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When it comes to Western languages, most long-form text you’ll encounter is either left-aligned (with an uneven, “ragged” right edge) or justified (with words spaced evenly across a line). But I’ve long avoided the latter in my web design work. Why? Hyphenation. To quote Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography, “if you’re using justified text, you must also turn on hyphenation.” But hyphenation on the web can be tricky. In On Web …

Wanna know one of the best ways to help someone? Identify some of their risks and remove it. In other words, take the risk… as in, take the risk away from them. Adopt their risk as your own, on their behalf. It works in situations small to large. It might be risky for a friend to go to a new book club on their own, but you can take their …

Welcome to my life. Seriously, this is an amazing likeness to some of the stuff I go through every day at work.

This one also runs Apple Intelligence… Apple, Samsung, and now Xiaomi continue to enjoy growth at the expense of smaller players in the smartphone market, which saw a combined 3% year-on-year growth in Q4 2024. However, looking back growth, while welcome, seems a little slower than in similar quarters suggesting Apple’s AI smartphones haven’t quite generated too much heat yet. Then again, those AI services aren’t yet universally available, so …

Now that fandom has become more acceptable and doesn’t make its practitioners social pariahs, and earlier fan generations now have children or grandchildren, you get some very interesting products for young ones. Previously disposable entertainment is often transformed so that adults can share their love with their kids (whether the kids are interested or not). Take, for example, the first in the Mini Mysteries children’s book line, Agatha Christie’s The …

The thing I worked on the longest, in my Echo Nest / Spotify time, was calculating artist similarity. In the Echo Nest days, when we didn't have direct listening data, we derived scores for pairs of artists based on patterns of shared descriptive words found in web pages about each of them. Or, more accurately, web pages maybe about them, because figuring out whether any given blob of text that …

The obsession with how my monitors fit my workflow (what workflow?) continues. Yesterday I went from a side-by-side horizontal setup to a vertical display on the left and a horizontal display in the center. Not sure what to put on the vertical display in the absence of documents that need the height, but for now I threw Apple Music and Dash over there. Using macOS’s new window tiling feature to …

Shoot Many Robots Developer: Magic Pockets (music and sound engine are credited to Shin’en) Publisher: Atari Europe Release Date: September 24th, 2004 (EU only) Available On: Game Boy Advance Genre(s): Action (duh), Run & Gun, Beat ‘Em Up, 2D Platformer Going into this, I had no idea what Action Man was. The sound of it reminded me of G.I. Joe, which is something that was way, way before my time …

Barshasketh - Antinomian Asceticism (New Zealand, World Terror Committee): The album starts very potently but starts losing its direction towards the middle / ending part. Still quite enjoyable, well-written stuff. [3.25 / 5]Harvst - Mahlstrom (Germany, Onism Productions): I would prefer not to. [2.25 / 5]Infernal Cross - Blood Red Triumph (Sweden, Self-released): Devilish black / thrash metal with everything at the right place. [3.25 / 5]Luring - Malevolent Lycanthropic …

Perhaps, even though they are not themselves explainable, AIs can help us engineer explainable systems. But I’m not optimistic. It feels like we’re on a path to keep making systems harder for humans to configure, and we keep expanding our reliance on superhuman intelligence to do that for us. The Configuration Crisis and Developer Dependency on AI LLM series at The New Stack

I was already dreaming of starting my own business before I ever got my first job. My very first job was at a movie theatre in the late twentieth century. In my breaks I would brainstorm ideas for starting a web design business. I would fantasize about proposing to redesign the movie theatre's website. When the boss wasn't looking, I would sketch out my web site and my pricing on …

I’ve continued to lean into my shmup era lately, focusing mostly on Touhou 10 and Blue Revolver: Double Action (a brand new remaster of an acclaimed 2016 game). I started playing Blue Revolver some time after making that last post, and it is a proper jewel of a game. Actually: it’s the very next shmup I would recommend to a newcomer after ZeroRanger. ZR taught me why I should care …

Let’s review this year’s progress by looking east to west. The post Think the clean energy revolution moved fast last year? Just wait. appeared first on Canadian Climate Institute.

The post Artistic exchange in Footnote appeared first on STACK magazines.

Yesterday, the Mastodon team announced it would be handing over control of its project to a new non-profit organization. The timing of this announcement is perfect given everything that’s happening with WordPress, Meta, and… well, everything else. To date, I think Eugen Rochko has done an excellent job stewarding Mastodon, but I also might have said the same thing about Matt Mullenweg a few years back. Why gamble when you …