, and this is what UIs should strive for.

    Interfaces can be needlessly complex regardless of being flat or skeuomorphic.

    But flat interfaces still require mental effort to parse. Especially when the interface is complex and/or crowded and you’re trying to pick out active UI elements amongst decorations like group boxes/panels.

    Essentially, flat interfaces are currently popular because of touchscreen devices. Touchscreen devices have limited space and thus need simplistic UI elements that can be prodded by a fat finger on a small screen.

    But I don’t need a flat touchscreen-friendly interface on my non-touch dual 24" monitors with acres of screen real estate. I need an interface that nicely separates usable UI elements from the rest of the application window. That means 3D hints on a 2D screen, which allows my monkey-brain with five million years of evolved 3D vision the opportunity to run my “click the button” mental command as a background process.







  • Not really, it’s just phrased differently to the usual signup pitch, they’re putting in a middle ground between full “premium” subscribers (whatever that is) and public access with tracking and ad metrics.

    Companies need revenue to operate. They get that revenue from advertising data and selling ad slots, or subscriptions. Whether they actually cease all tracking and ad metrics when you subscribe is something I’d doubt though, and that could be a case for the legal system if they didn’t do what they claim.

    Personally, this behaviour is the point where I would not consider the site to be valuable enough to bother with.


  • Mainly the issues are about providing ~600 kilowatts for 8 minutes to charge your typical size EV battery.

    A row of 5 chargers of that size soaks up 3MW if they’re all in use, and that’s not something that can be quickly or easily shoehorned into a suburban electricity grid.

    It’s about 500 houses worth of electricity usage, for comparison. For just 5 fast chargers.

    Not to say it’s impossible, but infrastructure doesn’t come cheap, and so it’ll cost quite a bit to cram that 80 percent charge into your car’s battery.



  • If you’re interested in the systems behind Apollo, go find and read “Digital Apollo”.

    It goes all the way through the project and describes in good detail everything, how they developed the control systems, the computer hardware, how the software was designed, how they implemented one of the first real computer systems project management, all the interactions between astronauts/test pilots who still wanted to “manually fly the lander”, the political back and forth between competing teams, the whole thing.

    It’s a great read if you have a technical mindset.