The Unicode can be ridiculous at times. It contains a character used once in a single manuscript in a extinct language, but not a standardized glyph for an external URL link.
Also would the world be a better place if they gave it back to some third party, so it can be sold to a private collection and be locked in a vault somewhere?
Where it is now has a lot of historical and cultural significance. It is currently being admired publicly by thousands of people, sitting on the coffin of Queen Elisabeth.
however AVIF only has about 65% market penetration.
If you ran a serious webserver, it would make more sense to do automatic on the fly conversion using mod_pagespeed. This way it handles browser support for you.
A decent proportion of the .JPGs and .GIFs being rendered on sites I visit are actually now .WEBP files with the headers set. So I'm seeing lots of people already making this translation invisibly. You only notice when you try to save the images.
Or when you notice quality loss because the original JPEG has significantly higher quality than whatever it got transcoded to.
Seriously, people, stop transcoding to "newer, better" formats at lower quality. Just stop. I should never have a better experience if I set up an older browser that doesn't accept your newfangled stuff. Either manage to get the quality right (easier said than done) or just don't transcode stuff.
(This is much easier to get right if you are also shrinking an image.)
It seems to be pervasive for people to grossly overestimate the savings they can get, looking e.g. at how MPEG-4 TV channels are generally lower quality than MPEG-2 channels. And the biggest HEVC torrents are at most less than half the size of the AVC torrents, usually only like a quarter the size.
I've often felt that English is a prime candidate for spelling reform. Being the modern lingua franca it makes sense to remove the unneeded vestigial remnants of other languages that adds extra unneeded complexity. For some reason it seems that English majors seem to be dead set against it, as they love etymology.
I highly recommend reading Human color vision / Peter K. Kaiser and Robert M. Boynton. It's a great read if you've gone down the color vision rabbit hole as it has nearly every single topic in regards to human color perception. The biggest surprise for me was that there's still a bit of debate about how exactly neurons in the eye are wired together to produce the color signals that go to the brain.
I read an amazing article once that described the representations of color at different processing levels in the human brain. For example, the 3 types of rods in the retina sense R/B/Y intensity, but at some point it is transformed into a different 3d representation with a R-G axis, a B-Y axis, and a greyscale intensity axis. There was some implication that this is information-theoretically optimal in some sense for representing images sampled from the natural world. Anyone know what I'm talking about?
One of latest papers I've read recommended using a matrix to transform color spaces, which i've also done a codepen for.
Interestingly the opponent process mirrors the LAB color space, which is soon going to be available in Safari. This is pretty cool and can enable developers to color coordinate easier.
I'm going to give the webpage you linked a good read, looks very interesting.
Tailwind is great, but ironically it is full circle in regards to OP's post. You describe the page structure in HTML using classes, much the same before CSS was a thing. This is ideologically opposed to semantic HTML where you describe what the structure is, and not how it is. Using server side frameworks hides this, as long as you don't need to write static HTML. Tailwind has plenty of hype behind it and it's good, but it also has plenty of downsides too. As long as you're aware of where it's be suited for. I think Tailwind is a CSS framework for people who don't want to do CSS.
Semantic HTML is about using the write HTML tags for the right things, like <article>, <figure>, etc. The strings you put inside the class attribute are completely orthogonal to this — Tailwind has absolutely no influence on whether your HTML is semantic or not.
We worked with several accessibility experts when building Tailwind UI for example, and I am very confident in the semantics of all of that markup and how it performs in situations where that actually matters like when using assistive technology, because we tested it ourselves.
> The strings you put inside the class attribute are completely orthogonal to this — Tailwind has absolutely no influence on whether your HTML is semantic or not.
To add to this, screen readers for accessibility and search engine bots don't read CSS class names because they don't have standardised semantics (unlike HTML tags). Minifiers are allowed to mangle CSS class names because of this.
I think the problem here is it's common for people to confuse semantic HTML with semantic CSS class names. The latter are really to help your developers. If you're using utility classes though, you tend to use custom components to wrap + reuse styles versus using custom CSS classes so semantic class names aren't as important anymore. For others, this is explained well here:
I think the OP article is a good story on how we shouldn't cling on to current best practices. CSS was invented before complex single-page-applications were even a thing so it shouldn't be surprising at all if it turns out the old way doesn't scale well to our current needs.
If the R&D is done anyway, why not just wait and build a second telescope if the first one fails? I don't see why that would be any more expensive than building a backup ahead of time, and it means if the first one fails due to an undetected design flaw, they have a chance to correct it.
It’s cheaper to build two at the same time than shutting down production for years and trying to build another one. Tooling doesn’t last forever, and the process and skills required to build one can help you build the second one cheaper. But if you wait, that knowledge is often lost. For example, we have no way to build a Saturn V rocket today even having spent R&D and NRE decades ago.
Same reason NASA built the Space Shuttle Endeavour with spare parts left over from the others, instead of building it from scratch. People move on with their lives, and the facilities that manufacture these things do too. Assuming everything was well documented it should be possible to recreate the tooling and train new people, but that's much more expensive than building two in the first place.
People like to use the term free market to describe the optimal market system, but that's pretty lousy terminology. The truth is, functioning markets are not "free" at all. They are regulated. Unregulated markets rapidly devolve into monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, and, if things get really bad, libertarianism.
I've never seen this put so concisely. I've found it frustrating that so much of the popular social-economic diatribe is based on outdated economic terminology from 100 years ago. So much has changed and yet the language does not.
These sorts of projects hide where the real cost of construction is. Land, foundations, electrical, council permits, drainage, plumbing, telco, it all adds up. Building the walls is a minor cost in comparison, and if you're going to make a house you might as well spend a bit more, and get more house per dollar.
it claims it's sustainable, but i don't see these houses lasting more than 50 years. at least with a normal house you can repair it without having to demolish it.
I don't have any good sources to back this up, but I thought it was typical for homes in Japan to only have a 30-40 year lifespan anyway. This [0] cites average age of wood-framed homes between 27-30 years, with concrete more like 37 years, and contrasts with US wood frame building lifespan roughly 2x that.
Would enjoy reading comments from someone who really knows about this.
Market value is going to zero by getting 30 years old (probably more earlier), but it not mean that current residents don't live there. They would just live until die. 35yr loan is pretty common so the house must have 35yr life at least.
One of the most important regulation about houses is earthquake resistance standard. "New earthquake resistance standard" was made in 1985 so now is just after 36 year old. So maybe the market is going to change, along with the fact Japanese salary won't up much.
For sake of argument I'm building a 160m2 house (on the larger size for my part of Europe) and the materials and labour costs for all the exterior walls came to €15,000. Admittedly that's not a finished wall as we'll need plaster on the inside and insulation on the outside (we used clay air bricks, so in milder climates the insulation could be skipped). The same volume would need 15 shipping containers - I doubt you could even get the raw containers for that price.
Considering we'll probably be spending close to €300k in total, that's not a very big expense. It's also quite quick, it took a team of 2 people less than 2 weeks to build. So far we've been waiting 3 months for windows to be made.
I would also note that domes are solving a problem most people don't have with their houses.
Domes are a great way to maximize the volume enclosed by a surface, which is almost a thing for heat loss, but you can do almost as well with a box and adding unusable volume is a false economy.
Domes are great for creating a massive, self-supporting enclosed space ... but again, why do you need that in your house? Conventional building techniques can make you a pretty large space pretty easily, and you don't typically need to support unusual loads on top of your house.
You don't even need to make your home in a dome shape to make it out of insulated concrete; insulated concrete forms are and easy way too throw together a box with the same basic benefits.
Also, we already have a cheap prefab solution which is optimized for house construction: modular homes aka trailers. They don't have the best reputation.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of wood: trashy.
Home built with portable modular 8'x40' boxes made of corrugated steel: trendy.
We definitely don't talk about this enough. Trailer homes can be half the cost of a tiny home, but nobody wants them because of their reputation or appearance.
There's a great passage about this in Genome by Matt Ridley, which is a great book for anyone interested. In mammals both the male and female gametes imprint their DNA in their sex cells to repress certain genes, if you combine two generic sequences from two males (with no modification) the zygote forms with no brain and too much placenta and dies soon after. If you do the reverse with females, you wind up with a oversized head and no placenta. The working theory is embryonic development is a competitive environment, where males want the best for their offspring at the expense of the female host, and the females 'fight' back by limiting the amount of resources the child has. it's only been recently we've had the technology to remove the epigenetic markers from DNA sequences to allow combinations of same sex strands.
